John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

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СКАЧАТЬ the time Audubon left on his Mississippi odyssey, Wilson had been dead seven years. In Audubon’s mind, though, Wilson remained a competitor, the man who set the existing standards of ornithological art, the man whose work Audubon would frequently consult and almost as frequently criticize, the man whom Audubon felt the compelling need to surpass in order to define the measure of his own success. Even Henry Clay had brought up the specter of the late “American Ornithologist.” In sending his generous letter of introduction for the Mississippi trip, Clay wondered if Audubon knew what he was getting into, given the possible expense of producing such an ambitious work: “Will it not be well for you … to ascertain the Success which attended a Similar undertaking of Mr. Wilson?”⁴ Audubon could never escape the comparison thus imposed on him by others, and he would never cease imposing it on himself. In this as in many other ways, the pages of Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal give us a preview of issues that would continue to dog him for years to come.

      Flatboat Blues

      If Audubon needed any reminder of the low state of his circumstances, all he had to do was to consider the boat he was taking downriver—a flatboat, several pegs down the scale of comfortable aquatic conveyance. In 1820, the year he decided to leave Cincinnati for the Mississippi River region, the steamboat was still a recently arrived marvel on the western rivers. The first steamboat to make the Pittsburgh–New Orleans trip did so in 1811 (owned and operated, coincidentally, by an acquaintance of Audubon’s, Nicholas Roosevelt), and just a few years later, in 1817, steamboats began regular mail and passenger service from Cincinnati to New Orleans, usually making their way downriver in just over a week. The fortunate few who could pay for stateroom accommodations, about $125, could enjoy room and board all but equal to that found in the best hotels. Those who could only afford the Spartan conditions on deck had neither room nor board—they had to scrounge whatever sleeping space they could find amid the cargo and fix their own food—but they paid about a fifth of the fare, and they still got to New Orleans at the same time as their more prosperous fellow passengers.⁵

      Either way, Audubon couldn’t afford it. He couldn’t even afford flatboat fare. He made an arrangement with a flatboat owner named Jacob Aumack, who offered him free passage in exchange for being the boat’s hunter, shooting whatever he could to provide food for the others on board. One of those others was Audubon’s young traveling companion, Joseph Mason, a twelve-year-old former art student from Cincinnati whom Audubon had engaged to be, like himself, an unpaid flatboat employee. Mason came along to help Audubon with the hunting and background painting and, in addition, to help Aumack with whatever unpleasant but necessary tasks he could assign the boy.⁶ Traveling light, with only their guns and art supplies and a very few changes of clothing, Audubon and Mason joined Aumack and a handful of other men on the flatboat for what would turn out to be a long journey, both geographically and, for Audubon, psychologically.

      The best thing to be said about a flatboat was that it made decent economic sense at the time—a cheap, simple, single-use, one-way vessel. Almost anyone could build this entry-level means of river transport for about fifty dollars or so, load it with upward of forty tons of goods, and then, once arrived at a downriver destination—typically after a month or more all the way to New Orleans—disassemble the boat and sell the scrap wood for whatever money it might fetch. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of flatboats floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—almost 1,300 in 1816 alone—and flatboat transportation would remain a part of the river economy well into the steamboat era.⁷

      A flatboat also defined an enclosed social space, sometimes even the site of a downriver rite of passage for young farm boys who made the trip.⁸ One of the iconic genre paintings of the antebellum era, George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), shows a group of eight young men taking their leisure on top of a flatboat, one of them dancing, one playing a fiddle, another keeping time on a metal pan, and the other five variously lounging around and enjoying the show, their oars horizontally at rest. With slow-flowing water below and clear, blue skies above, the painting offers an idyllic image of men at ease on the water, making the most of their riverine relaxation.

      Behind this image of romanticized sociability, however, lay a much rougher reality. A modern history of the flatboat trade has described the boatmen of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as being “as filthy as the dogs whose howls they imitated,” living on a daily diet of bacon and beans, and washing down their meager meals with whatever beverage happened to be available on board—and whiskey was always available. Once the boatmen got ashore at the end of the downriver trip, they may have felt flush with a few dollars of wages to spend for a few days on better food and more drink, but then they had to get back up the Mississippi somehow, quite often having to make the journey on foot. Most of them had no doubt become a good deal less jolly by that point.⁹

      Figure 4. The Jolly Flatboatmen, by George Caleb Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 48 1/2 in. Object #2015.18.1. Patrons’ Permanent Fund. National Gallery of Art.

      Audubon had no illusions about the romance of the river, and he would certainly find little joy in this trip. He had been in the flatboat business before, back when he and his Kentucky-based business partner, Ferdinand Rozier, were moving goods from their store down the Ohio River to the Missouri Territory in the winter of 1810–1811. Now, a decade later, he found himself essentially bumming a ride on someone else’s boat. His journal repeatedly speaks of the “desagreable” discomforts of drifting downriver on a clumsy, slow-moving wooden barge, being thrown together with men he didn’t much like, and living in squalid accommodations that gave him almost no protection from the elements, much less enough room to work. With only a small, claustrophobic cabin for shelter, Audubon and his boatmates remained constantly exposed to the weather, which turned out to be repeatedly rainy, windy, and surprisingly chilly for mid-fall. On the second day out, Audubon wrote, “The Wind Rose and brought us to Shore, it raind and blowed Violantly untill the Next Day,” and for days more after that, morning frosts and temperatures below freezing seemed “desagreably Cold.” As an artist he suffered under the circumstances of the cramped onboard environment, “drawing in a Boat Were a Man cannot stand erect.” By November 1, another day with “weather drizly and windy,” flatboat life had already left Audubon feeling flat himself: “Extremely tired of My Indolent Way of Living,” he grumbled, “not having procured any thing to draw since Louisville.” Even his dog, Dash, seemed to have her own case of the flatboat blues, looking to be “apparently good for Nothing for the Want of Employment.”¹⁰

      Ornithology on the River

      For both man and dog, the best remedy for such ennui was to get off the boat and go on the hunt for food, which was Audubon’s responsibility in his free-passage arrangement with Aumack. Almost anything counted in flatboat cuisine, and the search for fresh meat put him in pursuit of both mammals and, as always, birds. From the first day he boarded the flatboat, in fact, Audubon kept a regular record of the birds he saw and shot, and the entry for October 18 gives a good indication of the variety and abundance of the avian life along the Ohio River:

      Saw some fine Turkeys, killed a Common Crow Corvus Americanus Which I drew; Many Robins in the woods and thousands of Snow Buntings Emberiza Nivalis—several Rose Breasted Gros Beaks—We killed 2 Pheasants, 15 Partridges—1 Teal, 1 T. T. Godwit—1 Small Grebe all of these I have Seen precisely alike in all Parts—and one Bared Owl this is undoubtedly the Most Plentifull of his genus.¹¹

      (Audubon’s occasional use of the Linnaean binomials in that passage also speaks to his self-conscious sense of identity as naturalist, and among his few flatboat possessions he carried a copy of William Turton’s 1806 translation of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Turton’s work served Audubon well as a ready reference for identification and classification, not to mention a model for drawing: One of the sketches in his journal is a detailed bird diagram copied closely from Turton.¹²)

      Despite СКАЧАТЬ