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

by Nancy Plain

  16. Passenger Pigeon. The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914 in a Cincinnati zoo. Her name was Martha.

  No one dared venture within the line of devastation.22

  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.23

  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.24

  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.25 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.”26

  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.”27 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.”28

  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.”1

  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.

  17. Bonaparte’s Gull. Audubon painted each gull separately, then brought them together in a collage.

  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.”4 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.5

  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.”6 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.”7

  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.

  18. Cliff Swallow. A young bird peeks out of its mud nest.

  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.”8 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.”9 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.”10 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.11 With every day that passed, he wrote, “the Stronger my Anxiety to see My familly again presses on m
y mind—and Nothing but the astonishing desire I have of Compleating my work keeps my Spirits at par.”12

  January 7, 1821, and “New Orleans at Last.”13 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.

  19. Carolina Parakeet. This bird has been extinct since the 1920s.

  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.”14 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.”15

  20. Carolina Parrot by Alexander Wilson. Wilson’s parakeet (top) is very different from Audubon’s.

  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.16 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.”17 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.”18 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.19 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.20 For a moment, he was tempted to abandon The Birds of America.

  Then he met Mrs. Pirrie.

  21. Great Egret. The egret was hunted almost to extinction for its feathers. Some of America’s earliest bird protection laws were passed to save it.

  5

  On the Wing

  Lucretia Pirrie was the wife of James Pirrie, the owner of a cotton plantation called Oakley. The Pirries had a fifteen-year-old daughter, Eliza. Since there were no schools near Oakley, Mrs. Pirrie invited Audubon to work there for a while as Eliza’s tutor. He would be paid sixty dollars a month, and his duties would be light. With no better plans before him, he couldn’t say no.

  Oakley was located north of New Orleans in West Feliciana Parish (a Louisiana parish is similar to a county). When Audubon and Mason arrived, they felt as if they had entered another world. The land was hilly, the soil red. Spanish moss hung from oaks and cypress trees, giving the countryside a dark and haunted look. Best of all were the sweet magnolia woods, home to countless birds. It was June, mating time for the winged creatures—what Audubon called the “love season.” The air echoed with song.

  22. Yellow-breasted Chat. During mating season, the chat shows off with aerial acrobatics.

  Oakley plantation house was cool inside, shaded from the heat by trees and shuttered windows. The two wandering artists settled in. For half the day, Audubon instructed “My Lovely Miss Pirrie” in drawing, dancing, music, math, and even the art of making decorative objects out of braided hair.1 The rest of the day was his. He hiked through woods and fields and slogged through swamps, armed with a stick big enough to fend off alligators. The Feliciana country was also on the Mississippi River Flyway, so there were many thousands of birds—robins and wrens, hawks and herons, woodpeckers and kites. Before Audubon drew a bird, he would spend days observing it and taking notes. “Nature must be seen first alive, and well studied, before attempts are made at representing it,” he believed.2 He wanted to know everything—what the birds ate, where they slept, how they found their mates and cared for their young. Because he thought of birds’ inner lives in terms of human emotions, he was interested in their personalities, too. Were they meek or fierce, shy or sociable? Blue jays ate other birds’ eggs, so according to Audubon, they were thieves and mischief makers—not unlike some people he knew.

  23. Yellow-breasted Chat by Mark Catesby. Catesby, an English naturalist, painted American birds in the 1700s.

  He also thought of birdcalls in human terms—the cry of the bald eagle was like the “laugh of a maniac.”3 He could identify every bird by listening, so when he heard an unfamiliar call, he suspected that it came from an unknown species. Most of the new species that he discovered, he would find in Feliciana. This corner of the world became his favorite place, and he called it Happyland.

  24. Blue Jay by John James Audubon.

  When he walked into Happyland, he walked in with his gun. “You must be aware,” he once wrote, “that I call birds few, when I shoot less than one hundred per day.”4 By obtaining many specimens of a single species, he could better understand the general characteristics of that species. After he drew a bird, his work as a naturalist began. First he measured every part of the bird, even the length of its tongue. Then he dissected it, examining its organs and the contents of its stomach. Male and female of a species, young and old—Audubon the naturalist wanted to know his subjects literally inside and out.

  “The naturalist . . . ought to be an artist also.”5 Ever since the trip down the Mississippi, Audubon had been experimenting with color, and in Louisiana, his genius began to shine. He used pastel and watercolor together, layering and blending them, rubbing the colors with his finger or a piece of cork to create effects as rich and soft as feathers. He added other media, too. Pencil or black ink was perfect for delicate things such as spider webs or the legs of a bug. Oil paint formed a tree branch here, a cloud there. Gold metallic paint was just right for the flash of a feather, clear glaze for the gleam of an eye. This mix was something new in painting—a revolution quietly taking shape among the magnolias.

  Louisiana was full of snakes, as well as birds. One of Audubon’s most startling pictures, done at Oakley, shows a confrontation between four mockingbirds and a rattlesnake. The snake, coiled in a tree, is poised to strike while the birds, which Audubon admired for their “undaunted courage,” defend their eggs.6 The artist used as his model a dead rattler almost six feet long. With Eliza Pirrie sketching next to him, he worked on the drawing for sixteen hours in the summer heat. He always liked to finish a picture at one sitting, but this time he couldn’t—the stench became too strong. The finished picture, Northern Mockingbird, is only one of many
scenes in which Audubon shows the natural world as a place where every living thing must struggle to survive.

  25. Northern Mockingbird. This picture caused years of controversy among ornithologists.

  Mrs. Pirrie began to think that Eliza was starting to like her tutor a little too much. She told Audubon to leave, allowing him only ten days to organize and pack all his notes and drawings. When he asked to be paid for some classes that his pupil had missed, Mrs. Pirrie flew into a rage. Humiliated, Audubon was not sad to leave “the Ladies of Oakley.” But it was “not so with the sweet Woods around us, to leave them was painfull.”7 He and Joseph caught a steamboat back to New Orleans.

  In the city once again, Audubon cut his hair—his “horse’s mane”—and bought a good suit of clothes.8 He hoped that his new look would be more pleasing to the respectable folk he met on the street. He listed all he had accomplished since leaving Cincinnati: “62 Drawings of Birds & Plants, 3 quadrupeds, 2 Snakes, 50 Portraits of all sorts.”9 But he was lonelier than ever and missed his family so much that he wrote in his journal, “Wished myself off this Miserable Stage.”10 Lucy had finally promised to join him, but she wouldn’t say when. Then on December 18, 1821, she did arrive, along with twelve-year-old Victor and Johnny, nine. After a year of separation, the Audubons were together again, living in a tiny house on Dauphine Street.