Under a Wild Sky (19 page)

Wilson got as far as Savannah. After some time walking the “beds of burning sand” that were the streets of that city during an uncommonly warm spring, Wilson wrote to Bradford saying he would soon take a ship north and that all of his thoughts were now of home:

There is a charm, a melody, in this little word home, which only those know, who have forsaken it to wander among strangers, exposed to dangers, fatigues, insults and impositions, of a thousand nameless kinds. Perhaps I feel the force of this idea rather more at present than usual, being indisposed with a slight fever these three days, which a dose of sea-sickness will, I hope, rid me of.

The trip had been expensive.
Wilson later calculated the cost at about five times the value of the subscriptions he obtained, though this must have been an exaggeration.
He was victimized by innkeepers who were “like the vultures” that hovered over the cities, and he struggled to locate people of means whom he could call upon in hopes of a sale.
Sometimes he was forced to advertise
American Ornithology
in the local papers.
Despite the many difficulties and Wilson's dim view of this section of the country, however, he wrote to Bartram in Philadelphia to say that the subscription list was now approaching 250. It was March 1809.

The second volume of
American Ornithology
was published in January 1810.
That same month, Wilson again left Philadelphia, heading this time for Pittsburgh and the frontier. He most likely rode past Mill Grove on his way out of town, about a year and a half after Audubon had gone by the same route.

Wilson paused occasionally on his way west, showing his books to potential subscribers, chatting up amateur naturalists who knew the birds
and mammals of the Pennsylvania mountains, and gathering anecdotes for contributions he planned to make to a popular Philadelphia journal,
The Port Folio.
Near the town of Carlisle, he visited a local attraction, a cave that stood at the foot of a perpendicular limestone cliff. Its opening was about nine feet high and slightly wider than that at the base. Wilson entered, carrying a candle. The floor of the cave was level and smooth, but interrupted by ice stalagmites three and four feet high. He saw a lone wren. Wilson proceeded into the mountainside for something like three hundred yards, passing through chambers where the ceiling rose two stories overhead, stopping at last at a point where the cave divided down several paths. Here the walls were damp, and still pools of water were at his feet.
Wilson—in one of his moods—blew out his candle and sat down to meditate, indulging, he later wrote in a letter to Lawson, “in a train of solemn and melancholy contemplations, that forc'd themselves on my mind in this gloomy & silent recess.” Evidently his spirits were more festive after he relit his candle—on his way out of the cave, Wilson captured several hibernating bats. He wrapped them in his handkerchief and put them in a pocket.
Later that evening, as Wilson relaxed in the barroom of the tavern where he was staying, the bats woke up and, disentangling themselves, commenced to fly around the room.

In Pittsburgh, Wilson was struck by the number of keelboats waiting to descend the Ohio, which was choked with ice, and also by the thriving industry of the place. Under its clouds of smoke, the city was busy, and far more prosperous than it first seemed.
Wilson sold nineteen subscriptions while waiting for the river to open, a success beyond all expectation. He searched the surrounding woods for birds, but found nothing of note.
Wilson bought a one-man skiff for his passage down the Ohio, painting the name
Ornithologist
on its low stern.
He left near the end of February, under warming skies, maneuvering his boat through chunks of floating ice that dotted the otherwise mirrorlike surface of the Ohio. Within a day the ice disappeared. Wilson had some biscuits and cheese, plus his gun and trunk, in the bow. He used a small tin to bail the
Ornithologist
, occasionally dipping it over the side for a drink from the crisp waters carrying him along.
When he rowed, Wilson estimated his speed at six miles an hour. He passed many arks, some as long as seventy feet, carrying families, livestock, and all manner of trading goods. A much lesser volume of traffic came upstream, barges that were backbreakingly poled ahead at a rate of twenty miles a day. The sight of so many people
moving to the frontier impressed Wilson.
It was as if all these human beings were, he wrote, “migrating like birds of passage to the luxuriant regions of the south and west.” He covered more than fifty miles his first day out, spending the night at a “miserable cabin” where he slept on corn-stalks. He was back on the river before sunup.

The nights were still bitterly cold.
It was the breeding time for owls, and Wilson often heard their “hideous hollowing” echoing through the woods after dark. He explored as he went, stopping off to visit the Big Bone Lick and inspecting many of the Ohio's tributaries. He shot and skinned a number of ducks, bundling the skins in his coat. Wilson found a mix of people as the river carried him on—amusing Kentucky storytellers, a colony of Swiss immigrants living in a tidy community where they were bottling a decent wine, and many desperately poor squatters who were “roving the frontiers advancing as the tide of civilized population approaches.” The fields were full of horses and cattle that appeared half-starved, while fat pigs roamed the forests, feasting on that year's unusually large acorn mast. Later, when he headed off across Kentucky, Wilson noted that the horse stock much improved.

On the morning of the seventeenth of March, having come many hundreds of miles, Wilson spotted several turkeys near the river on the Indiana side. He put ashore and gave chase, but did not succeed in getting one. A short time later he saw another flock, this time on the Kentucky side, and tried again, but still he could not get close enough to the keen-eyed birds for a shot. The turkey would end up being one of the major species he had yet to draw when he died, but on this morning his thoughts were equally divided between the bird and the town of Louisville, which he was nearing. By the time he gave up on the turkeys, he'd lost several hours. Hurrying along through the afternoon, Wilson failed to reach Louisville before nightfall. He went on anyway, confident that he would spot the lights of the city as he approached it, but around eight o'clock he heard the falls up ahead and grew uneasy. Steering his boat close to the shore, Wilson advanced slowly until he found the mouth of Bear Grass Creek and tied up there.

Wilson found a room at the Indian Queen. He may or may not have known that a young, newly married couple named Audubon was living there. Perhaps they saw each other.
The dining room at the Indian Queen was legendary for bringing its boarders together, as it was necessary to rush in at mealtime to claim a seat. Polite travelers were sometimes
astonished to find the meal completed and the room empty before they'd finished their first cup of tea.

What did happen is this:
A day or two after his arrival, Wilson was out making rounds in search of subscribers when he entered Audubon and Rozier's store. Audubon never forgot the “peculiar character” Wilson appeared to be that day—with his fine, long nose, hollow cheeks, and burning eyes. He was dressed too formally for this part of the world—in a short coat, an overcoat, and fitted trousers. He had two books with him. Audubon thought the man looked nervous as he placed the volumes on the counter and explained what they were.

Audubon, of course, was agog at
American Ornithology
and its beautiful color plates. Without hesitation, he got out his pen and was about to add his name to Wilson's subscriber list when Rozier, who'd been watching from the back of the shop, stopped him.

“My dear Audubon, what induces you to subscribe to this work?” Rozier said in French. “Your drawings are certainly far better, and again, you must know as much of the habits of American birds as this gentleman.”

Audubon wasn't sure if the visitor understood Rozier, but Wilson seemed suddenly put off. At the same time, Rozier's flattery had the intended effect, and Audubon put down his pen. Wilson asked if Audubon had any drawings of birds. He would like to see them if that was possible. It was. Taking down his large portfolio, Audubon showed Wilson his collection of paintings, which was now thick. Wilson was floored. He said he had never dreamed anyone else was at work on an illustrated ornithology. When Audubon told him that he hadn't given any thought to publishing his drawings, Wilson seemed even more taken aback.

Wilson asked if he might borrow a few of Audubon's drawings while he was in town. Audubon happily agreed. In fact, he said, if Wilson wanted to publish any of them he would be fine with that, so long as his name was mentioned somewhere in the process. Wilson was particularly interested in a species of flycatcher he didn't recognize. Audubon said there were plenty of them in the woods outside Louisville and offered to take Wilson hunting the next day. They went and Wilson collected several specimens. Wilson also got his first look at a flock of whooping cranes in the wild.
Audubon, who claimed Wilson had until then seen only stuffed versions of the bird, told Wilson that immature whooping cranes could be distinguished from the pure white adults by their gray plumage. Audubon later complained that Wilson had included this observation
in the third volume of
American Ornithology
without crediting him as the source.
In fact, Wilson stated—correctly—that young whooping cranes are brown. Whatever information Audubon shared with Wilson, it was insufficient to make him tarry in Louisville.
A few days later, having sold the
Ornithologist
for half what he had paid for it, Wilson left town on horseback, heading overland to the south.

This chance meeting between Wilson and Audubon seems, in retrospect, an improbable coincidence. Actually, it would have been more surprising if they had not happened upon one another on the frontier. Everyone coming into the country passed the same way, stopped off at the same taverns and towns, moved in the same limited circles of a far-flung but still very small population. Yet there's doubt about the particulars, as the only record of their encounter is Audubon's after-the-fact account. It would not have been beyond Audubon to invent details of such an episode showing himself to advantage.
Audubon said that when he compared his own drawings with Wilson's at the shop it was apparent that his collection was “already much greater.”
Audubon also maintained that he and Wilson met a second time, two years later, when Audubon was briefly in Philadelphia on business. According to Audubon, he called on Wilson, who was busy with a painting of the bald eagle—a bird the two ornithologists depicted in virtually identical poses. He said Wilson was noticeably cool, taking him to see the artist Rembrandt Peale but avoiding all discussion of ornithology. After an uncomfortable couple of hours, Audubon excused himself, never to see Wilson again.

Audubon told these stories many years after Wilson's death, and also after reading in
American Ornithology
Wilson's claim that he had visited Louisville in March 1810 and found it a wretched backwater.
There was not a single subscriber to be had in the town, and not a single new bird could he find in the woods nearby. “Science and literature,” Wilson concluded, “has not one friend in this place.”
In a journal Wilson kept of his travels that was later edited and then lost, he talked of hunting near Louisville with “no naturalist to keep me company.” Wilson never mentioned Audubon in print, and perhaps he never even talked to anyone about him.
There is evidence that Wilson had been alerted to the presence of a naturalist named Audubon in Louisville by Lucy Audubon's uncle, Benjamin Bakewell—the same man for whom Audubon had worked as a clerk in New York. Bakewell had since moved to Pittsburgh and was a successful glassmaker there when Wilson passed through.
And a different
version of the missing Wilson journal reportedly did refer to a meeting with Audubon, and included an account of their seeing many passenger pigeons and sandhill cranes while out hunting together one day near Louisville.

Nobody ever asked Rozier about the meeting.

Wilson rode to Lexington, Kentucky, and then down to Nashville, Tennessee, through Natchez, Mississippi, and finally all the way to New Orleans, where he arrived in June. Passing down the western edge of the civilized world, Wilson moved through an unfolding spring. Birds were everywhere—owls, whippoorwills, grouse, passenger pigeons.
Wilson made drawings and took notes as he went, although many of the paintings were lost when he forwarded them to Lawson from Nashville and they miscarried en route. He was accompanied for a portion of his trip by a pet Carolina parakeet.
Wilson had wounded the large green-and-yellow bird in Kentucky and nursed it back to health. It lived in his pocket and would climb out and perch on his shoulder to amuse people wherever he stopped.

Wilson's account of this trip brimmed with high adventure and frequent encounters with scoundrels and cutthroats. In the barrens region of southwestern Kentucky, Wilson spent five days hunting and making drawings. It was a strange place, almost devoid of trees and covered with wild strawberries. Rumors circulated that tavern keepers in this part of the country were a dangerous lot, given to murdering unwary travelers and secreting their bodies in caves.
Wilson actually met a man suspected of such a crime—and boldly accompanied him on a visit to a cave. On seeing that Wilson carried a pistol, the man turned pleasant and professed innocence of any wrongdoing.
In western Tennessee a short time later, Wilson spent a night in an Indian village, lying comfortably on a deerskin. The next day he rode through the tribe's territory. The Indians were fascinated by his parakeet. Wilson thought them primitive but pleasant. The women were naked above the waist, and because they never combed their hair, had the appearance of wearing a “large mop” atop their heads.