Dixie Hippos

The passage presented above from a book titled Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation, written in 1913 by taxidermist-turned-conservationist William T. Hornaday, was the full statement made on the strange subject. Without offering further elucidation, the author seemed to be speaking about a proposal that had been common knowledge among the citizenry of the time. Clearly, he came down on the the side of the nays; but the nays did not necessarily represent the prevailing view of the populace, as writer Jon Mooallem discovered. 

Mooallem, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, was reading this early twentieth-century volume as part of research for his book Wild Ones, which investigates the relationship, both historical and contemporary, that Americans have with wildlife. Intrigued by the tossed-off hippo reference, Mooallem subsequently uncovered an all-but-forgotten slice of historical ephemera and published his findings in a longform article, called “American Hippopotamus,” in the online magazine Atavist. 

The high points of the plot include a cast of colorful characters: there is the populist Louisiana politician (What good story is complete without one?), a steely military scout with super-human self control, and a con man cum psychopath whose hustle is energized by sheer rage. Together these men, in a strange and serendipitous collision of mutual interests, scheme to import, among other animals, African hippos to Louisiana’s swamps. 

The reason for this mad scheme? Though each man was attending his own agenda, the points that were driven home to the public were the assertions that hippos could be raised for meat and could, at the same time, help solve the state’s water hyacinth problem. 

While on the surface the proposition may seem preposterous, there were legitimate, serious causes for its origins. And when considered against the backdrop of a building concern for the impact of human activity on the natural world in the early 1900s as well as an American ethos that celebrated innovative problem solving and dominion over/stewardship of the natural world, the idea was arguably pretty reasonable—well, reasonable if you believed that Americans could responsibly manage their natural resources. Mr. Hornaday clearly didn’t think so.

∞

During America’s rapid expansion, its new settlers took and took and took, heedlessly exhausting the country’s plenty. They took for food; they took for raw materials; they took for pure sport, unconcerned or unaware of possibly emptying the full-to-bursting landscape. Then one day, they noticed that the flocks of passenger pigeons, previously so thick that they could block out the sun, were gone, and that the buffalo, whose herds had roamed the prairies by the millions, now numbered in the hundreds.

“The hippo plan was happening in a moment where, all of a sudden, people were starting to feel a little queasy about all that,” said Mooallem in a phone interview, referring to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Americans were increasingly aware of and concerned about the decimation of the country’s inherited riches. “And it’s the exact moment when the first modern conservationists are starting things like the Audubon Society, and they’re passing some of the first conservation laws like the Migratory Bird Act.”

But, Mooallem said, concomitant with increased awareness and proactive stewardship was a second, potentially disturbing notion: “This is a moment where America was starting to own up to its power over nature, and that was good in some ways in the sense that it started a lot of the conservation and preservation stuff. But I think it was also bad in that there was a sense that you could be emboldened to do more.” 

Need to save the buffalo? Breed them in captivity. Need to get rid of canker worms in Central Park? Import sparrows. Need to repopulate vacant ecological niches? Import antelopes from Africa. All without a care for possible ripple effects. “They weren’t burdened by that kind of thinking at this time,” said Mooallem.

In the midst of this energized, problem-solving approach to the country’s limited and damaged natural resources, a charismatic senator from New Iberia, Louisiana, set about addressing two concerns: one national and one local, both solvable, in Broussard’s estimation, by Africa’s river horse. 

∞

According to Mooallem, who conducted research on Democratic congressman Robert Broussard in UL Lafayette’s Edith Garland Dupré Library, the statesman was a consummate political operative. He knew how the political game was played, and on several fronts, skillfully guided resources to his South Louisiana home. The way Mooallem describes him, he’s a familiar kind of character in Louisiana: 

[Broussard] was the son of a Cajun planter and had lived in the district he represented for most of his life. He loved speechifying and glad-handing and generally addressing himself to the job of campaigning the way a gourmand addresses himself to a platter of oysters. … Louisianans knew Broussard affectionately as Cousin Bob.

As Mooalem outlines, Broussard was looking for a solution to the water hyacinth plague. Hyacinths had been brought to New Orleans by the Japanese in 1884, offered as gifts during their visit for the international cotton exposition. The hyacinth became a favorite ornamental and was planted in yards and ponds all over the city. But they soon began to reproduce at staggering rates, making their way into the state’s waterways, choking river and channel passages. The plants were hindering shipping and damaging fisheries.

Broussard was alerted to the aquatic plant-eating talents of hippos by an eccentric researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture named William Newton Irwin, who estimated that these giants would make quick work of the exotic import. And Irwin saw a second advantage to herds of home-grown hippopotami: a solution to the country’s Meat Question.  

The Meat Question, Mooallem writes, was the shorthand given by the press to an intermittent, but chronic, problem facing America at this time. Increasingly, there was not enough meat to satisfy the populace, with sometimes wildly fluctuating meat prices and meat shortages fueling panicked musings about the country’s ability to feed itself.

Previously, America’s appetite for meat could be met by westward expansion, wherein farmers and ranchers corralled huge parcels of land to raise the meat upon which America feasted. Yet, even as expansion hit the Pacific coast, immigrants continued to arrive, cities continued to bloat, and international meat markets grew ever hungrier. If free-range hippos could, as one estimate proposed, “easily yield a million tons of meat a year,” perhaps the hippo could solve two pressing problems in one gigantic sweep. 

Sensing traction (for who could resist such an elegant formula?), Broussard convened a panel of experts who helped him argue in favor of H.R. 23261—“a bill to appropriate $250,000 for the importation of useful new animals to the United States”—before the House Committee on Agriculture in 1910. 

Mooallem dives deep into this fascinating tale, made more so by the backstories of two of Broussard’s experts. The first, Frederick Russell Burnham, was a scout, a type of mercenary/spy who would move into enemy territory ahead of soldiers. Raised in the American West, Burnham was described by a reporter this way: 

He has trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst, and wounds; has subdued the brain to infinite patience, has learned to force every nerve in his body to absolute obedience, to still even the beating of his heart. 

His talents were employed by the British during the Boer Wars in southern Africa. 

It was on those battlefields that Burnham first encountered the Black Panther, a Boer scout fighting for the opposite side and Burnham’s mortal enemy. His name was Fritz Duquesne, and he was just as physically impressive as Burnham—fierce, intimidating, self-controlled. But his character reflected Burham’s opposite; where Burnham was humble and dignified, Duquesne was crafty, manipulative, and narcissistic.   

Both Burnham and Duquesne had suffered great tragedy as youngsters, which must have helped fuel their fervent ambition and strident self-sufficiency. But they each grafted opposing lessons from these formative experiences—Burham choosing the high road, Duquesne the low. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the early 1910s, they found themselves on the same side—hitched to Broussard’s connections and charisma and trying to convince the nation that the answer to its woes lay in Africa. 

∞

That we don’t enjoy smoked hippo brisket or tender hippo filets and that, as Mooallem reports, we must spend $2 million annually controlling hyacinths, is evidence enough that the hippo scheme never came to fruition. Not one hippo ever found itself at home in a Louisiana bayou, a circumstance Mooallem attributes to several causes, not least of which was the cumbersome nature of communication in 1910. But, in general, as Mooallem writes, “… Robert Broussard’s bill did exist. It was discussed and debated. There was a window when anything was possible. Then the window closed. In retrospect, it’s hard to even pinpoint a moment when America said no to hippopotamuses. There were just too many moments when it failed to say yes.”

As more recent history may attest, the scheme might have fallen flat anyway. In the 1980s, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries considered the state’s nutria infestation (recounted in an article called “Canine Conservation Corps?” in our September issue) a serious enough problem that they instituted a publicity campaign through which the gastronomic potential of nutria was promoted. Alas, the public could not be convinced, and the initiative dried up. 

Of course, LDWF didn’t have Burnham, Duquesne, and Broussard. 

Details. Details. Details. 

Visit atavist.com to read the full article by Jon Mooallem, titled “American Hippopotamus.” 

Jon Mooallem’s article has been optioned by RatPac Entertainment and will be produced with Edward Norton and William Migliore’s Class 5. We may see a feature film one day soon.