Capt. George Anderson and his hidden plan that saved the park
In mid-October 1871, Lt. George Smith Anderson, U.S. Cavalry, fresh from West Point, was on his way to Fort Lyon, Colorado, when he began seeing buffalo: “Hundreds”, he recorded later, “where the night before there had been only dozens”, and then, “from the higher points of our route, when the horizon was distant from 10 to 20 miles, hundreds of thousands.” [1]
Slightly over a year later, the same trail “was lined with Buffalo [hunting] camps and I imagine I saw 5,000 skinned carcass during my trip.” [2] By 1891, when Anderson, now a captain and the new Army superintendent of Yellowstone Park, the last wild bison herd numbered at best two hundred animals in a remote Park valley and it was his duty — something he took very seriously — to protect them. With no applicable law against killing Yellowstone’s wildlife, each winter the great beasts were poached with impunity, their very rare and valuable heads and hides sold to taxidermists for wealthy collectors.
In twenty years’ service, Capt. Anderson was one of the Army’s most polished career officers. As a young lieutenant, he served in the Red River Indian war, was named chief military engineer for the Arizona Territory, and afterwards taught physics at West Point for three years. [3] His Yellowstone assignment, however, was unexpected and controversial. Stationed in Arlington, Virginia, fresh from a two-year assignment in Paris to observe the French army and evaluate side arms for Army purchase, he was appointed over the objection of General Nelson Miles, the legendary commander of the Department of the West, who favored one of Yellowstone’s first explorers, Capt. Augustus Doane, a much senior officer on duty nearby. [4]
In Washington, Anderson’s social connections extended high into Army echelons, as well as Congress and the Benjamin Harrison administration; friends that included Yellowstone Park’s fiercest defender, the federal civil service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. The son of a New Jersey judge, Anderson knew TR through a network of New York men’s clubs, high society bastions dedicated to eating and drinking, hunting and fishing, and so, with sportsmen’s logic, the conservation of wild places. [5]
Anderson assumed command of a park in crisis, chronically underfunded and, after serial failures by the Interior Dept., now overseen by the Dept. of War, part of the network of forts still maintained across the west. By then, even Yellowstone’s greatest champions believed it was only a matter of time before the Park was sectioned off and sold.
But they didn’t know Capt. Anderson. In his seven-year tenure, he brought a strict military order to the park’s administration, building out its roads, overseeing construction of its magnificent headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, and, less than three years into the job, masterminding a public relations coup, the widely reported arrest of a buffalo poacher that put a national spotlight on the plight of Park wildlife and in short order brought civil law — criminal penalties for poaching and vandalism — at last to “America’s Wonderland”.
Contemporary accounts, and every history since, assert that the two reporters, a writer and a photographer, who publicized the poacher’s arrest got their story by chance, an amazing stroke of luck. Though certainly fortunate, I submit that it wasn’t wasn’t accidental. One of the greatest victories in the history of American conservation was very likely engineered by Capt. Anderson and a New York magazine editor, a good friend of Roosevelt’s, who, to seal their victory, covered their tracks.
What’s certain is that on March 12, 1894, Army scout Felix Burgess and an enlisted man named Troike were on patrol in Yellowstone’s remote Pelican Valley when, following fresh tracks in the snow, they discovered a heap of buffalo carcasses. Hearing far-off gunfire, they soon caught a man named Ed Howell skinning five more of the animals. So preoccupied was Howell in his task that Burgess crossed some four hundred yards of open country on long skis before arresting him at gunpoint.
By nightfall Burgess and Troike had their prisoner at the Park’s Lake Hotel, where a phone line to headquarters some seventy miles away, brought Capt. Anderson word of the arrest. He ordered another detail to bring Howell to Fort Yellowstone and collect the remains of what turned out to be twelve of the Park’s nearly extinct buffalo.
Two reporters were embedded at the time with Anderson’s troops: F. Jay Haynes, Yellowstone’s official photographer, who took pictures with a heavy, tripod-supported view camera, and Emerson Hough, a correspondent for Forest and Stream magazine, an outdoor and hunting weekly. They were teamed with the Park’s most experienced guide, Elwood “Uncle Billy” Hofer. [6]
Hough and Haynes met the arrest detail on its way back to headquarters and documented the crime in words and pictures. Hough notified his Forest and Stream editor in New York, George Bird Grinnell, who published a brief exclusive in the next issue, with fuller accounts of the scoop appearing in the magazine over the next several weeks. [7] At that time Park regulations lacked the force of law. Poachers were fined a fraction of their potential profits and then set free.
Long an advocate of laws protecting Park wildlife, Grinnell, the founder of the Audubon Society, ran editorials urging readers to demand legislation to answer this latest outrage. With energized popular and political momentum, coupled with forceful lobbying by Commissioner Roosevelt, the Lacey Act, which extended Wyoming territorial law into Yellowstone, passed Congress and was signed into law six weeks (weeks!) after Howell’s arrest.
Contemporary accounts, recapitulated in every Yellowstone history since, stated that Hough and Haynes were in the park to report on winter conditions for Grinnell’s magazine, and so got their big story by mere chance. But considering Capt. Anderson’s little-known, but long-standing connections to Grinnell and Roosevelt [8], and to the exclusive Boone and Crockett Club, a pro-conservation hunting fraternity the two men founded, makes it hard to credit that two seasoned reporters got the biggest story of their lives in the middle of nowhere, in late winter, by accident.
In the two decades following the Park’s 1872 creation, vandalizing tourists and commercial hunters assaulted its features while a Congress cozened by railroad interests, and unwilling to disburse money for a remote western reserve, annually threatened its existence. After the Interior Dept’s Park budget was cut almost completely in 1885, management of the reserve was transferred by law to the War Dept.
In late 1890, the then Army commander of Yellowstone, Capt. Fraser Boutille was ordered to South Dakota with a company of 2nd Cavalry to help suppress the Sioux Ghost Dance movement, a ceremonial uprising that soon ended in the Wounded Knee massacre.
In his eighteen months managing the Park, Boutille earned a reputation as a bellyacher for his utterly justified complaints of a lack of material support. His command was quartered in tents its first winter there, and Boutille’s office was in a blacksmith’s shop. Worse, he was seen by Yellowstone defenders back east as sympathetic to plans to mechanize access, elevators and trains, to popular Park destinations. While away in the field, Boutille was relieved of his Park command. [9]
His replacement, George Anderson, 42, cut a splendid figure: 6’2” tall, he sported a short beard in the style of Ulysses Grant, favored smartly-tailored uniforms that emphasized his barrel chest and wore a flat-billed soldier’s cap that highlighted the size of his head. Fifth in his 1871 West Point class, where he excelled in engineering, he first saw duty along a line of western outposts from Kansas to New Mexico. [10]
His contemporary journal reveals an exceptionally well-read and conscientious young officer. A keen networker, “Venus” (his Army nickname) Anderson sang and played trumpet in what appears to have been a constant round of frontier picnics and dances. He was also an avid hunter, recording in his journal bagging an uncountable number of ducks, along with antelope, rabbits, turkeys, badgers, snipe (a favorite target), deer, hawks, owls, a swan, and at least two buffalo. [11]
A successful assignment surveying a wagon road from Colorado to New Mexico earned Anderson an appointment to the general staff in charge of the Arizona territory, but not before serving in the Red River War, the brief Texas campaign commanded by General Miles characterized by a low body count and the obliteration of every material resource the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people relied on to live outside their assigned reservation. The war’s central strategy was the extermination of the southern bison herd, millions of animals. Nine years later, the American Bison was extinct in the wild.
Apart from a three-year assignment to the West Point faculty, Anderson remained on active duty out west. Promoted captain in 1885, he was ordered east in 1887 and sent to France two years later. By then he belonged to New York’s exclusive University Club where a member his own age, Bird Grinnell, another avid western game hunter, held the annual dinners of his new Boone and Crockett Club. [12]
Named for Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, the club was founded by Grinnell and Roosevelt in 1887 from a select circle of millionaires, legislators, and prominent military men, and dedicated to ethical hunting regulations, wildlife management, and resource conservation. Early members included Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman; Speaker of the House Thomas Reed; Secy. of War Redfield Proctor; former Interior Secy. Carl Schurz; Hallett Phillips, a high level Interior Dept. bureaucrat; U.S. Reps. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Ohio’s Bellamy Storer; Associate members included Missouri Senator George Vest and, after he got the Yellowstone command, Capt. George Anderson. [13]
Some measure of the complicated nature of Anderson’s new job, as well as the power he was granted, is clear in an unsigned, typewritten letter, marked “Confidential” and dated January 26, 1891, apparently handed Anderson just before he left D.C., outlining “some matters of which I note down confidentially for your inspection.”
A comparison of handwriting in the margins of this and another letter, signed and dated May 12, 1894, in the Yellowstone Park archive points to the author as one Edward Bowens, a senior Interior Department clerk, someone who has “kept myself so advised as to what has been going on [at the Park] for the last ten years.” [14]
He notes Interior Secretary John Noble, “has so much to do that he has little or no time for attending to the matters of detail in regards to the Park” and tells Anderson to “manage those details without bothering him about them,” that is: “run the Park, according to your best judgment and do as little letter writing as possible. […]
“Now as to your troubles, for troubles, you will have and plenty of them:” Bowens notes first and foremost the managers of the several Park hotels, whom he characterized as, basically, lying thieves who treated customers like pigs: “[T]he only reason the department has not turned them out is because it has been thought nobody could be found to take their place.”
Indeed, Anderson’s central problem, one touching on every aspect of his assignment, was how the locals — concessionaires, tour operators, waggoners, and other workers servicing the Park and its visitors — mainly acted without giving a toss to rules from Washington. Interestingly, his first official report to the Interior Secretary, sent that August, lavishly praises hotel and transportation managers, their accommodations and conveyances. [15] He also offered his full support for the then-controversial sale of alcohol at Park concessions. (There was, he said, a medicinal need at such high altitude.)
Not coincidentally, the gregarious new commanding officer was a regular at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel bar. A man’s man in a man’s world, Anderson quickly won the affection and loyalty of those civilians under his supervision; social investments that would shortly pay dividends.
His first report excoriates tourists keen on carving their names on, or breaking off, portions of the Park’s natural formations. As there were no laws to enforce Park regulations, Anderson took matters to hand, using hotel registration books to identify vandals by name, and then, marching them to the scenes of their crimes, compelling them to clean up their damage before being expelled.
Poachers faced expulsion and confiscation of their goods, and were jailed as long as possible, about a month, before the inevitable orders to release them came from Washington. Anderson then had the miscreants sent by foot to the Park gateway furthest from their homes and told never to return. Most, of course, did. [16]
Illegal hunting — for beaver pelts, elk meat, and especially buffalo trophies — was highly profitable. (A large buffalo head fetched as much as $500, nearly a year’s wages, from taxidermists in nearby Bozeman and Livingston, Montana.) “So long as there is no law within the Park for the prevention of hunting and trapping,” Anderson concluded in his initial report, “it will be a most difficult matter to break up.” [17]
He commanded some one hundred men. Overwhelmed during tourist season, the company ran regular winter patrols, mostly on long cross-country skis. Soon as the snow melted, Anderson made a personal reconnaissance of his new domain, the size of Connecticut he liked to brag, noting ways to improve communications, and setting locations for new, year-round patrol stations. He also started construction of the handsome stone administration buildings at Mammoth Hot Springs that are the main Park Service offices there today.
Late in his first report, Anderson observes, “The buffalo are contented and quiet in the Park and […] are on the increase.” He estimated a total of 400 bison under his care, a number that would soon prove wildly optimistic. [18]
By the start of his third year in command, Anderson was getting regular citizen reports of poachers — who they were and where they operated. [19] Writing the new Interior Secretary, Hoke Smith, in September, 1893 Anderson emphasized poachers would be “all the bolder this year” and wanted “authority to supply two more scouts for the next six months. They are greatly [his emphasis] needed.”
He also proposed an undercover operation. A Department agent “could do much good by operating among the people secretly. It would be best that his communication with me should be only by letter.” [20] Secy. Smith replied that, unfortunately, neither the Interior nor War departments would pay for new scouts, or secret agents. Anderson had to work with what he had. [21]
Anderson was certain Cooke City poachers would be after more buffalo that winter. In February 1894, he got word that one Ed Howell was preparing an expedition from there to the Pelican Valley. [22] Poachers like Howell sledded their supplies in at night, shot the snowbound animals, then hid their frozen trophies in deep stands of trees, to pack out at their leisure.
To suffer even mild punishment, poachers had to be caught red-handed, and in the two previous years, the Army captured and released two of them without halting the practice. Anderson surely understood that, to truly protect the Park’s buffalo, any arrest and release of Howell needed to provoke public outrage. [23]
In reconstructing events, a researcher will find large gaps in the official record. Several of Anderson’s letters to Boone and Crockett associates, Grinnell, and the Interior Dept.’s Hallett Phillips, from this period are missing from the Yellowstone archive (contemporary copies of his hand-written, official correspondence were made through carbons onto onionskin paper and then filed), though their replies, specifically referencing the lost correspondence, survive. Stranger still, Yale University’s extensive collection of Grinnell’s papers is entirely missing that Yellowstone-critical period, all of 1893 and the early months of 1894. [24]
To think that Anderson didn’t share with Grinnell his specific knowledge of the coming poaching expedition dismisses his loyalty to Boone and Crockett’s ideals, and his willingness to act as he saw fit to protect Park wildlife. In fact, one of Grinnell’s correspondents (almost certainly “Uncle Billy” Hofer) had reported encountering a suspected bison poacher near Alum Creek while touring the Park with one of Anderson’s troopers the previous March. [25] (That article, in the June 9, 1893 Forest and Stream, was clipped and sent to Anderson by Interior Secretary Noble.) [26] By then, Grinnell was in the habit of reprinting Forest and Stream reports of Park conditions in pamphlets he sent to members of Congress and the press. [27]
Following Anderson’s autumn 1893 correspondence, Grinnell assigned one of his regular writers, Emerson Hough, to join Hofer for a March tour of the Park, and asked F. Jay Haynes to meet Hough and provide pictures for his report. [28] Haynes owned the exclusive franchise for commercial Park photography and kept a summer home at Mammoth Hot Springs. His main residence was in St. Paul, MN where he was corporate photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which ran Yellowstone’s hotels through a subsidiary. Haynes’ photos would bear unimpeachable witness to any massacre of Park bison.
Haynes’ pictures and Hough’s dramatic account indeed provided vivid testimony of a national shame. But had they been seen as being in the Park expressly to report Howell’s capture, Park opponents could have easily accused Anderson of entrapment, that the bison killings were allowed for political ends. Better then that the immediate news of Howell’s capture was presented as a stroke of good fortune.
And so it was, and continued to be. According to Park historian Aubrey Haines’ official account, the reporting team, “unexpectedly met” Burgess and Troike returning with Howell at Norris Station; that Hough then wrote an impromptu account of the capture and sent it back with the soldiers for transmission to Grinnell. [29]
But that is certainly wrong. In his fullest account of the arrest, published in the Forest and Stream of May 5, 1894 Hough states he was with Capt. Anderson at Fort Yellowstone when the arrest call came in: “This was just before Hofer and I started into the Park from the post, and as I was the guest of Capt. Anderson at the post, of course, I learned the news at once, and at once put it on the wire for Forest and Stream.” [30]
Hough never says he traveled with Haynes. Both Anderson’s letter reporting Howell’s arrest to Secy. Smith, and a March 24 report in the Livingston, Montana Enterprise state that Haynes was on Capt. George Scott’s patrol, the unit that included Burgess and Troike, sent by Anderson expressly to catch Howell. [31] “Fortunately,” Anderson reported to Smith, “Mr. Haynes will have photos of the poacher and the dead bodies of his buffalo. I shall send you copies of them as soon as I can get them.” [32] Hough is conspicuously absent from both the Enterprise story and Anderson’s official report.
So it is reasonable to think Haynes was sent with Scott’s patrol to photograph any evidence of poaching, while Hough remained at headquarters until such time as Howell was in custody, first to telegraph the news to Grinnell and then set out with Hofer and several more troops to get the fuller story.
“When Capt. Anderson came in after hearing the news of this capture,” Hough told readers, “he was positively jubilant. He couldn’t sit still. He was so glad.” [33] We might wonder if Anderson’s glee was less about Howell’s capture than that his plan for it to be widely and immediately publicized had worked perfectly.
Hough’s telegram read: “Capt. Scott in charge scouting party reports from the Lake to Captain Anderson that Park Scout Burgess has captured Howell, the notorious Cooke City poacher with ten fresh Buffalo skins on Astringat [sic] Creek, near Pelican. The Prisoner has been ordered brought in. This is the most important arrest ever made in the park.” [34]
An April 14, 1894 Forest and Stream editorial declares, “[T]here seems now to be little doubt that within the last year or two, a wholesale slaughter has been taking place among our Buffalo preserved in the Yellowstone Park.” and calls for every reader “who is interested in the Park [… to] write to his senator and representative in Congress.” [35]
Three weeks later, the Lacey act, named for Iowa congressman John Lacey, passed, extending Wyoming law into Yellowstone, and establishing a U.S. District Court at Mammoth Hot Springs to try those accused of breaking those laws. While Roosevelt complained the bill did not do more — railroads still threatened — it was an astounding victory, all the more so for being unexpected. [36]
So how did the “coincidence” narrative arise? Hough’s final and fullest account of Howell’s capture, appearing on the eve of the Lacey Act’s passage, freely uses the words “fortunate”, “fortune”, and “lucky”. It “was a venture singularly fortunate in every respect.”; “Fortune was kind and raised no obstacle to [sic] hard to overcome.”; “Fortune relented and all became possible and plain.” He was “highly fortunate in having Mr. Hofer as member of” his expedition. [37] But all of the above was written regarding his winter circuit of the Park, a hazardous journey completed after Howell’s arrest without loss or injury.
Of Howell’s capture, Hough wrote, “had not Forest and Stream been born under a lucky as well as an energetic star, it could not have enjoyed the journalistic good fortune of having a man right on the spot — and a most remote and improbable spot, too — to obtain exclusively for its services the most important piece of news.” [38] This is another way of saying that the magazine’s star connection, the energetic Capt. George Anderson, put him in Yellowstone in the first place, emphatically not how everything that followed was a fantastic coincidence.
An unsigned editorial in that same issue, almost certainly by Grinnell, nearly gives the game away. “[The Hough and Haynes’ expedition] was an enterprise with a purpose (all ital. mine). This purpose was actual, definite and important, and it’s occasion pressing. It was nothing less than to make real to 65 million people of this country and their agents in Congress. […] The perils which threaten [Yellowstone Park]; to arouse them to the necessity of immediate action to rescue it from these perils. […]
“The course of events has been what we foresaw. The results of the expedition have been secured at a moment when they are certain to be of the highest possible utility.” [39] But Grinnell may have tipped the plan from the get-go. Consider that Hough’s published telegram ends with: “This is the most important arrest ever made in the park.”, which had no historic basis whatsoever; until then every poacher arrested had been set free, as Howell soon was. His arrest was “the most important” only because Hough and Haynes were there to report it.
Seven buffalo heads, large and small, appear in a now-famous photograph, arrayed in a grotesque line on a Fort Yellowstone veranda attended by four officers, Capt. Scott holding the center. [40] The heads were stuffed on Anderson’s order, the largest sent to the War Dept. and another to Interior. The balance was sold, the proceeds remitted to the Interior Dept. general account. Anderson asked permission to send one to “a club that has been liberal in its terms to army officers”, almost certainly the University. [41] While club records show a bison head donated by Capt. Anderson, whether it came from the Howell group or a later confiscation is impossible to say. [42]
For sadly, in his 1895 report, Anderson notes that though elk, deer, bear, and antelope poaching had ended, bison still needed special protection. He estimated the Park herd at two hundred, a figure his last report a year later reduced to fifty. He notes then: “Whether or not I shall be able to save them remains a doubtful problem. The forces of nature and the hands of man are alike against them, and they seem to be struggling against an almost certain fate.” [43]
By 1900 the Yellowstone herd numbered twenty-five animals, now kept in an enclosure near the fort — paid for by the Smithsonian Institution that Anderson ordered constructed for the purpose five years earlier. [44] Their numbers were added to from small Texas and Montana private herds and have since grown to the current total of around 4,000 Park bison. [45]
In June 1897, Capt. Anderson was reassigned during the run-up to the Spanish-American War. His other lasting accomplishments at the Park include the definitive survey of Park boundaries, gaining larger budgets, and ending any further designs by the railroads to lay track in the park. Known by the end of his tenure as the Czar of Yellowstone, Anderson’s rigorous procedures were the template for the nascent U.S. Park Service, founded when Fort Yellowstone was decommissioned on the eve of WW I.
Steadily promoted, Anderson was appointed to the Army’s first General Staff, and retired a Brigadier General in 1912, He was living at the University Club when, on March 7, 1915, almost exactly twenty-one years after Howell’s arrest, he suffered a heart attack in the club’s lobby while reading the Sunday paper and died almost immediately. He was 65. Following a well-attended Episcopal morning service at Manhattan’s Church of the Transfiguration two days later, his coffin was placed on the 2:15 train from Grand Central to West Point for internment at the Academy cemetery. [46]
His Times obituary made a brief, inaccurate note of his Yellowstone command. In his Forest and Stream memorial, Grinnell wrote: “Besides the work that he did in administering the Park — in keeping out evildoers and making protection popular among the neighboring inhabitants — Gen. Anderson kept the friends of the Park in the East advised of the dangers that threatened it, and thus enabled them to secure in Washington sympathy that was helpful to the reservation. […]
“With the stature of a giant and the bearing of a soldier, he had the simplicity, the directness, and the heart of a little child.” [47]
Notes
[1] George Anderson, “A Buffalo Story”, American Big-Game Hunting, ed Theodore Roosevelt, George B. Grinnell, 1893 (2nd ed. New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Co., 1901), 21
[2] George Anderson, Personal Journal, 1872–1873, pg. 26, entry of Nov. 19, 1872, Yellowstone National Park Archive, RG00 Box 24,
[3] Details of Anderson’s life drawn from Mary F. Anderson, George Smith Anderson 1849–1915 A Biographical Sketch, unpublished 1939, YNPA HISTORY (Anderson 2), and Memorial, George S. Anderson, Annual Reunion of the Association Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 11, 1915 (Saginaw: Seeman and Peters Inc., 1915) 164–166USMA Library Digital Collection, http://digital-library.usma.edu/digital/collection/aogreunion/id/14441/rec/1
[4] George Black, Empire of Shadows (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 426–428.
[5] For his membership and contributions to New York’s University Club, and likely connection there to Roosevelt via George Bird Grinnell, see [12]
[6] Details of Howell’s arrest taken from: Aubrey L. Haines, The Yellowstone Story, vol 2 (Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: Yellowstone Library and Museum Assoc. & Colorado Associated University Press, 1977), 62–64; H. Duane Hampton, How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) 121–122 ; Michael Punke, Last Stand (New York: Smithsonian Books, HarperCollins, 2007) 206–212; George Anderson to Hoke Smith, March 17, 1894 YNPA, Microfilm reel #20, 1–9; Emerson Hough, “The Account of Howell’s Capture”, Forest and Stream vol. 42, #18, 877–878 (May 5, 1894); and Anon., “Slaying Park Buffalo”, Livingston (MT) Enterprise, vol. 11 no.43, 1 (March 24, 1894)
[7] Forest and Stream, issues March 24 — May 5, 1894 All at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000046163
[8] see [12]
[9] My account of Boutille’s troubled tenure, and dismissal from the Park command is drawn from Hampton, Cavalry 97–104 and Richard A. Bartlett, Yellowstone; A Wilderness Besieged, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 259–260.
[10] M. Anderson, Biographical Sketch op. cit. Anderson’s stature and appearance are seen in photographs in Punke, Last Stand, 192, and at: https://www.nps.gov/features/yell/slidefile/mammals/blackbear/Images/16544.jpg https://www.nps.gov/features/yell/slidefile/mammals/blackbear/Images/16545.jpg Judge John Meldrum, in Bartlett, Yellowstone, 261, described Anderson touring in the Park in civilian clothes.
[11] “Venus” from Annual Reunion, 166. Anderson’s gregarious nature is described in Punke, Last Stand, 193, and Bartlett, Yellowstone, 261. I will note here that he never married. Anderson kept detailed accounts of his reading and hunting accomplishments, as well as his social calendar, in his journal of 1872–1873, op. cit..
[12] Army service from M. Anderson, Biographical Sketch op. cit. Anderson’s own report of Army officer membership of the University Club is in James W. Alexander, A History of the University Club of New York 1865–1915, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915) 428. It details twenty West Point graduates joining from 1886 to 1888, a demographic bulge showing a marked increase over previous years, and a larger total than in those following; probability dictates Anderson was among them. Punke, Last Stand, 192 notes the shared age, 44, of Anderson and Grinnell in 1893. Letters from Grinnell to Anderson mentioning the University Club: Aug. 15, 1892 YNPA Microfilm reel #1, 492 and Jan. 16, 1897 YNPA Microfilm reel #2, box 11 Regarding Boone and Crockett annual dinners, see Alexander, History, 321–322.
[13] A list of Boone and Crockett members, a frank statement of social prestige and political clout, appears at the end of American Big-Game Hunting, ed. Theodore Roosevelt, George B. Grinnell, 1893 (2nd ed. New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Co., 1901) 340–345.
[14] Anon. (presumed Edward Bowens), “Confidential” memorandum, Jan. 26, 1891, [YNPA] Perhaps because previous research could not establish authorship, there is no mention of this very interesting document in the central histories consulted here. I identify Bowens as the likely author by noting identical crossed ‘t’s in marginalia of this document and in Bowens to Anderson, May 12, 1894 YNPA, Microfilm reel #2, 741.
[15] George Anderson Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park 1891 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891) 6–7
[16] Punke, Last Stand, 193 gives a good account of Anderson’s innovative approach to punishing vandals and poachers, noting his willingness to “press the limits of his authority”, very much in line with Bowens’ advice to “run the Park, according to your best judgment.”
[17] Anderson, Report 1891, 9; the $500 figure is from Hampton, Cavalry, 108
[18] Anderson, Report 1891, 10
[19] Bartlett, Yellowstone 319, Punke, Last Stand 195
[20] Anderson to Smith, Sept. 23, 1893, YNPA Microfilm reel #20, 338
[21] Smith to Anderson, October 12, 1893, YNPA Microfilm reel #2, Box 8
[22] Freeman Tilden, Following the Frontier with F. Jay Haynes, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 364
[23] Punke, in Last Stand, describes Anderson’s earlier rationale behind shaming Park vandals: “… that public opinion, if properly mobilized, could be a potent ally in his work.” 193
[24] I invite anyone so interested to attempt a search more thorough than mine of the Yellowstone archive’s microfilm files, indexed by subject, not date, as well as the original, gossamer-thin, sometimes illegible, carbon copies bound in two large volumes. Apparently missing are Anderson’s letters to Grinnell, Oct. 7, 1893, Nov. 19, 1893, and (re: Howell) March 27, 1894, along with May 11, 1894 (re: Howell) to Wendell Phillips. The peculiar lacunae in Yale’s collection appears in Guide to the George Bird Grinnell Papers MS 1388, 7, the only gap — Dec. 23, 1892 to March 30, 1894 — in an otherwise complete collection of personal correspondence, Aug. 2, 1888 to Dec. 2, 1920. Note too that Yale’s collection resumes shortly after the date of Howell’s arrest. Yale’s archive of Forest and Stream business correspondence begins Sept. 20, 1895.
[25] Hofer had been sending dispatches to Forest and Stream since at least 1887, see Forest and Stream vol. 42, #15, 312 (April 14, 1894), and Hofer years later recounted a story about meeting a presumed poacher near Henry’s Lake with many of the same details that appear in the June 9, 1893 article, see Haines Yellowstone, 68. In a letter of Aug. 15, 1893, Grinnell complains to Anderson that Hofer has not kept him appraised of a recent Park controversy YNPA, Microfilm reel #1, doc. 492, a possible reason why Grinnell gave the March ’94 assignment to Hough, one of his regular writers, with Hofer acting as Hough’s guide.
[26] Noble to Anderson, June 13, 1893, YNPA Microfilm reel #1 doc. 205
[27] Grinnell to Anderson, Nov. 28, 1892 Micofilm reel #1 doc. 940
[28] Tilden, Frontier, 361
[29] Haines, Yellowstone, 63
[30] Hough, “Howell’s Capture”, op. cit.
[31] Anderson to Smith, March 17, 1894 op.cit.; Unknown “Slaying Park Buffalo” op cit. The grim photographs appeared in Hough, “Howell’s Capture” op.cit.
[32] Ibid
[33] Hough, “Howell’s Capture”, op. cit.
[34] Telegram in Forest and Stream vol. 42, #12, 250 (March 24, 1894)
[35] George Bird Grinnell, “Save the Park Buffalo” Forest and Stream vol. 42, #15, 312 (April 14, 1894)
[36] Roosevelt to Anderson, April 30, 1894, YNPA, Microfilm reel #2, 1284
[37] The coincidence narrative appears in Hampton, Cavalry, 122 and Haines, Yellowstone, 63, and is repeated in subsequent accounts. It is curious that Haines glossed over Hough’s testimony of being with Anderson at Mammoth Hot Springs, but that’s a small detail in a large work of history. Certainly Anderson gave an incomplete telling of events in his two accounts of Howell’s capture: the March 17, 1894 letter to Secy. Smith, op. cit., and a year later in George Anderson, “Protection of the Yellowstone National Park”, ed. Roosevelt and Grinnell, Hunting in Many Lands (New York, Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 1895) 395–400. As noted, Grinnell and Hough were particularly cagey in recounting the how’s-and-why’s of the Forest and Stream winter expedition, perhaps from an understandable reluctance, given Yellowstone’s still parlous status in Washington, to fully describe the calculations behind the prompt and vivid reports of Howell’s arrest.
[38] Hough, “Howell’s Capture”, op cit
[39] George Bird Grinnell (presumed) “Our Park Game Exploration”, Forest and Stream vol. 42, #18, 875 (May, 5, 1894)
[40] Photograph caption identifying the subjects in ed. Elizabeth A. Watry and Lee H. Whittlesey, Fort Yellowstone, (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012) 119.
[41] Anderson to Smith, March 17, 1894 op. cit.
[42] Alexander, History, 201. Anderson also donated sets of horns, and the heads of an elk and mountain sheep. The bison head hung in the club dining room.
[43] George Anderson, Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone Park 1896, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896) 13
[44] Haines, Yellowstone, 68
[45] Yellowstone’s carrying capacity for its bison herd is a fraught subject. The 4,000 figure seems to be the base above which Park Service managers decide how much of the herd will be culled in a given year. NPS.gov “History of Bison Management”, www.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/bison-history.htm
[46] Obituary, New York Times vol 64, #20,862, 9 (March 8, 1915); funeral notice NYT vol 64, #20,863, 9 (March 9, 1915)
[47] George Grinnell, “Death of General Anderson”, Forest and Stream vol 84, #4, 234 (April, 1915). It is tempting to hear in Grinnell’s memorial a final coded boast about Anderson’s scheme to publicize Howell’s arrest, see [33]. The greater mystery, one beyond the aim of this article, is how George Anderson was named acting Yellowstone superintendent in the first place. Writing to a clergyman who accused him of being drunk and out of uniform while on duty in the summer of 1892, a threat to his command Anderson did not take lightly, he declared: “I, too, have friends, in the army, in journalism, in the Church; in the Senate, and in general politics, quite as influential and noted as they that you submit…” Anderson to Joseph Pullman, Aug. 9, 1892 Bound vol. IV 37–45. Immediately following Anderson’s Park assignment, an executive order by President Benjamin Harrison set aside tens of thousands of acres around Yellowstone as a forest reserve to be part of Anderson’s domain, a proposal put forward by Wendell Phillips and Arnold Hague, Boone and Crockett members at Interior, and swiftly enacted. A warm letter to Roosevelt from Interior Secretary John Noble, April 16, 1891 YNPA Microfilm reel #1, doc. 252, notes B&C’s effort and congratulates TR on the win. Under the circumstances, it is easy to picture Grinnell and Roosevelt first vetting Anderson then letting the rest of their club’s Washington network handle the fact of his appointment.
