Читать книгу Under a Wild Sky - William Souder - Страница 15
ОглавлениеTroculus colubris: The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
I ask of you, kind reader, who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover?
—Ornithological Biography
While Wilson walked in the woods and practiced his draftsmanship, drawing and redrawing his owl, someone else was watching the birds thirty miles away. The eighteen-year-old who now called himself John James Audubon had arrived at his father’s estate, Mill Grove, in late summer of 1803. The final leg of his journey from France had proved more difficult than the ocean crossing. Two weeks earlier, Audubon had left his ship the instant it docked in New York and walked all the way into Greenwich Village, where his father had arranged a line of credit with a bank. Audubon, excited by the city, perhaps failed to notice an uneasy quiet in the streets. Yellow fever had broken out in New York that summer, and by the time Audubon made his way back to the docks he was feeling unwell. His condition deteriorated so quickly that the captain, a man named John Smith, hired a carriage and hurried him out of the city. He ended up at a boardinghouse run by two Quaker ladies who cared for him as his condition first turned grave and then, amazingly, improved just as rapidly.
Audubon’s first weeks after finally reaching Mill Grove were awkward. His English was all but nonexistent, and his exact status at the estate was ambiguous. The elder Audubon was having trouble managing his property from France, and was at odds with both his American agent in Philadelphia (who, among other things, evidently was to handle John James’s modest allowance) and with François Dacosta, the man he’d sent over from Nantes to develop the lead mine on the property. Audubon’s father and Dacosta had entered into an agreement for shared ownership of Mill Grove that was a continually evolving tangle of bonds, mortgages, and promises to split future proceeds from the mine. To the extent that anybody was actually running the place, it seemed to be the tenant farmer, a Quaker named William Thomas. Thomas tilled the land, tended the livestock, operated the lumber and grist mill, and took care of the large house. Audubon, apparently oblivious to these arrangements, assumed he was in charge of Mill Grove. But he showed little interest in accepting any daily responsibilities. Instead, he went hunting.
For a young man already in love with the outdoors and fascinated by wildlife, Mill Grove was a dream come true. It was near the confluence of Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Audubon would recall the place later in his life as his “beautiful American plantation.” The house, already forty years old, was impressive—a sprawling, three-story stone structure topped by a dormered shake roof and several tall brick chimneys. Inside, it was a warren of small rooms and low ceilings. The floors were wide-planked southern yellow pine worn to a warm patina. The house and a compound of out-buildings stood on a hillside, at the end of a long drive. A wide veranda ran the length of the house in the rear, overlooking an expanse of lawn and pastureland falling away to the south on a long slope above Perkiomen Creek. The Perkiomen, more truly a river than a creek, was eighty yards wide at the foot of the hill, where it ran over a low dam built to power the mill. Being close to the main crossing point of the creek, the house featured a small addition on its west end, with a tavern in the basement and rooms for travelers above. The famous lead mine was in the front yard, only twenty paces from the entrance to the house. Its shaft was twelve feet across and went straight down for some distance before angling off beneath the hillside.
Audubon spent little time in the house. Every day he was up at dawn and into the woods with his gun. The countryside, just then beginning to color with the onset of fall, was spectacular. High bluffs flanked the grounds, and the ravines were cathedrals of old-growth beech and oak and chestnut. Hemlocks stood on the ridgetops. The bottoms, especially along the creek, were shaded by immense, thick-bodied sycamores. Recent surveys at Mill Grove have found 176 species of birds in the forest. In Audubon’s day there were more, including flocks of passenger pigeons that appeared from time to time.
The intensity of Audubon’s curiosity about the birds and animals in the forest was unflagging. In the evenings he practiced his violin and flute, but he also retreated to an upstairs room where he assembled a growing collection of specimens—nests, eggs, shed snakeskins, and now and then a freshly dispatched bird or small mammal that he practiced drawing. He was always reluctant to come home at the end of the day, and usually only returned after the dew had begun to settle and he had a full game bag hanging against his damp trousers. In a crevice in the rocks on one of the cliffs above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon discovered a grotto that became a favorite retreat. Phoebes nested there, and under his constant attentions the birds became so tame that Audubon could hold them in his hands. Curious as to whether they returned to the same nesting place every year, Audubon tied threads around their feet in hopes of identifying them in subsequent seasons. Audubon would later recall this as a time when he had not a care in the world, passing each day afoot in the woods, dressed in fancy coats and shirts with lace cuffs, or riding over the fields on one of his fine horses. The reality may have been more modest—it took him some months to save up for a new gun and a hunting dog—but Audubon’s claim of having spent these days in a kind of nature-induced trance was true.
Shortly after he got to Mill Grove, Audubon learned that a new family was moving in at a big house only a half-mile down the road. Their name was Bakewell. They were originally from Derbyshire, in England, and more recently by way of New Haven, Connecticut. Evidently they were well off. Expensive stocks of fancy-bred sheep and cattle arrived shortly, and the Bakewells renamed their estate Fatland Ford after a local legend about the richness of its soil. Like Mill Grove, the house at Fatland Ford—far bigger and grander than Audubon’s—commanded stunning vistas of the rolling countryside to the south and west. On a clear day, you could see from Fatland Ford all the way to Valley Forge.
Audubon was curious about the Bakewells. It was said that they had several handsome daughters, though he was more intrigued by the rumor that William Bakewell, the father, raised pointing dogs. But Audubon kept his distance. These people were, after all, English—countrymen of the enemies of his father. And although Audubon had slipped effortlessly into the role of young prince on his American plantation, he was painfully aware of his limited education and social experience, and that there were only a handful of English words that made sense to him. The Bakewells were sure to be much too sophisticated for his company.
But one day right after New Year’s, Audubon came upon William Bakewell when they were both out grouse hunting along Perkiomen Creek. Bakewell was friendly and reassuring, and insisted the young man come to Fatland Ford for a visit and a formal introduction to the Bakewell family. Audubon said he would, and after some delay, he nervously went.
Audubon never forgot that day. He went down the lane to Fatland Ford in the morning. A servant answered the door and quietly led him into the parlor, where he found himself alone with a girl who was sewing by the fire. She seemed momentarily surprised by her visitor, but stood politely and offered Audubon a seat. Her father, she said, was out but would return shortly. They sat. Audubon could not take his eyes off the girl, who continued to sew and now chatted amiably with her guest. Her name was Lucy. She was the Bakewells’ eldest daughter. In two days she would be eighteen.
Between stitches, Lucy studied the young man squirming in his chair and staring at her. She’d heard of her reclusive neighbor. The reality was unexpectedly pleasant. He was full of energy and most definitely handsome, although his hair, which hung to his shoulders, took some getting used to. But he was friendly, and his accent was cute. Lucy found his odd use of archaic expressions like “thee” and “thou” utterly charming. Despite the language problem, they managed to understand one another. Soon they were talking about England and France, and comparing impressions of their new homes in America. When Lucy spoke of the moors in Derbyshire, Audubon sensed that they shared certain feelings about wild places. He found himself hoping that her father would take his time getting back. She was pretty, he thought. Maybe not classically so, but she had lovely gray eyes and a sweetness that seemed to fill the room. Audubon was happy to see a pianoforte in the corner. When William Bakewell at last appeared, he saw that the two of them were getting on well and suggested that Lucy prepare lunch. Audubon would later recall that he and William Bakewell ate “over guns and dogs,” lost in talk of hunting. But his most vivid memory was of Lucy’s tiny waist as she went to the kitchen ahead of them.
“She now arose from her seat a second time,” he later wrote, “and 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.”
Audubon’s feelings for Lucy advanced quickly in the days that followed. He got to know all the Bakewells, which in addition to Lucy, William, and Mrs. Bakewell, included five more children: Thomas, who was seventeen; his eager little brother William, who was five; plus Eliza, who was fourteen and exceedingly pretty; and the two little girls, Sarah and Ann. After Audubon’s visit to Fatland Ford, the Bakewells called at Mill Grove on several occasions. One cold evening, everyone went skating on Perkiomen Creek—where Audubon demonstrated impressive skill. He also had a fine time pushing Lucy around the ice on a sled. On another occasion, Audubon led the Bakewells up the cramped stairway to his specimen room, where they were impressed by his collection of stuffed birds and other animals. Shyly, he took out a few crayon drawings of some birds and a mink. He was an intense young man, though in his eagerness to impress he was prone to rash claims. He foolishly told the Bakewells that a portrait of George Washington hanging above the mantel had been presented to his father, “Admiral” Audubon, by Washington himself after the “Battle of Valley Forge.” Audubon was ignorant of the fact that Washington had only camped his troops at Valley Forge, and that the general had visited not Mill Grove, but Fatland Ford. No doubt he got by with these lies because the Bakewells by then wanted to believe that Audubon was the aristocrat he seemed. If they doubted his boast of having studied painting with Jacques-Louis David, they apparently let that one pass as well.
There was no denying that Audubon had many talents. He danced well, played music, and was an accomplished horseman. He could fence and swim, and he was a superb shot. He seemed to know everything about birds and animals. His curiosity about nature never rested. Audubon was always in a good mood, always full of ideas about what to do or where to go to see something interesting. It gave William Bakewell pause to hear that young Audubon had led his daughter to some hidden place in the bluff above Perkiomen Creek—but he relaxed when he was reassured that they were only up there to look at phoebes. He was less forgiving when Audubon, on skates and armed with a shotgun, talked Tom Bakewell into tossing his cap in the air for a target.
One afternoon in late winter, Audubon led a hunting party after ducks. The season was not yet far enough advanced for a spring flight of waterfowl, but there must have been a few early arrivals and some ducks always stayed through the winter. The hunters moved up frozen Perkiomen Creek on skates, being careful to avoid the patches of open water they called “air holes.” The group was still a long way from Mill Grove when darkness fell, leaving a fair distance of treacherous river ice between them and home. Undaunted, Audubon volunteered to lead the way. Tying a white handkerchief to a stick, Audubon held it aloft and told everyone to follow him. The others adjusted the still-warm ducks hanging from their belts, looking around doubtfully at the gloom. Then they were off, gliding down the creek beneath the bare branches of the overhanging trees, now and then passing by a gurgling air hole. The frigid night air stung their faces. At the head of the line, Audubon’s white signal bobbed along like a beacon in the dark sky. Suddenly, it disappeared.
Audubon had fallen into an air hole. Instantly, the current swept him under, pushing him along beneath the ice and away from all sight and sound. His friends rushed to the place where he’d gone through. An eternity seemed to pass as they stared, horrified, into the swirling blackness. There was nothing to say, nothing they could do. The night was a clear, frozen envelope of silence surrounding them. They shifted on their skates. The ice groaned. Then they heard a cry many yards downstream. Audubon had somehow found his way up through another air hole. He was dragged coughing and shaking onto the ice, where someone stripped off a coat and wrapped it around him. As they got him to his feet, Audubon told his companions that in the shock of going under he’d lost consciousness. It was by pure chance that he’d popped up through another opening and regained his senses before being pulled down again.
Audubon worked hard at his drawing. His favorite subjects were birds, but they frustrated his efforts to translate nature onto paper. In France, as a boy, he’d collected birds with his father along the Loire River, but when he drew them in pencil and crayon the results were “miserable.” The objects of these early sketches looked like what they were—dead birds. Audubon depicted them in “stiff, unnatural profiles,” a manner he would later find all too common in conventional ornithology. The elder Audubon was unstinting in his encouragement, but warned his son that “nothing in the world possessing life and animation” is easy to imitate. At Mill Grove, Audubon tried to solve the problem by taking his crayons and pencils to the grotto above Perkiomen Creek, where he made countless attempts at drawing his beloved phoebes as they flitted about. Sometimes he made rough outlines of birds in the field, then shot them and returned to his room, where he laid them out as best he could in the same positions. This didn’t work, as “they were dead to all intents and neither wing, leg, or tail could I place according to the intention of my wishes.” He even tried tying threads to the head and wings of his specimens to support them in lifelike attitudes. But when he compared these clumsy models to the real, live thing, he said, “I felt my blood rise in my temples.”
These efforts so demoralized Audubon that at one point he stopped drawing for a month. Instead, he walked every day through the woods, looking at birds and waiting for inspiration. Audubon later claimed that during this time he began to dream about drawing birds, and long before daylight one morning he sat up in bed with a start. As Audubon told it, he ordered his horse saddled—probably he had to do it himself—and rode off at a gallop to Norristown, about five miles away. There he bought wire in various gauges and, leaping back on his “steed,” returned to Mill Grove. He passed up breakfast and instead grabbed his gun and bolted down the hill for Perkiomen Creek, where he shot a kingfisher. He gently carried the bird home by the bill and then went back down to the mill for a soft board. Filing points onto short lengths of wire, Audubon skewered the bird through the head, legs, and feet, and then, laying it on its side against the board, drove the wires into the wood to maintain the body in a fixed position. A final stiff wire was stuck under the tail to hold it up at a jaunty angle. Audubon was so excited he began to draw immediately, giving no further thought to time or hunger until he had finished. That kingfisher, he later said, marked the real beginning of his career. As he worked on his drawing, he reached over periodically and carefully opened the bird’s eyelid, and every time he did this it was as if the kingfisher had sprung back to life.
Audubon eventually added an important refinement to what he called “my method of drawing.” He marked off the surface of his mounting board with squares, and matched this grid with lightly penciled duplicate squares on his drafting papers. This allowed him to get the proportions and the foreshortenings of perspective just right. As for the scale, it was always a simple one-to-one. Audubon drew every bird as he saw it, exactly life-sized. It was a practice from which he never deviated.
Months streamed by in a delicious haze. Audubon was in love. Lucy was smart and bold, and she shared his enthusiasm for a day in the woods. He was thrilled at how well she kept up with him, and impressed by her riding skills. In England, Lucy had ridden with the hounds. She was at ease in the forest, and increasingly, she was attached to her companion at Mill Grove. They began to talk of marriage. When Audubon got sick just before the holidays in the fall of 1804, he went to Fatland Ford to be taken care of. His illness lasted weeks, and at one point it looked as if he might die. But once again he bounced back to life. Lucy read to him while he recovered. By early February he was well enough to go out for a ride.
Audubon did have one nagging concern—his father’s overseer, François Dacosta, who seemed intent on gaining control of Mill Grove. Evidently the two argued over who was giving orders to whom, and the elder Audubon got wind of it back in France. In truth, Audubon’s father had never completely explained to his son that Dacosta was an equal partner in Mill Grove. He wasn’t satisfied with Dacosta’s slow progress in opening the lead mine, but their arrangement had not changed. It meanwhile dawned on the younger Audubon that his say in the management of the estate didn’t amount to much, and that it was all but impossible to convey to his father on the other side of the world how unsatisfactory this was to him. The elder Audubon, having also heard of his son’s possible engagement, was already doing everything in his power to prevent a marriage between Audubon and Lucy. Audubon’s father suspected Lucy might only be after a wealthy husband. He wrote to Dacosta, urging him to find a way to delay his son’s plans, and, if need be, to let the Bakewells know that young Audubon, despite outward appearances, was not rich and could not expect anything in the way of support from his family in France if he were to marry “in his present condition.” In a follow-up letter, Audubon’s father warned Dacosta to stop complaining about his son, whose conduct must be the result of “bad advice and lack of experience.” Young Audubon was, after all, not yet twenty. The elder Audubon felt certain that the Bakewells had “goaded” his son into bragging that Mill Grove was his.
The old sea captain’s vision remained sharp. Even from across the ocean, his view of the situation was penetrating, and his response was a masterly demonstration of finesse and fatherly concern. He wrote to Dacosta, reassuring him that everyone in Philadelphia—except, apparently, young Audubon—understood perfectly that Dacosta’s rights and interests in Mill Grove were the same as his own. He said he had written to his son advising him as much and admonishing him to be a more respectful member of the household. He told Dacosta that sending young Audubon home to France, as Dacosta now proposed, was out of the question. All of the elder Audubon’s reasons for having his son in America were as before. Instead, he artfully suggested how Dacosta could act in his stead to bring the boy under control. Having repeated his command that his son not get married at such a young age, Audubon advised Dacosta to go easy:
Only an instant is needed to make him change from bad to good; his extreme youth and his petulance are his only faults, and if you have the goodness to give him the indispensable, he will soon feel the necessity of making friends with you, and he can be of great service if you use him for your own benefit.
If Dacosta followed this advice, Audubon said, his son could be “reclaimed” and would be fit to assume the duties at Mill Grove that he had thus far ignored. If this could be accomplished, the elder Audubon said, he would be “under every obligation” to Dacosta, adding, “This is my only son, my heir, and I am old.”
Unfortunately, both Dacosta and young Audubon ignored all this advice. In late February, Audubon announced he was going to visit his father to set things straight. He demanded funds for the trip, and Dacosta complied with a “letter of credit” Audubon was to use to book his passage in New York. The letter was bogus—Audubon was laughed out of the bank to which Dacosta had sent him—but he successfully prevailed on Lucy’s father to arrange a loan of $150. On March 12, he boarded the Hope, bound for France.
Audubon stayed with his family at their big house near Nantes for just over a year. After recovering from the surprise of his son’s unexpected return, the elder Audubon soon perceived that Dacosta thought he was in some way being swindled. He undertook to settle matters at Mill Grove once and for all. While his son hunted and explored the countryside—taking care not to be recognized by anyone who might report him for conscription—the elder Audubon replaced certain papers of agreement that had apparently miscarried en route to Dacosta, and agreed to some much-needed repairs at Mill Grove. Short of funds, he also sold a portion of his share in Mill Grove to his neighbors in France, a family named Rozier.
The Roziers had a son, Ferdinand, who had once visited young Audubon at Mill Grove and wanted to go back to America. The elder Audubon, sensing the advantage to his son of being associated with Ferdinand—who was hardworking, serious, and eight years older than John James—encouraged a joint venture. In March 1806, John James Audubon and Ferdinand Rozier formed a legal partnership. In ten written “articles of association,” they agreed to proceed to the New World and to enter into commercial ventures as equal proprietors. Much of the agreement centered on Mill Grove, where they would now jointly control half of the plantation. But it also stipulated that they would work together in whatever business seemed suitable and at whatever place they chose, “whether inland or maritime.”
On April 12, 1806, Audubon and Rozier sailed aboard the Polly, an American ship bound for New York. Audubon’s papers gave his home as Louisiana. Rozier’s said he was from Holland. The crossing was eventful. A man was killed in a duel over a lady’s bonnet, the ship was looted by a British privateer, and a storm drove them temporarily aground in Long Island Sound.
Audubon and Rozier spent most of the next year haggling with Dacosta while they tried their hands at business. Rozier found work with an importer in Philadelphia. Audubon, in a monumental mismatch of vocation and personality, took a job as an apprentice clerk in a countinghouse in New York. The business was owned by Lucy’s uncle, Benjamin Bakewell. This friendly arrangement probably prolonged Audubon’s employment in a position for which he was clearly unsuited. He visited Mill Grove and Lucy when he could, and continued to seek his father’s approval for their marriage. Audubon corresponded now in his own peculiar English, blending odd formalisms with imaginative spellings, as in this letter to his father in the spring of 1807:
I am allways in Mr. Benjamin Bakewell’s store where I work as much as I can and passes my days happy; about three weeks ago I went to Mill Grove . . . and had the pleasure of seeing there my Biloved Lucy who constantly loves me and makes me perfectly happy. I shall wait for thy Consent and the one of my good Mamma to Marry her. Could thou but see her and thou wouldst I am sure be pleased of the prudency of my choice . . . I wish thou would wrights to me ofnor and longuely. Think by thyself how pleasing it is to read a friend’s letter.
Audubon and Rozier grew restless. Convinced they would never devise a workable partnership with Dacosta, they decided instead to sell him most of their share in Mill Grove for just under $4,000 and a promise of future payments when the mine came in. They mortgaged what was left for $10,000. Rozier, meanwhile, considered returning to France. Then they started to discuss something entirely different. Why not go west? Settlers were making their way into new territories west of the Alleghenies. Some took a southern route by way of the Wilderness Road. The road followed the old trace blazed by Daniel Boone in the 1770s along Indian trails and bison tracks from the Cumberland Gap in Virginia, across southeastern Kentucky, angling north all the way to the Ohio River. The trace was now becoming a busy turnpike. The other way west was to travel overland to Pittsburgh and then float down the Ohio and into whatever future was out there. The fast-growing town of Louisville sounded promising.
Rozier and Audubon agreed that there were likely to be commercial opportunities in Kentucky. Audubon encouraged this view, while thinking to himself how fine the hunting would be and how many birds must live in the wilds of America. He said goodbye to Lucy—who said she’d be waiting for him to return once he found them a home in the West. There are discrepancies in the record as to when they actually left Philadelphia, and whether they were much delayed on the way to Pittsburgh, but sometime between the end of August and the start of October 1807, Audubon and Rozier headed off. At first they made splendid time, reaching Lancaster, a distance of more than sixty miles from Philadelphia, in one day. The roads were good and lined with pleasant taverns. Crops of hemp grew in the fields. But the roads worsened. A team of six horses was needed to keep their coach moving over increasingly rough terrain. The jostling ride was exhausting. Sometimes, they got out and walked, finding a faster pace that was also easier on their aching backsides. In a place called Walnut Bottom, beyond Harrisburg, they had a wonderful meal in a clean tavern where they were served, Rozier happily noted, by “pretty girls.” Rozier was likewise impressed by a species of tree he’d never seen before, called a hackberry. On the third day of November, bone-chilling rains commenced just as the stage entered the steepest section of mountains. The passengers all commented on the treacherousness of this stretch. Four days later, as the rain abated and the afternoon turned unusually hot for that time of year, they descended a final time—cautiously on foot now—and arrived in Pittsburgh.
Audubon and Rozier spent twelve days in Pittsburgh, staying at the Jefferson Hotel. Despite its captivating location, the town was a dismal place. It had been built in the shadow of British Fort Pitt in the 1760s, and was situated in a lovely valley where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers met and the surrounding hills formed a kind of natural amphitheater. The two rivers merged there to form the mighty Ohio, whose broad beginnings wandered north from the city before turning south and west and heading into the forever and ever of the frontier. But the town itself was a grimy black scar. Smoke and ash from coal fires powering the businesses and warming the homes occupied by four thousand residents rose in a towering pall. More smoke poured from several nearby coal mines that had caught fire years before and continued to smolder. Every surface exposed to the air was coated in soot. People choked and wheezed and went grimly about their business beneath a perpetual dark cloud hanging over the narrow streets and the low, ugly buildings.
But business was good. Pittsburgh was already becoming a manufacturing center and was sending a diversifying assortment of supplies down the Ohio on the heels of the settlers who would buy these goods at the other end. The trade included nails, cloth, glassware, wire, buttons, rope, iron implements, and lead. There were eight boat and barge builders in town, and so many keelboats, arks, and Kentucky flatboats now regularly descended the Ohio from Pittsburgh that nobody could keep count. With fair weather and high water, it was possible to reach Louisville in as little as ten days. The estimated value of all trade passing through Pittsburgh exceeded a million dollars a year, and with the promise of regular steamship travel arriving soon, there was talk of a coming boom. Audubon and Rozier were elated at all of this, and also at discovering several French-speaking merchants with whom they arranged to acquire inventories. Rozier considered these people honest and easy to deal with.
The two men bought passage on a flatboat for $15, which included the transport of a small amount of merchandise with which they planned to open a store. The boat moved swiftly down the smooth current, but it was crowded and uncomfortable. Rozier and Audubon slept in the open, with only their coats for blankets. Rozier found the monotony of river travel almost unbearable. Occasionally the boat careened to a sudden halt when it ran aground and the passengers were forced into the chilly November water to drag it off a sandbar. Rozier thought the boat’s captain, a man named Morris, singularly unpleasant. He treated the passengers roughly, invented additional charges that he collected by threat of force, and used the foul language of “a low class.”
Louisville waited for them just over seven hundred miles downstream. It stood on the slightly elevated south bank of the Ohio, immediately below the mouth of Bear Grass Creek, at a mile-wide bend in the river. Here the velocity of the current increased forcefully over a two-mile stretch. Boats lazing along at a gentle three miles an hour suddenly shot forward at ten to thirteen miles an hour, pitching violently through a section of almost invisible but dangerous rapids, as the water suddenly dropped twenty-two feet in elevation. The “Falls of the Ohio,” as this place was called, were caused by immense submerged rock shelvings that lay in terraces across the river bottom. In periods of high water, a skilled pilot could run the rapids on almost any line. But when the river was low, the jagged ledges emerged and the channel divided into frothy chutes that funneled through openings in the rock, and only the most experienced and daring local rivermen could bring a boat through.
The town of Louisville had been laid out in the 1770s, when General George Rogers Clark first built a fort there during his campaign against British and Indian forces in the Revolutionary War. About twenty families of civilian pioneers had tagged along with Clark’s small flotilla of boats when he descended the Ohio from Fort Pitt—somewhat to Clark’s astonishment, as he gave them no encouragement in what seemed to him an incautious adventure into a wild country still being contested by several armed factions. By the time Audubon and Rozier landed at Louisville—probably sometime before Christmas—they found a civilized-looking town of about thirteen hundred citizens. There were at least two hundred sturdy brick homes, some three stories high. Many of these were on a busy-looking Main Street, which was also lined with shops and commercial operations.
Audubon and Rozier liked what they saw. Businessmen—many of them French settlers—were making fine livings in Louisville. Thanks to the Falls, which naturally slowed the passage downstream and necessitated overland transfer for anyone or anything going upstream, Louisville was the principal trading city between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Some sixty thousand tons of goods now moved annually downriver to New Orleans. About one-tenth as much came back north—on keelboats that were sailed, rowed, poled, and sometimes dragged upstream. There was already talk of building a lock and canal on the south bank of the river that would have one terminus near the little waterfront community of Shippingport, which was home to fewer than a hundred people, though several were well-established French merchants and boat builders. Audubon and Rozier found store space for rent in town, and also got acquainted with the French in Shippingport. Audubon listened excitedly to their accounts of the local bird shooting, which featured great slaughters of migrating passenger pigeons and waterfowl.
In March the partners returned to Philadelphia for more goods, and so that Audubon and Lucy could be married. The wedding took place on April 5, 1808, at Fatland Ford, with a Presbyterian minister presiding. A few days later, Rozier, Audubon, and Lucy boarded a stagecoach for Pittsburgh. This time the trip seemed harder. With his new wife along, Audubon now took more notice of how horrible the roads were the farther they got from Philadelphia, especially in the mountain passages, where they were little more than ruts winding through the rock and mud. Lucy quietly endured the coarse language and drunken behavior they encountered at the taverns along the way. The inns—usually little more than saloons with a couple of sleeping rooms above—were crowded with unsavory travelers. Strangers shared their beds with one another and with the host of bedbugs that thrived between the infrequently washed sheets. A young woman who made the journey across Pennsylvania in 1810 said the physical hardships were only exceeded by the threat of unwanted attention from wagoners, who sometimes skulked about the sleeping quarters after long nights of drinking. Few settlers returned from the West, she speculated, not because the land there was so wonderful but because coming and going between civilization and the frontier was so arduous. But Lucy made no complaint and seemed perfectly enchanted by her dashing new husband and the great adventure they were on. One day, as they climbed a steep, rocky section of road, with Audubon walking behind and Lucy riding inside to stay out of a cold rain, the coach overturned and was dragged on its side some distance before the team could be brought under control. Audubon pulled Lucy, bruised and shaken, from the coach, then helped set it upright. On they went, that day and the next and for many after that, over the mountains and then down the river to their new life.
