This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon

by Nancy Plain

  6. Eastern Phoebe. Audubon called phoebes Pewee Flycatchers.

  The phoebes’ cave was on the banks of the Perkiomen Creek, a stream that flowed through the estate of Mill Grove, Audubon’s new American home. His father had chosen the property well. Not far from Philadelphia, Mill Grove was a lovely place—a big stone house on two hundred acres of lawn and orchard, forest and field. An underground vein of lead had been discovered on the land, too, and Captain Audubon hoped to develop it into a mine. Not so his son. Young Audubon was happy just to wander the countryside “with as little concern for the future as if the world had been made for me.”3 Along the creek and on old Indian trails, he hunted for all kinds of woodland animals to draw, but as always, he looked mostly for birds—wild turkeys, ducks, geese, eagles, and more.

  It did not take long for Audubon to think of Mill Grove as a “blessed spot” or to adopt the motto “America, My Country.”4 He worked hard at learning English, although he would always speak with a French accent. And he changed his name from the French Jean-Jacques Audubon to the American version—John James Audubon.

  He set up a drawing studio at Mill Grove but was as disgusted as ever with his bird pictures. Many of them were flat profiles, done in the tradition of the ornithologists of his day. Others were sketches of birds that he had shot and hung upside down on a string—more like signs for a poultry shop than art, he thought. How could he pose his birds to look alive? The solution came to him in a dream one night, and he jumped out of bed before dawn to try it out.

  First he made a “position board” out of a piece of wood, then drove into it sharp wires that could pierce a bird’s body and hold it in any position. He tested the device with a newly killed bird called a kingfisher, arranging and rearranging its head, tail, and feet until his fingers bled. “At last—there stood before me the real Kingfisher.”5 Now it was time to draw. In order to get the proportions right, he had drawn a network of lines on the position board and a matching grid on his paper. “I outlined the bird, aided by compasses and my eyes, colored it, finished it, without a thought of hunger. . . . This was what I shall call my first drawing actually from nature.”6 The new method was a turning point for Audubon and his art, and he would use it for the rest of his life.

  7. Mill Grove Farm, Perkiomen Creek, Pennsylvania by Thomas Birch, c. 1820.

  Soon after he fell in love with America, he fell in love with a girl named Lucy Bakewell. The eldest of six children, she was seventeen years old to his nineteen, and she lived across the road from him in a white-columned mansion called Fatland Ford. Her family, the Bakewells, had just emigrated from England. When Audubon first met Lucy, she was sewing by her parlor fire. He was struck by her friendly ways and the “grace and beauty” of her figure, and he believed—rightly—that she admired him as well.7 “I measured five feet ten and a half inches, was of a fair mien, and [had] quite a handsome figure.”8 He was especially proud of his strength—his “muscles of steel”—and his wavy brown hair, which hung down to his shoulders.9 John became a frequent visitor to Fatland Ford. The two young people played music together, with Lucy on piano and John on violin or flute. They rode horseback, walked in the woods, and visited John’s hideaway, the phoebes’ cave. In the cave, they first talked about marriage.

  While Lucy was modest and sensible, John was anything but. “I was what in plain terms may be called extremely extravagant,” he wrote.10 On an allowance from his father, he bought the best horses and dogs and fancy guns decorated with silver. “I was ridiculously fond of dress,” he added.11 Even to go hunting—often with Lucy’s youngest brother, Billy, tagging along—John wore black satin breeches, silk stockings, and a ruffled shirt. He was also a fearless natural athlete who never missed a chance to show off: “Not a ball, a skating-match, a house or riding party took place without me.”12 One day another Bakewell brother, Tom, dared Audubon to shoot a hole in his hat while skating by at top speed. “Off I went like lightning,” Audubon recalled, and when the hat was thrown into the air, he shot it so full of holes it looked like a sieve.13 A neighbor observed that Audubon was not only the fastest skater he had ever seen, able to leap over gaping holes in the ice, but also the best dancer: “All the ladies wished him as a partner.”14 No wonder Lucy’s father, William Bakewell, thought that John was “too young and too useless to be married.”15

  Audubon’s own father agreed. So in 1805 John sailed back to France to convince him to change his mind. He stayed for one year. Much of that time he spent hunting for birds in his old childhood haunts with a neighbor, Dr. Charles d’Orbigny. A naturalist and bird expert, d’Orbigny taught John how to conduct his bird studies in a scientific way—how to weigh and measure, how to dissect, and how to classify the different species. This type of classification, called taxonomy, was new to ornithology, and ideas about it were constantly changing.

  Audubon would return to America with a deeper understanding of the feathered tribes. He would also return with a business partner, a Frenchman named Ferdinand Rozier. Both Mr. Bakewell and Captain Audubon had advised John to become a businessman, serious and responsible at last. Only then would he win their permission to marry. This time when Audubon left France, he wasn’t sad. He couldn’t wait to see Lucy again.

  In 1807 he sold his share of Mill Grove to fund a general store, which he and Rozier planned to locate somewhere in Kentucky. Kentucky was then a frontier state in the “Western country,” on the very edge of the unknown. Only twenty-four years had passed since the end of the American Revolution. And only four years since Thomas Jefferson had made the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the country. There were no states at all west of the Kentucky border, yet Americans were moving to Kentucky to build towns and farm its fertile land.

  The future storekeepers set out from Pennsylvania in late August on what would be a rough trip. They trudged through the rain on horseback and endured long days in stagecoaches that bogged down in the mud. But Audubon loved it all. Moving through ancient, towering forests, surrounded by an orchestra of birdsong, he fell under a kind of spell. “Who is the stranger to my own dear country that can form an adequate conception of the extent of its primeval woods[?]”16

  8. Wild Turkey. Like Benjamin Franklin, Audubon wanted the turkey to be named the national bird.

  9. John James Audubon by Frederick Cruikshank, 1831. The artist as he looked in middle age.

  10. Lucy Bakewell Audubon by Frederick Cruikshank, 1835.

  They reached the Ohio River at Pittsburgh, loaded their supplies onto a flatboat, and started downriver. In those days before the steamboat, flatboats—raftlike crafts with squared ends—were the best way to move cargo and people on the nation’s waterways. The boats had no sails but floated with the current or were pushed along by means of long poles thrust into the riverbed. Audubon’s flatboat was carrying everything from hogs to horses, plows to spinning wheels—and whole families of pioneers. Gliding downstream, Audubon was enchanted by the clear, calm river, the untouched forests on shore. At night he saw the moon reflected in black water and heard owls sweep by on quiet wings.

  When Audubon and Rozier reached Louisville, Kentucky, they decided to stay. High on a bluff overlooking the river, the town was already a busy port—the right place to open a general store. The partners rented space and set out their goods, everything from bacon to gunpowder.

  John had finally won approval from both fathers to marry Lucy. So he made the long trip back to Pennsylvania for his wedding, which was held on April 5, 1808. The day after the ceremony, he and Lucy started back to Louisville. Along the way, their stagecoach overturned. Lucy was thrown from it and badly bruised, but she had no thought of turning back. Although wealthy and well educated, she was not afraid to try the pioneers’ life. She and John were travelers in the new nation, and they saw their future on the frontier.

  3

  The American Woodsman

  Owning a store did not keep Audubon from his wandering ways. While Ferdinand Rozier stood behind the coun
ter all day, Audubon took to the woods. “Birds were birds then as now,” he later wrote, “and my thoughts were ever and anon turning toward them as the objects of my greatest delight. I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only; my days were happy beyond human conception, and beyond this I really cared not.”1 The only parts of the business that he enjoyed were the buying trips that took him back through the “darling forests,” back to the big cities of Philadelphia and New York.2 These trips provided the perfect excuse for bird watching; once he lost sight of his packhorses because he was tracking the flight of a certain warbler. As her husband’s collection of drawings grew, Lucy confided in one of her sisters, “If I were jealous, I would have a bitter time of it, for every bird is my rival.”3

  Lucy and John lived in a Louisville boardinghouse called the Indian Queen. There in 1809 their son Victor Gifford was born. The Audubons were popular in the frontier town—Lucy for her gentleness and learning, John for his hunting skills and general love of a good time. On coming to Kentucky, he had put away his black satin clothes and put on buckskin and moccasins instead. He carried his gunpowder in a buffalo horn and stuck a tomahawk in his belt. Gone was the country gentleman of Mill Grove. He thought of himself now as the “American Woodsman.”

  One day in 1810 an unexpected visitor came to the store. He was Alexander Wilson, a Scotsman and the most famous ornithologist in America at the time. “How well do I remember him, as he then walked up to me!” Audubon wrote.4 Wilson had a “peculiar look,” with his long nose and piercing eyes.5 Tucked under his arm was part of his life’s work, a collection of bird drawings and descriptions titled American Ornithology. He asked Audubon to subscribe to it, to make payments as new volumes were completed. Audubon was about to sign up when Rozier stopped him. “Your drawings are certainly far better,” he said in French, “and again you must know as much of the habits of American birds as this gentleman.”6 Audubon had to agree.

  By this time he had completed about two hundred drawings of birds, all of them life-size. The woods were Audubon’s art school. Everything he drew, he had seen himself—unlike many other ornithologists, who worked from stuffed specimens. And almost everything he knew, he had taught himself. His only scientific book was one by Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomy.

  11. John James Audubon by John James Audubon, 1826. Pencil on paper. He sketched himself as the American Woodsman.

  12. Drawing of Bird Anatomy by John James Audubon.

  When Wilson saw Audubon’s pictures, he was astonished. How had this backwoods shopkeeper taught himself to draw so well? And how had he managed to find species that Wilson himself had never seen? He asked Audubon if he planned to publish his work. Audubon said no because he was still intent on running the store. But the idea of publishing took hold in his mind and never let go. From that day on, Audubon knew that Wilson was the ornithologist to beat. In the years to come, he would compare his birds with the Scotsman’s, checking for similarities, checking for—and sometimes finding—Wilson’s mistakes.

  Louisville was settling up fast. As more merchants came to town, Audubon and Rozier faced competition. So they moved a hundred miles down the Ohio to set up a new shop in Henderson, Kentucky. Henderson was just a huddle of log cabins then, with few customers for any store. But Audubon was happy. He always longed for a “wilder range.”7

  In the winter of 1810, he and Rozier started on an expedition to Ste. Genevieve, a village near St. Louis, Missouri. This time they traveled by keelboat—a cargo boat with a keel and pointed ends—first down the Ohio, then up the Mississippi River. All the way, the passengers battled snowstorms, ferocious cold, and solid masses of ice. Audubon smiled to see how Rozier endured the trip, “wrapped in a blanket, like a squirrel in winter quarters with his tail about his nose.”8 He himself was having the time of his life.

  Wherever the keelboat tied up to shore, Audubon went exploring. Once he spied a brownish-black eagle, which he called the Bird of Washington in honor of the first president. He was sure he had discovered a new species, but the bird was actually a young bald eagle that had not yet grown its distinctive white head feathers. On another side trip, a party of Shawnee Indians took Audubon to a lake where there were “swans by the hundreds, and as white as rich cream, either dipping their black bills in the water, or stretching out one leg on the surface, or gently floating along.”9

  13. Trumpeter Swan. Audubon watched swans toss water over their backs “in sparkling globules, like so many large pearls.”

  The expedition proved to be the last straw for Rozier. When the keelboat reached Ste. Genevieve, he decided to stay, and the partnership of Audubon and Rozier broke up. Rozier complained that “Audubon had no taste for commerce, and was continually in the forest.”10 Audubon would never deny it: “I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting its habits.”11 But he summed up his opinion of his ex-partner this way: “Rozier cared only for money.”12

  Audubon traveled overland back to his family in Henderson, a distance of 165 miles. “Winter was just bursting into spring. . . . The prairies began to be dotted with beauteous flowers, abounded with deer, and my own heart was filled with happiness at the sights before me.”13

  He claimed that he was almost murdered along the way. His story about the strange incident is called “The Prairie.” It is one of the many “episodes”—some true, some tall tales—that he would write.

  Following an Indian trail, Audubon came to a cabin where he hoped to spend the night. The owner, a gruff pioneer woman, invited him in. By the fire sat a young Indian, whose face was bloody from a wound he had gotten when his arrow backfired into his eye. The wounded man did not speak to Audubon but kept glancing with his good eye at the woman, as if to warn Audubon that she was dangerous. After she admired Audubon’s watch, which hung on a gold chain around his neck, the Indian’s warnings grew stronger. “He passed and repassed me several times, and once pinched me on the side so violently, that the pain nearly brought forth an exclamation of anger.”14 In the dead of night, the woman’s two sons came home. Pretending to be asleep, Audubon heard the three plotting to kill the Indian and himself in order to steal the watch. Then he heard a knife being sharpened, and “cold sweat covered every part of my body.”15 He silently prepared to fire his gun in self-defense. Just then “two stout travelers, each with a long rifle on his shoulder,” burst in.16 When they heard Audubon’s story, they helped him tie up the would-be killers. The next morning, the travelers dispensed frontier justice—were the cabin dwellers hanged or shot?—and burned the cabin to the ground. Audubon and the others went their separate ways. During all his wanderings, Audubon writes, “this was the only time at which my life was in danger from my fellow creatures.”17

  14. Victor Gifford Audubon by John James Audubon, 1823.

  15. John Woodhouse Audubon by John James Audubon, 1823.

  Back in Henderson, he formed a new partnership with Lucy’s brother Tom. Tom went to New Orleans, where he planned to sell goods imported from England. The venture failed soon after it started, though, because the War of 1812 between America and England put a stop to all trade between the two countries. But the store in Henderson thrived. Lucy and John bought a house with several acres of meadow and a pond for ducks and geese. They even kept a pet turkey, with a red ribbon tied around its neck. “The pleasures which I have felt at Henderson and under the roof of that log cabin, can never be effaced from my heart until after death,” wrote Audubon.18 In 1812 the Audubons’ second son, John Woodhouse (Johnny), was born, and now there were two “Kentucky lads” to raise.

  Audubon’s horse, Barro, was a scruffy little mustang that had once belonged to an Osage Indian. One afternoon, as Audubon trotted Barro through the countryside, the sky darkened, and he heard what sounded like “the distant rumbling of a violent tornado.”19 He tried to kick Barro into a gallop, but the horse “fell a-groaning piteously, hung his head, spread out his four legs, as if to save himself from falling, and stood stock stil
l, continuing to groan.”20 Audubon thought that Barro was dying, when suddenly—earthquake! “The ground rose and fell . . . like the ruffled waters of a lake. . . . I had never witnessed anything of the kind before. . . . Who can tell of the sensations which I experienced when I found myself rocking as it were on my horse, and with him moved to and fro like a child in a cradle . . . ?”21 When the rocking stopped, horse and rider raced home faster than they had ever run before. They had just survived one of the New Madrid earthquakes, a series of quakes that were the strongest ever recorded in the eastern United States.

  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:

  Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of “Here they come!” The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea. . . . As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful and almost terrifying, sight presented itself. The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses . . . were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath. . . . It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.