The Extermination Of The American Bison

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"Doctor Hornaday would have made a great Noah. The two men have much in common. And Doctor Hornaday is almost as well known." -The World's Work William Temple Hornaday (1854 - 1937) was an American zoologist, conservationist, taxidermist, and author. He served as the first director of the New York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, and he was a pioneer in the early wildlife conservation movement in the United States. In his position at the museum, Hornaday was tasked with inventorying the museum's specimen collection of American Buffalo, which was meager. He then undertook a census of bison by "writing to ranchers, hunters, army officers, and zookeepers across the American West and in Canada."[1] Based on firsthand accounts, Hornaday estimated that as recently as 1867 there were approximately 15 million wild bison in the American West. Through his census, he ascertained that those numbers had rapidly depleted. In a letter written to his superior at the Smithsonian, George Brown Goode, Hornaday reported that, "in the United States the extermination of all the large herds of buffalo is already an accomplished fact." In 1886 Hornaday went out west, to the Musselshell River region of Montana, where the last surviving herds of wild American buffalo lived. He was tasked with collecting specimens from the region for the United States National Museum collections, so that future generations would know what the buffalo looked like, after their expected extinction. Hornaday's work documenting the extinction of bison led to his publication in 1889 of "Extinction of the American Bison" in the Report of theNational Museum.

The Extermination of the American Bison is a book by William Temple Hornaday first published in 1889. It was reprinted from a report Hornaday wrote for the Smithsonian Institution in the years 1886-87.Extermination contains an exhaustive account of bison ecology and the story of the near-entire destruction of the bison population in the United States. The book argues for the consequent necessity of protecting the small number of bison then in Yellowstone National Park.