Under a Wild Sky (49 page)

Just before leaving Edinburgh, Audubon had sat for a portrait by John Woodhouse, who unlike his business-minded brother Victor had inherited his father's aptitude for drawing. The portrait, coming at the conclusion of his epic project, showed a different Audubon from the handsome, muscular huntsman John Syme had painted when Audubon first arrived in Scotland. Gone were the massive dark curls of hair cascading down his back, and gone too were the broad shoulders, the gun, and the hunting clothes. In John Woodhouse's picture, Audubon, appearing almost diminutive, is dressed in a suit coat, vest, and high-collared shirt. He sits stiffly in an overstuffed armchair, his hands folded in his lap. Audubon's hair, still longish, is parted, neatly combed, and mostly gray. His sober expression is made more so by the loss of most of his teeth, which gives him a tight-lipped, slightly downcast look.

Audubon and Bachman had begun contemplating a multivolume illustrated natural history of mammals they planned to call
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
. This was not the quiet, private retirement Audubon had often talked of during the long years he worked on
The Birds of America.
In fact, it was not clear that Audubon had earned enough to retire.
The Birds of America
had made his reputation, but had not made him wealthy.
Audubon estimated that his “great work” had cost him upwards of $115,000 to produce, not counting his own time.
While there never was a perfect accounting for all of the subscribers, it seemed that somewhere between 170 and 200 subscriptions had been filled at roughly $1,000 each. Almost the instant Havell had completed his work, Audubon decided to publish a smaller version of
The Birds of America
—an admission, of a sort, that there might be a market for a less expensive and
cumbersome edition.
The “little work,” as Audubon called it, was a project for John Woodhouse, who went to work with a publisher and lithographer in Philadelphia, reducing his father's life-size drawings by means of a camera lucida, a temperamental device that employed a system of prisms and lenses to project a scaled-down image onto paper where it could be traced. With skill and patience, the image could be copied over and then transferred to an engraving—in this case onto stone. Audubon had high hopes for the little work.

Although he could not be called rich, Audubon felt he now had the means to provide his family with a comfortable home and to undertake his long-wished-for expedition to the western United States. Audubon still thought he would like to see what was beyond the America he already knew. Bachman, who declined to accompany him, promised to compose the text for the mammal drawings Audubon would make on his trip.
In the meantime, Audubon applied for a permit from the mayor of New York to shoot rats in the Battery so he could paint those.

In 1841, the Audubons, who had been living in an apartment in New York, brought a tract of land “in the country.” It was a parcel of nearly forty acres on the Hudson River, in the area of upper Manhattan that would come to be known as Washington Heights, between 155th and 158th Streets. The land was wooded and sloped toward the river.
Audubon named it “Minnie's Land,” after an odd Scottish variant on Lucy's name that he'd picked up in Edinburgh. They built a big, square, two-story house, with ample porches front and back.
Forever in love with rivers, Audubon had steps built from the front porch down to a large patio they called the
piazza
, where they could sit and watch the Hudson flowing past.
Later on, Victor and John Woodhouse built houses on the property too, and Audubon's grandchildren would one day recall him as a tall, white-haired old gentleman who played with them and taught them to dance in a house by a river.

Audubon, dressed in a “dark frock coat, velvet vest, and blue hunting shirt,” left for the West in March of 1843.
The expedition, on which he planned to ascend the Missouri River into the Yellowstone country of Montana and possibly beyond, included a wealthy farmer named Ed Harris, whom Audubon had met on his first visit to Philadelphia in 1824 and who had also gone with him to Texas a few years earlier. They took with
them an assistant painter, a taxidermist, and one general helper.
The party went by train to Baltimore, then via stagecoach to Wheeling, West Virginia, where they caught a steamboat to Louisville. Audubon stayed briefly with Lucy's brother William.
They next boarded a filthy, dilapidated steamer named
Gallant
that Audubon rode in stoic misery to St. Louis.

Audubon spent four weeks in St. Louis, making ready to once more leave civilization. Reporters there were struck by his appearance.
They described him as “quite an aged man.” But while he had “silver locks and weight of years upon him,” Audubon seemed to everyone still strong and energetic, thanks, it was assumed, to a sturdy constitution and an active life. Audubon, who'd actually spent the better part of the last seventeen years writing and drawing, was only fifty-seven.

On the morning of April 25, the day before his birthday, Audubon and his fellow expeditioners walked to the levee and boarded the steamboat
Omega
, which was pointing upriver. About a hundred fur trappers, a wretched lot, were also traveling on the boat. Most had gotten drunk the night before, and quite a few were still drunk. While the captain rounded them up, Audubon stood patiently on the deck watching the brown waters of the Mississippi sliding by. Just before noon the
Omega
's boiler was stoked. Audubon felt the wheels begin to turn as the lines were cast off and the boat angled into the current, where it hung motionless for a long moment before gathering speed and moving away toward the frontier.

16

AFTER

Corvus corax
: The Raven

There, amid the tall grass of the far-extended prairies of the West, in the solemn forests of the North, on the heights of the midland mountains, by the shores of the boundless ocean, and on the bosom of the vast lakes and magnificent rivers, have I sought to search out the things which have been hidden since the creation of this wondrous world, or seen only by the naked Indian, who has, for ages, dwelt in the gorgeous but melancholy wilderness.

—Ornithological Biography

J
ohn James Audubon died at his home in New York City on January 27, 1851. He was sixty-five.
Near the end he was in pain and paralyzed, but before he became unconscious he opened his eyes and gave a “wistful” look at Lucy, Victor, and John Woodhouse, who were at his bedside. Sometime earlier, Audubon had spoken his last words to Lucy's younger brother, William Bakewell. Bakewell, who had been a boy of five when Audubon first called on his sister at Fatland Ford, had later hunted and tramped the woods with Audubon in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Now in his fifties, Bakewell had come for a last look at his brother-in-law. Audubon, who hadn't said a lucid thing for some time, suddenly looked intently at Bakewell and exclaimed, “Yes, yes, Billy!
You go down that side of Long Pond, and I'll go this side and we'll get some ducks.”

Audubon's addition to the taxonomic inventory of American birds was substantial. No firm count of the number of species he discovered or even depicted is possible because species are even today continually reclassified. But
The Birds of America
was a great leap forward. Alexander Wilson had drawn about 250 species.
Audubon—by a fair estimate—represented more than 440 species. He happily named many of his newly discovered birds for friends and colleagues: Bonaparte's Flycatcher, the Rathbone Warbler, Bartram's Vireo, Swainson's Warbler, MacGillivray's
Warbler, Bachman's Sparrow. There was an Audubon's Warbler and an Audubon's Shearwater, though both seemed to have been named for the artist himself and not for Lucy.
Audubon paid tribute to her in a quite different way, instructing Havell to engrave in the caption for Plate CLXXV, the swamp sparrow, the words “Drawn from Nature by Mrs. Lucy Audubon” in place of his own usual credit. The drawing was, of course, by Audubon.

Audubon was fifty-four when he completed
The Birds of America
and
Ornithological Biography
. The mental strain and physical exhaustion he endured before and during their publication took a toll, and in truth he was not the same man after his “great work” was done. His collaboration with John Bachman on
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
, which occupied him for several years, was a mixed success.
On the expedition to the West, Audubon and his companions got as far as Fort Union, near the mouth of the Yellowstone River in far western North Dakota. They passed much of their time there hunting buffalo, which they killed in unconscionable numbers, taking only the tongues and leaving the carcasses to the wolves and vultures. Audubon, who uncharacteristically seemed less energetic as the expedition wore on, lingered in camp, writing and drawing.
The buffalo slaughter disgusted him, and he seemed not to care to hunt other animals on his own. After eight months, they returned home with what John Bachman said was a meager and disappointing collection of new mammals. Audubon did, however, find fourteen species of birds to add to later editions of
The Birds of America.

Both Victor and John Woodhouse contributed significantly to
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
, which was initially published between 1845 and 1848 in three volumes at the “imperial” folio size, on pages about twenty-eight by twenty-two inches.
Both sons worked on background landscapes, as did Maria Martin down in Charleston. The mammals were not, of course, life-sized, as the birds had been.
But Audubon used much the same technique in drawing them, wiring freshly killed specimens into graceful poses and then outlining the figure in pencil before working over the image with watercolors and pastels. The results were often breathtaking, especially the delicate, soft textures Audubon achieved in depicting fur and hair. In one of his plates, for the gray squirrel, Audubon copied the animal he had used in the engraving for the barred owl in
The Birds of America.
For the otter, he went back to his tried-and-true image of the snarling animal caught in a trap—minus
the trap. Audubon did not see
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
through to completion.
In the end, about half the animals were painted by John Woodhouse, a number of them from specimens he studied in museum collections in England.

Audubon declined noticeably after his return from the Western expedition.
His eyesight dimmed and he started to drink to excess from time to time.
By 1846 he had stopped working.
A year later he wrote his last letters. In the spring of 1848, John Bachman visited the Audubons at Minnie's Land and was shocked at Audubon's condition.
Writing home to Maria Martin, Bachman said Audubon was no longer himself. “Alas, my poor friend Audubon, the outlines of his countenance and his form are there,” said Bachman, “but his noble mind is all in ruins.”

The cause of this precipitous collapse is not certain.
Audubon may have suffered one or more small strokes.
In 1833, while staying in Boston, Audubon had suffered a brief paralysis that was almost certainly what is known today as a transient ischemic attack, a mini-stroke. These not-uncommon events are caused by the temporary clogging of a small artery in the brain by either a tiny blood clot or a speck of plaque breaking loose from a vein. The symptoms, though alarming, are short-lived and do no lasting damage to the brain. But they can be indicative of a predisposition to a more severe stroke at a later time.

Audubon seemed to age at an accelerated rate.
His hair turned white and his once-handsome features collapsed, his toothless mouth sinking into his chin in a perpetual grimace. By the time he was in his early sixties, Audubon looked at least twenty years older than he was. A hard-to-characterize dementia accompanied his physical breakdown. It may have been Alzheimer's disease.
Audubon became less communicative, though his craziness was often expressed in childish pranks—hiding things or ringing the dinner bell at odd times. Audubon would not go to bed at night without kisses from all the women in the house, and he insisted on being sung to in French as he went to sleep. Any of these symptoms could simply have resulted from early senility following a hard life.

It's also possible that some of Audubon's health problems were related to his frequent exposure to arsenic, which he had used throughout his career as a preservative for bird skins. He also endured lesser exposures to mercury, which was used in taxidermy, and to the toxic compounds present in oil paints.
Chronic exposure to such toxins can cause symptoms not unlike Audubon's—including the premature loss of teeth,
though poor hygiene could well have been the cause of both Audubon and Lucy's dental problems. Like most naturalists and painters of the time, Audubon knew instinctively that some of substances he handled were toxic. He complained, for example, of the ill effects he experienced when grinding his own oil paints.
But he assumed that these effects were short-lived—comparable to the experience he once had in trying to kill an eagle with carbon monoxide. The charcoal that Audubon burned in a small room for nearly two days in an unsuccessful attempt to euthanize the bird instead nearly asphyxiated the naturalist himself.

In the spring of 1845, not long before his mind clouded over forever, Audubon went to Philadelphia on business.
He called on one of his subscribers there, the American Philosophical Society, which had been in arrears on its payments for a number of years.

The Philosophical Society, formed in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, was the oldest learned institution in the country.
It was housed in a handsome old two-and-a-half-story brick building on Second Street, adjacent to Independence Hall. When Audubon got there, the official on duty was one of the many members who also belonged to the Academy of Natural Sciences.
It was George Ord. Twenty-one years had passed since their last meeting. Apparently the unexpected encounter was cordial enough. Ord, abashed at being confronted by the still formidable woodsman, listened politely as Audubon explained his ongoing project with the quadrupeds.
Ord thought him hopeless, a fool who should have known by then that such expensive projects were doomed.
But, as Ord later said, “you can do nothing with an enthusiast.”