This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (2 page)

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America, My Country

Audubon sat in a small cave, watching a grayish brown bird, an eastern phoebe, as she sat on her nest. At first her mate had tried to chase him away, darting and scolding. But he had returned every morning until both birds had grown used to him. Now he was able to peek at the first newly laid egg. “So white and so transparent,” he wrote, “that to me the sight was more pleasant than if I had met with a diamond of the same size.”
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Soon five eggs hatched, and five baby birds jostled each other in the nest. They allowed Audubon to touch them. When they were old enough, he picked up each one and gently tied a silver thread around a tiny leg. The phoebes would fly south for the winter, but the threads would show him if any came back to the same spot in the spring.

The next April he heard cries of “fee-bee, fee-bee!” Were these the same “little pilgrims” that he knew?
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He searched for silver-threaded birds and found two nesting nearby. The experiment had worked. This was the first time that birds were banded in America. No older than twenty, Audubon had just made a major contribution to the study of bird migration and to
ornithology
, or the study of birds, in general.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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The new method was a turning point for Audubon and his art, and he would use it for the rest of his life.

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.
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“I measured five feet ten and a half inches, was of a fair mien, and [had] quite a handsome figure.”
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He was especially proud of his strength—his “muscles of steel”—and his wavy brown hair, which hung down to his shoulders.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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No wonder Lucy’s father, William Bakewell, thought that John was “too young and too useless to be married.”
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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[?]”
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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.