The American Woodsman
Owning a store did not keep Audubon from his wandering ways. While Ferdinand Rozier stood behind the counter 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. (left) Victor Gifford Audubon by John James Audubon, 1823.
15. (right) 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 still, 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.
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