In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

The art of taxidermy as practised at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in those days was very simple. To stuff a deer, for example, we treated the skin with salt, alum, and arsenical soap. Then the bones were wired and wrapped and put in his legs and he was hung, upside down, and the body stuffed with straw until it would hold no more If then we wished to thin the body at any point, we sewed through it with a long needle and drew it in. Now to do this, no knowledge of the animal's anatomy or of anything else about it was necessary. There was but little attempt to put the animals in natural attitudes; no attempt at grouping, and no accessories in the shape of trees or other surroundings. The profession I had chosen as the most satisfying and stimulating to a man's soul turned out at that time to have very little science and no art at all.

The reason for this was not so much that no one knew better. It was more the fact that no one would pay for better work. Professor Ward had to set a price on his work that the museums would pay, and at that time most museums were interested almost exclusively in the collection of purely scientific data and cared little for exhibitions that would appeal to the public. They preferred collections of birds' skins to bird groups, and collections of mammal data and skeletons to mammal groups. The museums then had no taxidermists of their own.

However, many of the prominent museum men of to-day had their early training at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Soon after I went to Ward's another nineteen-year-old boy named William Morton Wheeler, now of the Bussey Institution at Harvard, turned up there. E. N. Gueret, now in charge of the Division of Osteology in the Field Museum of Natural History, George K. Cherrie, the South American explorer; the late J. William Critchley, who became the chief taxidermist in the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences; Henry L. Ward, director of the Kent Scientific Museum in Grand Rapids; H. C. Denslow, an artist formerly associated with several of the leading museums as bird taxidermist; William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoölogical Park, and Frederick S. Webster, who was the first president of the Society of American Taxidermists, were all among the friends I made in those early days. A long list of others, not my contemporaries at that institution, but men with whom I have since been associated in museum work, might be added. Dr. Frederic A. Lucas had left Ward's shortly before my arrival to take up his duties at the Smithsonian Institution but I came to feel that I knew him very well through the stories and reminiscences of my companions. It was not until my return from my third expedition in 1911 that my delightful association with him as the director of the American Museum of Natural History was begun.

I have a theory that the first museum taxidermist came into existence in about this way: One of our dear old friends, some old-fashioned closet naturalist who knew animals only as dried skins and had been getting funds from some kind-hearted philanthropist, one day, under pressure from the philanthropist, who wanted something on exhibition to show his friends, sent around the corner and called in an upholsterer and said, "Here is the skin of an animal. Stuff this thing and make it look like a live animal." The upholsterer did it and kept on doing it until the scientist had a little more money. Given more work the upholsterer became ambitious and had an idea that these animals might be improved upon, so he began to do better work. But it took more time and cost more money so that he lost his job. Thus it has been that from the very people from whom we expected the most encouragement in the beginning of our efforts, we received the least.

I remember very well one time when an opportunity came to do something a little better. A zebra was brought into the Establishment. I had been studying anatomy and I had learned the names of all the muscles and all the bones. When I saw the zebra I realized that here was an opportunity to do something good and I asked to make a plaster cast of the body. I had to do it in my own time and worked from supper until breakfast time, following out a few special experiments of my own in the process. Nevertheless, the zebra was handed out to be mounted in the old way and my casts were thrown on the dump.

I stayed at this leading institution of taxidermy for four years and while I was there we stuffed animals for most of the museums in the country, for hunters and sportsmen, and various other kinds of people, including Barnum's circus. The animal we stuffed for Barnum's circus was the famous elephant Jumbo. We had to use a slightly different method for Jumbo, not only because of his size but because he had to be made rigid and strong enough to stand being carted around the country with the circus; for this old elephant served dead as well as alive to amuse and instruct the public. As a matter of fact, he is still at it, for his skin on the steel-and-wood frame we made for it at Ward's is at Tufts College and his skeleton is at the American Museum of Natural History.

Between the time that I first went to Ward's and my last job there, which was on Jumbo, there was an intermission which I spent in the taxidermy shop of John Wallace on North William Street in New York. I roomed in Brooklyn with Doctor Funk, of Funk & Wagnalls, and worked in the basement shop of Wallace's, and a more dreary six months I never had spent anywhere. So when Ward came after me to go back, saying that his having fired me was all a mistake due to erroneous reports that had been given him, I went, and stayed three years. During this time I got to know Professor Webster of Rochester University, who later became president of Union College, and he urged me to study to become a professor. In spite of the fact that my education had stopped early on account of a lack of funds, I set to work to prepare myself to go to the Sheffield Scientific School. But between working in the daytime and studying at night I broke down, and when examination time came I wasn't ready. However, my chances of further education, although delayed, seemed improved. At the time I was studying for the Sheffield Scientific School my friend, William Morton Wheeler, had left Ward's and was teaching in the High School in Milwaukee. He wrote and offered to tutor me if I would go out there. So I went to Milwaukee and got a job with the museum there, which was to give me food and lodging while I prepared for college. It did more than that, for it absorbed me so that I gave up all thought of abandoning taxidermy. I stayed eight years in Milwaukee, working in the museum and in a shop of my own.

Several things happened there which stimulated my interest in taxidermy. One of the directors had been to Lapland and had collected the skin of a reindeer, a Laplander's sled, and the driving paraphernalia, and he was anxious to have these shown in the museum. This material we turned into a group of a Laplander driving a reindeer over the snow. That was fairly successful, and we induced the museum to buy a set of skins of orang-outangs, which Charles F. Adams, another of my former colleagues at Ward's, had collected in Borneo. We arranged them in a group using some bare branches as accessories.

In making these groups we had had to abandon the old straw-rag-and-bone method of stuffing and create modelled manikins over which to stretch the skins. As soon as this point was reached several problems presented themselves, the solution of which meant an entirely new era in taxidermy. If a man was going to model a realistic manikin for an animal's skin, instead of stuffing the skin with straw, it was evident he would have to learn to model. Likewise it turned out that, even if a man knew how to model, he couldn't model an animal body sufficiently well for the skin to fit it unless he knew animal anatomy. And we found out also that making a manikin from a model was not as simple as it sounds, but that on the contrary it is about as difficult as casting in bronze, the difference being that the art of bronze casting has been developed through many years, while the art of making manikins had to be created comparatively quickly and by a very few people. We worked at these problems step by step in Milwaukee and made a good deal of progress.

The reindeer and orang-outang work encouraged me to suggest a series of groups of the fur-bearing animals of Wisconsin, the muskrat group to be the first of the series. This suggestion was more tolerated than encouraged when it was first made, but I went as far as I could go with my dream and before I left there I finished the muskrat group, as I did most of my early experiments, in spite of the opposition of the authorities. It was the old, old story of starting a thing and having to give it up because of lack of support. But my idea won eventually. It was only a short time until my friend Wheeler was made director of the museum and from then on there was full sympathy for the plan. This was an entering wedge, and since that time group after group has been added, until now that museum has a magnificent series.