The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife

Extract

William Temple Hornaday lived up to his self-description as a “most defiant devil.” A driven, cantankerous, and deeply racist world traveler, Hornaday was also a self-made man and a learned lover of nature, with a politics and personality derived from a combustible mix of elitist and populist inclinations. He developed one of the most important conservation and education institutions in the United States—the New York Zoological Park (now known as the Bronx Zoo)—and pioneered new public outreach and animal display techniques. Above all, he was a widely known and greatly active conservationist. A biography of this important and fascinating man is long overdue. Gregory J. Dehler's The Most Defiant Devil finally fills that vacuum, giving a rich and complete life of a man who could blithely ascribe the reasons for his losing an internecine conservation battle to “general hatred of W. T. Hornaday” (p. 120).

Like many Progressive Era conservationists, Hornaday came from the Midwest. He was born in 1854 and spent his childhood hunting and fishing when not working on his family's Iowa farmstead. A scholarship landed him at Iowa State University where he studied zoology and became an avid taxidermist. He left Ames after his sophomore year to work for Henry A. Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Hornaday's brazenness and skill in taxidermy—as well as his youth and unmarried status—made him a good candidate for foreign collecting expeditions. Soon Hornaday was killing and stuffing animals in India, the Orinoco River valley, the Caribbean, and North Africa. This experience translated into a zoo career, and at age forty-two he became director of the New York Zoological Park.