This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (9 page)

The agent in charge of Fort Union was Alexander Culbertson. His wife was a Blackfoot named Natawista. One day the couple put on war paint and staged a horse race. “Mrs. Culbertson and her maid rode astride like men,” wrote Audubon, “and all rode a furious race, under whip the whole way, for more than one mile on the prairie; and how amazed would have been any European lady . . . at seeing the magnificent riding of this Indian princess—for that is Mrs. Culbertson’s rank—and her servant. Mr. Culbertson rode with them, the horses running as if wild, with these extraordinary Indian riders, Mrs. Culbertson’s magnificent black hair floating like a banner behind her.”
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Audubon’s group left the fort daily on horseback to explore. Often they camped out on the prairie, using buffalo dung to fuel their campfires. It was summertime, and there was an astounding number of birds. On the way upriver, Audubon had already named a species each for Bell, Sprague, and Harris. Now he became the first ornithologist to discover that the western meadowlark was a different species than the meadowlark back east.

This was the kingdom of the quadrupeds, too. Antelope bounded over the prairie. Elk bearing huge antlers swam the rivers, and bears foraged in the brush. Wolves prowled everywhere, even coming near the fort at night. Audubon made a special trip to North Dakota’s Badlands, home of the bighorn sheep. There, where ancient rivers had carved a strange landscape, the sheep scampered up and down rock towers a thousand feet high.

But the buffalo ruled over all. The shaggy, bellowing beasts were
the largest mammals—viviparous quadrupeds!—on the North American continent. They ranged over the land in herds so immense that Audubon found it “impossible to describe.”
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It had taken one frontiersman six days to ride through a herd.

Audubon shot hundreds of mammals to study and draw for his new book, and he sent home skins and specimens preserved in barrels of brine. He hunted for science, he hunted for food, and he hunted because he loved to. Buffalo hunting was the most exciting—and most dangerous—of all. But Audubon was fifty-eight now, and he had trouble shooting his rifle while riding at a mad gallop. “How I wish I were twenty-five years younger!”
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And once he was almost gored by a wounded bull, so he watched more often than he took part. After one hunt, he looked on amazed as Natawista scooped out the still-warm brains of a dead buffalo and ate them, raw and dripping.

In spite of his love for hunting, Audubon realized that species could become extinct, and as the years went by, he grew increasingly concerned. He saw that, like the passenger pigeons in Kentucky, buffalo were being slaughtered at an alarming rate: “What a terrible destruction of life, as it were for nothing, or next to it. . . . The prairies are literally
covered
with the skulls of the victims.”
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And he added, “This cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.”
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But the animals continued to be shot for their hides, for their meat, and for sport. By the 1880s—Audubon would not live to see his prediction come true—almost all the buffalo would be gone.

Winter comes early to the Upper Missouri country. By mid-August, there was a sharp bite in the wind, and the air was thick with the
coming snows. Audubon and his men built an oar-powered barge called a mackinaw and started for home. The naturalist had not had time to go as far as he had wanted, to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, but he had seen a part of the Wild West and many of its wild creatures.

Down past the Mandan villages and the Sioux encampments, down through the prairie that he called “sublime.”
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From St. Louis he traveled back to New York, reaching Minniesland in November. “Thank God, [I] found all my family quite well.”
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The family was bigger now, too. Victor and Johnny had remarried, and the house was filled with their children. Audubon’s hair and beard, all white now, were long, and he had brought back with him a coat trimmed with wolf fur. Johnny painted a portrait of his father, looking like a true western frontiersman.

As soon as his barrels of specimens arrived, Audubon sat down to perfect his drawings. With pencil and ink, he drew every whisker and eyelash. He used watercolor, pastel, and oil paint to show the softness of fur and its many shadings. His quadrupeds would be as lifelike as his birds.

As with the
Octavo
, the quadruped pictures were printed on lithographed plates and colored by hand. Audubon brought sample prints to Washington
DC
so that members of Congress could see them before buying a subscription. He was shocked at how little the politicians knew about the animals of their own country. “The Great Folks call the Rats Squirrels, the squirrels flying ones, and the Marmots, poor things, are regularly called Beavers or Musk Rats.”
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By 1845, he had finished half the illustrations for the book. But his eyesight was failing. His mind was beginning to fail, too. After a lifetime of drawing, writing, and exploring, he was nearing the end of his working days. The family team stepped in to help. Victor painted
backgrounds and sent specimens to John Bachman as Bachman wrote text. Johnny hunted for more quadrupeds and visited European museums to sketch polar bears and other arctic mammals. When he came home, he completed the other half of the drawings.
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
, with 150 large images, was published in three volumes from 1845 to 1848. It was a landmark of natural history, the most complete record of American mammals of its time.

John Bachman visited his old friend in 1848 and found him much changed. “Alas, my poor friend Audubon! The outlines of his beautiful face and form are there, but his noble mind is all in ruins. It is indescribably sad.”
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By 1850 the artist was spending his time wandering the grounds of Minniesland, withdrawn and silent. There came a day when he did not recognize his son.

Billy Bakewell paid a visit. When Audubon saw his hunting buddy from the old Mill Grove days, he sat up straighter and spoke. “Yes, yes, Billy! You go down that side of Long Pond, and I’ll go this side, and we’ll get the ducks.”
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These were his last words. John James Audubon died on January 27, 1851. He was sixty-six years old.

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Audubon Then and Now

“The study of ornithology must be a journey of pleasure,” Audubon wrote.
1
His own journey gave us the spectacular
The Birds of America
. It marked the beginning of modern ornithology, too, bringing naturalists out to where the birds really lived, to see and study. Audubon’s vision—to erase the boundary between ornithology and art—was realized in his historic achievement. Yet there were times, early in his career, when he feared that he would die unknown.

His life itself is one of the great American adventure stories. A passionate rambler, he tramped across the country from shortly after its founding to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans were poised to overspread and settle the continent. He met everyone from frontiersmen to presidents and wandered through a wilderness that was teeming with animals in numbers almost unimaginable today. No artist or naturalist traveled as far or saw as much. His art and writings form a unique kind of travelogue of America when it was new. Audubon had a powerful love for his country, and he understood how fast it was changing. In middle age, he looked back on an earlier trip down the Ohio River:

He was a man of his time and a man ahead of his time—a hunter who could kill a hundred birds in a day and an early environmentalist who worried about the survival of species from birds to buffalo. He probably discovered about twenty-three new bird species, although the exact number is hard to know.
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Taxonomy in Audubon’s lifetime was in its infancy, and today
DNA
analysis is leading to frequent revisions. Audubon was never able to depict all the North American birds. Ornithologists now count more than nine hundred species. But his gift to the world is greater even than his life’s work. It is also the legacy that his work has inspired.

The Audubon Society was founded in 1886 by the naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who was tutored by Lucy Audubon when he was a boy. Today the National Audubon Society includes hundreds of state chapters, nature centers, and sanctuaries. While Audubon the man
collected birds, the Audubon Society is dedicated to protecting and preserving them. For the twenty-first-century naturalist, bird watching has replaced shooting, and photography provides the close-ups that John James Audubon craved. The mission has evolved.

The Audubon Society and many other bird and wildlife organizations have inherited John James Audubon’s concern for bird species under threat and work to save them by educating the public and advocating for protective laws. Some species, such as the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, are gone forever. But others that Audubon admired—the whooping crane, the roseate spoonbill, the brown pelican—have been pulled back from the brink of extinction.

Naturalists in Audubon’s day worked in isolation, but now the Internet has brought birders together nationwide and worldwide. Websites enable organizations to sponsor global bird counts, track migrations, provide field guides, and play recorded birdcalls. Not only professional ornithologists but citizen-scientists, amateurs, contribute important information. How pleased Audubon would have been to know this, for he was self-taught and a citizen-scientist himself.

He is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City, not far from Minniesland. A tall monument over his grave is carved with birds and mammals, flowers and leaves.

“In imagination I am at this moment rambling along the banks of some murmuring streamlet . . . while the warblers and other sylvan choristers, equally fond of their wild retreats, are skipping in all the freedom of nature around me.”
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Appendix

Looking for Audubon and His World

Historical Sites

Museums and Galleries

Wildlife Societies and an Educational Institution