This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (4 page)

Another time the sky grew dark not because of an earthquake but because a flock of passenger pigeons was flying overhead. In Audubon’s time, these birds owned the skies. There were billions of them, more than all other American bird species combined, and one flock could take three days to pass by. Audubon describes a scene in which men assembled with poles and guns to kill the birds for food for their hogs:

Few people then thought that these birds could ever become extinct. But Audubon predicted correctly that they would and not from mass slaughter but from loss of habitat. As America’s infinite forests fell to the settler’s ax, the pigeon population disappeared. “Here, again, the tyrant of the creation, man, interferes,” wrote Audubon.
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The young Audubon family was growing up with the country, and Kentucky was home. John was free to roam its woods, hunt birds, and practice his art. In 1815 a new baby, Lucy, was born. “This Place saw My best days, My Happiest,” he would recall.
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But soon his happiness turned to sorrow. Baby Lucy died at age two. And there were more troubles to come. Audubon and Tom Bakewell had built a large steam mill in Henderson, but it “worked worse and worse every day” until it finally failed, sinking Audubon in a swamp of debt.
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A man who owed him money beat him viciously with a club, and Audubon had to stab his attacker—not fatally—in self-defense. Then in 1819 a nationwide financial panic ended Audubon’s chances of recovering his business losses. He and Lucy sold the store and almost
everything they owned to pay their bills. Lucy “felt the pangs of our misfortunes perhaps more heavily than I,” Audubon wrote, “but never for an hour lost her courage.”
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Without the store, he had to find a new way to make a living. Taking only the clothes on his back, his drawings, his dog, and his gun, he walked to Louisville in hopes of finding a job. Along the way, he was “Poor & Miserable of thoughts.”
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For the first time in his life, he had no interest in the birds that clucked, sang, strutted, and sailed through the forest around him. They “all looked like enemies, and I turned my eyes from them, as if I could have wished that they had never existed.”
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4

Down the Mississippi

When Audubon reached Louisville, he was arrested and thrown into jail for his debts. He declared bankruptcy and was set free, but he had no place to go. Nicholas Berthoud, the husband of Lucy’s sister Eliza, took him in. The Berthouds lived in the nearby village of Shippingport, and Lucy and the boys soon joined Audubon there. In Shippingport, Lucy had another baby girl, whom she named Rose. But Rose, too, died, only months later. The Audubons’ lives really had hit bottom, yet John refused to accept defeat. “Was I inclined to cut my throat in foolish despair? No!! I
had
talents, and to them I instantly resorted.”
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He began drawing portraits in black chalk for five dollars apiece. Louisville citizens liked them, and Audubon was able to raise his prices. Out around town and country he rode, paid even to capture last images of people on their deathbeds. One clergyman disinterred his dead son for a portrait, “which, by the way,” the artist noted, “I gave to the parents as if [the boy were] still alive, to their intense satisfaction.”
2

Although he was working to keep his family off the “starving list,” he sometimes skipped a portrait job to draw a bird.
3
In troubled times, birds and forest solitude comforted him best, and he often had to force himself to return to the company of people.

When the demand for portraits in Louisville dried up, Audubon took a job in Ohio at the new Western Museum at Cincinnati College. It was one of America’s first natural history museums. There he worked as a taxidermist, stuffing birds and fish for wildlife displays. He also started a small drawing school. But in his spare time, it was still “I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only.”
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On one outing, he saw a pair of Bonaparte’s gulls, “sweeping gracefully over the tranquil waters” of the Ohio River, and he visited a colony of cliff swallows, whose odd nests looked like a cluster of mud pots stuck sideways onto rock.
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Dr. Daniel Drake, president of Cincinnati College, gave Audubon space to exhibit his drawings. He recognized that the collection included many species never pictured before. Drake’s praise—and the example of Alexander Wilson’s bird book—inspired Audubon to come up with his own “Great Idea.”
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He would explore the country to study and paint every bird species in its natural habitat. And he would publish his findings in a major work to be called
The Birds of America
. This would make him what he already knew he could be—the greatest ornithologist in America.

It was a risky plan. It seemed crazy. Audubon was already thirty-six years old, and Lucy’s relatives were furious. How could he even
think
of leaving his family to tramp around after birds? And how could he possibly find every species? But Lucy believed that John could succeed. She promised to support herself and the boys by teaching while John was gone. Audubon himself had no money. “My Talents are to be My Support and My enthusiasm My Guide.”
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On October 12, 1820, he boarded another flatboat and traveled south by way of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He was bound for New Orleans and the waterways of Louisiana, where millions of migrating
birds spent the winter. The flatboat crew was a bunch of rowdy young men. Meals were mostly bacon and biscuits, and Audubon’s bed was a buffalo robe spread out on deck. In his bags were his book on taxonomy, some volumes by Wilson, rolls of drawing paper, a box of art supplies, his flute, his fiddle, and a journal that he would write in every day. In his wallet were letters of introduction that he and Lucy had collected from their Kentucky congressman, Henry Clay, and from William Henry Harrison, the future president. These letters were the nineteenth century’s version of social networking, and Audubon planned to present them to influential people in New Orleans.

He had also brought along his most talented art student, a Cincinnati boy named Joseph Mason. Mason’s father had given him permission to go, along with a gift of five dollars. Although the boy was only thirteen, he would be Audubon’s assistant and paint backgrounds—flowers and plants—for the bird pictures.

It was Audubon’s favorite season on the Ohio. A golden mist hung in the air. The riverbank blazed with fall colors, and “every tree was hung with long and flowing festoons of different species of vines, many loaded with clustered fruits of varied brilliancy.”
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When the boat reached Henderson, Kentucky, Audubon sent other men to pick up his dog, Dash, who had been left behind with neighbors. The thought of returning to the scene of his business failures made Audubon’s blood run cold.

Because he couldn’t afford to pay for the ride, he had signed on as the boat’s hunter. There were no supermarkets in 1820, so most Americans who wanted meat had to find it for themselves. Audubon and Mason often rowed to shore in a small skiff to shoot turkeys or ducks for dinner, as well as deer, squirrels, and opossums. They kept a sharp eye out for any bears that might be lurking in the woods.

At the place where the Ohio joins the big Mississippi, two Indians paddled by in a canoe, and Audubon wrote, “Here the Traveller enters a New World.”
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This was bird country—the great Mississippi River Flyway, one of the busiest migration routes in the world. Long, V-shaped lines of birds streamed by overhead, all going south for the winter. There were Canada geese and trumpeter swans. Sandhill cranes and cormorants. Flocks of gulls gathered on islands in the river. And blackbirds zipped past, “forming a Line Like disbanded Soldiers all anxious to reach the point of destination.”
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In the woods, Audubon spotted red-tailed hawks, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and Carolina parakeets. The colorful little parakeets, a type of parrot, were the only parrots native to North America. But because they liked to feast on crops, farmers were shooting them by the thousands. Audubon worried—and rightly so—that they would soon become extinct.

He shot and drew from first light to candlelight. Neither the rocking of the boat nor the crowded quarters stopped him. He felt like a migrating bird himself, although his mood seesawed between high excitement and the “blue devils” of homesickness and doubt.
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With every day that passed, he wrote, “the Stronger my Anxiety to see My familly again presses on my mind—and Nothing but the astonishing desire I have of Compleating my work keeps my Spirits at par.”
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January 7, 1821, and “
New Orleans
at Last.”
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It was a Sunday, and Audubon stepped ashore to the ringing of church bells. The city was the capital of Louisiana, which had become a state only nine years before. At the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was a booming port town. Its levees and markets were alive with tradesmen, merchants, and planters and with visitors from all over the world—an exotic jumble of languages and faces. Steamboats, the newest mode of
river travel, carried away cotton and sugar from southern plantations and returned with goods from almost everywhere else. New Orleans was also a major center for the slave trade. The rich economy of the American South was built on the backs of the enslaved.

Audubon was ragged and wild looking after his long trip, but he slung his portfolio over his shoulder and took to the streets, looking for work. He bumped into some old acquaintances but was greeted coldly. Then his pocket was picked, and he began to despair. “I rose early tormented by many desagreable thoughts, nearly again without a cent, in a Busling City where no one cares a fig for a Man in my Situation.”
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Yet within a couple of weeks, he had found customers for portraits and some drawing students, too. Sometimes he made enough money to send some home to Lucy. At other times, he couldn’t even afford a new journal to write in. One of his drawing pupils was a pretty young woman. Her husband believed that Audubon was flirting with her, so he fired the artist without paying for any past lessons. This was not the only time Audubon had been accused of flirting, although he protested, “Seldom before My coming to New Orleans did
I
think that I was Looked on so favourably by the
fair
sex.”
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Audubon and Joseph Mason lived in dingy, rented rooms. Dinner was often just a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese, one piece so old that maggots popped out of it and made “astounding Leaps” around the table.
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The two artists were so busy scraping together a living that they had little time to explore the countryside around New Orleans. But birds were sold in the marketplace, and many species lived within the city itself. There were cuckoos, their voices “Loud and Sweet and their Movements elegantly airy.”
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There were yellow-breasted chats, which turned fantastic somersaults in midair during mating season. Warblers sang among the pink magnolias. Often Mason spent whole days drawing flowers, and Audubon noted, “He now
draws Flowers
better than any man probably in America.”
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Audubon himself made wonderful pictures in New Orleans. A great egret, ghostlike against the night sky. A whooping crane, chasing a snack of baby alligator.

Yet Audubon could still write that he was “very much fatigued” of the city.
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He had not found many new species. And he felt slighted by the city’s important men. Once when he asked a well-known painter for a recommendation, he was kept waiting, then told to lay out his drawings on a dirty floor. Most of all, Audubon missed Lucy and wanted her to come to him. But she refused to leave her secure teaching job only to face poverty in New Orleans. Husband and wife exchanged angry letters. “Thou art, not, it seems, as daring as I am about Leaving one place to go to another. . . . I am sorry for that,” wrote John.
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For a moment, he was tempted to abandon
The Birds of America
.