Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel

museums in America. In the OsteologyBuilding, a different kind of specialist pieced together the skeletons of animals living and long gone, from wolverines and tigers to immense prehistoric crocodiles. Another building served as a carpenter shop; the Long Museum—despite a disapproving placard at the compound’s entrance warning curiosity-seekers that “THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM”—was essentially a musuem or storehouse where finished specimens were kept; and Cosmos Hall was where Professor Ward kept his mineral and fossil collection, which was so extensive it was obvious to Hornaday that he must be one of the world’s greatest collectors. 18
    But it was the Taxidermy Building that captured Hornaday’s interest with the swoon of young love. Reeking with the smell of camphor and creosote, chemicals used to store skins before they were mounted for exhibition, it was a regular Noah’s Ark of species from around the world. Hornaday later wrote that he couldn’t walk into that room without feeling he was being watched, by a black jaguar, a bull elephant, a wildebeest, or some other creature in the process of being resurrected on the mounting-tables. Years later, he described the thrill of it all:
    To me, the romance and glamour of Ward’s museum was as fascinating and compelling as the stage and footlights are to the confirmed actor. Up to that time, nothing else of the kind had entered into my life. At that one spot, the jungles of the tropics, the game-haunted mountains and plains, and the mysterious depths of the seas seemed to contest for the privilege of pouring in day by day their richest zoological treasures. 19
    Hornaday had been working at Ward’s for six months, spending most of his waking hours in the company of older men who had exotic field experiences in far-off places. But Rochester was about as far-off a place as he’d ever been in his life. Now, he felt, he was ready to test his mettle against the world. After all, he was nineteen years old, a grown man. It was time to mount an expedition of his own, just like Paul Du Chaillu had in Africa. When Du Chaillu left on his first expedition, the one that made his name famous around the world, he had been only twenty.
    When Hornaday marched into Professor Ward’s office that Maymorning and dropped the name of Paul Du Chaillu, it was a name that was no doubt familiar to a majority of households in America. Fifteen years earlier, in 1859—the same year Charles Darwin published his famous book on the origin of species—the French-American explorer had emerged from the trackless jungles of Gabon after a four-year expedition with conclusive proof of the existence of the hairy, upright-walking “ape-man” of the jungle, which had long been rumored but never confirmed. Although the myth of such a creature had persisted since Roman times, it was not until 1847 that Dr. Thomas Savage, an American missionary in Africa, had produced an actual skull of the beast. The skull was shocking: heavy and low-slung, it looked vaguely human, but with thick ridges over the brows and a long sagittal crest across the top of the head. Then, two years later, another explorer produced an entire skeleton of the beast and put it on display at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London. That’s when Du Chaillu vowed to devote the rest of his life to finding an actual specimen of the creature, a living one if possible. 20
    With funding from the National Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, he mounted an expedition to West Africa, where he’d spent time as a boy when his father was a trader there. The late nineteenth century was a time when a very young man, armed with nothing but pluck, a modest bankroll, and the vaguest of maps, could strike out into the unknown and come back with enough specimens and stories to make him world-famous. He might even bring back a major new discovery, some exotic species hitherto unknown to