October 7, 2025 • 53 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
With his international fame as the most American of artists. Naturalists,
John James Audubon amazed the world with his life size
paintings of nearly five hundred 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
(00:22):
in America. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West,
brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt
meets the harvest. A portion of each battle goes to
support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck
Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsibly John James Audobon and Banishing America.
(01:12):
In the eighteen fifties, late in his life, the famed
American writer Henry David Thureaux 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
(01:32):
paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the Great Auks,
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.
(01:53):
Heath hens, passenger pigeons, trumpeter, swans, even pilliated woodpeckers and
ravens had become I'm rare reading accounts like William Woods
of the New England. They both shared, but two centuries
apart in time. Threw sat down to his journal one
morning in March of eighteen fifty seven, and his thought
(02:15):
follow of 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 when I consider that the nobler animals have
(02:39):
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 attained, and as it were, emasculated country. As he
(03:00):
went on, I imagine 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
(03:22):
and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. This experience,
he realized, was like attending a symphony, then understanding that
many of the finest instruments were missing their contributions to
the score silence, or as he pushed the idea, like
(03:44):
looking into the night sky only to discover that familiar
constellations had vanished. 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
demigod had come before me and picked out some of
(04:07):
the best of the stars thereau raged, I wished to
know an entire heaven and an entire earth. One person
who knew America's and the West's entire heaven and entire
(04:30):
earth better than anyone, and gave anguished witness to its
passing was the naturalist painter writer John James Ottobon. Like Threau,
Autubon benefited from a strategic placement in the American story.
Native peoples had spent twenty three thousand years studying and
(04:51):
learning America's animals us 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. Almost everything about
America was brand new to them. The continent turned out
(05:13):
not to yield up griffins or sirens, mermaids or unicorns,
those chimerical beings out of medieval fantasies, although occasional rumors
of such did pop up in the journals of European observers.
In sixteen fourteen, a British ship's captain said he saw
a siren of great beauty in New England waters, and
(05:37):
in seventeen twenty, the French explorer Bernard de la Harp
claimed a unicorn sighting in today's Oklahoma. But America's real
flesh and bud creatures, unexpected and puzzling as they were,
turned out to possess and enduring fascination all their own
for old worlders. America's strangeness had begun with a new
(06:00):
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,
(06:24):
and a squirrel that flew like a bat. Endless rivers
of wild pigeons flowed at fantastical speeds over the towering
forests of America. Some colonists told stories of wild cattle
with humpbacks and lion manes and tails carried like a
scorpion stinger. Skeptics in Europe dismissed many of these stories,
(06:47):
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, and lluting one that telegraphed intention
to strike with an angry, rattling warning. As one account
put it, there are a thousand different kinds of birds
(07:11):
and beasts of the forest which have never been known,
neither in shape nor name, neither among the Latins, nor Greeks,
nor any other nations.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
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
(07:45):
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
accept l different from all other living things and possessed
also of an economic system that regarded wildlife as potential
(08:08):
sources of wealth. A fascination with America's biological diversity was
never merely curiosity about never before seeing creatures. By John
James Audubn's time he was alive from seventeen eighty five
to eighteen fifty one, natural history had acquired a purpose.
(08:30):
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 Reasons breakthroughs was the so called
scientific method, which rested on a critical assessment of evidence
(08:54):
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 Ottobon's time, though, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, which revealed
(09:20):
the universal force of gravity and the laws of motion,
had transformed humanity's grasp of nature. Although Ottobon himself was
not inclined to push at the philosophical edges of science,
during his lifetime, natural history was hoping for a similar
grand theory to Newton's. Unfortunately, he did not quite live
(09:44):
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 hisay historical moment.
Naturalists like Mark Catesby, John Lawson, Antoine Lapage du Pratz,
(10:08):
William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Ottobon were doing
their best to learn America by seeking out and engaging
with the continent's remarkable and unique wildlife, aided by the
natural history geniuses of the age. In the seventeen hundreds,
caroless Linnaeus had established a universal system of species classification,
(10:32):
and Alexander von Humboldt had laid out early ideas about ecology.
Autobu 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 Audobon and
other early nationalists also chronicle, though, was the beginning of
(10:56):
American nature's decline, a decline we now know would ultimately
produced the loss of two million years of specially evolved genetics.
This happened in the space of a mere four hundred
years and was well underway in Audubon's time. Of all
(11:18):
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's shoulder, linked chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the
easy grace of an athlete. Automon remained lean and cut
(11:39):
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.
Audoman was the very definition of romantic charisma, a rough
hewn New world Byron of White Indian. As his own
(12:02):
brother in law said of him, Audubon was not just
a painter of nature 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 away with dogs and horses, and with women like
the New Orleans beauty who asked to pose nude for him.
(12:25):
Are women of high station all over Europe. Like Byron,
Audobon 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. Destined to be
(12:47):
one of early America's celebrity exports, Audubon was actually the
out of wedlock son of a wealthy Frenchman, Captain Jean Ottobon.
Audobon 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 Reban, who died
(13:12):
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 fleeing with a peasant chambermaid.
Raised in nat Along with another of Captain Otdobon's illegitimate children,
Audobon dodged Napoleon's draft at age eighteen and fled to
(13:35):
America in eighteen o three. 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,
(13:58):
he was self taught. He claimed to have studied under
Jacques Luis da Vide in France, but there exists no
evidence of it. In eighteen oh eight, when he quit
his father's farm and fled with his new bride Lucy
to Kentucky and then Louisiana, painting seems to have hovered
in his mind like a beckoning evening star. The couple
(14:20):
had two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse by eighteen twelve.
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 eighteen nineteen, and that disaster
(14:43):
led him to try, at age thirty four, to become
a full time painter. It was the literal fulfillment of
the notion of art as an act of desperation. Audubon's
art interests had always been painting birds, but therein lay
a problem. By eighteen nineteen, all nine volumes of the
(15:05):
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 eighteen ten, Audubon's version had it that after
Wilson proudly showed his work, Audubon had laid some of
(15:26):
his own paintings on the store counter, stunning Wilson into
dismayed silence. Wilson's account of his Kentucky visit barely mentioned
Audobon at all, no friendship ever developed between them, a
pattern in Audubon's life. Audubon intended his opus The Birds
(15:50):
of America to be a comprehensive book that would portray
every bird in the United States life sized. That meant
the natural has had to find, observe, collect, study, and
paint every species, which brings up an unavoidable topic. All
these early naturalists were shootests to capture and paint the
(16:14):
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. Ottomon certainly observed and wrote
about living birds, but to paint he needed specimens, which
he wired in lifelike poses and tried to render rapidly
with either hand and sometimes both, before death glazed their
(16:38):
eyes and dull the vibrancy of their coloring. Ottomon 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
(16:59):
while life abundance of the colonial period was disappearing. How
could that be In the mid seventeen hundreds, a ninety
year old American colonist had lamented to a visiting European
that during his lifetime he had witnessed an orgy like
slaughter of Atlantic seaboard wildlife. No one would even accept
(17:22):
blame for such destruction. When the animals disappeared, everyone pointed
fingers at someone else. It was the Indian's fault, the
colonists claimed, or the fault of the French or the Spaniards.
The European was a ghast. Why have none of your
governments passed laws against such a thing? The old man's
(17:44):
answer summed up and enduring American sensibility. The spirit of
freedom in America, he told the visitor, would never brook
such an infringement of individual rights. Killing as many animals
as one wished, was an American franchise essential to freedom.
(18:05):
Governments could pass all the laws they wanted, but his
fellow citizens simply would not suffer them to be obeyed,
he said. So. Automan 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
(18:28):
anything like the full body impact of passenger pigeon flights
that had characterized the continent for fifteen million years. They
were a multisensory 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
(18:50):
or a hurricane hitting shore. The air they moved was
a palpable wind against hair and skin. The flocks emitted
a peculiar scent. Witnesses struggled to assign something like the
smell of a very large poultry farm, but gameier with
hearing touch smell all engaged to their limits. The visual
(19:12):
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. Auburn said of these
feathered rivers that when a hawk or falcon swooped into one,
(19:33):
the whole body of birds proceeded to create a kind
of grand curvilinear swerve through the sky. Then, like a
snow melt stream routing around a boulder, all the succeeding
flocks would reenact the same movement all day long. Auburn
wrote that he saw one of these bird rivers that
(19:54):
ran for three days. Then there was America's giant wooden pecker.
From its dagger like bill to the stiff, forked tail
that propped it upright on tree trunks, the ivory bill
woodpecker was nearly a two foot tall woodpecker. In flight,
its wingspan extended two and a half feet. The ivory
(20:17):
bill was the second largest woodpecker in the world, exceeded
only by its genetic kin, the Imperial woodpecker of Mexico.
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
(20:39):
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 top not crests, but
the males was a livid scarlet, giving the bird an
air of formal, self aware magnificence. Beneath the crest was
(21:03):
a skull like a compressible sponge built to absorb shocks.
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
(21:24):
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. Automan famously said that every time he saw
(21:48):
an ivory bill fly through the old growth Southern forest,
its passage reminded him of an Anthony van Dyke painting
the Great Auke. Notwithstanding he could not imagined that America
would ever lose such a creature. And one more act
of witnessing, when he was still an aspiring naturalist painter,
(22:12):
Autobon 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 eighteen fourteen, by which
time American attitudes towards wolves had become almost vicious. Spending
(22:36):
the night with a farmer on the Vincennes Trace, Audobon
accompanied his host to a capture pit that held three wolves.
The wolf 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
(22:58):
exactly how to respond. Climbing into the pit, he one
by one severed the wolve's 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. Audubon helped him
(23:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It was alive.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
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 of the passenger
pigeons slaughter. Audubon initially reacted like most Americans of his time.
(24:10):
The great author of Nature, as he put it, would
never allow something like extinction. Then, in the eighteen thirties,
he came face to face with reality. Seeking out a
pair of great Owks, the Northern Hemispher's penguins to paint
for his Bird book, Audubon discovered that egg hunters already
(24:34):
wiped out the last known American colony. He had to
copy his ox from a prior painting by another naturalist.
The experience forced him to reassess his faith in divinity
and in human nature. To preserve for posterity the natural
(24:57):
world he experienced, Audubon first had to and duct fuel
work 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
(25:17):
publisher in either Philadelphia or New York would take on
his bird project, in eighteen twenty six, Audubon hauled four
hundred of his bird drawings to England. Here at last,
the handsome American was an immediate sensation. A long haired
Akian someone wrote with Locke spilling down his back. Once
(25:40):
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. Holy American trees, flowers, grass,
even the tints of the sky and the waters worked
their magic. He found his publisher in London, and he
(26:04):
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
twelve years. When it finally appeared in eighteen thirty nine,
The Birds of America didn't just present beautiful birds shown
(26:27):
in their habitats. Audubon had painted them life size. A showstopper,
the book was stunning, at thirty by forty 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 usual poses to fit the page without
(26:50):
cropping legs or wings. The final version contained four hundred
and thirty five plates, and with the eighty five Western
birds birds whose skins he had acquired from other naturalists,
enumerated four hundred eighty nine species of American birds. The world,
(27:10):
especially the European world, where Audubon traveled, dined, partied, and
soul subscriptions, was utterly entranced. No less than famous Parisian
naturalists Georges Cuvier called The Birds of America the greatest
monument ever erected by art to nature. It's fitting, then,
(27:36):
that a final poignant story in Audubon's life as a
nature witness took place in the West. In the summer
of eighteen forty three, Audubon finally made it to the
sunset side of the continent. While The Birds of America
was gathering admirers and praise, he had launched an ambitious
(27:56):
new project. Assisted by his son Victor and John Woodhouse
and their able father in law, John Bachmann, Audobon'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 Quadrupeds of North America was notably awkward,
(28:21):
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 fable bestiary of Western America, on
what Audubon called the grand and last journey I intend
to make as a naturalist. This was a world apart
(28:43):
from anything Audubon had experienced before. The man had spent
almost his entire life in nature. He'd witnessed what he
had 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
(29:05):
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. The west stunning. In the east,
the woods were alive with bird song, but mammals were
(29:27):
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. Automn set down these scenes in his journal.
(29:48):
I've excised some of his other observations here so we
can get to the pure experience of what he was
seeing and feeling. We've passed some beautiful scenery, and almost
opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or
big horns. On the summit of a hill. We saw
(30:10):
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
(30:32):
were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They
stared and then started at a handsome canner, producing a
beautiful picturesque view. We've seen many elks swimming the river.
These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever
there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's
(30:54):
the one we are now in. In fact, Autumn 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 equalled only by the Serengeti or the massaih Mara,
(31:17):
marvelous aggregations of big grazers and their predators, all visible
in the bright light and vast spaces he was reeling.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
He closed a.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Letter to his wife that summer this way my head
is actually swimming with excitement, and I cannot write anymore.
Automon portrayed himself in eighteen forty three as hale and hearty,
(31:51):
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 him he declined
a buffalo hunt, because, as he said he was two
near seventy, he had actually just turned fifty eight. He
took on painting animals much as he had birds, by
(32:14):
shooting them and wiring them into active poses, their eyes fixed.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
On the viewer.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
But of the one hundred and fifty plates in the
Quadruped's three volumes, he would paint only half of them.
His son, John Woodhouse, less talented did the rest. Perhaps
Ottoman's age made him value life, all life more, But
the artists had now begun to refer to himself as
(32:44):
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. What
a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for
(33:05):
nothing or next to it. Ottovin'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 twenty seven mammals the party collected on the
Missouri only the blackfooted ferret, a primary predator in prairie
(33:29):
dog ecology, turned out to be a new discovery. They
did at least add fourteen new birds to science. 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
(33:50):
muscular jaguars, which seemed to range over most of the Southwest.
What naturalists already knew of the animal life of the
Southwestern Deaders and the West Coast the Audubons painted from specimens.
The book was a heroic effort, but not nearly the
cultural triumph of Birds, partly because Audubon could not complete it,
(34:13):
partly because, as one reviewer put the difference, birds were
exalting and spiritual, while mammals somehow seemed earthy and base.
Because Audubon set it down in his journal, his lingering
memory of how he experienced the trip remains. Here is
(34:35):
his last impression of the West. As they headed down river,
wolves howling, and bulls roaring. Just like the long continued
role of a hundred drums thousands upon thousands of buffaloes,
the roaring can be heard for miles. Four years after
(35:01):
Audobon wrote that, his collaborator John Bachmann visited him at
his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and
found Audubon's noble mind is all in ruins. As Bachmann said,
the great naturalist was only sixty two. John James Ottoman
(35:23):
passed away three years later. In the same decade, Thureau
would write his Entire Heaven and Entire Earth passage, and
Charles Darwin would publish his blockbuster on the origin of species.
All three of them changed natural history and our sense
of ourselves for the rest of time.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
I got two humming bird questions. I'm gonna give them
to you both and you can take them. No hummingbirds
in Europe. And two somewhere you wrote something, maybe it
was in Wild New World about someone uh selling or
buying four thousand hummingbird skins.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yeah, which everyone want to do first.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah, so they're no hummingbirds are a North and South American.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
A surprising little would be man.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yes, well, I mean that's and that's how the Europeans reacted.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
It was like, what in the hell.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Is that I had never I'd never do that, man,
I picture, I would have guess. They were everywhere, some
version of them everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, now 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 eighteen
eighties at a time when the the use of bird
(37:14):
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 four hundred thousand, four
hundred thousand hummingbird skins from America, from North America, from
(37:36):
the United States.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
I feel like if you get some, I could get
you maybe like three or four over the summer if
I was really diligent about hanging out by my helping bird.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
How are they, like, what are they doing? They were
using netting them or something.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
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 find butterfly net
or something and just snagging them, skinning them out, and
skinning them.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
So someone can have some little shit and feather like
that on a.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
This on a hat on their clothing.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Yeah, and you'd never like, I'm surprised with that volume,
there'd be more accounts than mentions of it.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, I've blurbed a new hummingbird book about two years ago,
and according to this particular book, the trade in hummingbirds
skins in Latin America is still a going enterprise. So
hummingbirds evidently are still being killed and skinned to preserve
(38:42):
their their feathers intact. And then apparently the skins are
dried and they're used On.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
You know, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Sure exactly how they're used, but supposedly it's a going thing.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I tell you, you want to get on my kid's
bad side, you'd bring harm to a hummingbird.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
I think a lot of people would fail that.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
I think a lot of people would.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, Audubon is one of those characters that from a
contemporary perspective, there's a little bit of irony in what
they do, and that he's killing these birds. You know,
you think of the Audubon society.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
This is over. This is over people. You don't want
this question, no, go ahead and ask it. Go ahead.
I just is over observed. I feel over observed that
killed birds. Well, it's like it's it's inconsequential in the
scheme of things.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
I just I think what I'm interested in is this
early I mean some 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 tests to do with description and collection and cataloging,
(39:58):
and you know, inherently in that you're killing a lot
of stuff, like up until the early twentieth century. There's
a lot of people who are just collecting things.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, 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. No, there were naturalists collecting.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
For this question does get us somewhere new.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
There was a naturalist in about nineteen oh one collecting
for it was either the Smithsonian or for the American
Museum of Natural History, who found a flock of about
forty 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,
(40:51):
in Autubn's time, Autobn's take to be able to paint
these birds is, I mean, it's pretty paltry, it's small.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, that's a specimen.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, it's a specimen.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
But then one can almost say, thank god he did,
because now you have these renderings and understandings of them
that if he just said, like, I don't.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Know, and we have the actual 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 anathma to our contemporary sensibilities. So you're like, Hey,
I'm into birds, let me kill a bunch of them
and drama.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
It's not I have friends that work on entomology, surveys,
aquatic invertebrates, baseline data collection, and stream systems. You'd be
a ghast.
Speaker 4 (41:39):
You'd be a gast because they'll take those invertebrates and
put them little vials of alcohol.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Heavens, I told you, I told you to be a gas.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Well, yeah, I mean so, I understand your question completely, Randall.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
And but.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I think that this has been a feature of and
of science for a long time. And autoban, I mean,
Ottoman's not doing it specifically to preserve collections and museums,
although I do have on my phone right now a
photograph of the specimen, two of them in fact, that
(42:21):
are just beautifully preserved Carolina parakeets that he collected on
that eighteen forty three Western Oh where are those?
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Are they in New York?
Speaker 1 (42:30):
I think they're in New York.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yeah, I held one, you held well, they had everything. Man,
it was at the Ornithological you know, the Cornell Cornell
that's right, Yeah, they pull out that they kind of
got like all the really good stuff in one tray.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
And they had Carolina parakeets that had passenger pigeon. Yeah,
and that had that iverybild woodpecker I have I.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Have not seen Yeah, wow, ivorybuild woodpecker a specimen of that?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Am I making that upfill?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
So I you know. And so one of the things
that's happening, 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 in order
to possibly clone a line of say blackfooted ferris, which
(43:19):
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. So those specimens that were
collected and Autumn certainly collected some of them have are
actually turning out to be really important for modern science
(43:40):
and maybe even for you know, preserving endangered species today.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
But yeah, he.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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
(44:08):
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 really fast.
And he learned to paint. George Callen did the same thing,
learned to be ambidextrous painting them so he could paint
with seriously.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
Yeah, yeah, you know Audubon, I dodn't know. He died
probably not as young in his time as would seem now,
but sixty one sixty one. Yeah, his friend visited him.
You mentioned his friend visit him and talks about his
mind was in shambles or somewhere.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, did he go did he go mad? Or did
he have dementia? No, he had dementia.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
I mean, yeah, that's what Bachman, who was Bakman, both
of Ottoman's sons that they married sisters, and so they
had the same father in law, John Bachmann, who participated
in that Western expedition. And Bachman was a very good
naturalist himself, and that's where that comes from he went
to see Autubun and what he meant by his mind
(45:10):
as all in shambles is that he had dementia. He
didn't recognize Bachmann or or kind of no, pretty much
of anything at all.
Speaker 4 (45:18):
What was the understanding of that at that time period.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
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. Yeah, and that was it
was attributed just to old age, although I mean even
then sixty one was not very old, and he's only
(45:42):
sixty one years old when when he passes away, But
you know, he had lived this really remarkable life, and
as I tried to convey in the episode, I mean,
he left us with this. So when you're trying to
recreate a past world, somebody who both writes and also
(46:07):
can come up with a visual representation of what they're seeing,
in Ottoban'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 timelines the way they do is that they
have given us a way to access decades, sometimes centuries
(46:31):
in the past, and I think his Autoban's writing is
as compelling and as worthwhile as you know his art
and rendering all these creatures. But his task that he
set himself talked about Catland before Catland of course, wanted
to preserve everything he could about American Indians before they
(46:51):
were lost to time and history. And what Autoban'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
(47:12):
as we know, many many things have been discovered since
Ottoman's time, but for his time, he was pretty thorough.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
I want to run any more questions by me for
approval renal.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
One of the.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
One of the things that I picked up on the
article 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 flare for the dramatic,
and he's got this personality that kind of reminds me
(47:49):
of Buffalo Bill. And then I recalled that when we
were working on our Boon project. The story about Daniel
Boone barking squirrels is written down by Audubon, who claims to.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Have met him.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Wilson, No, no, this is from Audubon.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
Well that was Audubon.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah, he claims to have met him when he went
out west or when 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.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Oh I had in my head for a minute that
was that John Philson. Dude was a biographer.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, Philson is the biographer, but Audubon is where we
get the story of and it doesn't line up.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Like Boone wasn't in the state that Audubon says he
was in.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, and so and there was you know the It
made me wonder like, how are there other instances we know,
like what other sort of colorful aspects are there to
to Audubon's character, because remembering that anecdote made me think
like maybe this guy uh had did this more often
(48:55):
than not in terms of inventing things that happened to
him or.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well he was Yeah, he was egotistical and so he
wasn't beyond I think creating a story like that to
sort of illustrate his you know, his presence in the world,
(49:21):
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 freaking 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 autoban writing about
(49:41):
boon barking squirrels, but yeah, the fact.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Even claims they sat down and had a dinner of squirrels.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, he sat on the river bank with him for
the afternoon. They got all they needed for dinner. But
there are characters like that sort of when you peel
back to Veneer, you realize that there's a lot of
you know, fabrication maybe or self aggrandizement.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Yeah, and I think Ottoman was not above that. Yeah,
as I you know, said he he was not generous
about other people, anybody else who you know, who had
any kind of success. Autobn tended to kind of detegrate
(50:28):
their success, and so he.
Speaker 3 (50:30):
Wasn't even besides other painters, Yeah, even.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Besides other painters. But I mean probably the most uh,
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.
(50:56):
I mean he never went west or anything like that.
But before where Auduburn was ever on the scene, Alexander
Wilson was doing this and he was not nearly as
good a painter as Oudobn 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 met
(51:16):
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. Now, you just went around the
country and you knocked on here's a town that's got
(51:39):
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 Oudoburn
was running. And as Audubn tells the story, Wilson comes
(52:02):
in and says, I'm selling subscriptions to a new book
on birds. And of course Ottobon has already been working
on his own, he's already And so Wilson opens up,
you know, his portfolio and shows Audubon eight or ten
of his paintings, and Audubon says, you know, he nods
and everything, and yeah, that's really nice. And then he
(52:24):
reaches out of 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.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
Of the store immediately.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Wilson's version is he hardly even recounts having.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
Met let alone, it being like a career ending.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's like that.
Speaker 4 (52:54):
So you know, there's that, and there'll be blood. Daniel
day Lewis's character has the line he says, there's a
competitiveness in me. I don't want anyone else to succeed
but me.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
I think Automat had that same feeling.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
All right, Well, thank you dan Oh, you bet
With his international fame as the most American of artists. Naturalists,
John James Audubon amazed the world with his life size
paintings of nearly five hundred 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
(00:22):
in America. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West,
brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt
meets the harvest. A portion of each battle goes to
support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck
Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsibly John James Audobon and Banishing America.
(01:12):
In the eighteen fifties, late in his life, the famed
American writer Henry David Thureaux 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
(01:32):
paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the Great Auks,
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.
(01:53):
Heath hens, passenger pigeons, trumpeter, swans, even pilliated woodpeckers and
ravens had become I'm rare reading accounts like William Woods
of the New England. They both shared, but two centuries
apart in time. Threw sat down to his journal one
morning in March of eighteen fifty seven, and his thought
(02:15):
follow of 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 when I consider that the nobler animals have
(02:39):
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 attained, and as it were, emasculated country. As he
(03:00):
went on, I imagine 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
(03:22):
and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. This experience,
he realized, was like attending a symphony, then understanding that
many of the finest instruments were missing their contributions to
the score silence, or as he pushed the idea, like
(03:44):
looking into the night sky only to discover that familiar
constellations had vanished. 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
demigod had come before me and picked out some of
(04:07):
the best of the stars thereau raged, I wished to
know an entire heaven and an entire earth. One person
who knew America's and the West's entire heaven and entire
(04:30):
earth better than anyone, and gave anguished witness to its
passing was the naturalist painter writer John James Ottobon. Like Threau,
Autubon benefited from a strategic placement in the American story.
Native peoples had spent twenty three thousand years studying and
(04:51):
learning America's animals us 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. Almost everything about
America was brand new to them. The continent turned out
(05:13):
not to yield up griffins or sirens, mermaids or unicorns,
those chimerical beings out of medieval fantasies, although occasional rumors
of such did pop up in the journals of European observers.
In sixteen fourteen, a British ship's captain said he saw
a siren of great beauty in New England waters, and
(05:37):
in seventeen twenty, the French explorer Bernard de la Harp
claimed a unicorn sighting in today's Oklahoma. But America's real
flesh and bud creatures, unexpected and puzzling as they were,
turned out to possess and enduring fascination all their own
for old worlders. America's strangeness had begun with a new
(06:00):
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,
(06:24):
and a squirrel that flew like a bat. Endless rivers
of wild pigeons flowed at fantastical speeds over the towering
forests of America. Some colonists told stories of wild cattle
with humpbacks and lion manes and tails carried like a
scorpion stinger. Skeptics in Europe dismissed many of these stories,
(06:47):
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, and lluting one that telegraphed intention
to strike with an angry, rattling warning. As one account
put it, there are a thousand different kinds of birds
(07:11):
and beasts of the forest which have never been known,
neither in shape nor name, neither among the Latins, nor Greeks,
nor any other nations.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
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
(07:45):
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
accept l different from all other living things and possessed
also of an economic system that regarded wildlife as potential
(08:08):
sources of wealth. A fascination with America's biological diversity was
never merely curiosity about never before seeing creatures. By John
James Audubn's time he was alive from seventeen eighty five
to eighteen fifty one, natural history had acquired a purpose.
(08:30):
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 Reasons breakthroughs was the so called
scientific method, which rested on a critical assessment of evidence
(08:54):
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 Ottobon's time, though, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, which revealed
(09:20):
the universal force of gravity and the laws of motion,
had transformed humanity's grasp of nature. Although Ottobon himself was
not inclined to push at the philosophical edges of science,
during his lifetime, natural history was hoping for a similar
grand theory to Newton's. Unfortunately, he did not quite live
(09:44):
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 hisay historical moment.
Naturalists like Mark Catesby, John Lawson, Antoine Lapage du Pratz,
(10:08):
William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Ottobon were doing
their best to learn America by seeking out and engaging
with the continent's remarkable and unique wildlife, aided by the
natural history geniuses of the age. In the seventeen hundreds,
caroless Linnaeus had established a universal system of species classification,
(10:32):
and Alexander von Humboldt had laid out early ideas about ecology.
Autobu 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 Audobon and
other early nationalists also chronicle, though, was the beginning of
(10:56):
American nature's decline, a decline we now know would ultimately
produced the loss of two million years of specially evolved genetics.
This happened in the space of a mere four hundred
years and was well underway in Audubon's time. Of all
(11:18):
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's shoulder, linked chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the
easy grace of an athlete. Automon remained lean and cut
(11:39):
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.
Audoman was the very definition of romantic charisma, a rough
hewn New world Byron of White Indian. As his own
(12:02):
brother in law said of him, Audubon was not just
a painter of nature 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 away with dogs and horses, and with women like
the New Orleans beauty who asked to pose nude for him.
(12:25):
Are women of high station all over Europe. Like Byron,
Audobon 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. Destined to be
(12:47):
one of early America's celebrity exports, Audubon was actually the
out of wedlock son of a wealthy Frenchman, Captain Jean Ottobon.
Audobon 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 Reban, who died
(13:12):
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 fleeing with a peasant chambermaid.
Raised in nat Along with another of Captain Otdobon's illegitimate children,
Audobon dodged Napoleon's draft at age eighteen and fled to
(13:35):
America in eighteen o three. 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,
(13:58):
he was self taught. He claimed to have studied under
Jacques Luis da Vide in France, but there exists no
evidence of it. In eighteen oh eight, when he quit
his father's farm and fled with his new bride Lucy
to Kentucky and then Louisiana, painting seems to have hovered
in his mind like a beckoning evening star. The couple
(14:20):
had two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse by eighteen twelve.
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 eighteen nineteen, and that disaster
(14:43):
led him to try, at age thirty four, to become
a full time painter. It was the literal fulfillment of
the notion of art as an act of desperation. Audubon's
art interests had always been painting birds, but therein lay
a problem. By eighteen nineteen, all nine volumes of the
(15:05):
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 eighteen ten, Audubon's version had it that after
Wilson proudly showed his work, Audubon had laid some of
(15:26):
his own paintings on the store counter, stunning Wilson into
dismayed silence. Wilson's account of his Kentucky visit barely mentioned
Audobon at all, no friendship ever developed between them, a
pattern in Audubon's life. Audubon intended his opus The Birds
(15:50):
of America to be a comprehensive book that would portray
every bird in the United States life sized. That meant
the natural has had to find, observe, collect, study, and
paint every species, which brings up an unavoidable topic. All
these early naturalists were shootests to capture and paint the
(16:14):
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. Ottomon certainly observed and wrote
about living birds, but to paint he needed specimens, which
he wired in lifelike poses and tried to render rapidly
with either hand and sometimes both, before death glazed their
(16:38):
eyes and dull the vibrancy of their coloring. Ottomon 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
(16:59):
while life abundance of the colonial period was disappearing. How
could that be In the mid seventeen hundreds, a ninety
year old American colonist had lamented to a visiting European
that during his lifetime he had witnessed an orgy like
slaughter of Atlantic seaboard wildlife. No one would even accept
(17:22):
blame for such destruction. When the animals disappeared, everyone pointed
fingers at someone else. It was the Indian's fault, the
colonists claimed, or the fault of the French or the Spaniards.
The European was a ghast. Why have none of your
governments passed laws against such a thing? The old man's
(17:44):
answer summed up and enduring American sensibility. The spirit of
freedom in America, he told the visitor, would never brook
such an infringement of individual rights. Killing as many animals
as one wished, was an American franchise essential to freedom.
(18:05):
Governments could pass all the laws they wanted, but his
fellow citizens simply would not suffer them to be obeyed,
he said. So. Automan 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
(18:28):
anything like the full body impact of passenger pigeon flights
that had characterized the continent for fifteen million years. They
were a multisensory 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
(18:50):
or a hurricane hitting shore. The air they moved was
a palpable wind against hair and skin. The flocks emitted
a peculiar scent. Witnesses struggled to assign something like the
smell of a very large poultry farm, but gameier with
hearing touch smell all engaged to their limits. The visual
(19:12):
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. Auburn said of these
feathered rivers that when a hawk or falcon swooped into one,
(19:33):
the whole body of birds proceeded to create a kind
of grand curvilinear swerve through the sky. Then, like a
snow melt stream routing around a boulder, all the succeeding
flocks would reenact the same movement all day long. Auburn
wrote that he saw one of these bird rivers that
(19:54):
ran for three days. Then there was America's giant wooden pecker.
From its dagger like bill to the stiff, forked tail
that propped it upright on tree trunks, the ivory bill
woodpecker was nearly a two foot tall woodpecker. In flight,
its wingspan extended two and a half feet. The ivory
(20:17):
bill was the second largest woodpecker in the world, exceeded
only by its genetic kin, the Imperial woodpecker of Mexico.
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
(20:39):
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 top not crests, but
the males was a livid scarlet, giving the bird an
air of formal, self aware magnificence. Beneath the crest was
(21:03):
a skull like a compressible sponge built to absorb shocks.
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
(21:24):
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. Automan famously said that every time he saw
(21:48):
an ivory bill fly through the old growth Southern forest,
its passage reminded him of an Anthony van Dyke painting
the Great Auke. Notwithstanding he could not imagined that America
would ever lose such a creature. And one more act
of witnessing, when he was still an aspiring naturalist painter,
(22:12):
Autobon 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 eighteen fourteen, by which
time American attitudes towards wolves had become almost vicious. Spending
(22:36):
the night with a farmer on the Vincennes Trace, Audobon
accompanied his host to a capture pit that held three wolves.
The wolf 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
(22:58):
exactly how to respond. Climbing into the pit, he one
by one severed the wolve's 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. Audubon helped him
(23:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It was alive.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
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 of the passenger
pigeons slaughter. Audubon initially reacted like most Americans of his time.
(24:10):
The great author of Nature, as he put it, would
never allow something like extinction. Then, in the eighteen thirties,
he came face to face with reality. Seeking out a
pair of great Owks, the Northern Hemispher's penguins to paint
for his Bird book, Audubon discovered that egg hunters already
(24:34):
wiped out the last known American colony. He had to
copy his ox from a prior painting by another naturalist.
The experience forced him to reassess his faith in divinity
and in human nature. To preserve for posterity the natural
(24:57):
world he experienced, Audubon first had to and duct fuel
work 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
(25:17):
publisher in either Philadelphia or New York would take on
his bird project, in eighteen twenty six, Audubon hauled four
hundred of his bird drawings to England. Here at last,
the handsome American was an immediate sensation. A long haired
Akian someone wrote with Locke spilling down his back. Once
(25:40):
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. Holy American trees, flowers, grass,
even the tints of the sky and the waters worked
their magic. He found his publisher in London, and he
(26:04):
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
twelve years. When it finally appeared in eighteen thirty nine,
The Birds of America didn't just present beautiful birds shown
(26:27):
in their habitats. Audubon had painted them life size. A showstopper,
the book was stunning, at thirty by forty 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 usual poses to fit the page without
(26:50):
cropping legs or wings. The final version contained four hundred
and thirty five plates, and with the eighty five Western
birds birds whose skins he had acquired from other naturalists,
enumerated four hundred eighty nine species of American birds. The world,
(27:10):
especially the European world, where Audubon traveled, dined, partied, and
soul subscriptions, was utterly entranced. No less than famous Parisian
naturalists Georges Cuvier called The Birds of America the greatest
monument ever erected by art to nature. It's fitting, then,
(27:36):
that a final poignant story in Audubon's life as a
nature witness took place in the West. In the summer
of eighteen forty three, Audubon finally made it to the
sunset side of the continent. While The Birds of America
was gathering admirers and praise, he had launched an ambitious
(27:56):
new project. Assisted by his son Victor and John Woodhouse
and their able father in law, John Bachmann, Audobon'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 Quadrupeds of North America was notably awkward,
(28:21):
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 fable bestiary of Western America, on
what Audubon called the grand and last journey I intend
to make as a naturalist. This was a world apart
(28:43):
from anything Audubon had experienced before. The man had spent
almost his entire life in nature. He'd witnessed what he
had 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
(29:05):
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. The west stunning. In the east,
the woods were alive with bird song, but mammals were
(29:27):
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. Automn set down these scenes in his journal.
(29:48):
I've excised some of his other observations here so we
can get to the pure experience of what he was
seeing and feeling. We've passed some beautiful scenery, and almost
opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or
big horns. On the summit of a hill. We saw
(30:10):
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
(30:32):
were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They
stared and then started at a handsome canner, producing a
beautiful picturesque view. We've seen many elks swimming the river.
These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever
there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's
(30:54):
the one we are now in. In fact, Autumn 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 equalled only by the Serengeti or the massaih Mara,
(31:17):
marvelous aggregations of big grazers and their predators, all visible
in the bright light and vast spaces he was reeling.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
He closed a.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Letter to his wife that summer this way my head
is actually swimming with excitement, and I cannot write anymore.
Automon portrayed himself in eighteen forty three as hale and hearty,
(31:51):
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 him he declined
a buffalo hunt, because, as he said he was two
near seventy, he had actually just turned fifty eight. He
took on painting animals much as he had birds, by
(32:14):
shooting them and wiring them into active poses, their eyes fixed.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
On the viewer.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
But of the one hundred and fifty plates in the
Quadruped's three volumes, he would paint only half of them.
His son, John Woodhouse, less talented did the rest. Perhaps
Ottoman's age made him value life, all life more, But
the artists had now begun to refer to himself as
(32:44):
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. What
a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for
(33:05):
nothing or next to it. Ottovin'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 twenty seven mammals the party collected on the
Missouri only the blackfooted ferret, a primary predator in prairie
(33:29):
dog ecology, turned out to be a new discovery. They
did at least add fourteen new birds to science. 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
(33:50):
muscular jaguars, which seemed to range over most of the Southwest.
What naturalists already knew of the animal life of the
Southwestern Deaders and the West Coast the Audubons painted from specimens.
The book was a heroic effort, but not nearly the
cultural triumph of Birds, partly because Audubon could not complete it,
(34:13):
partly because, as one reviewer put the difference, birds were
exalting and spiritual, while mammals somehow seemed earthy and base.
Because Audubon set it down in his journal, his lingering
memory of how he experienced the trip remains. Here is
(34:35):
his last impression of the West. As they headed down river,
wolves howling, and bulls roaring. Just like the long continued
role of a hundred drums thousands upon thousands of buffaloes,
the roaring can be heard for miles. Four years after
(35:01):
Audobon wrote that, his collaborator John Bachmann visited him at
his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and
found Audubon's noble mind is all in ruins. As Bachmann said,
the great naturalist was only sixty two. John James Ottoman
(35:23):
passed away three years later. In the same decade, Thureau
would write his Entire Heaven and Entire Earth passage, and
Charles Darwin would publish his blockbuster on the origin of species.
All three of them changed natural history and our sense
of ourselves for the rest of time.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
I got two humming bird questions. I'm gonna give them
to you both and you can take them. No hummingbirds
in Europe. And two somewhere you wrote something, maybe it
was in Wild New World about someone uh selling or
buying four thousand hummingbird skins.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yeah, which everyone want to do first.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah, so they're no hummingbirds are a North and South American.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
A surprising little would be man.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yes, well, I mean that's and that's how the Europeans reacted.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
It was like, what in the hell.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Is that I had never I'd never do that, man,
I picture, I would have guess. They were everywhere, some
version of them everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, now 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 eighteen
eighties at a time when the the use of bird
(37:14):
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 four hundred thousand, four
hundred thousand hummingbird skins from America, from North America, from
(37:36):
the United States.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
I feel like if you get some, I could get
you maybe like three or four over the summer if
I was really diligent about hanging out by my helping bird.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
How are they, like, what are they doing? They were
using netting them or something.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
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 find butterfly net
or something and just snagging them, skinning them out, and
skinning them.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
So someone can have some little shit and feather like
that on a.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
This on a hat on their clothing.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Yeah, and you'd never like, I'm surprised with that volume,
there'd be more accounts than mentions of it.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, I've blurbed a new hummingbird book about two years ago,
and according to this particular book, the trade in hummingbirds
skins in Latin America is still a going enterprise. So
hummingbirds evidently are still being killed and skinned to preserve
(38:42):
their their feathers intact. And then apparently the skins are
dried and they're used On.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
You know, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Sure exactly how they're used, but supposedly it's a going thing.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I tell you, you want to get on my kid's
bad side, you'd bring harm to a hummingbird.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
I think a lot of people would fail that.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
I think a lot of people would.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, Audubon is one of those characters that from a
contemporary perspective, there's a little bit of irony in what
they do, and that he's killing these birds. You know,
you think of the Audubon society.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
This is over. This is over people. You don't want
this question, no, go ahead and ask it. Go ahead.
I just is over observed. I feel over observed that
killed birds. Well, it's like it's it's inconsequential in the
scheme of things.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
I just I think what I'm interested in is this
early I mean some 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 tests to do with description and collection and cataloging,
(39:58):
and you know, inherently in that you're killing a lot
of stuff, like up until the early twentieth century. There's
a lot of people who are just collecting things.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, 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. No, there were naturalists collecting.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
For this question does get us somewhere new.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
There was a naturalist in about nineteen oh one collecting
for it was either the Smithsonian or for the American
Museum of Natural History, who found a flock of about
forty 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,
(40:51):
in Autubn's time, Autobn's take to be able to paint
these birds is, I mean, it's pretty paltry, it's small.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, that's a specimen.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, it's a specimen.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
But then one can almost say, thank god he did,
because now you have these renderings and understandings of them
that if he just said, like, I don't.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Know, and we have the actual 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 anathma to our contemporary sensibilities. So you're like, Hey,
I'm into birds, let me kill a bunch of them
and drama.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
It's not I have friends that work on entomology, surveys,
aquatic invertebrates, baseline data collection, and stream systems. You'd be
a ghast.
Speaker 4 (41:39):
You'd be a gast because they'll take those invertebrates and
put them little vials of alcohol.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Heavens, I told you, I told you to be a gas.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Well, yeah, I mean so, I understand your question completely, Randall.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
And but.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I think that this has been a feature of and
of science for a long time. And autoban, I mean,
Ottoman's not doing it specifically to preserve collections and museums,
although I do have on my phone right now a
photograph of the specimen, two of them in fact, that
(42:21):
are just beautifully preserved Carolina parakeets that he collected on
that eighteen forty three Western Oh where are those?
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Are they in New York?
Speaker 1 (42:30):
I think they're in New York.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yeah, I held one, you held well, they had everything. Man,
it was at the Ornithological you know, the Cornell Cornell
that's right, Yeah, they pull out that they kind of
got like all the really good stuff in one tray.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
And they had Carolina parakeets that had passenger pigeon. Yeah,
and that had that iverybild woodpecker I have I.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Have not seen Yeah, wow, ivorybuild woodpecker a specimen of that?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Am I making that upfill?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
So I you know. And so one of the things
that's happening, 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 in order
to possibly clone a line of say blackfooted ferris, which
(43:19):
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. So those specimens that were
collected and Autumn certainly collected some of them have are
actually turning out to be really important for modern science
(43:40):
and maybe even for you know, preserving endangered species today.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
But yeah, he.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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
(44:08):
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 really fast.
And he learned to paint. George Callen did the same thing,
learned to be ambidextrous painting them so he could paint
with seriously.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
Yeah, yeah, you know Audubon, I dodn't know. He died
probably not as young in his time as would seem now,
but sixty one sixty one. Yeah, his friend visited him.
You mentioned his friend visit him and talks about his
mind was in shambles or somewhere.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, did he go did he go mad? Or did
he have dementia? No, he had dementia.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
I mean, yeah, that's what Bachman, who was Bakman, both
of Ottoman's sons that they married sisters, and so they
had the same father in law, John Bachmann, who participated
in that Western expedition. And Bachman was a very good
naturalist himself, and that's where that comes from he went
to see Autubun and what he meant by his mind
(45:10):
as all in shambles is that he had dementia. He
didn't recognize Bachmann or or kind of no, pretty much
of anything at all.
Speaker 4 (45:18):
What was the understanding of that at that time period.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
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. Yeah, and that was it
was attributed just to old age, although I mean even
then sixty one was not very old, and he's only
(45:42):
sixty one years old when when he passes away, But
you know, he had lived this really remarkable life, and
as I tried to convey in the episode, I mean,
he left us with this. So when you're trying to
recreate a past world, somebody who both writes and also
(46:07):
can come up with a visual representation of what they're seeing,
in Ottoban'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 timelines the way they do is that they
have given us a way to access decades, sometimes centuries
(46:31):
in the past, and I think his Autoban's writing is
as compelling and as worthwhile as you know his art
and rendering all these creatures. But his task that he
set himself talked about Catland before Catland of course, wanted
to preserve everything he could about American Indians before they
(46:51):
were lost to time and history. And what Autoban'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
(47:12):
as we know, many many things have been discovered since
Ottoman's time, but for his time, he was pretty thorough.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
I want to run any more questions by me for
approval renal.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
One of the.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
One of the things that I picked up on the
article 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 flare for the dramatic,
and he's got this personality that kind of reminds me
(47:49):
of Buffalo Bill. And then I recalled that when we
were working on our Boon project. The story about Daniel
Boone barking squirrels is written down by Audubon, who claims to.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Have met him.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Wilson, No, no, this is from Audubon.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
Well that was Audubon.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah, he claims to have met him when he went
out west or when 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.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Oh I had in my head for a minute that
was that John Philson. Dude was a biographer.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, Philson is the biographer, but Audubon is where we
get the story of and it doesn't line up.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Like Boone wasn't in the state that Audubon says he
was in.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, and so and there was you know the It
made me wonder like, how are there other instances we know,
like what other sort of colorful aspects are there to
to Audubon's character, because remembering that anecdote made me think
like maybe this guy uh had did this more often
(48:55):
than not in terms of inventing things that happened to
him or.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well he was Yeah, he was egotistical and so he
wasn't beyond I think creating a story like that to
sort of illustrate his you know, his presence in the world,
(49:21):
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 freaking 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 autoban writing about
(49:41):
boon barking squirrels, but yeah, the fact.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Even claims they sat down and had a dinner of squirrels.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, he sat on the river bank with him for
the afternoon. They got all they needed for dinner. But
there are characters like that sort of when you peel
back to Veneer, you realize that there's a lot of
you know, fabrication maybe or self aggrandizement.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Yeah, and I think Ottoman was not above that. Yeah,
as I you know, said he he was not generous
about other people, anybody else who you know, who had
any kind of success. Autobn tended to kind of detegrate
(50:28):
their success, and so he.
Speaker 3 (50:30):
Wasn't even besides other painters, Yeah, even.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Besides other painters. But I mean probably the most uh,
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.
(50:56):
I mean he never went west or anything like that.
But before where Auduburn was ever on the scene, Alexander
Wilson was doing this and he was not nearly as
good a painter as Oudobn 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 met
(51:16):
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. Now, you just went around the
country and you knocked on here's a town that's got
(51:39):
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 Oudoburn
was running. And as Audubn tells the story, Wilson comes
(52:02):
in and says, I'm selling subscriptions to a new book
on birds. And of course Ottobon has already been working
on his own, he's already And so Wilson opens up,
you know, his portfolio and shows Audubon eight or ten
of his paintings, and Audubon says, you know, he nods
and everything, and yeah, that's really nice. And then he
(52:24):
reaches out of 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.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
Of the store immediately.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Wilson's version is he hardly even recounts having.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
Met let alone, it being like a career ending.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's like that.
Speaker 4 (52:54):
So you know, there's that, and there'll be blood. Daniel
day Lewis's character has the line he says, there's a
competitiveness in me. I don't want anyone else to succeed
but me.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
I think Automat had that same feeling.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
All right, Well, thank you dan Oh, you bet
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