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Chapter 2

Hearing Birds, Heeding Their Call

At a very early period of my life I arrived in the United States of America, where, prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and colouring.

—John James Audubon, “Account of the Method of Drawing Birds”

Audubon’s father didn’t send his son to America to become a bird artist. In addition to getting him well beyond Napoleon’s militaristic reach, he had a much more prosaic plan in mind. He wanted the teenaged boy to learn to speak and write better English, which could be a useful skill for another task that might soon be at hand: helping to manage Mill Grove, a Pennsylvania farm that the elder Audubon had acquired in 1789. Audubon père could hope that, with some combination of guidance and experience, his son would someday become a capable overseer of the Mill Grove operation; he at least assumed that the boy could benefit from the combination of responsibility and opportunity the place provided. He sent him off to America, then, with a letter of credit and a connection to a well-trusted local agent, giving him just the sort of support a young man might need for a promising start in the new nation.

Looking back some years later on that American beginning, Audubon clearly appreciated his father’s sending him to the Pennsylvania farm. He wrote fondly of his early days at Mill Grove, embracing the place as a “blessed spot” as he looked upon the work his father had done years before, “the even fences round the fields, or on the regular manner with which avenues of trees, as well as the orchards, had been planted by his hand.”¹ In fact, that work had been done by the hand of a tenant, who had also discovered lead deposits underground sometime in the 1790s, giving an additional dimension to Mill Grove. Lead wasn’t as good as gold, but in a bullet-hungry hunting country like the United States, such a mineral bonus could certainly be a substantial asset. With the promising combination of land and lead, then, everything seemed quite well laid out for young Audubon, just waiting for him to make it even better.

Unfortunately, however—or, perhaps fortunately, given his eventual artistic success—Audubon had neither head nor heart for farm management, and he never made the most of the opportunity his father first offered. By his own account, he never made much of the various other business ventures he pursued during his first two decades in the United States. All he really wanted, he insisted, was to become a bird artist.

The Precarious Calling of Art

Becoming an artist of any sort has always been a low-percentage career move, particularly in an upstart place like the early nineteenth-century United States. The number of painters who became reasonably prominent at the time could probably be counted on two hands, and those who gained lasting significance on one. We might think immediately of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) in the second half of the eighteenth century and Washington Allston (1779–1843), Thomas Cole (1801–1848), and Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) in the first half of the nineteenth, all of whom followed different paths to their profession. Copley, for instance, grew up in a poor Boston household headed by a widowed mother, an Irish immigrant who ran a tobacco shop, but he taught himself to paint well enough to make a comfortable living by making exquisite portraits of middle-class New Englanders in the era of the American Revolution. The American colonies, however, had neither the art museums nor the painting masters that could help an aspiring artist rise to the next level, both professionally and financially. In 1774, Copley left America for England, where he studied at the Royal Academy, worked with the British master Benjamin West, and then took off on the near-requisite tour of the Continent to see the treasures of France and Italy. So, too, did Allston, who graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and soon thereafter followed in Copley’s footsteps to England, the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, and the Grand Tour. Theirs became the path that other aspiring American artists would hope to follow for the next two centuries.

Cole and Durand came up the harder way. Born into middling backgrounds at best, both of them the sons of merchant-tradesmen, neither had the opportunity to cross the Atlantic for artistic training. Instead, they learned their trade by becoming itinerant artists, slogging along the path of other painters who populated the broader base of the pyramid of American art, most of whom never made it to the loftier reaches of the American art world, such as it was. Itinerants catered to the rising aspirations of clients in the middling range of society, more ordinary folk who nonetheless had the wherewithal to pay for a “correct likeness”—even if the likeness turned out to be not exactly correct. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for personal pictures grew rapidly as a form of consumption in a commercially expansive society, and itinerant artists carried their brushes from town to town, giving people the images—and emblems of status—they wanted. Largely self-taught, relying more on design books and simple observation than on a formal training, these artist-entrepreneurs did thousands of portraits of individuals, family groups, and sometimes even prized livestock, creating affordable artwork destined to hang on the walls of a family’s parlor rather in the staircase of a grand estate or halls of a gallery. They gave their sitters something of vernacular value, and then they moved on to do the same for people in the next town.²

Cole and Durand lived the life of the itinerant painter for a while, but both eventually turned their artistic attention to the American landscape and, equally important, attracted the attention of a prominent patron. John Trumbull, the well-born and successful artist, became a valuable advocate for both, helping them attain commissions from wealthy clients, members of the emerging American elite who would willingly pay for a painter’s artistry—sometimes if only to satisfy their own vanity. Patronage had a price, and their clients quite often dictated the tone, if not the actual content, of their paintings: In a time of increasing urbanization and industrialization, many patrons preferred images of romantic, even nostalgic, nationalism, paintings of a past American landscape that could be eternally preserved on canvas. Cole and Durand both became famous and prosperous as the twin pillars of the Hudson River School, but they sometimes felt their talents constrained, even squandered, by having to pander to the demands of aristocratic clients who commissioned the work and took it as their right to influence its execution.³

Audubon, like Cole and Durand, would work his way upward while still following a career path very much of his own making. Along the way, he would have to undertake the kinds of ad hoc tasks that had become common among America’s itinerant artists—making quick and cheap portraits, painting signs, or teaching art classes—but only as a financial means to a larger artistic end. Audubon never quite used the term “struggling artist” to describe himself, but he did indeed struggle, usually without much help from anyone else. Audubon came from a reasonably prosperous family, and even though he claimed (almost certainly falsely) to have studied with the great French painter Jacques-Louis David, his background in France did little for his art career in America. Friends of his father and, later, father-in-law proved to be useful allies, but none of them became as committed a champion as John Trumbull, much less a financially supportive patron of Audubon’s artistic ambitions. Perhaps the best one can say is that Audubon developed such a single-minded dedication to one single task—drawing birds—that he did not have to bow to the artistic expectations or a priori demands of a patron. To be sure, he would spend an enormous amount of time and trouble trying to track down people wealthy enough to pay for his “Great Work,” but he did so in pursuit of subscriptions, not commissions. For better or worse, he had no one telling him what to do, and he could follow his own passion.

We now know the remarkable result. In strictly aesthetic terms, he became a better bird artist than anyone else had ever been: The proof is in the pictures. Moreover, no one in nineteenth-century America so successfully combined artistic and scientific ambition or did more to bring nature to the nation. Audubon’s birds became emblematic of the fusion of art and science in antebellum American culture.

The Persistent Calling of Birds

Still, for all the fame and lasting success of Audubon’s astounding lifetime achievement, The Birds of America, there remains a basic question that has to be asked: Why did he do it? Why did he devote the better part of his adult life to producing a huge book about every bird known in North America? How sensible would it be, after all, to make one’s calling out of wandering through the woods or along the riverbanks and seashores, looking for birds, shooting them, arranging their decomposing carcasses into lifelike poses, drawing the dead birds, filling in the pictures with paint, working with an engraver and a publisher to make a big and expensive book, and then wandering around some more, essentially from door to door, to try to sell the book to skeptical customers? All sorts of people, from the middling ranks to the upper reaches of society, wanted individual and family portraits, especially in the era before photography made accurate likenesses readily available. Socially prominent patrons might also pay quite well to commission a large landscape, especially if they could exert enough influence over the artist to shape the painting to their vision of a romanticized past. Many devotees of natural history would also pay for one-off paintings of plants and animals—but a whole collection of birds? Of all the many ways a young man might try to make a good living in the energetic but often erratic economy of the early American republic—and as we shall see, Audubon tried more than a few—making and marketing an oversized book of bird pictures might have seemed among the least likely paths to success, an almost crazy career choice even for an artist. What sort of person would devote his life to such a challenging and, at the outset, financially unpromising pursuit?

In Audubon’s own account of his life, the answer became clear: someone whose passion began to overshadow any sort of profession, until eventually the two merged into one. It is difficult to say exactly when Audubon determined that painting birds would become his life’s work. He began drawing them as a young boy in France, but he apparently destroyed much of that early work. It was only when he came to the United States, he wrote, that he resolved “to draw each individual of its natural size and colouring,” and he dated “the real beginning of my present collection, and observations of the habits of some of these birds, as far back as 1805.”⁴ He claimed to have been driven by what he called an “innate desire” to know and depict the birds in this new land, an impulse that gripped him as soon as he landed on American shores and that propelled him throughout the rest of his life. Still, writing some three decades later, in the last volume of Ornithological Biography, he admitted that had anyone suggested at the outset that he would ever complete “a work comprising five hundred species of birds of the United States and British America, I should have smiled and shaken my head.”⁵

He began his artistic career long before it could even be called a career, in fact, first drawing birds as a part-time pastime, in “all that portion generally called leisure,” doing something he wanted to do, perhaps had to do, while he was doing something else—trying to make a go of his father’s farm, running his own store and steam mill, or painting portraits and doing the other sorts of artistic hackwork he hated. Sometimes, he complained, something else got in the way of the one thing he liked most of all: “I have often been forced to put aside for a while even the thoughts of birds, or the pleasures I have felt in watching their movement, and likewise to their sweet melodies, to attend more closely to the peremptory calls of other necessary business.”⁶ Whatever his other responsibilities, though, Audubon could not help heeding the call of those “sweet melodies,” and the art and science of birds would become his sole and certainly most necessary business—with, to be sure, a series of personal and professional missteps that put his eventual success in much sharper contrast.

That contrast, though, stands as an important part of Audubon’s life story, an almost necessary element in the larger narrative he created about the artistic and scientific trajectory of his life. The recurring conflict he frequently describes between “peremptory calls of … necessary business” and his more pleasurable “thoughts of birds” requires reading with some measure of caution, if not skepticism.

When it came to taking care of business, he tended to depict himself as inconsistent, impatient, and very easily distracted, sometimes making bad decisions, sometimes simply not caring enough to do the work before him. He wrote that he reveled in the delightful diversions of his business trips, which gave him ample opportunities to track down birds while he should have been looking after his merchandise: “Were I here to tell you that once, when travelling, and driving several horses before me laden with goods and dollars, I lost sight of the pack-saddles, and the cash they bore, to watch the motions of a warbler, I should repeat occurrences that happened a hundred times and more in those days.”⁷ Written some years after the fact in “Myself,” Audubon’s autobiographical sketch for his sons, this frank confession of failure—what might be called a form of professional attention deficit—did not go on to drive home a fatherly lesson about the need for better commitment to commercial affairs. Instead, Audubon drew a contrast between his fascination with birds and his indifference, even disdain, for day-to-day business.

Just as Audubon used various written accounts of his life—particularly the autobiographical “Myself” but other briefer passages throughout Ornithological Biography as well—to complicate, at times even obfuscate, the details of his origins, so, too, did he use his writings to underscore his distaste for, and ultimate failure in, the world of commerce. In the more than two decades between first arriving in the United States in 1803 and then departing for Great Britain in 1826, to devote himself fully to the production of The Birds of America, Audubon did indeed have his financial ups and downs. He did well enough in his financial affairs to be able to acquire considerable property—both land and enslaved human beings—to create a comfortable existence, and then he lost essentially everything in the Panic of 1819.⁸ The failure was real, and the distaste no doubt just as real.

His later portrayal of his struggles in those years can sometimes appear to be a near-parable about one man’s high-minded pursuit of art and science within the less lofty economic context of American society. The story is hardly that simple, though. In an era of ever-expanding economic activity in America, Audubon tried his hand at enough entrepreneurial enterprises to seem just as energetic and resilient as the next small-scale capitalist, and if he turned out to run up against financial failure at one point, so, too, did thousands of others. The point is not to declare his business narrative altogether true or false, but to be aware of the always self-conscious construction of the image he sought to offer the world. Audubon became a self-made man in more ways than one.

The Birds and the Beauty of Mill Grove

Arriving at his father’s farm in the autumn of 1803, Audubon alighted in an ornithologically fortunate spot. Situated along Perkiomen Creek just before it flows into a bend in the Schuylkill River, about twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia and less than a hundred miles east of the Kittatinny Ridge, Mill Grove lay within a major American flyway. According to a leading modern-day naturalist, the Kittatinny region is “one of the world’s most famous migration corridors,” a true “birding paradise” now, and probably even more so back in Audubon’s day.⁹ Contemporary observers certainly celebrated the avian abundance of eastern Pennsylvania. William Bartram, whose 1791 Travels became one of the best works of natural history in the new nation, wrote about bird migrations through Pennsylvania, taking happy note of “those beautiful creatures, which annually people and harmonise our forests and groves, in the spring and summer seasons.”¹⁰ From his professorial post at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton likewise studied the multitudes of birds that passed within eighty miles of Philadelphia, from the rarely seen “Occasional Visitants,” such as the Great White Owl (or Snowy Owl), to the more regular arrivals of “Passeres,” none more numerous than the massive flocks of Passenger Pigeons. Barton attributed part of the attraction to the region’s rural areas, where “the hand of man, by clearing and by cultivating the surface of the earth, contributes essentially to the greater uniformity in the temperature of climates,” thus making the environment more inviting to migrants. In turn, the annual migrations also influenced human behavior. He pointed, for instance, to the Pewee, “one of the earliest Spring birds of passage,” typically arriving in the vicinity in mid-March: “We have seldom hard frosts after the arrival of this bird, which seems to give a pretty confident assurance to the farmer, that he may very soon begin to open the ground and plant.”¹¹

Figure 1. Mill Grove Farm, Perkiomen Creek, Pennsylvania, by Thomas Birch, ca. 1820. Oil on wood panel, 16 1/4 x 24 3/8 in. Object #1946.161. New-York Historical Society.

Mill Grove thus provided the perfect place for a bird-conscious boy like Audubon. He seemed little inclined to worry much about the seasonal call to “open the ground and plant,” leaving most of the agricultural concerns to the farm’s tenant, William Thomas, and his family. Instead, Audubon admitted that living in this new place liberated him and allowed him to indulge in all the engaging activities he had enjoyed back in France: “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment,” he wrote; “cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.”¹²

He did get to know the neighbors, and he came to care quite a bit about one of them, the young woman who would become his wife. Just across the road from Mill Grove stood another farm, Fatland Ford, which had lately come into the possession of another recently arrived immigrant, an Englishman named William Bakewell. At first, Bakewell’s Englishness ran up against Audubon’s Anglophobia—the English were, after all, the traditional enemy of France, and they had twice made his father a prisoner of war—but Audubon quickly came to realize that, except for being British, the Bakewells might be close to perfect neighbors. William Bakewell liked to hunt, was an expert marksman, and had a big house, beautiful dogs, and, perhaps best of all, an especially fetching seventeen-year-old daughter named Lucy.

Lucy immediately caught Audubon’s eye, exuding “that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ which intimated that, at least, she was not indifferent to me.” As soon as he sat down in the room with her, he just stared, “my gaze riveted,” while she made polite chit-chat with her good-looking visitor. She looked good to him, too, and when she stood up to go help produce the family meal, Audubon noticed that “her form, to which I had previously paid but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart followed every one of her steps.” The rest of him, though, soon followed her father’s steps: “The repast over, guns and dogs were made ready,” and Audubon went out hunting with Mr. Bakewell and his boys.¹³ But Audubon knew he had everything a nineteen-year-old could want, and right on the other side of the road. Mill Grove seemed a lucky spot to have landed, indeed.

To complement Lucy’s je ne sais quoi, Audubon brought his own joie de vivre to the Bakewell household. Audubon let himself go before the Bakewells, giving them a one-man show of his exuberant spirit—a self-celebrating, scene-stealing penchant for performance that would stay with him even into his last years. Lucy’s younger brother, William Gifford Bakewell, captured some of Audubon’s eclectic talent in a quick survey of the sorts of prowess Audubon displayed before the family: “He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer, a clever rider … he was musical, a good fencer, danced well, and had some acquaintance with legeredemain tricks, worked in hair, and could plait willow baskets.”¹⁴

Audubon himself was hardly the type to downplay his personal profile with false modesty, and he later described himself in those days as being “extremely extravagant.” “I was ever fond of shooting, fishing, and riding on horseback,” he wrote, and he took considerable pride in doing those things well and, equally important, well equipped. His guns, fishing tackle, and horses had to be the best. So did his clothes. He admitted that going hunting in satin breeches, silk stockings, and a ruffled shirt might have been a bit foppish, “but it was one of my many foibles, and I shall not conceal it.”¹⁵ (Two decades later, when first in London, he would do something of the reverse, going against cultural context by dressing in the garb of an American backwoodsman, but once again using a surprising sartorial display to draw attention to himself.)

On the other hand, he noted that he was “temperate to an intemperate degree,” and his abstemious eating and drinking habits gave him an “uncommon, indeed iron, constitution.” He existed, he said, “on milk, fruits, and vegetables, with the addition of game or fish at times, but never had I swallowed a single glass of wine or spirits until the day of my wedding.”¹⁶ Not many Frenchmen could make that claim, nor could many citizens of early nineteenth-century America, a bibulous country that one scholar has called the “Alcoholic Republic.”¹⁷ But Audubon had left one nation behind and was just getting his footing in the other, and he took personal pride in making the transition on his own terms. Still, boastful though he could be about the “iron constitution” of his youth, he could also later look back at the time and see himself as a work in progress: “I had no vices, it is true, neither had I any high aims.”¹⁸

High aims or not, he still had birds. For all the time he spent hunting and fishing and riding and dancing and wooing Lucy, he always turned his attention back to his growing avian obsession. In the short time he first lived in Pennsylvania, he began a new project, “a series of drawings of the birds of America, and … a study of their habits.” The term “study” seems especially apt, because it was in the account of his time at Mill Grove that Audubon described a now-famous but then-novel experiment in bird banding, which still stands as a much-respected contribution to American ornithological practice. In early April of 1804, finding a pair of Eastern Pewees in one of the many caves above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon visited the cave day after day until “the birds became more familiarized to me, and, before a week had elapsed, the Pewees and myself were quite on terms of intimacy.” Audubon soon observed one of the most intimate moments of the pewees’ relationship: the laying of six eggs and the feeding of the five young birds that survived. By that time, he said, “The old birds no longer looked upon me as an enemy,” and they made no fuss when Audubon handled their young and “fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each, loose enough not to hurt the part, but so fastened that no exertions of theirs could remove it.” Sure enough, the next year he caught some of the banded pewees in roughly the same area, and he thus determined that they migrated back to the neighborhood of their birth.¹⁹ Audubon had not yet developed the systematic practices that might constitute a true scientific method, but with his persistent field observation and his innovative approach to bird identification, he was clearly taking some useful first steps toward becoming a serious naturalist.²⁰

Audubon also wrote of using thread to make an innovative approach in his drawings of birds, an artistic technique that he would employ throughout his life. While again observing a pair of pewees and their “innocent attitudes,” he wrote, “a thought struck my Mind like a flash of light”—the idea that the only way to capture nature on paper would be to represent the birds as they were in life, “alive and Moving!” If alive, most birds are indeed moving, and they don’t tend to stay in place for long, so trying to draw them as they fly or flit from branch to branch could be frustrating, all but impossible, work for anyone. Audubon admitted he “could finish none of my Sketches.” He knew how to draw dead birds, of course: “After procuring a specimen, I hung it up either by the head, wing, or foot, and copied it as closely as I possibly could.”²¹

But dead birds just hung there, looking dead, and Audubon wanted to bring them back to life. He kept pondering the problem until early one morning, well before dawn, he had his “aha!” moment. He leapt out of bed, saddled his horse, and rode a fast five miles to Norristown, where, given the hour, “not a door was open.” Having time to kill and being too agitated just to wait, he went on to the Schuylkill River, jumped into the water and took a chilly bath, and then retraced his ride back to Norristown. This time he found an open shop, and he bought what he needed: thin wire. Racing back to Mill Grove, he grabbed his gun, rushed down to Perkiomen Creek, and shot the first bird he could find, a Belted Kingfisher. Using the wire he had just purchased, he fixed the dead bird to a board and got its head and tail looking just right, and then he drew it on the spot. “Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first attempt at Drawing actually from Nature,” he explained, “for then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if full of Life before me whenever I pressed its Lids aside with a finger.”²²

Drawing from nature—or at least recently deceased specimens put in a natural-seeming pose—became an important part of Audubon’s artistic signature: “I have never drawn from a stuffed specimen.”²³ In the end, that claim did not turn out to be altogether true, but it still served as a proud declaration of artistic independence.

Moving on from Mill Grove

Banding birds and arranging them in lifelike poses might have been fine ornithological and artistic activities, but neither one did much for the management of Mill Grove. Audubon’s father already knew his teenaged son didn’t yet have the talent and temperament to take on that sort of responsibility. When the boy was growing up in France, Jean Audubon had been mildly tolerant of his boy’s fascination with nature—“so pleased to see my various collections,” the younger Audubon wrote, “that he complimented me on my taste for such things”—but the father also wanted him to study something more practical, perhaps even more manly, like seamanship and engineering.²⁴ When young Audubon failed at those things, Jean Audubon had good reason to feel exasperated by his son’s aversion to schooling and unprofitable-seeming predilections. Not surprisingly, when he sent the boy off to America for safekeeping, the elder Audubon also had good reason to feel that his son still needed adult supervision.

That came most immediately in the person of Francis Dacosta, one of Jean Audubon’s allies from Nantes, whom the elder Audubon had enlisted to go to Pennsylvania to oversee both his lead mine and teenaged son. Young Audubon and Dacosta turned out to be a bad match, however. “This fellow was intended to teach me mineralogy and mining engineering,” Audubon later wrote, “but, in fact, knew nothing of either.” Indeed, Dacosta quickly found a place on Audubon’s life list of much-despised enemies, becoming a useful villain in Audubon’s narrative of his early life, representing the sort of treachery that could lead a young innocent astray. When Dacosta tried to curry a bit of favor by complimenting the young man’s early work—“he assured me the time might come when I should be a great American naturalist … and I felt a certain degree of pride in these words even then”—the flattery faded fast. Instead, Audubon came to characterize Dacosta as a “covetous wretch, who did all he could to ruin my father, and indeed swindled both of us to a large amount.”²⁵

What Dacosta did most to ruin were Audubon’s prospects for marrying Lucy, speaking “triflingly of her and her parents” and telling young Audubon it would be beneath him to marry into the Bakewell family.²⁶ In that regard Dacosta may well have been reflecting the feelings of the father, Jean Audubon, who also had doubts about the wisdom of his son’s rushing into marriage. “My son speaks to me about his marriage,” the elder Audubon wrote to Dacosta. “If you would have the kindness to inform me about his intended, as well as about her parents, their manners, their means, and why they are in that country, whether it was in consequence of misfortune that they left Europe, you will be doing me a signal service, and I beg you, moreover, to oppose this marriage until I may give my consent to it.” Jean Audubon probably cared more about the Bakewells’ means than their manners, and like all fathers trying to size up the prospects of the potential in-laws, he wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be marrying into the family for the money: “Tell these good people,” he concluded, “that my son is not at all rich, and that I can give him nothing if he marries in this condition.”²⁷

Young Audubon bristled at this intrusion into his love life, and he blamed it all on Dacosta. For a while, he fell into a “half bewildered, half mad” fury and thought about killing Dacosta, but an elderly lady “quieted me, spoke religiously of the cruel sin I thought of committing,” and eventually talked him out of it. Thanks to those wise words, Dacosta stayed alive, and Audubon stayed out of jail and off the gallows. Instead, Audubon decided to head back to France, where he would make his case to his father. After a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing in the spring of 1805, Audubon arrived at La Gerbetière, his father’s home near Nantes, where he happily fell into “the arms of my beloved parents.”²⁸ Wasting no time, he spilled out his accusations against Dacosta—who, as it turned out, had already lost credibility in his relationship with Jean Audubon anyway—and the much-despised supervisor essentially ceased to be an issue.

Then, like any young man coming back home on what amounted to an extended vacation, Audubon took full advantage of the family largesse: “In the very lap of comfort my time was happily spent,” he wrote. “I went out shooting and hunting, drew every bird I procured, as well as many other objects of natural history and zoology.”²⁹ He also studied taxidermy with a family friend and physician, Charles Marie D’Orbigny, developing a skill that would become professionally useful in the decades to come.

But in addition to his further bird research, Audubon’s trip to France in 1805–1806 produced two important results that would shape his return to the United States. First, he got his father’s tentative permission to marry Lucy Bakewell. Despite Jean Audubon’s initial doubts about the possible gold-digging ambitions of the Bakewells, he yielded on the marriage question, insisting only that young Audubon find some means to support a wife. Second, the elder Audubon arranged for young Ferdinand Rozier, the son of a family friend, to form a business partnership with his own son, whereby the two would go to the United States, try to make the Mill Grove lead mine a viable venture, deal with Dacosta, then seek out whatever other sort of business they could find to turn a profit.³⁰

All the two young Frenchmen had to do, then, was to get out of France before Napoleon conscripted them. Rather than let the young men get snatched away into the military, the elder Audubon used his pull to help them get passports (albeit somewhat bogus-looking ones) and book passage on an American ship, the Polly, bound for New York. After a handful of harrowing oceanic adventures—enduring a ransacking at the hands of a British privateer, then making a close escape from a pair of British frigates, and finally running aground during a violent storm in Long Island Sound—the Polly managed to make it safely to New York Harbor in late May 1806. And there the two young Frenchmen disembarked and set out to begin what Audubon would later call “a partnership to stand good for nine years in America.”³¹

Audubon in Business

As in many partnerships, the first few years were the most uncertain, but in some ways also the best. Audubon and Rozier initially had ambitious intentions of taking up residence at Mill Grove, making a go of the mining operation and the farm as well, and perhaps ousting Dacosta in the process. Unfortunately, neither had any experience in operating a lead mine, and neither had any interest at all in doing the difficult field labor that the farm required. They did, however, still have the obstacle of Dacosta, who, as a result of his earlier arrangement with Audubon’s father, also held title to a large portion of the whole Mill Grove estate. He would be hard to move. Realizing they would probably not be able to beat Dacosta, then, and certainly not wanting to join him, the two young Frenchmen decided to sell him the remainder of Mill Grove.

That decision also led them in slightly different directions for a while: Rozier, who was not at all fluent in English, became a clerk in a French-owned importing business in Philadelphia, while Audubon went to New York to work for another wholesale import house, this one owned by Benjamin Bakewell, the uncle of Lucy Bakewell, the young beauty Audubon already knew he wanted to marry. Audubon stayed with the Bakewell business for about a year, from the fall of 1806 until the late summer of 1807, and he did a good-enough job to stay in Bakewell’s good graces, a useful boon to Audubon’s matrimonial aspirations. Since the elder Audubon needed some assurance that his son could support himself and a wife, the job with Bakewell certainly helped. It also helped Audubon pursue his other passion. During his time in New York he spent what free time he could away from the countinghouse, scouring the shoreline and wooded areas of the city for birds to draw. He also developed a friendship with Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, a New York naturalist who allowed Audubon to practice taxidermy on his specimen collection, stuffing birds and mammals. On the whole, Audubon’s brief stint in New York seemed reasonably well spent. Bakewell provided both income and indulgence, helping Audubon learn something about business, but also letting him roam the streets in search of birds.³² Indeed, trying to balance business and birds became the main theme of Audubon’s early days in the United States.

In August 1807, he and Rozier decided to go back into partnership again, this time getting away from the main East Coast cities and setting up a retail shop in the distant river town of Louisville, Kentucky. Having arranged for a starting stock of store goods, bought from Benjamin Bakewell on generous terms, they headed west by stage on August 31. By the latter part of September, they had started in business—but, as luck would have it, just before Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807 disrupted trade everywhere, even for small-time operators like Audubon and Rozier.

Audubon couldn’t do much about the bigger picture, and he had other business on his mind anyway: He wanted to marry Lucy. In March 1808, after he had been in Louisville for just over six months, he took the trek back to Pennsylvania to ask Mr. Bakewell for Lucy’s hand, and on April 8, 1808, they were married at Fatland Ford. With that, the young couple headed off for Louisville, following the same rough route Audubon and Rozier had taken the previous year. After enduring almost two weeks of stagecoach bumps and flatboat exposure, they arrived in Louisville and settled in an extended-stay hotel, the Indian Queen. Surveying her new situation, Lucy sent her English cousin some hopeful-seeming words about the Louisville environment (“The country round is very flat, but the land is very fertile”), the inhabitants (“very accommodating”), and the houses (“some of them are very prettily laid out indeed”). Still, she confessed to being “very sorry there is no library here or book store of any kind for I have very few of my own and as Mr. Audubon is constantly at the store, I should often enjoy a book very much whilst I am alone.”³³

Being alone became a big part of the story of Lucy’s life. As she would soon find out, her husband’s habit of being “constantly at the store” would quickly dissipate, and he would spend as much time thinking about birds as business. Over the coming years, in fact, birds would become his business, and in pursuit of that business he would leave her alone for long stretches of time, most notably a three-year stint in England, 1826–1829, to begin producing The Birds of America. In the early years of their marriage, though, Audubon and Lucy would be together enough to have four children: two boys, Victor Gifford (born 1809) and John Woodhouse (born 1812), both of whom would turn out to be important assistants in their father’s work; and two girls, Lucy (born 1815) and Rose (born 1819), both of whom died in infancy. Beyond being a mother, though, Lucy’s main role in life eventually meant being a quiet contributor to the Great Work that defined Audubon’s career and truly became a family business. Before any of that would happen, however, she had to adjust, many times over, to being married to a man whose head so often seemed to be in the clouds, his eyes typically turned to the tops of trees. Like Audubon’s father, Lucy probably never expected her husband to become a bird artist.

She probably also never suspected that his life would become so affected by his first meeting with another—really, the other—bird artist in America.

Louisville Encounter

Every field has its famous, even defining moments, and there’s a much-told Audubon story that merits a place in the apocrypha of early American art and science. The incident in question seems so implausible and yet so perfect that no one would dare have the gall to invent it completely—not even Audubon himself. And because the story comes from two sources, not just Audubon but the other main character as well, we might well assume it actually happened, even if not exactly as it has been told by either of them. Perhaps the best thing to say is that the story is close to being true, and it points to larger truths beyond the specific narrative details.

Audubon tells it this way: “One fair morning” in March 1810, he writes, he happened to be working behind the counter of the Audubon-Rozier store in Louisville, when “I was surprised by the sudden entrance into our counting-room of Mr. Alexander Wilson, the celebrated author of the ‘American Ornithology.’” From the beginning, the story sets up a much-repeated contrast, with Audubon trying to take care of business but being distracted by birds or, in this case, pictures of birds. When Audubon took a look at Wilson’s work, he saw something that filled his artist’s eye with admiration, perhaps even envy—two large, leather-bound books with a total of eighteen engraved, hand-colored plates and over three hundred pages of accompanying text, volumes that were physically impressive in heft and visually striking in appearance.³⁴

In those first few lines of his narrative, though, Audubon took quite a leap ahead, looking considerably beyond the time frame of the encounter at hand. “Celebrated author” would have been a bit of a stretch for Wilson, at least at the time he showed up in Audubon’s store. A gruff and grumbling Scotsman who had worked as a weaver and then as a political activist and largely unsuccessful poet in his native Scotland, Wilson had failed at essentially everything he had attempted. Feeling financially frustrated and politically persecuted in Scotland, he left for the United States in 1794, but the new land of opportunity didn’t seem to help. He faced yet another string of occupational failures, from weaving to day labor, the final straw being teaching in a school in Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Wilson had worked as a schoolteacher before, and he approached this new post with something less than pedagogical enthusiasm: “I shall recommence that painful profession once more with the same gloomy, sullen resignation that a prisoner re-enters his dungeon or a malefactor mounts the scaffold,” he wrote to a friend, offering a prediction that this new position would not turn out to be a success.³⁵ It didn’t.

While in the Philadelphia area, however, Wilson had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of several of the city’s prominent men—most usefully the naturalist William Bartram and the engraver Alexander Lawson—who became allies, both personally and financially, in encouraging him to try his hand at art. Even sympathetic friends might reasonably have surmised that, for a forlorn loser like Wilson, there seemed precious little left. Still, with some helpful lessons under Bartram’s guidance, Wilson finally decided upon his life’s true (and final) calling: “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” he declared. That collection would eventually become the nine-volume compendium of bird drawings and written descriptions, American Ornithology (1808–1814).³⁶ On the first page of the first volume, Wilson made the high-minded declaration that he wanted only to “draw the attention of my fellow-citizens … to a contemplation of the grandeur, harmony, and wonderful variety of Nature,” adding that “lucrative views have nothing to do in the business.”³⁷

Figure 2. Portrait of Alexander Wilson, probably painted by Thomas Sully, 1809–1813. Oil on wood, 23 1/4 x 22 inches. American Philosophical Society, gift of Dr. Nathaniel Chapman, 1822.

Wilson certainly turned out to be right about the “lucrative” part. Putting behind him the comparative comfort and support he enjoyed in Philadelphia, he started stumping the country off and on for a couple of years, lugging around examples of his work to show potential customers in order to secure subscriptions to his larger but still incomplete project. (At the time Wilson happened to come to Louisville, only the first volumes had begun to appear in print, in a limited edition of two hundred copies.) A subscriber to American Ornithology would be expected to come up with $120 for the full work, a hefty sum that only prosperous individuals and institutions could afford, and even many of them seemed disinclined to pay the price. In one instance, Wilson complained, a potential purchaser of American Ornithology “turned over a few leaves very carelessly; asked some trifling questions; and then threw the book down, saying—I don’t intend to give an hundred and twenty dollars for the knowledge of birds!” After picking up his sample volumes and heading for the door, Wilson later grumbled that if “science depended on such animals as these, the very name would ere now have been extinct.”³⁸ After suffering a depressing share of such insults and indifference, Wilson came to Louisville with no celebrity billing, just four letters of introduction that he hoped would open the doors of “all the characters likely to subscribe” and, most important, with the two volumes of his bird drawings, which he wearily lay on the counter in Audubon’s store.³⁹

As Audubon later related the opening moments of their meeting, Wilson’s work seemed almost too good to be true and too good to pass up—at least at first viewing. Even though he could hardly afford to do so, Audubon was about to sign his name to the subscription list when, just then, his partner, Rozier, stopped him. After looking at Wilson’s bird images, Rozier whispered to Audubon (in French, their common tongue) that Audubon’s own drawings were “certainly far better” and that Audubon himself was just as good as Wilson: “You must know as much of the habits of American birds as this gentleman.” A bit awkwardly and perhaps a bit too suddenly, Audubon backed away from his decision to subscribe to Wilson’s work. Wilson seemed annoyed, Audubon continued, but he asked to see Audubon’s own images, and Audubon laid a portfolio of his own drawings before his visitor. Wilson found it hard to believe that anyone else had also begun the same sort of work on birds, and, like any suddenly insecure author, he asked Audubon if he planned to publish his images. When Audubon said no, Wilson then asked if he could borrow some of Audubon’s drawings, and Audubon said yes. Audubon also suggested the possibility of an artistic collaboration, or at least collegial attribution. Even though he remained convinced of his decision not to subscribe to Wilson’s work—“for, even at that time, my collection was greater than his”—he did think that Wilson might be willing to print some of his images: “I offered them to him, merely on condition that what I had drawn, or might afterwards draw and send to him, should be mentioned in his work, as coming from my pencil.” Wilson never took him up on the offer, however, and the Scotsman soon left Louisville, “little knowing how much his talents were appreciated in our little town, at least by myself and my friends.” That, at least, was Audubon’s version of the encounter, which he published in the first volume of Ornithological Biography in 1831.⁴⁰

For his own part, Wilson never wrote much about his visit to Louisville, and he never mentioned Audubon by name in American Ornithology. He did, however, offer a few details in his diary. On March 19, he wrote that he examined Audubon’s drawings, which he pronounced “very good,” and he noted that Audubon had two new birds, “both Motacillae,” or warblers. The following two days he went out shooting, once with Audubon, but he also complained he had “no naturalist to keep me company,” thus excluding Audubon from that category. Finally, he departed the town, giving a very different ending to the story: “I bade adieu to Louisville … but neither received one act of civility … one subscriber, nor one new bird,” he grumped. “Science or literature has not one friend in this place.”⁴¹ Neither, apparently, did Wilson, who left town with a bitter taste in his mouth.

And that, after a week, was apparently that. Audubon wrote about seeing Wilson only one more time, during a brief visit Audubon made to Philadelphia in 1811, a polite but chilly-seeming meeting that left Audubon feeling that “my company was not agreeable.” No matter how that second encounter went—or if it happened at all—that was the end of the personal relationship between them.⁴² Two years later, Wilson was dead, brought down by dysentery and the general debilitations of too much time spent tramping around outdoors, trying to find birds to paint and, perhaps even more difficult, customers to buy his bird paintings.

So the story is told, from both Audubon’s perspective and Wilson’s, neither of which may be absolutely accurate. Wilson’s parting shot at Louisville and its inhabitants might have been sharpened in print by Wilson’s posthumous promoter, George Ord, whose hostility to Audubon, as we shall see, grew to be all but boundless. In turn, Audubon’s more upbeat telling of Wilson’s warm reception in Louisville clearly came in response to Ord’s published account of Wilson’s unhappy departure, thus putting himself in a more positive and hospitable light. (Like Ernest Hemingway’s treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, Audubon’s description of Wilson in Ornithological Biography underscores an important point: Whoever lives longer gets the last and most self-serving word.) Still, for all the questions and caveats surrounding the competing narratives, the Audubon-Wilson encounter stands as the most famous human sighting in the history of American ornithology, and it invites speculation about the meaning of this remarkable meeting.

First, this unlikely encounter raises a simple but significant question: Was Rozier right? Was Audubon’s work actually better than Wilson’s? It would take a bird-by-bird analysis of the images both men had at the time even to begin to answer that question conclusively, and even then, it would probably be impossible to reach any all-encompassing artistic or ornithological judgment. Still, a one-bird comparison—in this case, of the Belted Kingfisher—can provide a good idea of the talents of the two artists at the time of their Kentucky encounter (see Plates 2 and 3). Wilson’s kingfisher perches in profile in the midst of four other birds, three warblers and a thrush, dominating the picture in both size and prominence.⁴³ The bird’s distinctive markings, particularly the reddish band that identifies it as a female, are sharp and well defined—but perhaps too much so, certainly more so than would be the case on a real bird. Audubon’s kingfisher—drawn in 1808, well before Wilson came into his store, much less into his life—was also a female, but rendered with a better representation of the subtlety and irregularity of the color patterns and the texture of the feathers, especially in the bird’s crest. One might acknowledge, of course, that the materials Audubon used in rendering his kingfisher in 1808—pastel, graphite, and ink—allowed for more subtlety than the final engraved version of Wilson’s image. One might also complain—as some critics indeed have—that both Wilson’s and Audubon’s portrayals of the Belted Kingfisher seem a bit stiff, still adhering to the standard conventions of avian art by presenting the bird in profile and certainly not displaying the often dramatic vivacity that would later come to characterize Audubon’s art.⁴⁴ Still, if Wilson had even a glance at Audubon’s kingfisher—and it seems highly likely that he did—he would have had good reason to be impressed, perhaps even worried. Audubon had already become a remarkably avid observer and gifted illustrator of birds, and anyone who saw his work would have to take note of his skill. Alexander Wilson certainly must have.⁴⁵

The artistic comparison, even competition, leads to a second question: What might have happened if the Audubon-Wilson story had had a happier ending? How might the course of American art and science have been affected if Wilson had lived longer and the two had indeed become collaborators, as Audubon said he had suggested? The two men clearly shared a common passion, and the work it required might also have been shared. The attempt to depict every bird in America defined an enormous, almost impossible-seeming agenda, certainly the sort of undertaking that might invite goodwill and a mutually respectful effort, especially in a society that did not yet have well-established science departments in research universities or substantial government funding to provide employment or ensure support. Neither Wilson nor Audubon had the personal financial resources to establish himself as an independent gentleman-naturalist, but both did have seemingly unlimited ambition, unflagging energy, and unmistakable artistic skill.

In the end, Audubon surpassed Wilson enough to claim a degree of celebrity and success that no other American naturalist had ever known—or, arguably, would know since—but he could scarcely see or talk about his own work without taking its measure next to that of Wilson. Throughout his long quest to illustrate all the species that would eventually grace the pages of The Birds of America, Audubon frequently relied on Wilson’s American Ornithology as a ready reference. Even more often, however, he took it as a point of competitive departure, taking posthumous potshots at its author for decades to come.

Wilson’s allies shot back, pursuing a professional struggle that became very personal, attacking Audubon with an intensity that may well have even exceeded Wilson’s own, had he lived. Thanks to the work of Wilson’s Philadelphia friends and defenders, Audubon would confront challenges to his ornithological accuracy and even integrity, with accusations (apparently true in a few cases) of having copied some of Wilson’s images and published them as his own.⁴⁶ Wilson would forever be the “Father of American Ornithology” in the minds of his admirers, the original standard against which all subsequent work must be measured. No matter how much Audubon believed himself to have far exceeded that standard, he would always have his Scottish predecessor hovering like a grim ghost over his life. The edgy 1810 encounter between the two remained a problematic issue in Audubon’s personal history and in the history of The Birds of America, later creating artistic and scientific comparisons that Audubon could never escape.⁴⁷

In 1842, an American author writing under the nom de plume Christopher North celebrated the prospect of Wilson and Audubon in an ornithological pantheon: “‘Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon!’ We call on them—and they appear and answer to their names … they grasp each other’s hand.… They are brothers, and their names will go down together … in all the highest haunts of ornithological science.”⁴⁸ By that time, however, any notion of ornithological solidarity between the two had to be a fantasy. Instead of figuratively grasping each other’s hand, they might more likely have been portrayed clutching each other’s throats. Any notion of scientific collaboration had long since taken on a much more menacing aspect, leaving a legacy of unseemly enmity and competition that lasted throughout their lives, and even beyond.

First Taste of Financial Failure

In the meantime, at least for the decade after 1810, Audubon still had to take account of the other pressing imperative in his life: making a living in business. In writing about his professional trajectory, he almost always claimed to have pursed his passion for birds while letting pretty much everything else go. He was, he admitted, neither assiduous nor successful in his various business ventures, always having his eye more on the skies than on the bottom line: “Birds were birds then as now,” he 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.”⁴⁹ But he had to care about his life beyond birds, of course, because he had obligations to a wife and children and, for a while, to his friend and business partner, Rozier—but only for a while.

While Audubon’s family always remained a source of emotional, sometimes even sentimental, attachment, Rozier soon fell from grace in Audubon’s narrative of his Kentucky days. Rozier never took on quite the treacherous aspect of the despised Dacosta, but he did serve as a money-focused foil to Audubon’s emerging self-portrayal as a man with a higher-seeming focus on art and science, too busy with the birds to spend time with business.

Soon after the in-store encounter with Alexander Wilson, Audubon wrote, he and Rozier “became discouraged at Louisville, and I longed to have a wider range.” He would readily admit the fundamental flaw in the management of the original mercantile operation: “Louisville did not give us up, but we gave up Louisville. I could not bear to give the attention required by my business, and which, indeed, every business calls for, and, therefore, my business abandoned me.”⁵⁰ He made only a tepid confession about his lack of attention, however, pointing instead to his fascination with pursuing his larger calling, all the while using the more practical-seeming Rozier to make the comparative point: “I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting its habits, Rozier meantime attending the counter,” Audubon wrote. “I could relate many curious anecdotes about him, but never mind them; he made out to grow rich, and what more could he wish for?”⁵¹ All Audubon seemed to wish for was being out of the store.

Instead, they both got out of the town and into another store, this one 125 miles farther down the Ohio River, in an even newer and less developed town, Henderson, Kentucky. One early observer unkindly described Henderson as a town of “about twenty houses, and inhabited by a people whose doom is fixed.”⁵² To be sure, Henderson had a population of only 159 in 1810, but doom did not seem to be the town’s destiny, at least in Audubon’s eyes at the time. The village was “quite small,” Audubon admitted, “but our neighbours were friendly.… The woods were amply stocked with game, the river with fish; and now and then the hoarded sweets of the industrious bees were brought from some hollow tree to our little table.”⁵³ Into that scene of Arcadian simplicity and contentment, Audubon added only a brief, half-sentence reference to Rozier: “I had then a partner, a ‘man of business.’” The quotation marks around “man of business” served to separate Rozier’s commercial inclinations from the “sports of the forest and river” preferred by Audubon, who “thought chiefly of procuring supplies of fish and fowl.”⁵⁴

Audubon did not belabor the difference any further in Ornithological Biography—he never mentioned Rozier again, certainly not by name—but in the more private space of the autobiographical “Myself,” he offered an extended anecdote about their different approaches to business and perhaps to life in general. Soon after arriving in Henderson, Audubon writes, he and Rozier took a flatboat-load of whiskey and other goods down the Ohio River, headed to the Mississippi River to sell Kentucky’s best beverage to settlers in the Missouri Territory. Starting out in a snowstorm in late December 1810, they had traveled only three days, to a few miles above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, before learning that the Mississippi was covered with ice, meaning that their journey would have to wait for a thaw. In the meantime, they camped with some Shawnee Indians, and Audubon quickly made the most of the cross-cultural encounter: “I understood their habits and a few words of their language, and as many of them spoke French passably, I easily joined with their ‘talks’ and their avocations.” The Shawnee people also joined Audubon in his own avocation, “and as soon as they learned of my anxiety for curiosities of natural history, they discovered the most gratifying anxiety to procure them for me.” While Audubon became the center of attention in this lively exchange of information, his partner sulked on the sidelines: “My friend Ferdinand Rozier, neither hunter nor naturalist, sat in the boat all day, brooding in gloomy silence over the loss of time, &c. entailed by our detention.”⁵⁵ Again, the contrast with Rozier and his fretting over the loss of time and, presumably, money seems critical to the narrative.

Audubon goes on to describe a six-week icebound stay with native people—first Shawnees, then Osages—during which he happily hunted birds and bears with his newfound “Indian friends,” played the flute for their amusement, sketched a “tolerable portrait of one of them in red chalk,” and always carried on his study of birds and mammals, recording the results every night by the light of the fire: “I wrote the day’s occurrences in my journal, just as I do now,” he recalled almost two decades later, “and well I remember that I gained more information that evening about the roosting of the prairie hen than I had ever done before.”⁵⁶

Once the weather warmed and the ice on the Mississippi broke up enough to get their flatboat through, Audubon and Rozier eventually made their way up the river to Ste. Genevieve, where they quickly disposed of their cargo at a handsome rate of return: “Our whiskey was especially welcome, and what we had paid twenty-five cents a gallon for, brought us two dollars.” But Ste. Genevieve, “an old French town, small and dirty,” seemed not such a promising business site, at least not for a restless yet homesick man like Audubon. He quickly decided “it was not the place for me; its population was then composed of low French Canadians, uneducated and uncouth.”⁵⁷

Rozier apparently liked the people there just fine, and he decided to stay, so he and Audubon dissolved their partnership in April 1811, with Rozier buying Audubon out for a combination of cash and bills of credit. Rozier went on to do quite well in Ste. Genevieve, marrying a young woman of the town, fathering ten children, and eventually, in 1864, dying a prosperous pillar of the community at the age of eighty-seven.⁵⁸

Audubon opted to take the money, such as it was, and run. Actually, he bought a “beauty of a horse” and rode back home to Henderson, back to Lucy and their infant son, Victor Gifford, and back to business. For a while, he would occasionally badger Rozier for more money, even going back to Ste. Genevieve a couple of times to try to collect—once walking all the way, he claimed, 165 miles in just over three days, “much of the time nearly ankle deep in mud and water,” but never with much success.⁵⁹ Instead, he turned his attention toward new enterprises—but, again, never with much success.

The subsequent history he gives of his various financial ups and downs—mostly downs—in his Henderson years can best be compressed into a fairly (and perhaps mercifully) short narrative. But even a brief summary suggests that, for all his self-avowed aversion to the world of commerce, Audubon had an active, if not always canny, business sense. He may have sniffed disparagingly at Rozier as a “man of business,” but his own entrepreneurial turn toward new ventures put him squarely amid the economic innovation—and turbulence—of his era.

Soon after parting with Rozier, for instance, Audubon formed a new business partnership with Lucy’s brother, Thomas Bakewell, a young man of seemingly unwavering ambition. In 1811, Bakewell hatched a promising-seeming plan for opening an import-export operation in New Orleans, and he wanted to bring Audubon into it, seeing the value of both his Francophone-language abilities and his financial resources. Unfortunately, neither Bakewell nor Audubon could do much to control the context of larger global politics. Just as their new venture stood on the verge of opening its doors, the increasingly apparent prospect of war with Great Britain threatened to cut off the Atlantic trade, and the Audubon-Bakewell business went bust before it was ever really born. Audubon lost money—“My pecuniary means were now much reduced”—but he still kept faith in his brother-in-law, who moved to Henderson and joined Audubon in business there.⁶⁰

Business prospects seemed promising for a while in Henderson, which, despite the economic uncertainties of the War of 1812, appeared to be heading into a business boom along with the rest of the region.⁶¹ Audubon and Bakewell shared in the excitement as small-town storekeepers, expanding their business to a few downriver towns and engaging in land speculation on the side. They “prospered at a round rate for a while,” and the Audubon family settled into comfortable-seeming circumstances, living in a well-appointed house, with handsome furniture, a piano, silver candlesticks, a substantial number of books indoors, and a newly dug pond outdoors, where Audubon could keep turtles for making turtle soup. (The pond was dug by Audubon’s slaves. By 1813–1814, he had done well enough to buy nine slaves for just over ten thousand dollars, and even though he never said much about them or the larger institution of slavery in his writings, the people of color in his possession represented yet another indication of his financial standing in the early Henderson years.) Audubon seemed financially set and well satisfied: “The pleasures which I have felt at Henderson … can never be effaced from my heart until after death.”⁶²

Figure 3. Audubon’s mill, Henderson, Kentucky. From Maria Audubon, Audubon and His Journals (New York, 1899).

But the pleasures would be effaced soon enough by other means. Audubon’s young brother-in-law had ideas of going beyond mere storekeeping, and he took Audubon with him—down what eventually proved to be the path toward failure. First, young Bakewell got inspiration to embrace the cutting-edge technology of the era and “took it into his brain to persuade me to erect a steam-mill.” Henderson had nothing like it, a combination grist mill and sawmill, both parts powered by a steam engine, and Audubon and Bakewell built a considerable structure on the banks of the Ohio River, just two-tenths of a mile from their store. When it opened in 1817, the mill was, according to the town’s historian, “a great convenience” for the region, not to mention a showcase for Audubon’s art as well: “The walls of his mill presented the appearance of a picture gallery, every smooth space presenting to the view the painting of some one or more birds.”⁶³

This huge project quickly became a huge headache, however: a slowly built, badly built, and ultimately overbuilt six-story structure that, even had it worked well, offered more capacity than the community needed. While other towns in the region enjoyed a better boom-time experience and became more important mercantile centers, Henderson remained a disappointment to its boosters.⁶⁴ Two of them, Audubon and Bakewell, soon had to realize that the region had too few customers to supply adequate demand for such capital-intensive technology; they had overbuilt and overspent, and they had even bet on the wrong materials. Soon after their mill opened, so the local story goes, good clay for brickmaking was discovered nearby, and the ensuing “building boom” favored brick structures over wooden ones, causing the demand for milled lumber to fall sharply. Moreover, the steam-powered mill could not compete with water-powered gristmills, and the Audubon-Bakewell mill business collapsed.⁶⁵ (The building lasted far longer than the business, and the town’s local historian called it “perhaps the strongest frame in the city.”⁶⁶ Today, the stone steps still stand.) In general, Audubon and Bakewell faced a perfect storm of adverse circumstances, and even though Audubon would admit that “the great fault was ours,” he would also lament that “the building of that accursed steam-mill was, of all the follies of man, one of the greatest, and … the worst of all our pecuniary misfortunes.”⁶⁷

The first-person plural reference to “our pecuniary misfortunes” soon became first-person singular, and Audubon’s alone. Soon after getting married in Henderson, Thomas Bakewell and his new bride decided that the town was not suitable for their social and financial aspirations, and so they moved away, leaving Audubon holding the almost empty bag of their joint business ventures. Glad as he may have been to see Bakewell go, taking his big ideas with him, Audubon stayed and suffered the economic consequences.

In addition to the steam-powered mill, Bakewell had involved Audubon in yet another steam-based misadventure, a partnership in a new steamboat named, with a striking lack of imagination, the Henderson. “This also proved an entire failure,” Audubon later wrote with considerable understatement.⁶⁸ Thanks to Bakewell’s quick exit from the scene, Audubon became embroiled in a complicated, shaky-seeming financial arrangement with another Henderson investor, a man named Samuel Bowen. The question of who owned what and who owed what to whom soon became all but moot when Bowen absconded with the Henderson and headed for New Orleans, with the intention of selling it. Audubon quickly took pursuit all the way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, chasing after Bowen in his own small skiff, along with two slaves, to recover his boat and his money, but he never saw either again. He sold the skiff and the slaves in New Orleans and went home. Then, in June 1819, when he and the evasive Bowen next encountered each other back in Henderson, both men felt wronged, enraged, and ready to kill each other—which they nearly did, in a street fight in broad daylight, not far from the behemoth Audubon-Bakewell steam mill. Audubon soon found himself under arrest for assault and battery, and even though he was quickly acquitted for acting in self-defense—the judge agreed that Bowen was a “damned rascal” who deserved to die—the Henderson era of Audubon’s life had taken on a decidedly unhappy appearance.⁶⁹

Audubon avoided jail in the Bowen fracas, but he soon faced incarceration because of an even larger financial crisis, the Panic of 1819. At a time when specie had become scarce because of the contraction in the European economy, largely unregulated local banks in all parts of the United States issued paper currency almost at will, and free-flowing money and other forms of paper-based credit seduced investors to take a shot at seemingly anything.⁷⁰ Audubon had been one of them—but only one. Unrealistic expectations had led to unbridled expansion everywhere, until the chain of debt began to weaken and eventually snap, leading to the downfall of people all over the country, at all levels of economic life. When the Panic of 1819 hit the Henderson region, the town’s bank—which had been built with lumber from the Audubon-Bakewell sawmill barely two years earlier—collapsed, at least financially.⁷¹ The crisis also struck Audubon especially hard, delivering what seemed to be the final financial blow. By that time, his money troubles amounted to much more than had been at stake in the Bowen imbroglio, and he “had heavy bills to pay which I could not meet or take up,” his creditors came after him with a vengeance, and he “was assailed with thousands of invectives.”⁷²

On one level, there was nothing altogether disgraceful about financial failure in early nineteenth-century America, perhaps least of all in the volatile ups and downs of the 1810s, when businesses big and small hit the wall. (Audubon may have taken note of the fact that the Philadelphia firm of Bradford and Inskeep, Alexander Wilson’s publisher, had declared bankruptcy in 1814–1815, soon after it printed the last volume of American Ornithology.⁷³) On the other hand, looking at the larger financial situation still offered little solace when the pain became personal. Being a fellow sufferer in a national financial calamity couldn’t pay an individual’s bills, nor could it keep a struggling businessman out of jail.

As a consequence of this financial collapse, Audubon had to sell almost all the family possessions—his share of the mill, the house and its now-numerous furnishings, his musical instruments and much of his artistic equipment, Lucy’s books, some farm animals, and, not to be overlooked, the remaining seven slaves—to his more successful and certainly supportive brother-in-law Nicholas Berthoud.⁷⁴ Even that was not enough. When Audubon went from Henderson to Louisville to try to clear up his financial situation, his creditors still hounded him, he was arrested for debt and put in jail, and he got out only by declaring bankruptcy. He left jail, he said, “keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun.”⁷⁵ Those last two possessions proved critical, soon becoming essential keys to his future.

They had perhaps been a bit underutilized in the recent past. Over the years he spent in his “never-to-be-forgotten residence at Henderson, on the banks of the fair Ohio,” Audubon always kept his good eye for birds—his ability both to shoot them in the bush and to render them on paper—and the region proved to provide the avian abundance Audubon needed.⁷⁶ Some thirty of his later written descriptions of birds in Ornithological Biography have a connection to his Henderson days, as did some of the images drawn during that period, which later made their way into the finished version of The Birds of America. Unfortunately, though, not many of the latter survived. In fact, he had probably suffered a net loss in the number of drawings, most famously when, as he recounted in the introduction to Ornithological Biography, a pair of Norway rats took up residence in a box of his work and gnawed the papers into nesting material. He was understandably distraught at the loss—“reader, feel for me”—but then, in classic Audubon fashion, he turned near-tragedy into triumph: “I took up my gun, my note-book, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened … and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, I had my portfolio filled again.” He may indeed have done so, but very few images from the Henderson era now survive. It might even seem that instead of neglecting his business for the birds, as Audubon so often liked to tell it, he had actually done just the opposite.⁷⁷

But again in classic Audubon fashion, he cast the collapse of his business and the attendant economic agonies of 1819 as an artistic epiphany, a realization that “nothing was left to me but my humble talents.” “Were those talents to remain dormant under such exigencies? Was I to see my beloved Lucy and children suffer and want bread, in the abundant State of Kentucky? Was I to repine because I had acted like an honest man? Was I inclined to cut my throat in foolish despair?” To those rhetorical questions, Audubon had an emphatic answer: “No!! I had talents, and to them I instantly resorted.”⁷⁸ And with them he moved on to the next step in his career.

Cincinnati Respite

After the debacle of bankruptcy, Audubon’s immediate prospects had only one way to go, of course, and up they went—at least a bit, at least for a while. He did indeed resort to his artistic talents to support his family, taking on portrait commissions for around five dollars a head. Although he had little training (and even less interest) in portraiture, he gained a good reputation for doing the work quickly and effectively for his clients, drawing both the living and, when family members of a soon-to-be-lost loved one wanted one last likeness, the dying. He even did one posthumous portrait of the disinterred son of a Kentucky clergyman, which, he said, “I gave to the parents as if still alive, to their intense satisfaction.” (As it happened, Audubon suffered the loss of a child of his own soon afterward: Lucy gave birth to Rose, named after Audubon’s own half-sister in France, in 1819, soon after Audubon got out of jail in Louisville, but the infant girl died in early 1820, just seven months old.) Whatever his general disgruntlement over the less-than-agreeable artistic calling of producing quick portraits, Audubon kept himself sane with his unstoppable pursuit of birds. “In this particular there seemed to hover round me almost a mania,” he later explained, “and I would even give up doing a head, the profits of which would have supplied our wants for a week or more, to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe.”⁷⁹

Better still, he suddenly got a good, bird-related break. He heard that Dr. Daniel Drake, a prominent physician and president of the new Medical College of Ohio, in Cincinnati, needed an artist and taxidermist for the natural history collections he was helping assemble for another new institution in that city, the Western Museum. With a few letters of reference quickly sent to Cincinnati, Audubon soon found himself with a promising job offer—working on the museum’s specimen collections for a decent-seeming salary of $125 per month. With a patron like Drake, Audubon might well begin to imagine a new future.

Drake was a man of lofty intellectual and civic ambitions.⁸⁰ Born in the same year as Audubon, 1785, he had had quite a bit more success in life, with a solid career in medicine and teaching already to his credit, along with several memberships in prominent learned societies, including, since 1818, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society.

But the Philadelphia institution that Drake wanted most to emulate in Cincinnati was Charles Willson Peale’s museum, or “Repository for Natural Curiosities,” the best-known and most successful exhibition space in the United States at the time. With a well-organized display of natural history specimens—plants, stuffed birds and mammals, even a mastadon skeleton—along with portraits of prominent Americans, Peale had created a site for both entertainment and instruction, a place where people could gaze about the gallery and behold some of the wonders of the American wilderness without even going outdoors. In the process, Peale gave his visitors a way to understand the connection between nature and nation, and he confidently expected that a museum of this sort could be a credit to its founder, to its city, and to the country as a whole.⁸¹

So did Drake, and he sought to create something similar in Cincinnati. Incorporated as a city only in 1819, Drake’s Cincinnati seemed a pale reflection of Peale’s Philadelphia, with just under 10,000 inhabitants in 1820, compared to almost 64,000 in the Quaker City. Like Philadelphia, though, Cincinnati had a hodgepodge population, with a combination of New England Yankees, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and Kentuckians, not to mention a growing number of Germans and other European immigrants. Like Peale, Drake saw the new museum as a means of providing a civilizing influence over such a diverse society.⁸² “As the arts and sciences have not hitherto been cultivated among us to any great extent,” he observed, speaking the obvious truth, “the influence they are capable of exerting on our happiness and dignity is not generally perceived.” But rooted in a foundation of scientific method, the Western Museum could be a place of celebration of the arts and sciences, where the eclectic collection of items “will rise from it in order and beauty, like those which start from the prepared canvass into imitative life, under the creative pencil of the painter.”⁸³

Audubon needed money more than he needed such lofty pronouncements about the rise of order and beauty, even with a positive word about the “creative pencil of the painter.” Unhappily, he apparently didn’t make as much as he had hoped in working for Dr. Drake, and he later complained that “the members of the College museum were splendid promisers and very bad paymasters.” Anyway, his work for the Western Museum came to a fairly quick end, because he and his colleague Robert Best, the British-born curator of the collection, were “so industrious,” he wrote, “that in about six months we had augmented, arranged, and finished all we could do for the museum.”⁸⁴ Drake laid Audubon off at the end of April 1820, and even though he promised to pay Audubon for the work he had done, the money never materialized. Audubon and Lucy stayed on in Cincinnati, both teaching to make ends meet, both no doubt wondering what they might be able to do next.

Still, the time spent working at the Western Museum proved valuable in ways other than monetary. Audubon got additional experience in taxidermy, he found time to consult the museum’s copy of Wilson’s American Ornithology and other ornithological works, and he had the good fortune to display his bird drawings to prominent visitors to the museum—most notably Major Stephen Long, the expedition leader; Thomas Say, the naturalist; and Charles Willson Peale’s son Titian, himself a budding artist-naturalist, all of whom “stared at my drawings of birds.”⁸⁵ He also gained some valuable recognition for the useful work he had done. Elijah Stack, the president of Cincinnati College, wrote a letter of recommendation for Audubon, noting that “he has been engaged in our Museum for 3 or 4 Months & his performances do honor to his Pencil.”⁸⁶

Daniel Drake also put in a good word in a public venue. On the evening of June 10, 1820, in his formal address just before the opening of the Western Museum, Drake gave both Audubon and his profession a positive plug in his formal remarks before an audience of the museum’s patrons. When speaking specifically about the field of ornithology, he made the obligatory bow to Alexander Wilson, acknowledging that to “this selftaught, indefatigable and ingenious man we are indebted for most of what we know concerning the natural history of our Birds.” No sooner had he given Wilson this compliment, though, than he compromised it with an ornithological qualification based on his regional devotion to “that portion which we inhabit,” the Ohio River Valley and the territory closer to the Mississippi River. While Wilson had “nearly completed” the study of birds of the Middle Atlantic states, Drake noted, he “must necessarily have left that of the Western imperfect.” He went on to explain that birds don’t typically migrate across mountains, but along rivers, such as the Mississippi, and from that geographical perspective he pointed out that “it is reasonable to conjecture, that many birds annually migrate over this country which do not visit the Atlantic states, and might, therefore, have escaped the notice of their greatest ornithologist in the single excursion which he made to the Ohio.” That “single excursion” was, of course, the one that took Wilson to Louisville and Audubon’s store in 1810. Without making any explicit reference to the touchy-seeming situation between Audubon and Wilson at the time, Drake quietly sided with his erstwhile employee Audubon, “one of the excellent artists attached to the Museum,” as the more comprehensive of the two: Audubon “has drawn, from nature, in colored crayons, several hundred species of American birds, [and] has, in his port folio, a large number that are not figured in Mr. Wilson’s work, and many which do not seem to have been recognized by any naturalist.”⁸⁷

Although Audubon was no longer in Drake’s employ at the time of this talk, he could have taken two encouraging notes from Drake’s remarks. First, he had to enjoy being called an excellent artist and, better still, receiving public recognition that he had a more extensive and comprehensive collection of avian images than Wilson had. Second, he could readily agree with Drake’s argument that the limitations of Wilson’s ornithological reach stemmed in large part from his spending almost all of his time in the East and only once venturing toward the West. Audubon knew that the millions of birds migrating in regions beyond the eastern mountain ridges represented fair game for dozens of new discoveries, and those could be his, not Wilson’s.

With his prospects in Cincinnati seemingly at a dead end, with no interesting new work in sight, he decided to look downriver to find his future. From his current perch in the Ohio River Valley, no place seemed more immediately promising or proximate than the Mississippi Valley, which could in turn give him access to an even greater territory for exploration. On August 12, 1820, just two months after Drake’s oration to the patrons of the Western Museum, Audubon bravely, perhaps brazenly, appealed to an even more prominent patron, Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Audubon wrote that he had spent “the greater part of Fifteen Years in procuring and Drawing the Birds of the United States with a view of Publishing them,” he wrote his fellow Kentuckian, but his collection of specimens were those that “usually resort to the Middle States only.” Wrapping himself in the expansive nationalism he no doubt knew would appeal to an ambitious political leader like Clay, he spoke of his “desire to complete the Collection before I present it to My Country in perfect order.” To do so, he continued, “I intend to Explore the Territories Southwest of the Mississippi … Visiting the Red River, Arkansas and the Countries adjacent.” A few good words of introduction “from one on whom our Country looks up to with respectfull Admiration” could be enormously “Necessary to a Naturalist,” and Audubon thus solicited the Speaker’s support.⁸⁸ Within two weeks, Clay responded with a letter that recommended Audubon as “a Gentleman of Amiable and Excellent qualities, Well qualified, as I believe, to execute the object which he has undertaken.”⁸⁹ Audubon now had just what he needed: a piece of paper that could open doors all along the Mississippi.

And that’s where he headed next, now fully focused on making his living as an artist after all—and a bird artist at that.