Dan Flores

Lacey acquired his status with the New Wildlife Activists following a series of celebrated incidents in Yellowstone Park in the early 1890s.

U.S.

Army Game Warden Ed Wilson had arrested a notorious park poacher whom a local judge promptly released, citing a lack of any law to prosecute him.

A few weeks later, Wilson vanished without a trace.

Other wardens found Wilson's hidden remains a year later.

That story brought a forest and stream reporter to Yellowstone, who soon elicited from another poacher that his own arrest and release had involved the massacre of 80 buffalo, most of the bison still left in the park.

At that point, Lacey introduced and secured passage in Congress of the 1894 Yellowstone Park Protection Act with $1,000 fines for killing wildlife.

Six years later, Lacey decided to take on the biggest monster of them all, a practice that since colonial days could have made fair progress filling the Grand Canyon with the bodies of all the American birds and animals killed for money.

White-haired, bearded, slender, Lacey was about to turn 60.

In history and in his career, the time had come.

Calling on the federal government's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, Lacey drew up an act he called the Wild Birds and Game Preservation Act that at last landed a body blow on the wild animals economy.

At long last, a federal law stopped the shipping of slain birds, animals, and their body parts from states where market hunting was still legal to states where it wasn't.

It was already too late for passenger pigeons and wild bison.

It verged on too late for snowy egrets, Carolina parakeets, and a lengthening list of others.

But the Lacey Act finally put a long, hesitant U.S.

federal government in play.

In his speech describing the bill before Congress, Lacey referenced both passenger pigeons and bison.

But he proclaimed that all was not lost, that there still remains much to preserve, as he put it.

In truth, the Lacey Act put the burden for enlightened laws on the states.

Following a Supreme Court case that ruled that wildlife was the property of the states where the animals resided, states now began creating what they called game departments and enacting policies on behalf of at least some of their wild animals.