Hornaday’s War CHAPTER 6 A Mysterious Stranger One winter afternoon in 1888, about two years after his return from the Montana Territory, William Temple Hornaday was kneeling in the ersatz buffalo grass and sage of an immense museum display in the Hall of Mammals, at the National Museum in Washington. The diorama, the most ambitious undertaking of his celebrated career as a taxidermist, was housed in the largest display case ever made for the museum: sixteen feet wide, twelve feet deep, and ten feet high, surrounded by a burnished mahogany frame. In addition to its size, what was genuinely new about the exhibit was that it was an immense glass cube, its contents visible from all sides. Virtually all other museum displays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were visible from only one side, or at most two sides. This was to be, Hornaday hoped, his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel of celebration for a vanishing—and perhaps vanished—species.1 The museum’s chief taxidermist had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and was wearing a full-length oilcloth apron.
