Transcribe Hornaday, W. T. Letter to Ward, Henry A. (1877-09-22)

once, box up very tightly and deposit there all my specimens, elephant skel. included, and do a few days-- 3 or 4-- collecting in that immediate vicinity. While I am doing all this the elephants will have a chance to come down into the Rajah's territory. Then I will ascend the Hills by another Ghat with my stores & everything, and go to that place T. & I were at when we [underscored:] didn't [/underscore] get any elephants, where I will build a good hut & settle down regularly. That is the healthiest spot I can get, except this, but there is nothing here, and I am resolved to bore Theobald no longer. Elephants [underscored:] must [/underscore] come into that forest next month. So T. says, and when they do some of them must die. For its myself that can kill an elephant now. I shall be able to work to better advantage now, having plenty of funds.

It is yourself, Prof, who underestimates the difficulty of taking the skin of an elephant. Though I have just said I [underscored:] would [/underscore] prepare the skin, there are things to be done about it that I fear may prove absolute impossibilities. The first is, getting the skin out of the forest after it is prepared. It can only be carried by men. The question is, could enough men get around it to carry it, even when cut in three pieces? As to men "thinning down vastly" the skin of an old male elephant, with knives, I protest once for all that i [underscored:] can't be done. [/underscore] A tree could be just as easily whittled with jackknives into a ships mast. No knife would hold an edge [underscored:] three minutes [/underscore] on an elephant skin. We had a first rate grindstone beside our elephant, a [steel?], and an oil-stone and I say it was as much as we could do to cut through the skin in cuting off legs & head, tail & trunk. If a man had a cast steel wrist & hand and a hollow ground razor he could then make