Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel Page B

liability—”
    â€œDone!”
Hornaday cried, momentarily letting loose the small boy, covered with mud and cockleburs, who had actually hatched the plot in the first place. 24
    Hornaday could hardly wait to dash off a letter to his relations back in Indiana, a place that already had come to seem like a sad backwater in the glow of his new reknown as a world-famous adventurer. With the same elaborate casualness he’d used in his encounter with Professor Ward, he wrote his Uncle Allen that he was mounting a collecting expedition for gorillas to West Africa, just like Paul Du Chaillu. It was several weeks after he posted the letter that his Uncle Allen, hero of the Civil War, an enormous man whose eyes had seen death, showed up at the door of his boarding house in Rochester. Uncle Allen was not smiling. In fact, he was quite determined to prevent his intrepid, moronic nephew from vanishing forever into the mists of Africa.
    In his autobiography, Hornaday recalled how Uncle Allen told him, “I’m prepared to offer you a good position in a business office in Buffalo, run by an acquaintance of mine, at a starting salary of $75 a week.” That was more than
eight times
what Will made as an apprentice taxidermist. But the thought of going gray sitting in a business office in Buffalo made him want to die.
    â€œThank you, uncle, but I’m sorry—I just can’t do that.”
    Then Uncle Allen upped the ante, offering the boy a flat-out bribe.
    â€œAll right, I am prepared to offer you $500, outright, if you’ll abandon this crazy plan to go to Africa. Honestly, Will—you’ll get yourself killed over there.” 25
    Will wavered, but still refused. Then, realizing that his Uncle Allen was here only because he cared about him, he gave ground. But not all of it.
    â€œWell, Uncle, if you feel that way about it,” he said, “I cannot go on,regardless of your feelings and judgement. I will not rob you of your $500, and I am willing to make my first venture abroad in some less dangerous place.” 26
    With Uncle Allen’s approval, Will and Professor Ward settled on the coast of Cuba and the Florida Everglades, because—though they were both still largely unexplored—these places were safer, and because Ward was in particular need of Atlantic seaboard maritime specimens. In October 1874, Will Hornaday sailed for the Everglades. He was not quite twenty years old.

CHAPTER 9
Yearning, Too Much, for Fame
    When the sixteen-ton, three-masted mail schooner
Liberty
hove into Miami Harbor on a sparkling afternoon in early January 1875, with Will Hornaday at the rail, there was barely a Miami Harbor, or even a Miami, to be seen. The tiny neotropical settlement was not even incorporated as a town, and in fact, it wasn’t much more than a remote postal stop for mail ships. Hornaday wrote in a letter to a friend that “there is no town here atall, three houses at the mouth of the river, and others at intervals of one and two miles, scattered along the shore of the Bay.” 1
    Standing beside Hornaday at the rail was a dishevelled-looking young man, a bit older and a bit taller than Hornaday, wearing filthy clothes and a look of wonderment on his face. Every lucky man eventually stumbles upon a best friend, and the starlight of good fortune seemed to follow Hornaday wherever he went. “I shall always believe I was born under a lucky star as a compensation for not having been born rich,” 2 he would later say. A month earlier, in Key West Harbor, Hornaday had met Chester Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old gallant from Racine, Wisconsin, who was taking a rambling winter trip through the South—Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida—and had wound up in Key West, as so many adventurers do, because it was as far south as you could get in the United States. That’s where Jackson had noticed an intense gentleman, his sleeves rolled up, sweat glistening on