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Chapter 3

Making an Odyssey for Art and Ornithology

Without any Money My Talents are to be My Support and My anthusiasm My Guide in My Dificulties, the whole of which I am ready to exert to keep, and to surmount—

—John James Audubon, “Mississippi River Journal”

“The Watter is Low,” Audubon observed as the boat moved into the Ohio River’s slow current, and so were his spirits. He knew what he wanted to do: “to Acquire a true knowledge of the Birds of North America.” He also knew he had to get beyond Cincinnati to do it: “I Concluded that perhaps I Could Not do better than to Travel, and finish My Collection or so nearly that it would be a Valuable Acquisition.”¹ He had big enough ambitions; he just hadn’t fully figured out a way to fulfill them.

In the meantime, the future must have seemed far overshadowed by the recent past: Audubon’s career had gone nowhere but down. The retail business had eventually been a bust, bankruptcy had been an embarrassment, and even his two interrelated loves, art and ornithology, held out precious little promise for financial support, much less success. Making quick portraits of people for five dollars a head seemed like hack work, and not very lucrative at that. Stuffing birds and animals as a museum taxidermist could hardly boost his imagination or reputation, and anyway, once the specimens went on display, that was the end of that. But for all the disappointments he had had to face, Audubon also had to face the reality that he had obligations to his wife, Lucy (who, with him, had suffered the recent loss of an infant daughter), and two young sons, eleven-year-old Victor and eight-year-old John. Even though Audubon’s family would have to stay behind, they stayed very much on his mind. As he made ready to head downriver, “the feelings of a Husband and a Father, were my lot when I Kissd My Beloved Wife & Children with an expectation of being absent for Seven Months.” Still, he stiffened his resolve and reminded himself that missing them would be a temporary loss in a longer-term process: “If God will grant us a safe return to our fammillies Our Wishes will be congenial to our present feelings Leaving Home with a Determined Mind to fulfill our Object.”²

Those brave words came on the first page of a journal Audubon kept on his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, with fairly regular entries from the day he left Cincinnati, October 12, 1820, until the end of December 1821. He wrote primarily for his sons—“My Journal gives you a rough Idea of My Way of Spending the tedious Passage … to New Orleans”—but the preserved journal also serves the modern reader quite well. While some passages seem sketchy and uneven, others are almost eloquent in their descriptions, giving us an ornithologically detailed list of the hundreds of birds Audubon watched (and shot) on the trip, the landscape he saw along the riverbanks, and the ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people he encountered both on the boat and on shore. In the end, Audubon’s 1820–1821 journal offers much more than a “rough Idea” of what he might have considered a “tedious Passage.” At its best, it can take its place alongside the more professionally polished travel narratives of the early nineteenth century.³

At its heart, however, the journal takes us into the unfolding inner journey of this mid-thirties man on a mission. In all of Audubon’s writings, his most significant subject is almost always himself, and even in his most successful written work, Ornithological Biography, he puts himself in the picture, right beside the birds. But in the case of the Mississippi River Journal, Audubon had not yet conceived, much less achieved, the sense of celebrity that would later shape his more self-conscious narrative of his life. Instead, he recorded the uncertain hopes and underlying vulnerabilities of a man whose commitment to a challenge far exceeded his confidence in its outcome.

The anxieties and frustrations that came to the surface in his Mississippi River Journal in 1820–1821 remained enduring concerns that would recur in Audubon’s writings throughout the rest of his life. He fretted, first of all, about his financial situation, knowing that he never bore the burden of poverty alone, but also laid it heavily on Lucy and his sons, left behind with no assurance of support in his absence. Money worries in turn had an effect on his sense of self-identity as an artist-naturalist. Before he could make his collection of avian art big enough and good enough to become a “Valuable Acquisition,” he would have to make a concession to other people’s notions of what it meant to be an “artist,” painting appealing portraits of whoever would pay the price and giving art lessons, largely to ladies and young girls.

And no matter what he did or where he went, Audubon always had an invisible companion in his mind: Alexander Wilson. By the time Audubon left on his Mississippi odyssey, Wilson had been dead seven years. In Audubon’s mind, though, Wilson remained a competitor, the man who set the existing standards of ornithological art, the man whose work Audubon would frequently consult and almost as frequently criticize, the man whom Audubon felt the compelling need to surpass in order to define the measure of his own success. Even Henry Clay had brought up the specter of the late “American Ornithologist.” In sending his generous letter of introduction for the Mississippi trip, Clay wondered if Audubon knew what he was getting into, given the possible expense of producing such an ambitious work: “Will it not be well for you … to ascertain the Success which attended a Similar undertaking of Mr. Wilson?”⁴ Audubon could never escape the comparison thus imposed on him by others, and he would never cease imposing it on himself. In this as in many other ways, the pages of Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal give us a preview of issues that would continue to dog him for years to come.

Flatboat Blues

If Audubon needed any reminder of the low state of his circumstances, all he had to do was to consider the boat he was taking downriver—a flatboat, several pegs down the scale of comfortable aquatic conveyance. In 1820, the year he decided to leave Cincinnati for the Mississippi River region, the steamboat was still a recently arrived marvel on the western rivers. The first steamboat to make the Pittsburgh–New Orleans trip did so in 1811 (owned and operated, coincidentally, by an acquaintance of Audubon’s, Nicholas Roosevelt), and just a few years later, in 1817, steamboats began regular mail and passenger service from Cincinnati to New Orleans, usually making their way downriver in just over a week. The fortunate few who could pay for stateroom accommodations, about $125, could enjoy room and board all but equal to that found in the best hotels. Those who could only afford the Spartan conditions on deck had neither room nor board—they had to scrounge whatever sleeping space they could find amid the cargo and fix their own food—but they paid about a fifth of the fare, and they still got to New Orleans at the same time as their more prosperous fellow passengers.⁵

Either way, Audubon couldn’t afford it. He couldn’t even afford flatboat fare. He made an arrangement with a flatboat owner named Jacob Aumack, who offered him free passage in exchange for being the boat’s hunter, shooting whatever he could to provide food for the others on board. One of those others was Audubon’s young traveling companion, Joseph Mason, a twelve-year-old former art student from Cincinnati whom Audubon had engaged to be, like himself, an unpaid flatboat employee. Mason came along to help Audubon with the hunting and background painting and, in addition, to help Aumack with whatever unpleasant but necessary tasks he could assign the boy.⁶ Traveling light, with only their guns and art supplies and a very few changes of clothing, Audubon and Mason joined Aumack and a handful of other men on the flatboat for what would turn out to be a long journey, both geographically and, for Audubon, psychologically.

The best thing to be said about a flatboat was that it made decent economic sense at the time—a cheap, simple, single-use, one-way vessel. Almost anyone could build this entry-level means of river transport for about fifty dollars or so, load it with upward of forty tons of goods, and then, once arrived at a downriver destination—typically after a month or more all the way to New Orleans—disassemble the boat and sell the scrap wood for whatever money it might fetch. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of flatboats floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—almost 1,300 in 1816 alone—and flatboat transportation would remain a part of the river economy well into the steamboat era.⁷

A flatboat also defined an enclosed social space, sometimes even the site of a downriver rite of passage for young farm boys who made the trip.⁸ One of the iconic genre paintings of the antebellum era, George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), shows a group of eight young men taking their leisure on top of a flatboat, one of them dancing, one playing a fiddle, another keeping time on a metal pan, and the other five variously lounging around and enjoying the show, their oars horizontally at rest. With slow-flowing water below and clear, blue skies above, the painting offers an idyllic image of men at ease on the water, making the most of their riverine relaxation.

Behind this image of romanticized sociability, however, lay a much rougher reality. A modern history of the flatboat trade has described the boatmen of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as being “as filthy as the dogs whose howls they imitated,” living on a daily diet of bacon and beans, and washing down their meager meals with whatever beverage happened to be available on board—and whiskey was always available. Once the boatmen got ashore at the end of the downriver trip, they may have felt flush with a few dollars of wages to spend for a few days on better food and more drink, but then they had to get back up the Mississippi somehow, quite often having to make the journey on foot. Most of them had no doubt become a good deal less jolly by that point.⁹

Figure 4. The Jolly Flatboatmen, by George Caleb Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 48 1/2 in. Object #2015.18.1. Patrons’ Permanent Fund. National Gallery of Art.

Audubon had no illusions about the romance of the river, and he would certainly find little joy in this trip. He had been in the flatboat business before, back when he and his Kentucky-based business partner, Ferdinand Rozier, were moving goods from their store down the Ohio River to the Missouri Territory in the winter of 1810–1811. Now, a decade later, he found himself essentially bumming a ride on someone else’s boat. His journal repeatedly speaks of the “desagreable” discomforts of drifting downriver on a clumsy, slow-moving wooden barge, being thrown together with men he didn’t much like, and living in squalid accommodations that gave him almost no protection from the elements, much less enough room to work. With only a small, claustrophobic cabin for shelter, Audubon and his boatmates remained constantly exposed to the weather, which turned out to be repeatedly rainy, windy, and surprisingly chilly for mid-fall. On the second day out, Audubon wrote, “The Wind Rose and brought us to Shore, it raind and blowed Violantly untill the Next Day,” and for days more after that, morning frosts and temperatures below freezing seemed “desagreably Cold.” As an artist he suffered under the circumstances of the cramped onboard environment, “drawing in a Boat Were a Man cannot stand erect.” By November 1, another day with “weather drizly and windy,” flatboat life had already left Audubon feeling flat himself: “Extremely tired of My Indolent Way of Living,” he grumbled, “not having procured any thing to draw since Louisville.” Even his dog, Dash, seemed to have her own case of the flatboat blues, looking to be “apparently good for Nothing for the Want of Employment.”¹⁰

Ornithology on the River

For both man and dog, the best remedy for such ennui was to get off the boat and go on the hunt for food, which was Audubon’s responsibility in his free-passage arrangement with Aumack. Almost anything counted in flatboat cuisine, and the search for fresh meat put him in pursuit of both mammals and, as always, birds. From the first day he boarded the flatboat, in fact, Audubon kept a regular record of the birds he saw and shot, and the entry for October 18 gives a good indication of the variety and abundance of the avian life along the Ohio River:

Saw some fine Turkeys, killed a Common Crow Corvus Americanus Which I drew; Many Robins in the woods and thousands of Snow Buntings Emberiza Nivalis—several Rose Breasted Gros Beaks—We killed 2 Pheasants, 15 Partridges—1 Teal, 1 T. T. Godwit—1 Small Grebe all of these I have Seen precisely alike in all Parts—and one Bared Owl this is undoubtedly the Most Plentifull of his genus.¹¹

(Audubon’s occasional use of the Linnaean binomials in that passage also speaks to his self-conscious sense of identity as naturalist, and among his few flatboat possessions he carried a copy of William Turton’s 1806 translation of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Turton’s work served Audubon well as a ready reference for identification and classification, not to mention a model for drawing: One of the sketches in his journal is a detailed bird diagram copied closely from Turton.¹²)

Despite all the discomfort and frustration of trying to draw in the cramped, uncomfortable quarters of the flatboat, Audubon kept at it, combining sketches of birds with close ornithological description. One “raw & Cloudy” Sunday morning in November, for instance, he got a “beautifull specimen” of a water bird he had never seen before, which he identified as an Imber Diver (and which is now identified as the Common Loon). He had to wait a while to get started on his drawing—“the Wind rendered our Cabin smoaky I Could Not begin to Draw until after Dinner”—but he finished it over the next two days, while also recording field notes in his journal:

It is with apparent Difficulty or a Sluggish disposition that these Birds rise out of the Watter & yet Will Not dive at the flash of a Gun—while on the wing are very Swift— … they frequently Dipp their Bill in the Watter, and I think have the power of Judging in that Way if the place Contains Fish = One I shot at; dove & raised again Imediatly as if to see Where I was or What Was the Matter.

Audubon took careful measurements of the bird’s weight and dimensions, and he opened it up to see what it had been eating: “Contents of Gutt & Gizard Small Fish, Bones & Scales and Large Gravel—Body extremely fat & rancid.”¹³

The day he finished his Imber Diver drawing, Audubon also “saw several Eagles, Brown & White headed,” and a few days later he shot a “beautifull White headed Eagle Falco Leucocephalus,” a male weighing eight and a half pounds and with a wingspan measuring over six and a half feet. Since his shot went through the eagle’s gizzard, he couldn’t determine its diet, but the dead specimen did give him the opportunity to make a close examination of the bird and become convinced that “the Bald Eagle and the Brown Eagle are Two Diferent Species.” (In fact, they are not, the Brown Eagle being the immature version of the Bald Eagle.) Audubon continued to observe eagle behavior, especially the mating habits and other relationships between male and female. On the afternoon of December 1, he had the good ornithological fortune to watch two eagles copulate: “The femelle was on a Very high Limb of a Tree and Squated at the approach of the Male, who came Like a Torrent, alighted on her and quakled Shrill until he sailed off, the femelle following him and Zig zaging through the air.”¹⁴

A week later, he made another observation of a male and female eagle pair, this one with a less happy outcome. “Mr Aumack Winged a White headed Eagle, [and] brought it a live on board,” Audubon wrote, noting that “the Noble Fellow Looked at his Ennemies with a Contemptible Eye.” Audubon then undertook a harsh-seeming scientific experiment with the captive eagle, tying a string to one of its legs, then making the wounded bird jump into the water. “My Surprise at Seeing it Swim well was very great, it used its Wing with great Effect and Would have made the Shore distant then about 200 yds Dragging a Pole Weighing at Least 15 lbs.” When his assistant Joseph Mason went after it, the defiant eagle defended itself, and all the while its female partner hovered above and “shrieked for some time, exhibiting the true Sorow of the Constant Mate.” This would not be the last time Audubon would have a close encounter with a captive eagle—thirteen years later, as we shall see, the story of his eye-to-eye showdown with a caged Golden Eagle would mark one of the most dramatic episodes in Audubon’s artistic career—but it speaks to the ways that rough, even cruel treatment of live specimens could be a seemingly necessary, albeit unseemly, element of his scientific method.¹⁵

Longing for Lucy

Audubon’s observations of male-female eagle relations may have been especially pressing on his mind, because he, too, experienced “the true Sorow of the Constant Mate.” The farther he drifted downriver, the more his sense of separation from Lucy and his sons weighed on his mind, the more his slow-moving pursuit of an unpromising calling reminded him of his poverty—and theirs. Here he was, floating slowly toward New Orleans for a couple of months, shooting and drawing birds along the way, but really having no idea of what prospects lay before him in the longer run. In mid-November, after being afloat for five weeks, and as the boat finally left the Ohio River and turned into the Mississippi, he took sad note of the turn his life had taken. “Now I enter it poor in fact Destitute of all things … in a flat Boat a Passenger.” In a brief reverie, he made the confluence of the rivers a metaphor for his own difficult history: “The Meeting of the Two Streams reminds me a Litle of the Gentle Youth who Comes into the World, Spotless he presents himself, he is gradually drawn in to Thousands of Dificulties that Makes him wish to keep Apart, but at last he is over done Mixed and Lost in the Vortex.” Before being swept too much deeper into this emotional abyss, Audubon snapped out of it and turned his attention to a visual description of the way the “beautifull & Transparent Watter of the Ohio … Looks the More agreable to the Eye as it goes down Surrounded by the Muddy Current” of the Mississippi. Still, he could not suppress one last look at the river that had taken him away from Cincinnati, where he had left his family: “I bid My farewell to the Ohio at 2 o’clock P.M. and felt a Tear gushing involuntarily, every Moment draws me from all that is Dear to Me My Beloved Wife & Children.”¹⁶

Audubon’s longing for his family, and no doubt the guilt he felt for leaving them, continued to hang heavily on his heart. Sundays on the flatboat were a time for renewal of sorts, when Audubon would shave and wash—“anxious to See the day Come for Certainly a Shirt worn One week, hunting every day and Sleeping in Buffaloe Robes at night soon became soild and Desagreable”—but moon over Lucy: “On Sundays I Look at My Drawings and particularly at that of My Beloved Wife—& Like to spend about one hour in thoughts devoted to My familly.”¹⁷ Sometimes those thoughts made him imagine the worst: “While Looking at My Beloved Wife’s Likeness this day I thought it was Altered and Looked sorrowfull, it produced an Imediate sensation of Dread of her being in Want.”¹⁸ He tried to write letters back home, but the river offered few opportunities for regular mail service, and letters could take six weeks or more to reach a recipient, no matter how beloved. Sometimes he could cheer up for a bit by remembering his mission, telling himself that “so Strong is my Anthusiast to Enlarge the Ornithological Knowledge of My Country that I felt as if I wish Myself Rich again and thereby able to Leave my familly for a Couple of Years.” Still, it was almost never that easy to take the long view, especially with his family so far off in the distance. By Christmas of 1820, when he had been away for two and a half months, he wrote of his “hope that My Familly wishes me as good a Christmas as I do them.… I hope to have Some tidings of them Tomorrow.”¹⁹

As it happened, he did get some mail from Lucy the next day, a couple of letters posted in early November. Perhaps just as promising, he also happened upon, quite by surprise, his Kentucky friend Nicholas Berthoud, who was on a stopover while taking his own keelboat to New Orleans, Audubon’s anticipated destination. Berthoud invited Audubon to join him on his keelboat for the rest of the trip downriver, giving him a welcome upgrade over Aumack’s flatboat. But by New Year’s Day, any encouraging effects of Lucy’s correspondence and his improved accommodations had worn off, and Audubon could not avoid coming to terms with the dispiriting reality of his situation: “I am on Board a Keel Boat going down to New Orleans the poorest Man on it.”²⁰

Ever the Observer

Poor as he was, Audubon had plenty of impoverished company in the Mississippi region, and he took note of the condition of the ordinary people he encountered, forming impressions that would later find a place on the pages of his published works. When he looked at riverside society, he frequently recoiled at the low state of the people’s lives in their squalid communities. Landing at New Madrid, in Missouri Territory, one afternoon in November, he noted that “this allmost deserted Village is one the poorest that is seen on this River bearing a name,” and the inhabitants looked shiftless and slovenly: “They are Clad in Bukskin pantaloons and a Sort of Shirt of the same, this is seldom put aside unless So ragged or so Blooded & Greased, that it will become desagreable even to the poor Wrecks that bear it on.”²¹ (Audubon neglected to note in his journal the possible economic aftershocks of the massive earthquakes that devastated New Madrid in 1811–1812, which may well have rendered it still a less desirable location for residence nine years afterward. Some years later, however, he did take note of the power of the earthquakes in the Mississippi region, when he wrote in Ornithological Biography about how “the earth was rent asunder in several places, one or two islands sunk for ever, and the inhabitants fled in dismay towards the eastern shores.”²²) A few days after passing New Madrid, he came upon two men and a woman in a skiff, “Too Lazy to Make themselves Comfortable, Lie on the Damp earth, near the Edge of the Watter, have Racoons to Eat and Muddy Watter to help that food down.” Later still, he saw “two Women the remainder of a party of Wandering Vagabonds … these Two Wretches, Never Wash, Comb, or Scarcely clad themselves,” barely surviving by doing a little sewing and washing and otherwise relying on the generosity of neighbors. Audubon painted, on the whole, a depressing picture of human jetsam washed up on the banks of the river, people who apparently headed westward “to proceed to the Promised Land” but wound up hopelessly stuck in the Mississippi mud. Still, he could hardly hold himself above them: “To Look on those people, and consider Coolly their Condition, then; compare it to Mine, they are certainly More Miserable to Common Eyes—but, it is all a Mistaken Idea, for poverty & Independance are the only friend that Will travel together through this World.”²³

Like many other American travelers of the time, Audubon made an exception for native people. “The Indian is More decent, better off, and a Thousand time More happy” than the wretched-seeming white people in the same region, he wrote, and he idealized their own “poverty & Independence” as a positive virtue: “Whenever I meet Indians I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the Man Naked from his Hand and Yet free from Acquired Sorrow.” But rather than truly finding a model for life in the native inhabitants, Audubon instead saw them, as he did almost everyone, as useful sources of ornithological information. He heard about an Indian chief on the Arkansas River who had shot three swans, one with a nine-foot wingspan, but “these Indians had Left when We arrived—a View of Such Noble Specimen would have been very agreeable.”²⁴

“New Orleans at Last”

When Audubon eventually reached the end of his Mississippi trip—“New Orleans at Last,” he wrote on January 7, 1821—he found little that would immediately improve his mood. On his first day in the city, he received an invitation to a dinner party with some “good, well disposed, Gentlemen,” but the loud talk and too much wine left him with a “bad head Hake.” On the second day he walked around town “absolutely to Kill time, the whole City taken with the festivals of the day” in commemoration of the Battle of New Orleans, but someone picked his pocket, leading him to write acerbically that he would “remember … the 8th of January for ever.” On the third day he made the rounds of a few acquaintances to begin looking for work, but when nothing turned up, he went back to Berthoud’s keelboat and “remained on board … opposite the Market, the Dirtiest place in all the Cities of the United States.” “My Spirits very Low,” he wrote, and over time, Audubon’s experience in New Orleans would take him lower and lower.²⁵

The city itself shouldn’t have been the problem. By the time Audubon got there, New Orleans was the fifth largest city in the United States—behind New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—having come into the United States in the same year Audubon had, 1803, when Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase added the whole Louisiana Territory to the new nation. Throughout the eighteenth century, since the city’s founding by the French in 1718, New Orleans had developed a remarkably mixed population, with some of the region’s original Native American inhabitants, primarily Caddos and Choctaws, who remained on the scene; Europeans, above all French and Spanish, but also immigrants from all over the continent, particularly southern Europe; people of African descent, both slave and free; and more recent arrivals from the West Indies, including several thousands from Saint-Domingue, slaveowners and slaves alike, refugees from the rebellions that had rocked the region at the turn of the century. The United States’ acquisition of Louisiana created yet another influx of immigrants in the years before Audubon’s arrival, making the city’s 27,176 inhabitants the most diverse population of any other urban area in the nation.²⁶

Some observers celebrated the city’s mix. One of the best accounts of a newcomer to New Orleans comes from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the British-born architect, who came to New Orleans in January 1819, exactly two years before Audubon arrived. Almost immediately, Latrobe’s artistic eye quickly took in the sights of the exciting city, beginning with the main outdoor market, where he beheld a remarkable array of goods: “wretched meat & other butchers meat,” but also fresher fare, “wild ducks, oysters, poultry of all kinds,” along with a great variety of vegetables and fruits, including bananas, oranges, apples, sugar cane, potatoes, “& all sorts of other roots,” and then “trinkets, tin ware, dry goods … more and odder things … than I can enumerate.” But the goods were not the only things on display. Latrobe also described an energetic and cacophonous scene of five hundred or more people, “sellers & buyers, all of whom appeared to strain their voices, to exceed each other in loudness,” all of whom reflected the rich ethnic and racial diversity of the city: “White men and women, & of all hues of brown, & of all classes of faces, from round Yankees, to grisly & lean Spaniards, black negroes & negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly & straight-haired, quarteroons of all shades, long haired & frizzled, the women dressed in the most flaring yellow & scarlet gowns, the men capped & hatted.”²⁷

To his credit, Latrobe took the time to look closely into other areas of New Orleans society, peering into all corners of the local culture and taking care to describe the different ethnic and racial groups that made the city so special. He liked the white women he saw at a fancy ball, for instance, writing appreciatively of their unpainted faces: “A few of them are perfect, and a great majority are far above the mere agreeable.… I could not see one face that had the slightest tinge of rouge.”²⁸ In addition to looking into the polite entertainments of New Orleans’s elite, Latrobe also took in the sights of the more vigorous outdoor dancing among the city’s other major population, the people of color, hundreds of whom assembled each Sunday—the slaves’ one day off—for a weekly festival of expressive celebration. Place Publique (or what was more commonly, albeit unofficially, called Congo Square) became the site of an open-air market and meeting place, where people of African descent rejoiced in their cultural heritage through dance and song. The city authorities often looked fearfully askance at such a large congregation of black people, and they occasionally tried to outlaw, or at least regulate, the jubilant gathering. Other white people came to the site as curious spectators to look on from the fringes, and Latrobe soon became one of them.

Like most white observers, Latrobe probably did not fully comprehend the cultural significance of everything he saw, but as a modern historian of slave culture in the city has noted, “His account is probably the best, most thorough observation available from the heyday at Congo Square.”²⁹ Latrobe wrote that he happened to stumble on the gathering by accident while out for a walk one Sunday afternoon, when he “heard a most extraordinary noise” and discovered that it came from some “5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square.” Making a quick estimation of the racial identities involved, he noted that “all those who were engaged in the business seemed to be blacks. I did not observe a dozen yellow faces.” He did observe the dancing men and women formed in circles, moving to music made by two drums and a stringed instrument, but he didn’t completely appreciate what he saw: “A man sung an uncouth song … & the women screamed a detestable burthen on one single note.… I have never seen anything more brutally savage, and at the same time dull & stupid, than this whole exhibition.” Latrobe might have noted that there was nothing more “brutally savage” than slavery itself, but he failed to make that connection. Still, he concluded, rather charitably and even credulously, that there “was not the least disorder among the crowd, nor do I learn on enquiry, that these weekly meetings of the negroes have ever produced any mischief.”³⁰

Latrobe took a dimmer and essentially dismissive view of New Orleans’s Native American population, mostly Choctaws, whom he saw as “outcasts, the fag end of the tribe, the selvage, the intermediate existence between annihilation & savage vigor.” After going through an exceedingly unflattering description of their appearance and behaviors—dirty and drunk, he said, “having strings of birds, squirrels, perhaps a raccoon or opossum, often ducks, which they either sell to the hucksters in the market or hawk about the streets”—he nonetheless found something positive to say about them: “They are most scrupulously honest. No theft of any kind has ever been charged to them, & their women are most scrupulously chaste.”³¹

Latrobe was an architect, after all, not an anthropologist, and the point of considering his account here is not its accurate understanding, or even appreciation, of different cultures. Rather, his extensive and inquisitive exploration of New Orleans society, however biased or wrongheaded it may have been, still offers a standard of comparison for Audubon’s own observations, which came just two years later. Audubon seemed considerably less interested and even less impressed; he certainly had less to say about the many textures of society in the city. Where Latrobe spent page after page on his perceptions of different cultures and customs in this remarkably diverse city, Audubon said what he had to say in less than two.

Like Latrobe, Audubon commented on the energetic scene he found in the Sunday morning market, “crowded by people of all Sorts as well as Colors, the Market, very aboundant, the Church Bells ringing the Billiard Balls knocking … the day was beautifull and the crowd Increased considerably.” But immediately, in the next sentence, Audubon lost interest in the female part of the crowd, saying that “I saw however no handsome Woman and the Citron hue of allmost all is very disgusting to one who Likes the rosy Yankee or English Cheeks.” Later in the day, he did see “some White Ladies and Good Looking ones,” but he begged off going to the “quartroon Ball … as it cost 1$ Entrance I Merely Listened a Short time to the Noise.”³² With that almost offhand expression of disdain toward women of color and apparent indifference to the lively entertainments they could provide, he essentially ceased further discussion of the matter. His failure to look more deeply into New Orleans society in this written account of his initial 1821 visit seems striking, particularly given his later biographical association with the city and its surrounding region. For a man who would eventually even claim, less than fifteen years later, that his father had been “in the habit of visiting frequently … Louisiana” and had “married a lady of Spanish extraction” there, Audubon remained decidedly silent on the multicultural mix of New Orleans.³³ Whatever its energy and diversity, New Orleans never became an especially happy place for Audubon. Poor, separated from his family, facing the unhappy prospect of somehow supporting himself, and always preferring to spend his time and talent on his own art, he spent most of his time there in a funk.

In the first few weeks, he also spent most of his time looking for work, and he soon found that the world of art didn’t offer much, certainly not in keeping with his artistic self-regard. When he had been in town for five days, he met “an Italian, painter at the Theatre,” who seemed to like his work, but all Audubon could get from the theater management was an insulting offer to “paint with Mons. L’Italian” for a hundred dollars a month. “I believe really now that my talents must be poor or the Country,” he grumbled. The following day he walked through the “Busling City where no one cares a fig for a Man in my Situation” to see John Wesley Jarvis, a local portraitist, but again the meeting amounted to nothing. Jarvis looked at some of Audubon’s bird paintings “but never said they Were good or bad.” When Audubon all but begged him for work as an artistic assistant, being willing to paint clothing and backgrounds and such, Jarvis proved at first evasive and then dismissive: “He very Simply told me he could not believe, that I might help him in the Least.” Over two months later, Audubon finally got an audience with John Vanderlyn, the eminent “Historical Painter,” who said some favorable words about Audubon’s color and composition but ultimately offered only the faintest praise, saying that Audubon’s works seemed “handsomely done”—hardly a forceful endorsement of Audubon’s art. “Are all Men of Talent fools and Rude purposely or Naturally?” Audubon wondered.³⁴

Audubon’s fellow artists, “Men of Talent” or not, may have seemed nothing more than a source of discouragement, but women—white women in particular—became his artistic bread and butter. Throughout Audubon’s two years in Louisiana, he made ends meet by painting portraits and giving art lessons, quite often for the wives and daughters of prominent men. Early on in his stay in New Orleans, he made a deal with Roman Pamar, a local merchant, to paint Pamar’s three daughters. Audubon wanted twenty-five dollars apiece for head portraits, but Pamar wanted all three girls in one painting, so Audubon raised the rate to a hundred. To prove his skill, Audubon did a quick pencil sketch of one of the girls, Pamar liked what he saw, and he “Civilly told me that I Must do my Best for him and Left it to my self as to the Price.” Several weeks later, Audubon’s biggest and certainly most interesting commission came from a mysterious woman who accosted him on the street, asked him to do her portrait—full-length, and in the nude—and after more than a week of sociable posing, compensated him with the one form of payment Audubon might have preferred to cash, a top-of-the-line gun, worth $120. On another occasion, though, he did a portrait of the wife of a man “who Could Not spare Money” but offered only a woman’s saddle in payment, “a thing I had not the Least use for.” Still, a saddle seemed better than nothing, and with a rueful pun, Audubon concluded that “not to disappoint him I Sufered Myself to be Sadled.” Working on one-off portraits had never been Audubon’s idea of success, but it paid the rent and may even have contributed a bit to Audubon’s personal self-esteem: “Seldom before My coming to New Orleans did I think that I was Looked on so favourably by the fair sex as I Have Discovered Lately.”³⁵

Making a Living on Lessons

Audubon’s most promising opportunity came in the summer of 1821, when a wealthy woman, Mrs. Lucy Gray Pirrie, invited him to tutor her teenaged daughter, Eliza, in the necessary arts for a young woman—what Audubon would describe as “Drawing, Music, Dancing, Arithmetick, and Some trifling acquirements such as Working Hair &c”—at the family plantation, Oakley, over a hundred miles upriver from New Orleans, near Bayou Sarah. At first, Audubon figured he had “one hundred Diferent Plans … as Opposite as Could be to this,” but the pay was decent—sixty dollars a month, along with a room in the plantation house for Audubon and his assistant, young Mason—so he took the deal and “found Myself bound for several Months on a Farm in Louisiana.”³⁶

Oakley was more than just a farm—a commodious house, full of family members and “constant Transient Visitors,” surrounded by extensive grounds and cotton fields, worked by slaves—and Audubon did more than just teach drawing and such. He did his duty as artistic tutor for his “Aimiable Pupil Miss Eliza Pirrie,” but he also spent as much time as he could on his own much-preferred project, “Hunting and Drawing My Cherished Birds of America.” On his way to the plantation in June 1821, he realized how refreshed he felt to be out of New Orleans:

The Aspect of the Country entirely New to us distracted My Mind from those objects that are the occupation of My Life—the Rich Magnolia covered with its Odiferous Blossoms, The Holy, the Beech, the Tall Yellow Poplar, the Hilly ground, even the Red Clay I Looked at with amasement,—such entire Change in so Short a time, appears, often supernatural, and surrounded Once More by thousands of Warblers & thrushes, I enjoyd Nature.³⁷

Figure 5. Oakley Plantation House, Audubon State Historic Site, St. Francisville, Louisiana. Photo by Audubon State Historic Site staff.

During his four months at Oakley, in fact, he wrote very little in his journal about working with Eliza, but page after page about birds: lists of species he had seen or hoped to see, extended descriptions of some of the ones he shot, and, best of all, a couple of accounts of first sightings.

The good times at Oakley came to an end, however, when Audubon was fired from his position. Eliza had been ill for a month, her doctor had warned against continuing her lessons with Audubon, and Mrs. Pirrie—never an altogether pleasant person, in Audubon’s estimation—dismissed him on October 10, 1821. Seeking just a little more time to continue his ornithological work, Audubon appealed to Mr. Pirrie, a “Man of Strong Mind but extremely Weak of Habit,” who drank too much and who, even in his sober moments, seemed to cower in the face of his wife’s “Violent Passions”—the plantation was hers from a previous marriage, after all, and he was just the next husband, and a fairly feckless one at that. Still, Audubon managed to hang on for another five days, an awkward time when he felt “a remarkable Coolness … from the Ladies,” but kept up a “close application to My Ornithology[,] Writting every day from Morning until Night, Correcting, arranging from My Scattered Notes all My Ideas.” He and Mason finally “left this abode of unfortunate Opulence without a single Sigh of regret,” but Audubon found it painful to leave the “sweet Woods around us … for in them We allways enjoyd Peace … [and] I often felt as if anxious to retain the fill of My lungs with the purer air that Circulate through them.”³⁸

Back they went to New Orleans, then, and back to the uncertain work of making a bare living through art—but not the sort of art Audubon wanted to do. From October 15, the day he arrived back in the city, through the end of 1821, the journal contains a series of dispirited entries about looking for work (“visited several Public Institutions where I cannot say that I Was very politely received”), enduring the jealousy of competitors in teaching art (“My Style of giving Lessons and the high rate I charge for My Tuition have procured Me the Ill will of Every other Artist in the City”), and actually having to give art lessons again and again (“Gave lessons at Mrs. Brand,” “Gave a Lesson to Miss Pamar,” “Gave My Lessons all round”). Finally, on December 18, Audubon recorded one much happier note: “My Wife & My Two sons arrived at 12 ’o’clock all in good health.” After fourteen disappointing and lonely months without his family and “all that renders Life agreeable to Me,” Audubon mustered up his gratitude and “thanked My Maker for this Mark of Mercy.”³⁹

Louisiana Ornithology

All Audubon had ever really wanted in Louisiana was birds—birds and enough paying work to allow him to keep finding and drawing more birds. And draw birds he certainly did: Well over a third of the avian images that would later fill the 435 plates of The Birds of America, and at least 75 of the 100 images in the first volume, originated during his Mississippi-Louisiana period in the early 1820s; some of them—for instance, his near-iconic image of the now-extinct Carolina Parrot (or Carolina Parakeet), which he began at the Pirrie’s Oakley Plantation in 1821 and completed in New Orleans in 1822—have become emblematic of his art.⁴⁰ By the same token, the pages of Audubon’s journal that cover his time in Louisiana offer extensive lists and descriptions of the species he saw there, and references to the region recur throughout the five volumes of Ornithological Biography, such as his “having studied the habits” of the Purple Gallinule “under every advantage in Louisiana, and especially in the neighbourhood of New Orleans.”⁴¹ Audubon had chosen his destination well, and he made the most of the ornithological opportunity, getting down to work right after his arrival.

No sooner had he settled into New Orleans in early January 1821 than he “took My Gun, rowed out to the edge of the Eddy and killed a Fish Crow.” Thus begins a series of ornithological entries in Audubon’s journal, always searching for birds to draw, whether dead ones bought in the city’s market or live ones shot in the surrounding environs. When he killed the first Fish Crow, for instance, “hundreds flew to him, and appeared as if about to Carry him off, but they soon found it to their Interest to let me have him.” Audubon also bagged the birds common to coastal areas—pelicans, gulls, cormorants, ducks, geese—and welcomed the early arrival of migrants in the mild winter weather. “I had the pleasure of remarking thousands of purple martins travelling eastwardly,” he wrote in the second week of February 1821, when the temperature sat at 68 degrees, and ten days later, he saw “Three Immense Flocks of Bank Swallows that past over Me with the rapidity of a Storm.” Even though he seemed surprised at the birds’ early arrival, he felt “pleased to see these arbingers of Spring,” figuring that they would make it to Kentucky in about a month. Even if he stayed within the city, he could find that “the Market is regularly furnished with the English Snipe … Robins Blue Wingd Teals Common Teals, Spoon Bill Ducks, Malards, Snow Geese, Canada Geese, Many Cormorants, Coots, Water Hens, Tell Tale Godwits … Yellow Shank Snipes, some Sand Hills Cranes, Strings of Blew Warblers, Cardinal Grosbeaks, Common Turtle Doves, Golden Wingd Wood Peckers &c.”⁴²

As February turned to March, then April, Audubon marked the migrations that came and went during the Louisiana spring, noting that “to My Astonishment, the Many Species of Warblers, Thrushes &c that Were numerous during the Winter have all Moved on Eastwardly,” but then, likewise to his surprise, he “heard the Voice of a Warbler new to Me, but could Not reach it.”⁴³ That summer, when he and Joseph Mason moved to the Pirrie plantation at Bayou Sarah, Audubon took care of his tutor duties well enough, but he more happily spent hours, sometimes several days, ranging through the woods and relishing the profusion of big birds (ibises, woodpeckers, herons) and small (flycatchers, orioles, warblers of all sorts). After that job came to an abrupt end and he moved back to New Orleans, he still took pleasure in recording sightings of birds of all sorts—“Green Back Swallows, Gamboling over the City and the River the Whole day”—and sometimes making very detailed ornithological notes; his extensive description of the Brown Pelican covers two complete pages, and his journal ends with brief descriptions of over sixty “Water Birds of the United States.”⁴⁴ Even now, Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal contains the sort of careful and comprehensive field notes that a modern-day ornithologist might still find extremely useful.

“Mr Wilson Has Made an Error”

Audubon cared only for one ornithologist, one who had come earlier—the late author of American Ornithology. Alexander Wilson’s work stood as the most comprehensive and authoritative work on American ornithology to date, and before Audubon could hope to surpass it, he had to see it. He frequently looked to Wilson’s work for corroborating his own observations, but even more, he took quiet pleasure in correcting any errors or omissions he found in American Ornithology.