This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (8 page)

Although Audubon shot thousands of birds in his lifetime, he claimed that he never disturbed nesting birds or their eggs. In Labrador, he saw—and instantly despised—the “Eggers,” men who raided wild birds’ nests and sold their eggs for a living. “At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause to consider the motive which could induce him to carry it off.”
17
Eggers destroyed whole generations of birds, and Audubon concluded that “this war of extermination cannot last many years more.”
18

By August the storm clouds of winter were already gathering. Audubon had lost fifteen pounds and was exhausted from the rain and cold, the tossing waves. “Seldom in my life have I left a country with as little regret.”
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But he was satisfied that he had learned much that was not known by any other ornithologist either in Europe or America.

In 1837 Audubon looked west to Texas and headed there with Johnny and his friend Edward Harris. Their route took them by stagecoach across Alabama. There they witnessed one of the tragic events in Native American history—the Trail of Tears.

Five Indian tribes—the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks—had lived in the southeastern part of North America for centuries, long before the United States was founded. But after the American Revolution and into the 1800s, southern states and territories were established. White settlers came and began to covet Indian lands.

In 1830 President Andrew Jackson had signed a law called the Indian Removal Act. It decreed that the southern tribes must be resettled in “permanent Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River. So tribe by tribe, family by family, Indians were torn from their homes. Taking
with them only what they could carry, they endured a forced march westward. Thousands died along the way.

Audubon recorded what he saw:

In New Orleans Audubon’s three-man expedition boarded a boat and sailed across the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana coast. Although they were tormented by mosquitoes and sweltering heat, they collected a wealth of plants and birds along the way. When they reached Galveston, they were no longer in the United States but the new Republic of Texas. The year before, Texans had won their independence from Mexico and elected Gen. Sam Houston as their first president. (Like Florida, Texas would join the Union in 1845.)

Audubon’s group ventured inland to Houston, the capital of the republic, where they met the president himself. Sam Houston wore a velvet coat and trousers trimmed with gold lace, but his presidential mansion was a two-room log cabin. Noted Audubon, “The ground floor was muddy and filthy; a large fire was burning; a small table, covered with paper and writing materials, was in the centre;
camp-beds, trunks, and different materials were strewn around the room.”
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President Houston introduced the visitors to members of his cabinet, “some of whom bore the stamp of intellectual ability.”
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Everyone took a glass of grog and toasted to the future of Texas. It was a visit that Audubon would never forget.

It took longer for Audubon’s fame to catch on in America than it had in Europe. And throughout the 1830s, his constant enemies, George Ord and Charles Waterton—those “beetles of darkness”—were hard at work.
23
As volumes of
Ornithological Biography
were published to glowing reviews, Ord and Waterton accused Audubon of not being the real author. “That impudent pretender and his stupid book,” Ord wrote.
24
Audubon never responded directly to their attacks, but he told a friend, “I really care not a fig—all such stuffs will soon evaporate, being mere smoke from a Dung Hill.”
25

He was right. Newspapers were reporting on his travels. Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences subscribed to
The Birds of America
, easing Audubon’s anger at that city. America’s great universities and public institutions—the U.S. Congress and several state governments—signed up as well. Many subscribers were prominent citizens, such as the statesman Daniel Webster and the writer Washington Irving, author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

By the summer of 1837
The Birds of America
was almost finished. All Audubon needed now were specimens of birds that two other naturalists, Thomas Nuttall and John Townsend, had collected on their expedition to the American West. The Audubon family was now together in Europe, shuttling between London and Edinburgh in a final push to the finish line. From dream to reality, thought Audubon. “How delicious is the Idea.”
26

8

This Strdge Wildersss

From its earliest days, Audubon knew that
The Birds of America
was unique. As it neared completion, he wrote, “I have laboured like a Cart Horse for thirty years on a Single Work, have been successful almost to a miracle in its publication so far, and am thought a-a-a (I dislike to write it, but no matter here goes) . . . a Great Naturalist!!!”
1

The last number of
The Birds
was published in 1838, twelve years after the first. The entire work was four volumes long and depicted 489 American species, twice as many as Alexander Wilson—or anyone else—had shown before. Some of the family and larger groupings had taken years to assemble, with Audubon using a collage technique to paste several bird drawings onto one sheet of paper. The printed engravings were so faithful to the original watercolors that they made Robert Havell Jr. famous along with Audubon.

One year later, the fifth and last volume of
Ornithological Biography
came out. This work, too, was revolutionary. Audubon had created a new kind of nature writing, combining scientific fact with his exuberant and poetic descriptions. “You may well imagine how happy I am at this moment,” he wrote. “I find my journeys all finished, . . . my mission accomplished.”
2
The family sailed back to America—this time
for good—and settled in New York City. At fifty-four and after so many years of almost superhuman effort, Audubon could finally rest.

Of course, he did not. He immediately began work on the
Octavo
edition, a miniature version of
The Birds of America
. Johnny Audubon helped. Using a device called a camera lucida, Johnny projected the images at one-eighth their original size onto sheets of paper and traced them. The traced drawings were then prepared for publication, not by copper engraving like the originals, but by the process of
lithography
, or etching on stone. The
Octavo
would be published in installments from 1840 to 1844. At the price of a hundred dollars, it was much less expensive than the big bird book, and to Audubon’s delight, it became an instant best seller.

Audubon had a friend named John Bachman who was a minister and fellow naturalist. Bachman’s motto was “Nature, Truth, and no Humbug.”
3
He had been an important member of the team that had helped produce
The Birds of America
, sending from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, specimens and information about the birds of the American South. Audubon’s and Bachman’s families had merged as well. Johnny Audubon married Bachman’s daughter Maria, and Victor married another Bachman girl, Eliza.

In 1840 Audubon and Bachman decided to do for North American mammals what Audubon had done for birds. As with the birds, no complete work had been published on the subject before. It was to be a joint effort—drawings by Audubon, text by Bachman. They chose a title—
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
. (Quadrupeds are four-legged animals. The term “viviparous” refers only to mammals because all mammals except the platypus and the anteater give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs.) But early in the project’s
planning stages, tragedy struck. Both Johnny’s and Victor’s wives died of tuberculosis. Audubon had particularly loved Victor’s wife, twenty-two-year-old Eliza. He was drawing a hare when she died: “I drew this Hare during one of the days of deepest sorrow I have felt in my life.”
4

Still he kept working. In 1841, with money from the
Octavo
, he bought land for his family—thirty acres on the banks of the Hudson River. That land is now part of New York City’s Upper West Side, but it was country then, all grass and tall, old trees. The Audubons named the new place Minniesland, because Victor and Johnny called their mother Minnie.

“Minniesland for ever say I!”
5
Audubon built a large, wooden
house—the family’s first permanent home since the Kentucky years—with a view of the water and the boats sailing by. Next came a barn and stables, a garden, and fruit trees. The naturalist also gathered around himself a menagerie of wild animals—foxes, elk, deer, even wolves.

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.

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.

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

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.