by Nancy Plain
“This Strange Wilderness is like walking through a secret door into early nineteenth-century America. Nancy Plain’s stellar prose and meticulous research, combined with the glorious paintings of John James Audubon, will delight readers of all ages.”
—Candace Simar, author of the Spur Award-winning Abercrombie Trail series
“Nancy Plain captures the essence of Audubon in words as beautiful and informative as his paintings.”
—Rod Miller, author of John Muir: Magnificent Tramp
This Strange Wilderness
This Strange Wilderness
The Life and Art of John James Audubon
Nancy Plain
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London
© 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Author photo by Misty Winter
All rights reserved
Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plain, Nancy.
This strange wilderness: the life and art of John James Audubon / Nancy Plain.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-4884-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8032-8401-2 (epub)
ISBN 978-0-8032-8402-9 (mobi)
ISBN 978-0-8032-8403-6 (pdf)
1. Audubon, John James, 1785–1851. 2. Ornithologists—United States—Biography. 3. Naturalists—United States—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Life and art of John James Audubon.
QL31.A9P65 2015 508.092—dc23
[B] 2014020552
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For my grandchildren
June Rose Evans, Jack Alan Dodge,
and those yet to come,
“with a heart as light as a bird on the wing”
I often think the woods the only place in which I truly live.
John James Audubon
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Drawn From Nature
1. Beloved Boy
2. America, My Country
3. The American Woodsman
4. Down the Mississippi
5. On the Wing
6. The Birds of America
7. Team Audubon
8. This Strdge Wilderness
9. Audubon Then and Now
Appendix: Looking for Audubon and His World
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
Illustrations
1. Great Blue Heron
2. Ruby-throated Hummingbird
3. La Gerbetière
4. Marsh Wren
5. Off the Maine Coast
6. Eastern Phoebe
7. Mill Grove Farm, Perkiomen Creek, Pennsylvania
8. Wild Turkey
9. John James Audubon
10. Lucy Bakewell Audubon
11. John James Audubon
12. Drawing of Bird Anatomy
13. Trumpeter Swan
14. Victor Gifford Audubon
15. John Woodhouse Audubon
16. Passenger Pigeon
17. Bonaparte’s Gull
18. Cliff Swallow
19. Carolina Parakeet
20. Carolina Parrot
21. Great Egret
22. Yellow-breasted Chat
23. Yellow-breasted Chat
24. Blue Jay
25. Northern Mockingbird
26. Black-billed Cuckoo
27. Northern Bobwhite and Red-shouldered Hawk
28. Great Horned Owl
29. John James Audubon
30. Wild Turkey
31. Whooping Crane
32. Bald Eagle
33. Eastern Meadowlark
34. Roseate Spoonbill
35. White Ibis
36. Northern Gannet
37. Atlantic Puffin
38. Northern Hare
39. Common American Wildcat
40. Swift Fox
41. Fort Union Trading Post
42. American Bison or Buffalo
43. John James Audubon
44. Blue-winged Teal
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Noah Burg for his generous help with my questions on ornithology and to Bill Markley for sending me valuable information on the western forts. I would also like to thank the New-York Historical Society for its magnificent and inspiring exhibition of Audubon’s watercolors. And many thanks go to the following museums and galleries that made this book possible by kindly granting me permission to use images from their collections: the New-York Historical Society; the American Museum of Natural History; the John James Audubon Museum in Henderson, Kentucky; the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University; the Montana Historical Society; Godel and Company Fine Art in New York, New York; and the Joel Oppenheimer Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.
I have long wanted to write a book about the roving bird artist, so I am grateful beyond words to everyone at the University of Nebraska Press. Alicia Christensen, Tom Swanson, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant, Rosemary Vestal, Kathryn Owens, Vicki Chamlee, Nathan Putens, and many others at the press have been with me every step of the way.
Introduction
Drawn From Nature
In the heat of the afternoon, the swamp was drowsy and still. Turtles rested on a fallen log. An alligator lazed by the water. High up in a cypress tree, there was a flash of color as a great blue heron smoothed her feathers and settled back on a mossy branch. Only the mosquitoes were busy, swarming and humming in the heavy air.
A gunshot blasted the stillness. Hundreds of birds burst shrieking from the treetops, flying in every direction. All except the great blue heron. She clung to her branch for a second, then tumbled down dead to the water below. The hunter, John James Audubon, shouldered his gun and waded through the swamp to pick up his prey.
That same afternoon he made a painting of the beautiful bird, capturing her jewel-like colors—blue, black, white, a splash of red. He preferred using live birds as models but almost always drew from freshly killed ones instead. These were the days before photography, and he wanted to get every detail right, down to the smallest feather. “My wish to impart truths has been my guide,” he wrote, and he signed his pictures “Drawn from Nature, by J. J. Audubon.”1
Ever since he was a boy, he had been curious about birds and often skipped school to sketch them in the countryside near his home. Now he had set out to do what no one had done before—to paint all the bird species in North America. Many others over the centuries had painted birds. But most of their work seemed stiff and unnatural to Audubon, as if the birds were sitting for their portraits. He thought—no, he knew—that he could do better.
“My Work will be the Work indeed!” he declared.2 And it was. His masterpiece, The Birds of America, was a lifetime in the making. It is a magnificent collection of pictures of almost five hundred species—some of them discovered by Audubon himself—and when it was published, the world knew him as one of the greatest bird artists who had ever lived.
Audubon’s birds glow with life. They look real enough to hop off the page and fly away. His paintings not only show how the birds look but also tell a story about how they live. A mockingbird defends its eggs from a rattlesnake, a bald eagle clutches a catfish in its claw, a fat litt
le puffin goes for a swim. The Birds of America is like a magical visit with all the winged creatures in a vast secret garden.
Born in Haiti and raised in France, Audubon had come to America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president. There were only seventeen states in the Union then, so most of the country was to Americans a mysterious wilderness. Every year explorers set out to chart distant rivers and mountains. Audubon became an explorer, too, looking for birds in their natural habitats. “My whole mind was ever filled with my passion for rambling,” he wrote.3 He loved to wake up before the sun, gather his dog and his gun, and head out into the singing forest. His quest took him all over the North American continent from the Florida Keys to the stormy coast of Labrador and from the New Jersey shore to Indian Country in the Dakotas. He hiked hundreds of miles, floated down rivers, climbed rocks, and crawled into caves. Once while chasing an owl, he nearly drowned in quicksand. Audubon was a naturalist as well as an artist because he studied everything he could about the birds, from the size of their eggs to the speed of their flight. He even tried to understand their emotional lives. Almost every day he wrote letters and detailed field notes, which he later turned into bird “biographies” and lively tales of the frontier.
1. Great Blue Heron by John James Audubon.
Artist. Naturalist. Writer. Hunter and explorer. The far places and the birds called to him. To the end of his life he stayed true to his plan “to search out the things which have been hidden since the creation of this wondrous world.”4
This Strange Wilderness
1
Beloved Boy
Hot sun and hummingbirds. Orange trees with dark green leaves. These were some of John James Audubon’s earliest memories. He was born a little French boy named Jean Rabin on April 26, 1785, in Haiti. Haiti, then a French colony called Saint-Domingue, forms a part of the island of Hispaniola, set in the warm Caribbean Sea. Jean never knew his mother, Jeanne Rabin. She had come from France to Saint-Domingue to work as a maid and died a few months after Jean was born. His parents had not been married to each other—a fact that he would try to hide all his life—so he was given his mother’s last name.
The boy’s father, Jean Audubon, was a French sea captain who owned a large sugar plantation on the island. He also bought and sold African slaves. But enslaved Africans far outnumbered white landowners, and during the 1780s, rumblings of an uprising against the brutal system were growing louder every day. So Jean Audubon brought his son and a daughter, Rose, back to his home base in France. There they would be raised by his wife, Anne, who had no children of her own.
2. Ruby-throated Hummingbird. Audubon described this bird as a “glittering fragment of the rainbow.”
Anne loved them as if they had been hers from the start, and she especially doted on Jean. “She therefore completely spoiled me,” he later recalled, “hid my faults, boasted to every one of my youthful merits, and, worse than all, said frequently in my presence that I was the handsomest boy in France.”1 She gave him plenty of pocket money, too, and allowed him to buy whatever he wanted at the candy stores in town. After a few years, the Audubons formally adopted the children. Now Jean had not only a new mother but a new name—Jean-Jacques Audubon.
The family had a home in the city of Nantes in western France and a country house called La Gerbetière in the village of Couëron. Both places were on the banks of the Loire River. In the countryside, young Audubon first learned the joys of rambling. Every morning, his mother packed his lunch basket for school, but he often played hooky instead, running off with his friends to explore meadows and marshes and the banks of the river. After he had eaten his lunch, he would load his basket with “curiosities”—birds’ eggs, flowers and mosses, interesting stones.2 His bedroom began to look like a miniature natural history museum, crammed with small treasures. He felt a bond with nature that grew stronger every year until, as he put it, it bordered on a “frenzy.”3
Most of all he loved birds. The “feathered tribes,” he called them.4 His father shared this love, and together the two went bird watching, studying the creatures’ habits, admiring their graceful flight. When Captain Audubon showed his son a book of bird illustrations, the boy was inspired to draw.
He made pencil outlines and filled in the colors with pastels. At first his birds were just stick figures with heads and tails, and he became frustrated with his “miserable attempts.”5 Even as his work improved, he thought it was never good enough. “How sorely disappointed did I feel. . . . My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.”6 Every year on his birthday, he threw hundreds of pictures into a bonfire and vowed to do better.
3. La Gerbetière, photograph of Audubon’s country house in France.
“A vivid pleasure shone upon those days of my early youth,” Audubon would one day remember.7 Yet there was another side to French life during his childhood. The French Revolution, which had begun in 1789, turned into a nightmare known as the Reign of Terror. In 1793, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded on the guillotine. One year later, the Terror came to the Audubons’ own city, Nantes, and it was worse there than almost anywhere else. The revolutionaries set out to exterminate their enemies, the royalists. Mass shootings and beheadings were common, and the streets came to smell like death. Hundreds of people, many of them priests, were tied up, thrown onto barges, and drowned in the river. In later life, Audubon would write little about these dark days except to say, “The Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child.”8
4. Marsh Wren by John James Audubon.
One day in 1796, Captain Audubon, who was now in the French navy, came back from a long sea voyage. What had his children learned while he was away? he asked. Rose showed how well she could play the piano. Jean-Jacques, who in addition to his school classes was taking private lessons in drawing, fencing, dancing, and music, had almost nothing to show. He hadn’t even bothered to put strings on his violin. “I, like a culprit, hung my head,” he wrote.9 His father usually had a temper “like the blast of a hurricane.”10 But this time, he just kissed Rose, hummed a little tune, and left the room.
Early the next morning, Jean-Jacques found himself in a horse-drawn carriage with his suitcase and violin. His father sat silently beside him. As the horses trotted farther and farther from home, Captain Audubon still said nothing, and Jean-Jacques did not know where they were going. After several days they reached the surprise destination—the naval academy in the town of Rochefort. The captain had decided that Jean-Jacques should follow in his father’s footsteps and train for a career in the navy. The boy was only eleven years old, but Captain Audubon himself had first gone to sea at age twelve. “My beloved boy, thou art now safe,” he said. “I have brought thee here that I may be able to pay constant attention to thy studies.”11 Unlike his wife, he was a practical person and wanted his son to get an education and prepare himself for the future.
5. Off the Maine Coast by Thomas Birch, 1835. In Audubon’s time, ships like these crossed the ocean.
Jean-Jacques, expert hooky player and adventurer, quickly learned how to shoot, sail, and climb the masts of ships. But he rebelled against the military discipline at Rochefort and the long hours of study. Mathematics, especially, was “hard, dull work.”12 One morning, he decided to escape from his strict math teacher. “I gave him the slip, jumped from the window, and ran off through the gardens.”13 He felt like a young bird fleeing the nest. But in no time he was caught and punished. Later, when he flunked the qualifying test for officer training, his father gave up. The elder Audubon retired from the navy, and father and son returned home.
The Audubons now spent all their time at their country house. Jean-Jacques was a teenager, but he had not forgotten his boyhood passions. “Perhaps not an hour of leisure was spent elsewhere than in woods and fields, and to examine either the eggs, nest, young, or parents of any species of birds constituted my delight.”14
In 1799, the French Revolution ended, but this did not bring
peace to France. A general named Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power, and, mad with dreams of empire, he plunged the weary country into war with the rest of Europe. In the spring of 1803, Napoleon was preparing to invade England, and his already enormous army would need a fresh supply of young men. Audubon was now eighteen. He had survived the revolution, and his father was determined that he should survive Napoleon’s wars, too. In his travels, Captain Audubon had stopped in America and bought an estate called Mill Grove in the state of Pennsylvania. He decided to send his son there to escape Napoleon’s draft and to start a new life.
That summer Audubon boarded a ship bound for America. “I received light and life in the New World,” he wrote, and now he was heading back.15 His mother cried when the ship sailed away, and the young man watched as the coastline of France faded into the distance. “My heart sunk within me. . . . My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness.”16
2
America, My Country
Audubon sat in a small cave, watching a grayish brown bird, an eastern phoebe, as she sat on her nest. At first her mate had tried to chase him away, darting and scolding. But he had returned every morning until both birds had grown used to him. Now he was able to peek at the first newly laid egg. “So white and so transparent,” he wrote, “that to me the sight was more pleasant than if I had met with a diamond of the same size.”1 Soon five eggs hatched, and five baby birds jostled each other in the nest. They allowed Audubon to touch them. When they were old enough, he picked up each one and gently tied a silver thread around a tiny leg. The phoebes would fly south for the winter, but the threads would show him if any came back to the same spot in the spring.
The next April he heard cries of “fee-bee, fee-bee!” Were these the same “little pilgrims” that he knew?2 He searched for silver-threaded birds and found two nesting nearby. The experiment had worked. This was the first time that birds were banded in America. No older than twenty, Audubon had just made a major contribution to the study of bird migration and to ornithology, or the study of birds, in general.