Under a Wild Sky, page 20
By the time Audubon published his description of the Bird of Washington, more than fifteen years after he had first seen the bird, it had morphed into an epic creature. Its flight, said Audubon, was quite different from the bald eagle’s, and in fact it was so unlike a juvenile bald eagle that Audubon dismissed the possibility out of hand—though he took satisfaction in pointing out Wilson’s misidentification of that bird as a so-called sea eagle. Instead, Audubon compared the Bird of Washington to the white-tailed or “cinerous” eagle, which he called the “true sea eagle.” Apparently he was referring to one of the two Eurasian eagles that occasionally find their way into parts of North America. As if determined to complicate matters further, Audubon suggested that the white-tailed eagle in its juvenile phase was sometimes mistaken for an osprey. Even more perplexingly, he also gave “sea eagle” as an alternative name for the Bird of Washington.
Against this muddled backdrop of intermingled taxonomy, Audubon offered many characteristic differences in plumage, bill structure, and so forth between the Bird of Washington and the white-tailed eagle. One claim above all seemed to set the Bird of Washington apart from other eagles, however. Audubon gave a weight for the Bird of Washington of over fourteen pounds, a length of forty-three inches, and a wingspan of ten feet, two inches. That’s about 50 percent larger than the biggest bald eagle. Not even the California condor, the largest North American raptor at well over twenty pounds, has that great a wingspan. Audubon thought it obvious that no other New World bird approached the magnificence of the Bird of Washington. “All circumstances duly considered, the Bird of Washington stands forth as the champion of America . . . henceforth not to be confounded with any of its rivals or relatives,” Audubon wrote. “If ornithologists are proud of describing new species, I may be allowed to express some degree of pleasure in giving to the world the knowledge of so majestic a bird.”
Audubon appears to have been wrong. There are only two American eagles, the golden eagle and the bald eagle. On closer examination—much of it by Audubon’s critics—the Bird of Washington was widely dismissed as merely a juvenile bald eagle and not the undiscovered lord of the skies. However, this conclusion is also questionable, as nobody could ever explain the extraordinary size of Audubon’s specimen. A printing error in Audubon’s published account is doubtful—it’s a stretch to think there would have been matching mistakes in the weight and the wingspan, the latter being given twice. The same would hold for Audubon’s measurements in the field. It is all but inconceivable that Audubon would have recorded a wingspan of over ten feet if it were really closer to the six or seven feet typical of eagles. Nor does it seem plausible that he could have mismeasured both the wingspan and weight—or that in doing so he would have been off by exactly the same factor.
What is the truth? Perhaps Audubon, eager to claim the discovery of a major new bird, exaggerated the bird’s dimensions. Maybe he had no field notes and simply made up the bird’s size and weight long after the fact. Maybe the bird he shot just happened to be unusually large. Some species of birds vary considerably in size, especially from one region to the next. Canada geese, for example, range in size from small ones scarcely larger than a duck to giants that are nearly double the size of common specimens.
What about the chance that Audubon was right—that the bird he shot and drew actually was a separate species, possibly a rare individual from a remnant population that was in the process of going extinct? Could there have been a Bird of Washington? Almost nobody, from the time of Audubon’s published account of the bird until now, has seriously considered that this might have been the case. But there are reasons, apparently overlooked, to think twice. And the evidence is all right there in Audubon’s own account.
First, there was Audubon’s observation of a mated pair with their young near the Green River. Though they could have been golden eagles—assuming Audubon was mistaken about their great size—these could not have been immature birds. Bald eagles tending a brood would have had the characteristic white heads. But more important is Audubon’s drawing of the Bird of Washington. Like all of his bird drawings, it was done to life size—the image a precise copy of the bird placed against a measured grid. It was the same with his drawings of the bald eagle and the juvenile bald eagle, which he also eventually published. A comparison of the three images, using actual measurements of Audubon’s original prints is revealing.
Although each of the three eagles is posed differently, it’s obvious, even without measuring, that the Bird of Washington dwarfs the bald eagle. Looking at the three prints side by side, it’s not even close. The Bird of Washington is positively massive, filling the double elephant paper to the edges. The adult and immature bald eagles, though large, impressive birds, occupy dramatically less space.
The measurements tell the same story. In Audubon’s drawing, the adult bald eagle is 30¾ inches long. The juvenile bald eagle—which typically has a longer tail than the adult—is slightly under 34 inches long. The Bird of Washington is 40 inches in length. The longest toe on the adult bald eagle is 3 inches long. On the juvenile, it’s 2¾ inches. The longest toe on the Bird of Washington is 4 inches long. Most telling of all, the visible section of folded wing—that is, the outer portion of a single wing that you would see with the wing held against the body—measures 24 inches on the adult bald eagle, and 23⅝ inches on the juvenile. The same wing section on the Bird of Washington measures 29½ inches long. Assuming the inner wing sections and shoulders are proportionally larger, the wingspan of the Bird of Washington would thus exceed that of the bald eagle by about two feet—making Audubon’s claim of a ten-foot wingspan plausible.
None of this is conclusive. If the Bird of Washington really was only a juvenile bald eagle, Audubon may be forgiven the error. Like other naturalists of his time, he made this kind of mistake over and over again. But nobody ever managed to do it quite so extravagantly—or to leave behind so many unanswerable questions—as Audubon did with the Bird of Washington.
By 1815, the Audubons’ life on the frontier had settled into a comfortable rhythm. The stores at Henderson and Shawneetown did steady business, meeting the modest local demands for whiskey and dry goods including everything from fencewire to ammunition. Audubon hunted and fished and painted as he pleased, while Lucy managed a crowded, slightly chaotic household that often included friends and relatives who came out from Pennsylvania to sample life in the West. It was mildly astonishing to the Audubons, who could not have been happier, when most of these visitors retreated East, complaining of Henderson’s discomforts and backward social life. Meanwhile, Audubon and Tom Bakewell, eager to expand their commercial interests, hit on the idea of building a steam-powered millworks that would grind grain and saw lumber. This was, to say the least, a highly speculative venture. The demand for such an expensive and technologically advanced mill was far from obvious. But with boatloads of settlers still coming downriver, the two men—especially the entrepreneurial Tom—assumed the need was imminent. They hired a mechanic, drew up plans, and began looking for property along the riverfront. Audubon, always easily excited by the hint of a golden opportunity conceived by somebody else, saw his horizons expanding in seemingly every direction: Lucy was pregnant again.
When the Audubons’ first daughter was born that year, they named her Lucy. The baby’s arrival coincided with what seemed the beginning of a new, even more luxuriant chapter in their charmed lives. It did not work out that way. Little Lucy was sick. Sick at first, as infants sometimes are, and then gravely sick. Nothing could be done for her, and in agony the Audubons watched their baby girl slipping away at the very time they also saw their own fortunes suddenly collapse in the construction and immediate failure of the mill. By the time little Lucy died in the winter of 1817, at the age of two, the heartbroken Audubons were facing financial ruin. They buried their daughter in a temporary grave in the garden until they could move her to a cemetery in the spring. They could not have imagined a crueler time. But it was coming.
12
EVER SINCE A BOY
Falco borealis: The Red-Tailed Hawk
It sails across the whole of a large plantation, on a level with the tops of the forest-trees which surround it, without a single flap of its wings, and is then seen moving its head sidewise to inspect the objects below.
—Ornithological Biography
The happy, prosperous life the Audubons had made for themselves on the frontier had been an early version of what later generations would call the American Dream. But this dream dies fast sometimes, and for the Audubons it did just that.
The mill was only part of the problem, though it was a big part. Almost from the time construction began on it in the spring of 1816, the mill devoured capital, grinding up Audubon’s savings faster than it would ever go through wheat or wood. Audubon and Tom Bakewell took on investors as the project swelled. When it was done, the mill was gargantuan—standing some six stories high on the waterfront side, with clapboard siding and rows of double-hung windows looking out over the Ohio River. Crumbling remains of its stone footings still lie, like the partially excavated skeleton of a huge beast, on the mill site today, in what is now a tree-lined city park.
In his lifetime—and ever since—Audubon’s failure in business was blamed on his frequent absences on hunting expeditions and his dislike of business routine. Whether he was lazy or merely at times careless about his responsibilities depends on how much value you attach to the paintings and the wildlife observations he was making when he was off in the woods—work that it is now all but impossible to put a value on. Audubon himself guiltily alluded to his birding as time he had subtracted from business duties that did not hold his interest.
But the truth was more complicated. Audubon’s business failure was in many respects caused by factors he could neither have foreseen nor controlled. A more charitable view is that Audubon’s main fault was a misjudgment of how much and how fast he should expand in good times—a failing that is often the flip side of the American Dream.
The years following the successful conclusion of the War of 1812—some called it the second war of independence—brought an economic boom to the country. The war’s interruption of trade with Europe had created a renewed overseas hunger for American goods—mainly livestock and agricultural produce, ranging from primary crops like cotton to specialty items such as ginseng and bourbon whiskey. England, meanwhile, suffered several crop failures in a row. Prices spiked and then settled back to a comfortable, seemingly stable level.
But the banking system in Kentucky was primitive and the currency fluid and unreliable. The Kentucky Insurance Company, formed in 1802 to insure river traffic, operated briefly as a regional bank. It was joined by the Bank of Kentucky and then by the federal banking authority, the Second Bank of the United States. In 1818, the Kentucky Insurance Company failed and the state chartered forty-six new banks to serve the region. They were soon derided as the “Forty Thieves.” Speculative ventures in real estate, manufacturing, and milling multiplied. Barter was still a common way of doing business, and shopkeepers and farmers typically traded on credit between harvests. Credit had never been easier to come by. Soon the whole economy of the state was overextended—mired in debt and bloated with heavily leveraged enterprises that had little or no prospects for the future. Some aspects of the Kentucky economy were simply unsustainable, notably the increasingly unpopular slave trade in which free blacks were hunted down to be resold and black families were split apart and shipped south to work on plantations.
The collapse came in 1819, with the onset of a nationwide economic depression. In the Panic of 1819, prices fell sharply and businesspeople who owed money to creditors and investors could not pay. When the banks and then the state of Kentucky itself were asked for help, none was forthcoming. In fact, few people at that time construed intervention in economic matters as a responsibility of government. As for the banks, they went broke right along with the businesses they served. The Bank of Kentucky began issuing its own paper currency. Its value fell almost as fast as it could be printed.
Against this background of economic malaise, Audubon had his own special problems. The mill, when it wasn’t idle, produced far less revenue than expected. Then, in 1818, his father died in Nantes. After protracted litigation, Audubon and Rose, his half-sister from Saint-Domingue, ended up inheriting nothing from the elder Audubon. At the same time, Tom Bakewell, now married and with two children of his own, wanted to reduce his investment in the business partnership with Audubon—and was asking for the return of several thousand dollars he’d borrowed from his father. In a convoluted exchange of credits and countercredits that had become all too common in the depressed Henderson economy, Bakewell gave Audubon a note—supposedly worth more than $4,000—that he had accepted as payment for the Henderson, a steamboat Bakewell and the mill engineer had built in yet another get-rich-quick scheme. Weirdly, both Bakewell and Audubon also owed money to the boat’s purchaser, a Mr. Samuel Bowen. In handing over the note to Audubon, Bakewell created an absurd closed circle of demands in which everyone owed everyone else money and nobody had either the wherewithal or the inclination to pay. It was up to Audubon to straighten out this mess by either getting cash for the note or seizing the boat. Meanwhile, the only viable collateral involved—the vessel—chugged off downriver with Bowen at the helm.
Audubon, rashly it would seem, gave chase. His pursuit of Bowen and the Henderson, which took him all the way to New Orleans and back, eventually culminated in the confrontation in which he stabbed Bowen. Their fight in the middle of the street near the mill, in turn, led to both criminal and civil proceedings against Audubon—in which he prevailed but from which he never recovered. The details of this episode—mostly long since lost or confused—do not add up to a coherent explanation for any of it.
Bowen evidently took off in the spring of 1819. Audubon, hastily equipping his skiff and bringing along a crew of two slaves to man the oars, followed. But why? Did he actually expect that a small boat rowed by two men could overtake a steamboat making a fast getaway? Besides, did Audubon know where Bowen was going? Once he reached the confluence with the Mississippi, Bowen could have turned north for St. Louis or south for New Orleans. Or he could have put in at any place in between.
More to the point, what was Audubon’s purpose? Even if he managed to catch up with Bowen and get either the money or the boat, the change in his fortunes would have been negligible. It’s possible—in fact it seems likely—that Audubon was looking for an excuse to get out of town. Harried by his creditors, still distraught about little Lucy’s death, and generally miserable over his sorry state, Audubon probably welcomed a chance to disappear into the wilderness. And the longer the better.
Whatever his thinking, Audubon remained several steps behind Bowen all the way—both going and coming home. By the time he reached New Orleans and got himself before a judge to bring suit against Bowen—an action that for some reason required Audubon to post more than $16,000 in bonds—the Henderson had already been surrendered to other creditors. Audubon may well have wondered then if there was anyone in the whole wide world who was not owed money that one way or another had to come out of his pocket.
Audubon caught a steamboat back north—again just behind Bowen. Because of either a lack of funds or bad weather, Audubon decided to walk the more than two hundred miles home from the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. He must have gotten to like this walk, since he made it two other times in his life—once a few years earlier after parting ways with Ferdinand Rozier, and then five years after this, when he headed north with Victor on his way to Philadelphia.
It was shortly after his return to Henderson—and to the fresh horror of still-mounting debts—that Audubon injured his right arm and then nearly killed Bowen one-handed when they fought in the street. A local judge, in dismissing an assault charge against Audubon, admonished him that he had committed a very serious offense in “not killing the damned rascal.” Even so, it was apparent that Audubon had few friends left in town. By summer, Bowen was back on his feet and suing Audubon for $10,000. Audubon, sensing that the community would back his enemy, asked for a change of venue—which he got. After Bowen twice failed to appear in court to press his case, it, too, was dismissed.
But by then Audubon had lost everything. An old friend in Shippingport bought Audubon’s house, a few pitiful real estate holdings, and what was left of his interest in the mill for just over $20,000. But with a depression on and the currency deflated, $20,000 wasn’t what it used to be. And it was still only a fraction of what he owed. Adding to this crushing burden was the mixed news that Lucy was pregnant again. Audubon, feeling himself at the edge of the abyss, gave every penny he had to his creditors. Feeling compelled now to leave town for good, he asked Lucy to wait while he went to Louisville and figured out what to do next. Audubon left Henderson, alone and “poor and miserable of thoughts,” as he later wrote. As he walked along the road leading east, Audubon scowled at the birds he saw. They looked, he said later, “like enemies.”
Audubon seemed to have no clear concept of where he was going. He had a vague idea that he wanted to visit his mother and half-sister in France. In Louisville he was arrested and jailed over unpaid loans. A judge helped him file for bankruptcy—a move that in those days got you out of jail but not out of debt. Broke and distraught, Audubon made his way to Shippingport, where he was put up by friends. Lucy joined him there soon after. When he asked his hosts to recommend him for a job on a riverboat, they politely declined. Audubon had a look in his eye that seemed to warn everyone he was on the verge of disappearing forever.
