But in 1888, Yellowstone was in big trouble. Even though the area had achieved National Park status (the first in the US) in 1872, the designation was toothless. Poachers ran rampant, railroad companies eyed its majestic passages as thruways for their locomotives, and the Army had set up a fort to make war on the Native people of Yellowstone and deny them rightful access to their land. So Grinnell and the Boone and Crockett Club began a petition to Congress, published in the pages of Forest and Stream among its coverage of hunting trips, fishing tips, and shooting competitions. First a column of names, then page after page of supporters, many cajoled into participation by the Boone and Crockett Club’s socially influential measures, like Roosevelt and his chums, as evidenced by the frequent appearance of high-level New York socialites on these lists, many of whom included acquaintances of the likes of Stuyvesant and Drayton.
But all that effort didn’t move Congress to act, despite year after year of attempts. That all changed on May 5, 1894, when Forest and Stream published an account of the capture of an infamous poacher, Edgar Howell. He had previously eluded apprehension because the U.S. Cavalry, who was tasked with patrolling the park, had to catch a perpetrator in the act of poaching in order to pursue and arrest them. Unbelievably, the Army only had a single patrolman for the entirety of Yellowstone. This patrolman happened to be near Howell during a shooting and got the drop on the poacher and was able to call for help on the new-fangled telephone. The story was covered in full by the lone correspondent to as yet overwinter in Yellowstone: Emerson Howe. But it wasn’t Howe’s breathless reporting of the killing of dozens of buffalo that spurred national outrage; it was the images of Howell’s animal victims left lying in piles on the plain, titled by Grinnell as “The Butcher’s Work.”
Except they weren’t pictures of the bison that Howell had killed. These pictures were used in an Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution from seven years earlier. Grinnell was apparently sent the original photographs by William T. Hornaday, whose collection of living animals formed the basis of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. No record has yet been found illuminating how or why the decision to fake the photographs was made. Of important note, Grinnell’s trickery wasn’t necessary to convict Howell, who confessed and never amended his ways.
The ruse was effective though: only days later Congress passed the Act to Protect the Birds and Animals in Yellowstone National Park, and to Punish Crimes in Said Park. Known as the Lacey Act of 1894, the law finally outlined a punishment for poaching on public lands. The first person convicted under the Act was none other than Edgar Howell.