Ep. 12: John James Audubon and Vanishing America | The American West

Before 1850 the artist and naturalist John James Audubon was America’s most famous celebrity. His Birds of America was widely regarded as “the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature.” But like Thoreau, Audubon was also a witness to the growing destruction of wild America. That was particularly evident when he and his sons journeyed up the Missouri River in the early 1840s to finish Audubon’s book on the mammals of America. Stunned at the staggering diversity and abundance of wild creatures visible in the West, Audubon soon despaired at the wholesale (and to him) senseless destruction he saw, a disturbing insight into human nature on a continent Audubon loved and tried to preserve in paint and words. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  With his international fame as the most American of artist naturalists, John James Audubon amazed the world with his life-size paintings of nearly 500 American birds. But by the time of his Western journey for a book on American mammals, he had grown depressed at the widespread destruction of nature in America. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  John James Audubon and Vanishing America.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  In the 1850s, late in his life, the famed American writer Henry David Thoreau looked back on the colonial past and early American history and felt personally injured. By then, the number of animals and birds that had disappeared or drastically declined in the East was shocking to anyone who paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the great auk's, were entirely gone, driven to extinction. Whooping cranes and sandhill cranes were rarely, if ever, seen. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys.

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  Heath hens, passenger pigeons, trumpeter swans, even piliated woodpeckers and ravens had become rare. Reading accounts like William Wood's of the New England they both shared but two centuries apart in time, Thoreau sat down to his journal one morning in March of 1857 and, as thought followed thought, took up his pen and scribbled a stark, powerful line: "I am that citizen whom I pity." I can imagine Thoreau, at first reflective as he sat at his desk in the morning twilight, becoming more irate by the minute.

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  "When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here," he finally sat down in his ledger, "the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country."

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  As he went on, I imagined his mind growing ever darker. "I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring," for instance, "thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then to my chagrin, I hear that it's but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places."

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  This experience, he realized, was like attending a symphony, then understanding that many of the finest instruments were missing, their contributions to the score silenced. Or, as he pushed the idea, like looking into the night sky, only to discover that familiar constellations had vanished.

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  No one else had put American history in quite this way, and no one since has said it so movingly. "I should not like to think some demi-god had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars," Thoreau raged. "I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth."

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  One person who knew America's and the West's entire heaven and entire earth better than anyone, and gave anguished witness to its passing, was the naturalist, painter, writer, John James Audubon. Like Thoreau, Audubon benefited from a strategic placement in the American story. Native peoples had spent 23,000 years studying and learning America's animals, a stupendous body of oral knowledge, but one also badly damaged in the colonial disease epidemics that took away so many native historians. Europeans and Africans, on the other hand, came from worlds away.

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  Almost everything about America was brand-new to them. The continent turned out not to yield up griffins or sirens, mermaids or unicorns, those shimerical beings out of medieval fantasies, although occasional rumors of such did pop up in the journals of European observers. In 1614, a British ship's captain said he saw "a siren of great beauty" in New England waters. And in 1720, the French explorer Bernard de la Harpe claimed a unicorn sighting in today's Oklahoma. But America's real flesh and blood creatures, unexpected and puzzling as they were,

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  turned out to possess an enduring fascination all their own. For old-worlders, America's strangeness had begun with a new category of birds barely larger than bumblebees, whose hovering, diving, and buzzing earned them the name "humbirds." There was a large and beautiful parrot, and an astonishing bird that mimicked to perfection every other bird song it heard. There was a mammal that carried its young in a stomach pouch, and a squirrel that flew like a bat. Endless rivers of wild pigeons flowed at fantastical speeds over the towering forests of America.

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  Some colonists told stories of wild cattle with humpbacks and lion manes, and tales carried like a scorpion stinger. Skeptics in Europe dismissed many of these stories, but those creatures all were real. So were America's poisonous snakes. From the first landings, Europeans were chilled to find that America possessed deadly snakes, including one that telegraphed intention to strike with an angry, rattling warning. As one account put it, "There are a thousand different kinds of birds and beasts of the forest which have never been known, neither in shape nor name,

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  neither among the Latins, nor Greeks, nor any other nations of the world."

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  This human interest in birds and animals is inherent and millions of years old in us. Even today, our evolutionary origins, among other creatures, leads us to expose human toddlers to images of birds and animals as a first step in learning about a diverse world. That's a bedrock foundation of human cultural training. We were made by our past to be naturalists. But for colonial Europeans, convinced by their religion that, as a result of divine design, humans were exceptional, different from all other living things, and possessed also of an economic system

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  that regarded wildlife as potential sources of wealth, a fascination with America's biological diversity was never merely curiosity about never-before-seen creatures. By John James Audubon's time, he was alive from 1785 to 1851, natural history had acquired a purpose. Europe's colonial-age royal societies had given natural history the task of determining whether the new species emerging from the Americas and elsewhere held advantages for the colonial enterprise. One of the Age of Reason's breakthroughs was the so-called "scientific method",

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  which rested on a critical assessment of evidence and conclusions that other disinterested researchers could test for validity. Western science's supposed purpose was to enable humanity to re-establish the control over nature it had lost when God had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. By Audubon's time, though, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, which revealed the universal force of gravity and the laws of motion, had transformed humanity's grasp of nature. Although Audubon himself was not inclined to push at the philosophical edges of science,

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  during his lifetime, natural history was hoping for a similar grand theory to Newton's. Unfortunately, he did not quite live long enough to learn about Charles Darwin's ground-shattering insights into the diversity of life and humanity's true place in it. So pre-Darwinian natural history occupied a separate historical moment. Naturalists like Mark Catesby, John Lawson, Antoine Lepage du Prats, William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon were doing their best to learn America by

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  seeking out and engaging with the continent's remarkable and unique wildlife. Aided by the natural history geniuses of the age, in the 1700s, Carolus Linnaeus had established a universal system of species classification, and Alexander von Humboldt had laid out early ideas about ecology. Audubon and his fellows investigated and portrayed America's diverse life, never dreaming the animals and birds they studied often had histories that stretched back millions of years. What Audubon and other early naturalists also chronicled, though, was the beginning

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  of American nature's decline, a decline we now know would ultimately produce the loss of 2 million years of specially-evolved genetics. This happened in the space of a mere 400 years, and was well underway in Audubon's time.

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  Of all America's early naturalists, Audubon best answered the old world's fantasy imagination of what a European become American nature man should be. With wavy, shoulder-linked chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the easy grace of an athlete, Audubon remained lean and cut a striking figure all his life. Speaking English with an accent, a visitor once asked him, "You are a Frenchman, sire? You look like a Frenchman, and you speak like one." Audubon was the very definition of romantic charisma: a rough-hewn New World Byron, a white Indian.

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  As his own brother-in-law said of him, "Audubon was not just a painter of nature's subjects or noteworthy for the elegance of his figure, he was also an expert with guns, an excellent swimmer, and a fine fencer and dancer who had a way with dogs and horses. And with women, like the New Orleans beauty who asked to pose nude for him, or women of high station all over Europe." Like Byron, Audubon actually shared many traits with the Native American deity Coyote. He was hugely talented and charismatic, but like Coyote, Audubon was also vain, jealous, and rarely generous.

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  Destined to be one of early America's celebrity exports, Audubon was actually the out-of-wedlock son of a wealthy Frenchman, Captain Jean Audubon. Audubon spent his entire life hiding the actual facts of his birth, but he came into the world in the Caribbean, his mother the captain's young mistress, Jean Rabanne, who died soon after giving birth. Audubon always denied his mother, claiming he was the offspring of a Spanish woman of good breeding, not the result of his father's fling with a peasant chambermaid. Raised in Nat, along with another of Captain Audubon's illegitimate children,

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  Audubon dodged Napoleon's draft at age eighteen and fled to America in 1803. By the time he arrived in Pennsylvania, he had anglicized his name and promptly fell in love with a well-educated young neighbor named Lucy Bakewell. He'd been captivated by drawing and painting since childhood. Picturing nature was his first love, but for all his later mastery, he was self-taught. He claimed to have studied under Jacques Louis David in France, but there exists no evidence of it. In 1808, when he quit his father's farm and fled with his new bride Lucy to Kentucky

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  and then Louisiana, painting seems to have hovered in his mind like a beckoning evening star. The couple had two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, by 1812. To support them, Audubon tried farming, briefly utilizing slaves, which in our time has sometimes gotten him canceled. Then he tried business. He lost everything the family had accumulated in the Great Financial Crash of 1819, and that disaster led him to try, at age 34, to become a full-time painter. It was the literal fulfillment of the notion of art as an act of desperation.

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  Audubon's art interest had always been painting birds, but therein lay a problem. By 1819, all nine volumes of the bird book done by his predecessor and rival, Alexander Wilson, were out. Wilson had passed away, but his work was widely respected. Of their meeting, when the Scotsman was in Kentucky in 1810, Audubon's version had it that after Wilson proudly showed his work, Audubon had laid some of his own paintings on the store counter, stunning Wilson into dismayed silence. Wilson's account of his Kentucky visit barely mentioned Audubon at all. No friendship ever developed between them, a pattern in Audubon's life.

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  Audubon intended his opus, The Birds of America, to be a comprehensive book that would portray every bird in the United States life-sized. That meant the naturalists had to find, observe, collect, study, and paint every species, which brings up an unavoidable topic. All these early naturalists were shooters. To capture and paint the iridescent color shadings of a hummingbird's wing, the bird had to be in hand. For the bird to be in hand, it had to be dead. Audubon certainly observed and wrote about living birds, but to paint, he needed specimens,

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  which he wired in lifelike poses and tried to render rapidly, with either hand and sometimes both, before death glazed their eyes and dulled the vibrancy of their coloring. Audubon didn't just paint, he wrote, which means that his great published works, along with the journals he kept, have left us some of the most profound descriptions of a long-lost America. He inhabited an age, though, when much of the original wildlife abundance of the colonial period was disappearing. How could that be? In the mid-1700s, a 90-year-old American colonist had lamented to a visiting European

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  that during his lifetime, he had witnessed an orgy-like slaughter of Atlantic seaboard wildlife. No one would even accept blame for such destruction. When the animals disappeared, everyone pointed fingers at someone else. "It was the Indians' fault," the colonist claimed, "or the fault of the French, or the Spaniards." The European was aghast. "Why have none of your governments passed laws against such a thing?" The old man's answer summed up an enduring American sensibility. "The spirit of freedom in America," he told the visitor, "would never brook such an infringement of individual rights."

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  Killing as many animals as one wished was an American franchise, essential to freedom. Governments could pass all the laws they wanted, but his fellow citizens simply would not suffer them to be obeyed, he said.

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  So Audubon lived, painted, and wrote in the decades when much of original America was starting to wobble seriously. None of us alive now, for instance, has ever experienced anything like the full-body impact of passenger pigeon flights that had characterized the continent for 15 million years. They were a multi-sensory overload and often left people shocked in a state of nervous exhaustion. Millions of beating pigeon wings created a roar like a tornado shaking down a forest or a hurricane hitting shore. The air they moved was a palpable wind against hair and skin.

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  The flocks emitted a peculiar scent witnesses struggled to assign, something like the smell of a very large poultry farm but gamier. With hearing, touch, smell, all engaged to their limits, the visual impression then added the beautiful and the scarcely believed. The flights, one of the continent's iconic natural spectacles, resembled the windings of a vast and majestic river. Audubon said of these feathered rivers that when a hawk or a falcon swooped into one, the whole body of birds proceeded to create a kind of grand curvilinear swerve through the sky.

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  Then, like a snow-melt stream, routing around a boulder, all the succeeding flocks would reenact the same movement all day long. Audubon wrote that he saw one of these bird rivers that ran for three days. Then there was America's giant woodpecker. From its dagger-like bill to the stiff forked tail that propped it upright on tree trunks, the ivory-billed woodpecker was nearly a two-foot-tall woodpecker. In flight, its wingspan extended two and a half feet. The ivory-billed was the second-largest woodpecker in the world, exceeded only by its genetic kin, the imperial woodpecker of Mexico.

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  Native people had long admired its disposition and courage. Attired as if in a tuxedo, the ivory bill's black body was artfully set off by a pair of white stripes extending from its yellow eyes to a large patch of white feathers on its back. Matching white strips on both sides of the trailing wing edges made it easy to identify in flight. Both sexes had topknot crests, but the male's was a livid scarlet, giving the bird an air of formal, self-aware magnificence. Beneath the crest was a skull like a compressible sponge, built to absorb shocks.

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  When not in use, the eight-inch tongue recessed into storage around the back and top of its head. There were three eyelids, one of which was transparent and remained over the eye to protect it from flying debris. Its flight was direct and fast, with slight up-and-down undulations. Wing beats, then glide. Wing beats, then glide. All who wrote about seeing one mentioned the elegance of an ivory bill's passage through the forest and its strange, primal, toy trumpet cries. Audubon famously said that every time he saw an ivory bill fly through the old-growth

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  southern forest, its passage reminded him of an Anthony Van Dyke painting. The great awe notwithstanding, he could not imagine that America would ever lose such a creature. And one more act of witnessing. When he was still an aspiring naturalist painter, Audubon left those of us down the timeline a chilling account of how one other symbolic wild American animal experienced the war we were leveling at wildlife. That animal was the wolf, and the year was 1814, by which time American attitudes towards wolves had become almost vicious.

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  Spending the night with a farmer on the Vincent's Trace, Audubon accompanied his host to a capture pit that held three wolves. The wolves' sin? They had attacked the farmer's loose stock in a country by then bled of nearly all its deer, bison, and elk. From his colonial forebears, this farmer had learned exactly how to respond. Climbing into the pit, he one by one severed the wolves' hamstrings with a knife, exhibiting as little fear as if he had been marking lambs, Audubon wrote. Then the farmer dragged the wolves out so his dogs could tear them to pieces.

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  Audubon helped him pull up the largest, a black male wolf in the prime of life. Audubon described this beast of old world horror stories as "motionless with fright, as if dead, its disabled legs swinging to and fro, its jaws wide open, and the gurgle in its throat alone indicating that it was alive." Petrified with fear, the black wolf offered no resistance. It took the dogs less than a minute to stop the gurgling and extinguish his life. Even as he witnessed such things, including what he called "the dreadful havoc

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  of the passenger pigeon slaughter," Audubon initially reacted like most Americans of his time. "The great author of nature," as he put it, "would never allow something like extinction." Then, in the 1830s, he came face to face with reality. Seeking out a pair of great auk's, the northern hemisphere's penguins, to paint for his bird book, Audubon discovered that egg hunters already wiped out the last known American colony. He had to copy his auk's from a prior painting by another naturalist.

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  The experience forced him to reassess his faith in divinity and in human nature.

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  To preserve for posterity the natural world he experienced, Audubon first had to conduct fieldwork like that I've just described. After he'd labored over the paintings, he had to find an engraver and a team of printmakers, then enroll subscribers while he was writing the text that would become the final book. When no publisher in either Philadelphia or New York would take on his bird project, in 1826, Audubon hauled 400 of his bird drawings to England. Here at last, the handsome American was an immediate sensation. "A long-haired acian," someone wrote, "with locks spilling down his back."

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  Once the subscribers tore their eyes from Audubon, his gorgeous paintings with the birds and dramatic animated poses and everyone set in what the English called a landscape wholly American, trees, flowers, grass, even the tints of the sky and the waters worked their magic. He found his publisher in London, and he even merited advanced praise by the French, the Parisians never expecting such genius from an American. Somehow Audubon completed all these tasks on both sides of the Atlantic in just 12 years. When it finally appeared in 1839,

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  the birds of America didn't just present beautiful birds shown in their habitats. Audubon had painted them life-sized, a showstopper. The book was stunning, at 30 by 40 inches the size of a small house window. Even so, the biggest birds, like whooping cranes, wild turkeys, and great blue herons, had to strike unusual poses to fit the page without cropping legs or wings. The final version contained 435 plates and with the 85 western birds whose skins he had acquired from other naturalists, enumerated 489 species of American birds.

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  The world, especially the European world, where Audubon traveled, dined, partied, and sold subscriptions, was utterly entranced. No less than famous Parisian naturalist Georges Cuvier called the Birds of America "the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature." It's fitting, then, that a final poignant story in Audubon's life as a nature witness took place in the West. In the summer of 1843, Audubon finally made it to the sunset side of the continent.

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  While the Birds of America was gathering admirers and praise, he'd launched an ambitious new project. Assisted by his sons Victor and John Woodhouse, and their able father-in-law, John Bachmann, Audubon's team had published the first volume of a new work the previous year. It had a less catchy title than the Bird Book. "Viviparous Quadripeds of North America" was notably awkward. But the country beyond the Mississippi had now lured one of the world's premier nature artists aboard the steam vessel Omega to witness the fabled bestiary of Western America

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  on what Audubon called "the grand and last journey I intend to make as a naturalist." This was a world apart from anything Audubon had experienced before. The man had spent almost his entire life in nature. He'd witnessed what he'd estimated were billions of passenger pigeons in flight, waterfowl and unimaginable numbers migrating down the Mississippi flyway, captive wolves terrified by the human hand. Yet his journal makes clear that he was in no way prepared for what unfolded in front of them as the Omega chugged up the narrowing Missouri River, their destination, Fort Union, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri.

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  The West stunned him. In the east, the woods were alive with birdsong, but mammals were often secretive and hard to see. But in this wide-open country, animals were in sight almost constantly, and their diversity and strangeness were breathtaking. Two weeks before they arrived at Fort Union, not far from the eastern border of today's Montana, Audubon set down these scenes in his journal. I've excised some of his other observations here, so we can get to the pure experience of what he was seeing and feeling.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  We passed some beautiful scenery, and almost opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams, or bighorns, on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them. They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter, producing a beautiful picturesque view. We've seen many elks swimming the river.

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  These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we are now in. "In fact," Audubon wrote, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean-like prairies." "Face to face with a spectacle equaled only by the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara, marvelous aggregations of big grazers and their predators, all visible in the bright light and vast spaces, he was reeling."

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  He closed a letter to his wife that summer this way. "My head is actually swimming with excitement, and I cannot write anymore."

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  Audubon portrayed himself in 1843 as Hale and Hardy, although by the time he went west, his hair had gone white and many of his teeth were missing. But the eight-month journey wore on him. He declined a buffalo hunt because, as he said, "he was too near seventy." He had actually just turned 58. He took on painting animals, much as he had birds, by shooting them and wiring them into active poses, their eyes fixed on the viewer. But of the 150 plates in the quadruped's three volumes, he would paint only half of them.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  His son, John Woodhouse, less talented, did the rest. Perhaps Audubon's age made him value life, all life, more. But the artist had now begun to refer to himself as "a two-legged monster with a gun." And now in the West, he soured on seeing animals die. "Thousands multiplied by thousands of buffaloes are murdered in senseless play," he wrote. "What a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for nothing, or next to it."

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Audubon's personal experiences in the West were rich, but the scientific returns were meager. Meriwether Lewis, Catlin, and Bodmer had already been in this country. Of the 27 mammals the party collected on the Missouri, only the black-footed ferret, a primary predator in prairie dog ecology, turned out to be a new discovery. They did at least add 14 new birds to science.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  To approach the thoroughness of Birds of America, John Woodhouse had to make a separate trip to Texas, where he collected an ocelot, a red Texan wolf, and heard stories of muscular jaguars, which seemed to range over most of the southwest. What naturalists already knew of the animal life of the southwestern deserts and the west coast, the Ottomans painted from specimens. The book was a heroic effort, but not nearly the cultural triumph of birds, partly because Ottoman could not complete it, partly because, as one reviewer put the difference, "Birds were exalting and spiritual,

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  while mammals somehow seemed earthy and base."

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  Because Ottoman set it down in his journal, his lingering memory of how he experienced the trip remains. Here is his last impression of the west as they headed downriver.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  "Wolves howling and bulls roaring, just like the long-continued roll of a hundred drums, thousands upon thousands of buffaloes. The roaring can be heard for miles."

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• 41:26Speaker 02

  I got two hummingbird questions.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  All right.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give them to you both and you can take them. No hummingbirds in Europe?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And two, somewhere you wrote something, maybe it was in Wild New World, about someone selling or buying 4,000 hummingbird skins.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Which everyone want to do first?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there, no, hummingbirds are a North and South American species.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Man, I had no idea. What a surprising little treat that would be, man.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? It's all of a sudden, you're like, the hell is that?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that's, and that's how the Europeans reacted. It was like, what in the hell is this?

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I had never, I'd never knew that, man.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I pictured, I would've guessed they were everywhere, some version of them everywhere.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, they, they were purely an American feature and they were one of the things that Europeans immediately, I mean, at once, began to describe and marvel over. And yes, you are remembering correctly, that happened in the 1880s, at a time when the, the use of bird feathers for fashion was a big deal, both in America and in Europe. And the actual figure is, in one week, in the London commercial rooms,

• 42:51Speaker 03

  400,000, 400,000 hummingbird skins from America, from North America, from the United States.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  God, I feel like if you told me to get some, I could get you maybe like three or four over the summer? If I was really diligent about hanging out by my hummingbird feeder?

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Do you have any idea, how are they, like, what are they doing?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  They were using them.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  They gotta be like netting them or something.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  I think they were netting them. I think that's exactly what they were doing. I think they were catching them in what would be some sort of modified butterfly net or something. And just snagging them.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  And skinning them out.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  And skinning them out.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  So that someone can have some little shitting feather like that on a.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Yes, on a hat, on their clothing. Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  I never, you never, like, I'm surprised, like, with that volume, there'd be more accounts and mentions of it.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Well, I, I blurbed a new hummingbird book about two years ago, and according to this particular book, the trade in hummingbird skins in Latin America is still a going enterprise. So hummingbirds evidently are still being killed and skinned to preserve their, their feathers intact. And then apparently the skins are dried and they're used on, you know, I'm not sure exactly how they're used, but supposedly it's a going thing.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Tell you, you wanna get on my kid's bad side, you'd bring harm to a hummingbird.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think a lot of people would feel that way. Yeah. I think a lot of people would. Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 05

  Audubon is one of those characters that, from a contemporary perspective, there's a little bit of irony in what they do. In that he's killing these birds, you know, you think of the Audubon Society.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  This is over, this is over, people.

• 44:45Speaker 05

  You don't want this questioned?

• 44:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  Go ahead and ask it. Go ahead and ask it. This is over observed, I feel.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Over observed, that, that Audubon killed birds.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Well, no, it's like, it's inconsequential in the scheme of things.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  I, I just, I think, wha- what I'm interested in is this early, I mean, some, he's, he's not a scientist. He's, he's working in the field of natural history, and I think, like, there's a really interesting distinction between natural history and, and quote unquote, modern science, where a lot of it just has to do with description.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 05

  And collection and cataloging and, um, in, you know, inherently in that you're killing a lot of stuff. Like, up until the, you know, early 20th century, there's a lot of people who are just collecting things, right?

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's regarded, that sort of collection is regarded as one of the things actually that contributed to the demise of the Carolina parakeet.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  There, there were naturalists collecting for-

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Maybe this question does get us somewhere new.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  There was a naturalist in about 1901 collecting for, it was either the Smithsonian or for the American Museum of Natural History, who found a flock of about 40 Carolina parakeets because they existed in flocks, and he killed all but like two for the specimen collection for the museum he was working for. Now, I would say in Audubon's time, Audubon's take to be able to paint these birds is, I mean, it's pretty paltry. It's small.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's like a specimen.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a specimen, but-

• 46:29Speaker 02

  And then one could almost say, thank God he did, because now you have these renderings and understandings of them, that if he just said like, "Yeah, I don't know."

• 46:36Speaker 03

  And we have the actual-

• 46:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just, yeah, I mean, I think like, I just think, it's not that he contributed to the decline of these species, but it's, it's sort of anathema to our contemporary sensibilities. It's not like, "Hey, I'm into birds, let me kill a bunch of them and draw them all."

• 46:53Speaker 02

  It's not, I have friends that work on entomology surveys, aquatic invertebrates, baseline data collection and stream systems. You'd be aghast, you'd be aghast, because they'll take those invertebrates and put them in little vials of alcohol.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Heavens.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I told you, I told you'd be aghast.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, I, so I understand your question completely, Randall, and, but I think that this has been a feature of, you know, of science for a long time, and Audubon, I mean, Audubon's not doing it specifically to preserve collections in museums, although I do have on my phone right now, a photograph of the specimen, two of them in fact, that are just beautifully preserved Carolina parakeets that he collected on that 1843 Western trip.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Oh, where are those? Are they in New York?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  I think they're in New York, yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I held one-

• 47:57Speaker 03

  You held one?

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Well, they had everything, man. It was at the ornithological- You know, the Cornell. Cornell. Phil was there.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Cornell, that's right.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, they pull out that they kind of got like all the really good stuff in one tray.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  And they had Carolina parakeets, they had a passenger pigeon.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  And they had they had Ivory-billed woodpecker.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  I have I have not seen, yeah, wow, an Ivory-billed woodpecker, a specimen of that.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Am I making that up, Phil? No.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  So I, you know, and so one of the things that's happening that which you know very well, because you and I both are serving on a particular advisory board that does this kind of thing. Scientists are going and looking at that those kind of specimens for DNA.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  For in order to possibly clone a line of, say, black-footed ferrets, which has actually happened, that has additional genetic diversity so that the present population, which is based on only eight animals, is a little more diverse.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  So those specimens that were collected, and Audubon certainly collected some of them, have are actually turning out to be really important for modern science and maybe even for, you know, preserving endangered species today. But yeah, he shot them and he wired the animals into poses to be able to paint them. And so when you look at those marvelous paintings that he did of birds, and later he did the same thing with the mammals when he went west, I mean, that's what they are. They're actually already dead, but he would wire them into these lifelike poses. And then he would try to paint them really fast before they would start to lose the luster of the feathers and the eye, the liquid of the eye and all, because of course that vanishes

• 49:42Speaker 03

  really fast. And he learned to paint, George Catlin did the same thing, learn to be ambidextrous in painting them, so he could paint with both hands.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Seriously?

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  You know, Audubon, I didn't I didn't know he died. Probably not as young in his time as it would seem now, but sixty-one, right?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Sixty-one, yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  His friend visited him, you mentioned his friend visited him and talks about his mind was in shambles or somewhere.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Did he go, did he go mad, or did he have dementia?

• 50:11Speaker 03

  No, he had dementia.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, that's what he, that's what Bachmann, who was Bachmann, both of Audubon's sons, they married sisters, and so they had the same father-in-law, John Bachmann, who participated in that Western expedition, and Bachmann was a very good naturalist himself. And that's where that comes from. He went to see Audubon, and, and what he meant by his mind is all in shambles is that he had dementia.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  He didn't recognize Bachmann, or, or kind of know very much of anything at all.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  What was the understanding of that, at that time period?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Nobody really knew what it was, what caused it, but it was like cancer was, which we also didn't understand. It was an observable thing.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that was, it was attributed just to, to old age, although, I mean, even then, sixty-one was not very old.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he's only sixty-one years old when, when he passes away.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  But, you know, he had lived this really remarkable life, and as I tried to convey in the episode, I mean, he, he'd left us with this, you know, when you're trying to recreate a past world, somebody who both writes and also can come up with a visual representation of what they're seeing.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  In Audubon's case, being able to paint things, I mean, that's a hell of a record to leave to the future. And so, that's probably why people like that survive down through the, the timelines the way they do, is that they have given us a way to access decades, sometimes centuries in the past. And I think his, Audubon's writing is as compelling and as worthwhile as, you know, his art and rendering all these creatures. But his, his task, his, that he set himself, we talked about Catlin before. Catlin, of course, wanted to preserve everything he could about American Indians before they were lost to time and history.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And what Audubon's task was, he wanted to paint every animal, every mammal and every bird that existed in North America. He wanted to get every one of them in his books. So he was trying to do a complete natural history. Of course, he, as we know, many, many things have been discovered since Audubon's time, but for his time, he was pretty thorough.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Want to run any more questions by me for approval, Randall?

• 52:50Speaker 05

  I think, so one of the, one of the things that I picked up on the article or in the, in the episode is, like, I think of Audubon as being this very clinical, descriptive, methodical artist and writer, but he also has this sort of flair for the dramatic and he's got this personality that kind of reminds me of Buffalo Bill.

• 53:16Speaker 05

  And then I recalled that when we were working on our Boone project, this, the story about Daniel Boone barking squirrels is written down by Audubon, who claims to have met him.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Filson.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  No, no, this is from Audubon.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Well, that was Audubon?

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, he claims to have met him when he went out west, or when he, he went to Kentucky. But the dates for when Audubon claims to have met Boone don't really line up with when Boone was actually in Kentucky.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I had in my head for a minute that that was that John Filson dude.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  No, Filson was the biographer.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, Filson is the biographer, but Audubon is where we get the story of barking squirrels. And it doesn't line up.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Like Boone wasn't in the state that Audubon says he was in.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, and there was, you know, the, the, it made me wonder like how.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Are there other instances we know, like what other sort of colorful aspects are there to Audubon's character? Because remembering that anecdote made me think like, maybe this guy had a, did this more often than not in terms of inventing things that happened to him, or?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Well, he was, yeah, he was egotistical. And so he wasn't beyond, I think, creating a story like that to, to sort of illustrate his, you know, his presence in the world, how he got around, who all he met. I mean, he, you know, when you read about the years when he's in Europe, I mean, he, he claims to have met frigging everybody, you know, everybody who was in Europe. And so, yeah, it doesn't surprise me, Randall. I don't know that, that particular story about the Audubon writing about bin barking squirrels. But, yeah, the fact that-

• 55:09Speaker 02

  He even claims they sat down and had a dinner of squirrels.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, he said he sat, he sat on the riverbank with them for the afternoon. They got all they needed for dinner.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  But, but there are characters like that, sort of when you peel back the veneer, you realize that there's a lot of, you know, fabrication, maybe, or self-aggrandizement.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think Audubon was not, not above that.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  As I, you know, said, he, he was not generous about other people. Anybody else who, you know, who had any kind of success, Audubon tended to kind of denigrate their success. And so he wasn't-

• 55:55Speaker 05

  Even besides other painters.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, even besides other painters. But, I mean, probably the most, you know, the most well-known example of it is that meeting between him and Alexander Wilson. I mean, Alexander Wilson is the true beginning of American ornithology. This guy did nine, he was a Scotsman who had immigrated to America. And he did nine volumes of books about American birds. I mean, he never went west or anything like that, but- Before Audubon was ever on the scene, Alexander Wilson was doing this and he was not nearly as good a painter as Audubon was, but he was a pretty good scientific observer and the scientists in America, that's what they appreciated about him. But he and Audubon

• 56:40Speaker 03

  met at one point and when, because Wilson was traveling around the country, when you had a book like that, what you did was you sold subscriptions to it and you, without a publisher, a marketing and publicity departments to help you sell your work, you just went around the country and you knocked on, here's a town that's got two doctors in it and a lawyer, those people will have the money and the educations and the interest to want a book about birds. And so Wilson was traveling through Kentucky and he walked into a hardware store, apparently, and it was a hardware store that John James Audubon was running.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  And as Audubon tells the story, Wilson comes in and says, I'm selling subscriptions to a new book on birds. And of course, Audubon has already been working on his own, he's already, and so Wilson opens up, you know, his portfolio and shows Audubon eight or 10 of his paintings. And Audubon says, you know, he nods and everything and, and yeah, that's really nice. And then he reaches under the counter and pulls some of his own paintings out and puts them on the counter. And according to Audubon's version of things, Wilson was stunned into silence and gathered up his portfolio and turned around and marched out

• 58:06Speaker 03

  of the hardware store immediately. Wilson's version is, he hardly even recounts having met John James Audubon.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Let alone it being like a career ending moment for him.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like that. So.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  You know, there's that, uh, in There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day Lewis's character has a line where he says, there's a competitiveness in me. I don't want anyone else to succeed but me.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think Audubon had that same feeling.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you, Dan.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Oh, you bet.

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