by Nancy Plain
His workroom was stacked from top to bottom with drawings, art supplies, and stuffed birds and quadrupeds. At one end of the room was a long drawing table where Audubon sat, preparing for The Viviparous Quadrupeds. Sketches of small mammals—rabbits, weasels, moles, mice, and rats—began to pile up.
John Bachman was an expert on mammals. “Don’t flatter yourself that the quadrupeds will be child’s play,” he warned.6 He counted twenty-four types of tree squirrel alone. And, he added, “books cannot aid you much. Long journeys will have to be undertaken.”7
“My Hairs are grey, and I am growing old, but what of this? My Spirits are as enthusiastical as ever,” wrote Audubon, and he planned a trip out west to see the quadrupeds of the mountains and plains.8 He knew it would be his last great adventure.
From Minniesland he traveled westward, noting along the way how the once open countryside was filling up with towns and farms. In St. Louis, he climbed aboard the Omega, a steamboat belonging to the Chouteau family, which controlled most of the fur trade on the western frontier. Audubon had brought along four others: John Bell, a taxidermist; Isaac Sprague, an artist; Lewis Squires, a young man who would be a general helper; and Edward Harris. According to Audubon, the other passengers were an “extraordinary and motley crew.”9 Most were fur trappers from many different countries who would fan out into the wilderness, trap animals, and sell their pelts at trading posts along the western rivers. Others were Indians, visitors to St. Louis, who were heading north and home. As the boat started up the Mississippi, many of the trappers got drunk. They fired their guns in the air—Pop! Pop! Pop!—and cheered. The date was April 25, 1843.
39. Common American Wildcat. This was Audubon’s name for the bobcat, or lynx.
When the Omega reached the Missouri, it had to fight the churning current, wind through twisting channels, and steer around sandbars and sunken logs. The crew rowed ashore often to chop wood to fuel the boat’s engine. When Audubon wasn’t busy drawing, he went ashore, too, “in search of quadrupeds, birds, and adventures.”10
Up and up for hundreds of miles. The travelers passed the Platte River—the path of the Oregon Trail—where wagons trains were just beginning to roll west. They passed the famous Council Bluffs, where in 1804 Lewis and Clark had first met with chiefs of the Missouri River tribes. The Omega was chugging through the Great Plains now. Indian Country. The vast land that would become the states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota was not even organized into territories yet, and few Americans had ventured this far. High bluffs lined the river. Behind them the prairie stretched out as far as the eye could see. “We are advancing in this strange wilderness,” Audubon wrote, spellbound.11 Blood-red sunrise and moonlit nights. There were hardly any trees.
40. Swift Fox. Audubon saw many of these fast runners on the prairie.
In Sioux territory—now South Dakota—they saw hundreds of tipis pitched next to a trading post. They began to see buffalo, too, and Audubon explored his first prairie dog town. Farther north, in what is now North Dakota, the boat reached a trading post called Fort Clark. The villages of the Mandan Indians were nearby. Audubon toured their round, earthen lodges, and the Mandans toured the steamboat. “There they stood in the pelting rain and keen wind, covered with Buffalo robes, red blankets, and the like, some partially and most curiously besmeared with mud. . . . They looked at me with apparent curiosity, perhaps on account of my beard. . . . They all looked very poor.”12
They were poor—and so hungry that they ate the rotten meat of drowned buffalo. In 1837 a steamboat had brought smallpox to the Upper Missouri region. The Indians had never been exposed to the disease before and so had developed no immunity to it. A terrible epidemic raced through the tribes, wiping out village after village. The Mandans were hit hard; 90 percent of them died. In his journal, Audubon recorded some desperate stories:
“One young warrior sent his wife to dig his grave. . . . The grave was dug, and the warrior, dressed in his most superb apparel, with lance and shield in hand, walked towards it singing his own death song, . . . and . . . threw down all his garments and arms, and leaped into it, drawing his knife as he did so, and cutting his body almost asunder. This done, the earth was thrown over him, the grave filled up, and the woman returned to her lodge to live with her children, perhaps only another day.”13
Audubon also told the story of “an extremely handsome and powerful Indian who lost an only son, a beautiful boy, upon whom all his hopes and affections were placed. The loss proved too much for him; he called his wife . . . and said to her, ‘Why should we live? All we cared for is taken from us, and why not at once join our child in the land of the Great Spirit?’ She consented; in an instant he shot her dead on the spot, reloaded his gun, put the muzzle in his mouth, touched the trigger, and fell back dead.”14
41. Fort Union Trading Post by Karl Bodmer.
On June 12, the Omega reached its final destination of Fort Union, in North Dakota, where the Yellowstone River flows into the Missouri. The hard-working steamboat had set a speed record to get there, traveling two thousand miles in only forty-eight days.
The fort was built to handle trade with the Blackfoot Indians and other Upper Missouri tribes. There they exchanged buffalo hides for the whites’ guns, knives, cloth, needles, and more. This was the farthest west Audubon had ever been, and he could not have wished for a wilder place. “Wolves howling, and [buffalo] bulls roaring, just like the long continued roll of a hundred drums.”15 He was given a special room to draw in, and he unpacked for a two-month stay.
The agent in charge of Fort Union was Alexander Culbertson. His wife was a Blackfoot named Natawista. One day the couple put on war paint and staged a horse race. “Mrs. Culbertson and her maid rode astride like men,” wrote Audubon, “and all rode a furious race, under whip the whole way, for more than one mile on the prairie; and how amazed would have been any European lady . . . at seeing the magnificent riding of this Indian princess—for that is Mrs. Culbertson’s rank—and her servant. Mr. Culbertson rode with them, the horses running as if wild, with these extraordinary Indian riders, Mrs. Culbertson’s magnificent black hair floating like a banner behind her.”16
Audubon’s group left the fort daily on horseback to explore. Often they camped out on the prairie, using buffalo dung to fuel their campfires. It was summertime, and there was an astounding number of birds. On the way upriver, Audubon had already named a species each for Bell, Sprague, and Harris. Now he became the first ornithologist to discover that the western meadowlark was a different species than the meadowlark back east.
This was the kingdom of the quadrupeds, too. Antelope bounded over the prairie. Elk bearing huge antlers swam the rivers, and bears foraged in the brush. Wolves prowled everywhere, even coming near the fort at night. Audubon made a special trip to North Dakota’s Badlands, home of the bighorn sheep. There, where ancient rivers had carved a strange landscape, the sheep scampered up and down rock towers a thousand feet high.
But the buffalo ruled over all. The shaggy, bellowing beasts were the largest mammals—viviparous quadrupeds!—on the North American continent. They ranged over the land in herds so immense that Audubon found it “impossible to describe.”17 It had taken one frontiersman six days to ride through a herd.
42. American Bison or Buffalo. “Almost every green spot along the hillsides has its gang of buffaloes,” Audubon told a friend.
Audubon shot hundreds of mammals to study and draw for his new book, and he sent home skins and specimens preserved in barrels of brine. He hunted for science, he hunted for food, and he hunted because he loved to. Buffalo hunting was the most exciting—and most dangerous—of all. But Audubon was fifty-eight now, and he had trouble shooting his rifle while riding at a mad gallop. “How I wish I were twenty-five years younger!”18 And once he was almost gored by a wounded bull, so he watched more often than he took part. After one hunt, he looked on amazed as Natawista scooped out the still-warm brains of a dead buffalo and ate them, r
aw and dripping.
In spite of his love for hunting, Audubon realized that species could become extinct, and as the years went by, he grew increasingly concerned. He saw that, like the passenger pigeons in Kentucky, buffalo were being slaughtered at an alarming rate: “What a terrible destruction of life, as it were for nothing, or next to it. . . . The prairies are literally covered with the skulls of the victims.”19 And he added, “This cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.”20 But the animals continued to be shot for their hides, for their meat, and for sport. By the 1880s—Audubon would not live to see his prediction come true—almost all the buffalo would be gone.
Winter comes early to the Upper Missouri country. By mid-August, there was a sharp bite in the wind, and the air was thick with the coming snows. Audubon and his men built an oar-powered barge called a mackinaw and started for home. The naturalist had not had time to go as far as he had wanted, to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, but he had seen a part of the Wild West and many of its wild creatures.
Down past the Mandan villages and the Sioux encampments, down through the prairie that he called “sublime.”21 From St. Louis he traveled back to New York, reaching Minniesland in November. “Thank God, [I] found all my family quite well.”22 The family was bigger now, too. Victor and Johnny had remarried, and the house was filled with their children. Audubon’s hair and beard, all white now, were long, and he had brought back with him a coat trimmed with wolf fur. Johnny painted a portrait of his father, looking like a true western frontiersman.
As soon as his barrels of specimens arrived, Audubon sat down to perfect his drawings. With pencil and ink, he drew every whisker and eyelash. He used watercolor, pastel, and oil paint to show the softness of fur and its many shadings. His quadrupeds would be as lifelike as his birds.
As with the Octavo, the quadruped pictures were printed on lithographed plates and colored by hand. Audubon brought sample prints to Washington DC so that members of Congress could see them before buying a subscription. He was shocked at how little the politicians knew about the animals of their own country. “The Great Folks call the Rats Squirrels, the squirrels flying ones, and the Marmots, poor things, are regularly called Beavers or Musk Rats.”23
By 1845, he had finished half the illustrations for the book. But his eyesight was failing. His mind was beginning to fail, too. After a lifetime of drawing, writing, and exploring, he was nearing the end of his working days. The family team stepped in to help. Victor painted backgrounds and sent specimens to John Bachman as Bachman wrote text. Johnny hunted for more quadrupeds and visited European museums to sketch polar bears and other arctic mammals. When he came home, he completed the other half of the drawings. The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, with 150 large images, was published in three volumes from 1845 to 1848. It was a landmark of natural history, the most complete record of American mammals of its time.
John Bachman visited his old friend in 1848 and found him much changed. “Alas, my poor friend Audubon! The outlines of his beautiful face and form are there, but his noble mind is all in ruins. It is indescribably sad.”24 By 1850 the artist was spending his time wandering the grounds of Minniesland, withdrawn and silent. There came a day when he did not recognize his son.
Billy Bakewell paid a visit. When Audubon saw his hunting buddy from the old Mill Grove days, he sat up straighter and spoke. “Yes, yes, Billy! You go down that side of Long Pond, and I’ll go this side, and we’ll get the ducks.”25
These were his last words. John James Audubon died on January 27, 1851. He was sixty-six years old.
43. John James Audubon by John Woodhouse Audubon, c. 1843.
9
Audubon Then and Now
“The study of ornithology must be a journey of pleasure,” Audubon wrote.1 His own journey gave us the spectacular The Birds of America. It marked the beginning of modern ornithology, too, bringing naturalists out to where the birds really lived, to see and study. Audubon’s vision—to erase the boundary between ornithology and art—was realized in his historic achievement. Yet there were times, early in his career, when he feared that he would die unknown.
His life itself is one of the great American adventure stories. A passionate rambler, he tramped across the country from shortly after its founding to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans were poised to overspread and settle the continent. He met everyone from frontiersmen to presidents and wandered through a wilderness that was teeming with animals in numbers almost unimaginable today. No artist or naturalist traveled as far or saw as much. His art and writings form a unique kind of travelogue of America when it was new. Audubon had a powerful love for his country, and he understood how fast it was changing. In middle age, he looked back on an earlier trip down the Ohio River:
When I think of these times, and call back to my mind the grandeur and beauty of those almost uninhabited shores; when I picture to myself the dense and lofty summits of the forests, that everywhere spread along the hills and overhung the margins of the stream, . . . when I reflect that all this grand portion of our Union, instead of being in a state of nature, is now more or less covered with villages, farms, and towns, . . . when I remember that these extraordinary changes have all taken place in the short period of twenty years, I pause, wonder, and although I know all to be fact, can scarcely believe its reality.
Whether these changes are for the better or for the worse, I shall not pretend to say.2
He was a man of his time and a man ahead of his time—a hunter who could kill a hundred birds in a day and an early environmentalist who worried about the survival of species from birds to buffalo. He probably discovered about twenty-three new bird species, although the exact number is hard to know.3 Taxonomy in Audubon’s lifetime was in its infancy, and today DNA analysis is leading to frequent revisions. Audubon was never able to depict all the North American birds. Ornithologists now count more than nine hundred species. But his gift to the world is greater even than his life’s work. It is also the legacy that his work has inspired.
The Audubon Society was founded in 1886 by the naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who was tutored by Lucy Audubon when he was a boy. Today the National Audubon Society includes hundreds of state chapters, nature centers, and sanctuaries. While Audubon the man collected birds, the Audubon Society is dedicated to protecting and preserving them. For the twenty-first-century naturalist, bird watching has replaced shooting, and photography provides the close-ups that John James Audubon craved. The mission has evolved.
The Audubon Society and many other bird and wildlife organizations have inherited John James Audubon’s concern for bird species under threat and work to save them by educating the public and advocating for protective laws. Some species, such as the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, are gone forever. But others that Audubon admired—the whooping crane, the roseate spoonbill, the brown pelican—have been pulled back from the brink of extinction.
Naturalists in Audubon’s day worked in isolation, but now the Internet has brought birders together nationwide and worldwide. Websites enable organizations to sponsor global bird counts, track migrations, provide field guides, and play recorded birdcalls. Not only professional ornithologists but citizen-scientists, amateurs, contribute important information. How pleased Audubon would have been to know this, for he was self-taught and a citizen-scientist himself.
He is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City, not far from Minniesland. A tall monument over his grave is carved with birds and mammals, flowers and leaves.
“In imagination I am at this moment rambling along the banks of some murmuring streamlet . . . while the warblers and other sylvan choristers, equally fond of their wild retreats, are skipping in all the freedom of nature around me.”4
44. Blue-winged Teal by John James Audubon.
Appendix
Looking for Audubon and His World
Historical Sites
John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Audubon, Pennsylvania
Oakley Plantation House, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana
Trinity Church Cemetery, New York, New York
Museums and Galleries
American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York
The Audubon Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina
Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
John James Audubon Museum, Henderson, Kentucky
Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana
New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
Wildlife Societies and an Educational Institution
American Birding Association, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York
allaboutbirds.org and ebird.org
National Audubon Society, New York, New York
Glossary
Bachman, John (1790–1874): An American clergyman and naturalist who helped John James Audubon with The Birds of America and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.
banding: The process of fastening a band around a bird’s leg to enable future identification.
biology: The scientific study of living things, mostly plant and animal life.
Blackfoot: An Indian nation of the Upper Missouri country and Canada.
botany: The scientific study of plant life.