The Audubon Reader (2 page)

Eastern Bluebird (
Sialia sialis)

Barred Owl
(Strix varia)

Chuck-will’s-widow
(Caprimulgus carolinensis)

Passenger Pigeon
(Ectopistes migratorius)

Eastern Phoebe (
Sayornis phoebe
)

Baltimore Oriole (
Icterus galbula
)

Purple Martin (
Progne subis
)

Cliff Swallow (
Petrochelidon pyrrhonota
)

Ivory-billed Woodpecker (
Campephilus principalis
)

American Crow (
Corvus brachyrhynchos
)

Common Barn Owl (
Tyto alba
)

Brown Booby (
Sula leucogaster
)

Great Black-backed Gull (
Larus marinus
)

Swallow-tailed Kite (
Elanoides forficatus
)

Wild Turkey (
Meleagris gallopavo
)

Least Bittern (
Ixobrychus exilis
)

The handsome, excitable eighteen-year-old Frenchman who would become John James Audubon had already lived his way through two names when he landed in New York from Nantes in August 1803. His father Jean, a canny ship’s captain with Pennsylvania property, had sent his only son off to America with a false passport to escape Napoleonic conscription, the young man’s second or third escape. The tenant who farmed the plantation Jean Audubon owned, Mill Grove, which straddled Perkiomen Creek close above Valley Forge, had reported a vein of lead ore. John James or Jean Jacques or Fougère was supposed to evaluate the tenant’s report, learn what he could of plantation management and eventually—since the French and Haitian revolutions had all but erased the Audubon fortune—make a life for himself.

He did that and much, much more. He married an extraordinary woman, opened a string of general stores on the Kentucky frontier, built a great steam mill on the Ohio River, explored the American wilderness from Galveston Bay to Newfoundland, hunted with Shawnees and Osages, rafted the Ohio and the Mississippi, identified, studied and drew almost five hundred species of American birds, saw English noblemen kneel before him to examine his dazzling drawings, raised the equivalent of several million dollars to publish a great work of art, wrote five volumes of “bird biographies” larded with narratives of pioneer life, won fame enough to dine with presidents and became a national icon, “The American Woodsman,” his ultimate appellation, a name he gave himself.

John James had first been Jean Rabin, his father’s bastard child, born in 1785 on Jean Audubon’s sugar plantation on Saint Domingue (soon to be renamed Haiti) to a twenty-seven-year-old French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin, who died of infection within months of his
birth. The first stirrings of slave rebellion in 1791 prompted Jean Audubon to sell what he could of his holdings and ship his son home to France, where his wife Anne, a generous older widow whom Jean had married long before, welcomed the handsome boy and raised him as her own.

When the Terror approached Nantes in 1793 the Audubons had formally adopted the bastard Jean Rabin, christening him Jean Jacques or Fougère Audubon, Fougère—“Fern”—an offering to placate the Revolutionary authorities, who scorned the names of saints.
Jean-Baptiste Carrier, sent out from Paris to quell the Vendéan peasant counterrevolution, ordered the slaughter of thousands in Nantes—a guillotine and firing squads in the town square, victims chained to barges sunk in the Loire, tainting the river for months—and even though Jean Audubon was an officer in the Revolutionary French navy, he and his family were jailed and barely spared. Two escapes and two names, and now a third escape and John James; but this escape opened up a world.

The young country to which John James Audubon emigrated in the summer of 1803 was barely settled beyond its eastern shores; Lewis and Clark were just then preparing to depart for the West. France in that era counted a population of more than 27 million, Britain about 15 million, but only 6 million people yet thinly populated the United States, two-thirds of them living within fifty miles of Atlantic tidewater. In European eyes America was still an experiment. It would need a second American revolution—the War of 1812—to compel England and Europe to honor American sovereignty.

But the first generation of Americans which the young French émigré was joining was different from its parents. Like Audubon, it had left home to migrate westward. Like Audubon also, it would break with tradition and take great risks in pursuit of new opportunities which its elders had not enjoyed. “National spirit is the natural result of national existence,” Gouverneur Morris had predicted back in 1784; “and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.” Audubon’s was the era, as the historian
Joyce Appleby has discerned, when “the autonomous individual emerged as an ideal.” American individualism was not a natural phenomenon, Appleby writes; it “[took] shape historically [and] came to personify the nation and the free society it embodied.” And no life was at once more unique and more representative of that expansive era when a national character emerged than Audubon’s. Celebrate him for his wonderful birds;
but recognize him as well as a characteristic American of the first generation—a man who literally made a name for himself.

Lucy Bakewell, the tall, slim, gray-eyed girl next door whom he married, came from a distinguished English family.
Erasmus Darwin had dandled her on his knee in their native Derbyshire. Her father had moved his family to America to follow Joseph Priestley, the chemist and religious reformer, but opportunity had also drawn the Bakewells. Their plantation, Fatland Ford, was more ample than the Audubons’, and William Bakewell sponsored one of the first experiments in steam-powered threshing there while his young French neighbor lay ill with a fever in his house under his talented daughter’s care. Lucy was a gifted pianist, an enthusiastic reader, a skillful rider—sidesaddle—who kept an elegant house. She and John James, once they married and moved out to Kentucky in 1808, regularly swam across and back the half-mile-wide Ohio for morning exercise.

Lucy’s handsome young Frenchman had learned to be a naturalist from his father and his father’s medical friends, exploring the forested marshes along the Loire. Her younger brother Will left a memorable catalog of his future brother-in-law’s interests and virtues; even as a young man, Audubon was someone men and women alike wanted to be around:

Audubon had begun teaching himself to draw birds in France. In Louisville and then downriver in frontier Henderson, Kentucky, he was responsible for keeping the pot filled with fish and game and the shelves with supplies while his business partner
Ferdinand Rozier ran the store and Lucy kept house, worked the garden and bore him two sons; as he hunted and traveled he improved his art on American birds and kept careful field notes as well. His narrative of an encounter with a flood of passenger pigeons is legendary (they were “passengers” rather than migratory because they moved from forest to forest feeding on fruit and mast, and they numbered in the billions). His descriptions match his best drawings in vivacity: of American
swifts lining a hollow seventy-foot sycamore stump near Louisville like bats in a cave, of brown pelicans fishing the shallows of the Ohio, of
sandhill cranes tearing away waterlily roots in a backwater slough, of the bald eagles that nested by the hundreds along the Mississippi stooping like falling stars to strike swans to ground, of
robins down from Labrador occupying apple trees, of crowds of black vultures, protected by law, patrolling the streets of Natchez and Charleston to clean up carrion and roosting at night on the roofs of houses and barns, of bright scarlet, yellow and emerald-green Carolina parakeets completely obscuring a shock of grain like “a brilliantly colored carpet” in the center of a field, of a least bittern standing perfectly still for two hours on a table in his studio while he drew it.

Drawing birds had been something of an obsession, but only a hobby, until Audubon’s businesses failed in the Panic of 1819, a failure his critics and too many of his biographers have ascribed to a lack of ability or the irresponsible distraction of his art. But almost every business in the trans-Appalachian West failed that year, because the Western state banks and the businesses they serviced were built on paper. When the Bank of the United States, needing specie (gold and silver) to finish paying off the Louisiana Purchase, demanded the redemption in specie of state bank balances and notes, the banks in response began calling in their
loans, shrinking the money supply. “One thing seems to be universally conceded,” an adviser told the governor of Ohio, “that the greater part of our mercantile citizens are in a state of bankruptcy—that those of them who have the largest possessions of real and personal estate … find it almost impossible to raise sufficient funds to supply themselves with the necessaries of life.” The Audubons lost everything except John James’s portfolio and his drawing and painting supplies. Before he took bankruptcy Audubon was even briefly thrown in jail for debt.

Through these disasters, Lucy never failed him, although they lost an infant daughter to fever that year as well. “[Lucy] felt the pangs of our misfortunes perhaps more heavily than I,” Audubon remembered gratefully of his stalwart love, “but never for an hour lost her courage; her brave and cheerful spirit accepted all, and no reproaches from her beloved lips ever wounded my heart. With her was I not always rich?”

Resourcefully, Audubon took up portrait drawing at five dollars a head. His friends found him work painting exhibit backgrounds and doing taxidermy for a new museum in Cincinnati modeled on
Charles Wilson Peale’s famous museum in Philadelphia, which Audubon knew from his Mill Grove days. Peale’s Philadelphia Museum displayed mounted birds as if alive against natural backgrounds, and preparing such displays in Cincinnati probably pointed Audubon to his technical and esthetic breakthrough of portraying American birds in realistic, lifelike poses and settings rather than stiffly perched on branches as ornithological tradition required. Members of the Long Expedition passing through Cincinnati in the spring of 1820, including the young artist Titian Ramsey Peale, son of the Philadelphia museum keeper, alerted Audubon to the possibility of exploring beyond the line of the frontier. Daniel Drake, the prominent Cincinnati physician who had founded the new museum, praised Audubon’s work in a public lecture and encouraged him to think of extending the range of American natural history by adding the birds of the Mississippi flyway to his collection.

By spring 1820, falling casualty to the Panic, Drake’s museum owed Audubon twelve hundred dollars, most of which it never paid. The artist scraped together such funds as he could raise from
drawing and teaching to support Lucy and their two boys while he was gone—she would move to Shippingport, below Louisville, to live with her prosperous brother-in-law and younger sister, not entirely happily—recruited his best student, eighteen-year-old
Joseph Mason, to draw backgrounds, bartered pot hunting for boat passage on a commercial flatboat headed for New Orleans and in October floated off down the Ohio and the Mississippi to claim his future.