William Negley: Lawyer, Conservationist, and Bowhunting Pioneer (1914–2006)

William “Bill” Negley, lawyer, businessman, sportsman, and conservationist, was born on March 28, 1914, in San Antonio, Texas, to Richard Van Wyck Negley and Laura Schley (Burleson) Negley. He was the grandson of William Robert Negley, the first president of the San Antonio Country Club, and great-great-grandson of Gen. Edward Burleson. Negley attended primary school in San Antonio before graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy of Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1932. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1935 before attending the University of Texas Law School and being admitted to the Texas Bar Association in 1937. He practiced law for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in the United States and Venezuela. On his World War II draft card, Negley reported that he worked in Caracas, Venezuela, as an attorney for Standard Oil Company of Venezuela, where he became fluent in Spanish.

On November 24, 1942, William Negley married Carolyn Wells Brown, daughter of Henry and Emily Lutcher of San Antonio. The couple had three children: Richard, James, and Laura. They divorced in 1958. Negley volunteered for military service in the U.S. Army on March 20, 1944, at Fort Sam Houston.

Upon his military discharge, Negley founded, with the aid of his father-in-law Lutcher Brown, a paper bag manufacturing facility in Monroe, Louisiana. He sold the Negley Bag and Paper Company in 1957. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he was also listed as a practicing attorney in San Antonio city directories. By the late 1950s he established a real estate development and residential construction business in San Antonio. Some years later, he took over management of his father’s business, the Negley Paint Company. He became the company's president and successfully operated it until selling it in 1985.

Bill Negley was an avid hunter, fisherman, and conservationist throughout his life. He credited his father, Richard Negley, who introduced him to hunting at an early age, and enjoyed dove hunting as a youngster. Negley started bowhunting in the 1950s. During a rifle safari in Africa, he used fifteen rounds of ammunition and killed fourteen antelopes of various species and one lion. He described the experience as "unfair to the animals and unrewarding to me." Bowhunting was still in its infancy, but Negley, after his trial and error of determining the best tackle and nine months of training on the Gage Ranch near Marathon, Texas, began to hunt deer and successfully bagged a javelina and two whitetails with a bow.

Following a game fishing tournament, Negley and Bill Carpenter (a tournament teammate) discussed the latter's recent safari to Africa. This conversation led to a $10,000 wager that Carpenter made, stating that Negley could not take an elephant with a bow. Waging ten to one odds that Negley would fail, Carpenter put up $10,000 of his money to Negley’s $1,000. In early 1957 Negley traveled to Belgium Congo, the only African nation where he could get a permit to hunt an elephant with a bow. With his bow and with no rifle backup, he successfully shot two elephants in February 1957. The feat garnered widespread media attention, and Negley donated his won wager from the successful hunt to San Antonio's Witte Museum, where he served as director of natural history at that time.

In 1966 Negley became the first and only bow hunter to successfully kill Africa's "Big Five" game animals—black rhino, cape buffalo, elephant, lion, and leopard—by pursuing these animals fair chase with no rifle backup or protection. He took his first black rhino in Angola, Africa, in October 1966. On this safari, Negley succeeded in killing the black rhino, cape buffalo, leopard, and lion during a forty-day hunt. He conducted these hunts with native trackers, a camera crew, and a custom-made 100-pound (some sources state 102-pound) Asiatic recurve bow and arrows of Forgewood and custom aluminum that Fred Bear, fellow conservationist and founder of Bear Archery in Michigan, made for one of the elephant hunts. A wounded lion almost killed him during a 1968 hunt in Angola if it hadn't been for a backup gun, but he continued to hunt with fair chase ethics. In 1971 Bill Negley took a black rhino bull for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He killed a Nile buffalo in January 1973.

Negley returned to hunt in Africa several times, and in June 1967 he ventured to the Arctic, where he killed a polar bear after a close-range encounter near Point Hope, Alaska. His multiple trips to Africa included Sudan, Gabon, and the Central African Republic. He went on his last African safari to the Selous in 1984. At age seventy, he was still shooting 100-pound bows. With his recurve bow, he had taken five elephants, two rhinos, two buffalo, one lion, one leopard, and a hippo. He held world records in various species he hunted, including skulls of his African lion and Nile buffalo. These and other trophies and hunting gear are on display at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio and have been part of the collection since the 1960s when the collection was part of Lone Star Brewery.

Negley’s claims as the first successful bowhunter regarding his African hunts were not without controversy. The first elephant kill using a bow was credited to famed big game hunter Howard Hill during his filming of the movie Tembo (1952) in Africa, but witnesses reported to Negley that the animal was first shot in the knee before the bow kill. When Negley successfully accomplished his “Big Five” hunt with a bow in 1966, he soon learned that bowhunter Bob Swinehart had already beaten him by taking his own “Big Five” in Africa first. Years later in 1983, however, Negley was told by witnesses that Swinehart’s elephant too had been rifle shot in the knee before the final kill. Nevertheless, Bill Negley is the only person to have taken each of Africa's “Big Five” game animals with a bow and arrow and no rifle backup. His safaris were filmed and compiled in the documentary Moments of Truth in 1981. He also wrote his thoughts and critiques of his safaris in the book Archer in Africa (1989).

Bill Negley was also an accomplished angler and participated in a number of international fishing tournaments, including as captain of the American team in the International Tuna Match in Nova Scotia. He held several world records for fly rod fishing, as in bow hunting. His world-record game fish include the “Negley Three”—a 1,056-pound black marlin caught in Cabo Blanco, Peru, in 1956; a 614-pound bluefin tuna; and a Pacific sailfish. All are on display at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum. Negley also held the world record for a 63-pound Atlantic sailfish that he caught off Cozumel, Mexico, in 1978. In later life, Negley devoted much of his time to conserving and protecting marine life of the bays of Texas and was an avid supporter of purchasing the rights of commercial harvesters of finfish, shrimp, and crabs to protect those resources for the recreational use of the public. He helped draft legislation to prevent water-quality degradation and protect inshore Gulf Coast game fish from commercial over-harvest.

Negley married Laura-Lu “Lolly” Carrigan Fitzsimons on April 15, 1977, and the couple remained together until her death in 1993. He was a life board member of the Coastal Conservation Association and in 2000 was named Conservationist of the Year by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. He was also an inductee in the Lone Star Bowhunters Association Hall of Fame. William “Bill” Negley died at age ninety-two on November 7, 2006,  in San Antonio, Texas. In that city, he is buried in the Negley family plot at Mission Burial Park South.