“People were not restoring animals that they thought were too rare. If anything, they were still persecuting animals that they thought were too abundant.”

He felt like, I need to show these people, these people come to the National Museum in Washington, D.C., I need to show them how majestic these animals really are.

And it worked. The people saw the majesty. There were lines around the block to visit his diorama of a bison family in the wilds of Montana. There were rave reviews. It was a sensation. But Hornaday quickly realized he had to do more. Eventually, he came up with the for then really radical idea of breeding bison in captivity and restoring them to the land. This was not something people did at the time.

Hornaday eventually was able to try to carry out this really outlandish plan, outlandish at the time. He purchased seven bison from ranchers in Texas and Oklahoma, and he set them up where else in New York City.

And there he started a program where he tried and eventually succeeded in raising a small herd of bison in the Bronx. And luckily for him, bison are similar enough to domestic cattle, to domestic livestock, that they can be raised relatively successfully in captivity. So he was able to do this. The bison were pretty healthy, and he started looking around for a place on the plains where these bison could roam relatively free.

At this point, we should say that Hornaday's bison revival quest was not just fueled by the pure love of bison. Some of his motivation for trying to stop the bison from going extinct was a little more dubious.