The greatest American taxidermist of his era, Hornaday was also an ardent evolutionist and passionate naturalist. He knew that scientifically sound fighting apes would incite both the lurid public and the sober scientist, and that's exactly what happened. The judges—leading museum men from Cambridge, Princeton, and Manhattan—awarded Tree-Tops the top prize. As much as Hornaday loved the limelight, however, he loved animals even more, and scholars do consider Tree-Tops to be the first large mammal group appropriate for scientific display. As a result, it revolutionized taxidermy by inspiring others to aim for accuracy in their art.
Hornaday, a towering figure and eloquent speaker who dined with Andrew Carnegie (a lifelong friend and SAT patron) and other elites, wielded tremendous influence in the scientific community. He served as the first director of the National Zoo and was the director of the New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo) for thirty years. His ardent conservation campaigns brought national attention to the plight of the American bison, the northern fur seal, and the white rhino. His efforts to save the passenger pigeon, a species that vanished in 1914, were, sadly, less successful.
Hornaday went to work for Ward's in 1874, during its glory days. Previously, while at Iowa State College, he had read books by world-renowned naturalist-explorers, including John James Audubon's Birds of America and Paul Belloni Du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. At Ward's, he also hunted specimens for science.
He got the idea for Tree-Tops on a two-year collecting expedition through the East Indies and Borneo. Ward's sent Hornaday there to collect crocodiles, Bengal tigers, water buffalo, primates, and other exotic species for his museum clients. While he was in Borneo, the twenty-four-year-old Hornaday spent hours on the banks of the Sadong River sketching orangutans and gibbons, more convinced than ever that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was right. This did not deter him from his primary responsibility: to shoot them. In all, he killed forty-three primates (twenty-seven orangutans), surpassing Darwin's colleague (and friendly rival), the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who in 1855 collected twenty-four for scientific study and display.
In 1879, Hornaday returned to Ward's with a diagram of a Tree-Tops-like primate group, vines and all. Henry Ward was skeptical. At the time, no museum had a display case combining large mammals and artificial foliage—a "habitat group" to museums. Ward doubted that any museum would pay for something so expensive to make, so cutting-edge, and so violent. It was one thing to admire an orangutan in a painting or to read about one in an explorer's tall tale. But to see "real" primates engaged in bloody combat without having to trek to Borneo was something else altogether. How better to depict how species fight for survival?. Ward gave in, and Hornaday went to work.
That August, Hornaday presented Tree-Tops at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization of scientists and museum men devoted to advancing science and serving society. As he described his field studies (explaining, exuberantly I imagine, how orangutans are not ferocious—indeed, they can be quite docile and playful), the attending scientists were riveted. Then he unveiled his case, and the orangutans appeared in the room as if by magic. Here was the jungle complete with creeper vines, moss, and bellicose apes. Even Hornaday could not convey in words this type of theater, which was electrifying, if a bit overwrought. The scientists were tantalized. After the lecture, George Brown Goode, curator and assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, offered Hornaday the position of chief taxidermist at the National Museum of Natural History. Albert'S. Bickmore, founder of the American Museum of Natural History, commissioned a tame Tree-Tops for his museum.
In 1883, the Smithsonian bought Tree-Tops and displayed it in its Hall of Mammals for a curious public eager for science. Sometimes Hornaday would visit the museum to see if his masterpiece held up in light of the latest phylogenetic discoveries. He was never anything less than sanguine. "Yes; even forty years after we are not ashamed of it; for it is sufficiently near to the standards of to-day to be entitled to a place in the sun," he boasted in his 1925 memoir, A Wild-Animal Round-up: Stories and Pictures from the Passing Show.
Tree-Tops was dismantled in the 1950s, its individual orangutans displayed in the World of Mammals Hall until 1999, when they were taken down and put into storage. If you saw the apes now, you'd think the taxidermy was crude, and you'd be right. The top taxidermists at the WTC today could sculpt a far more realistic and technically accurate primate—that is to say, one that was fleshier and less grotesquely savage. At the time, however, Hornaday's experiment was radical, equivalent to adding Technicolor to The Wizard of Oz.
Even so, it was the live animals that truly captured Hornaday's heart. "I love nature and all her works but one day in an East Indian jungle among strange men and beasts, is worth more to me than a year among dry specimens," he wrote in 1885.
In spite of Hornaday's breakthrough display, that year the SAT dissolved, mired in debt. Its third and last exhibit received mixed reviews: apparently some mounts showed a bit too much imagination—as if the mirrors held up to nature were from a fun house. By then, its remaining officers found the organization too unwieldy to manage; although everyone wanted to win ribbons, only a few would share their secret formulas and methods.
The SAT was far from a failure, though. Hornaday, for one, claimed that it had grandly served its purpose and was therefore no longer necessary. In fact, its most gifted members, such as Carl Akeley and Frederic Lucas, had already taken positions with the leading natural history museums, erecting astonishing dioramas unrivaled to this day. The era of "stuffing" animals, Hornaday later remarked, was finally over.
Nearly ninety years later, in 1976, an optimistic
