Under a Wild Sky, page 6
Jefferson thought there was only one reasonable explanation. Nature, he said, had drawn a “belt of separation between these two tremendous animals,” and in so doing, “assigned to the elephant the regions South of these confines, and those North to the mammoth, founding the constitution of the one in her extreme of heat, and that of the other in the extreme of cold.” Given the efforts of the Creator to thus distinguish these two animals by disposition and by geography, was it not then “perverse” of man to believe they were the same beast?
But Jefferson was less interested in the precise identity of the mammoth than he was in what the beast suggested about the faunal environment of the New World. Jefferson was well versed in Indian legends concerning the mammoth, which the Indians sometimes called the “big buffalo,” and had heard reports that Indian tribes in the north and west of the continent claimed the animal still existed in remote areas. Jefferson’s presumption was that remnant populations of the mammoth represented greatly reduced numbers as the animals retreated ahead of the settlers advancing into North America. It was much the same thing as was happening to the Indians. Some years later, when Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the American West, he would instruct the party to be on the lookout for mammoths. But even without a live mammoth to point to, or certainty of what the animal was, its existence refuted the concept of degeneration.
But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence in the conception and nourishment of animal life on a large scale: to have stifled in its birth the opinion of a writer, the most learned too of all others in the science of animal history, that in the new world . . . nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun . . .
Jefferson backed up his velvety demolition of Buffon’s theory with hard numbers. In table after table, Jefferson showed that animals common to both North America and Europe—from elk to flying squirrels—were in many cases bigger in the New World, and that there were so many species unique to America that no one could doubt the natural vitality of the continent.
During his time in Paris, Jefferson met with Buffon on several occasions and tried to talk him out of his ideas about degeneration. He found Buffon polite but indifferent until Buffon was presented with an ambitious argument. Jefferson prevailed on the governor of New Hampshire to send a moose to him in France. The governor dispatched a troop of soldiers who shot a sizable bull. The animal was dressed and skinned, and after the skeleton had been cleaned and dried, its hide was stitched together such that it could be draped over the bones in a semblance of its original shape. After some delay, the “moose” arrived in Paris and Jefferson showed it off to Buffon. Amazed at the animal’s size—it was as big as a large draft horse—the aged naturalist agreed that he would have to amend his theory. Buffon had always maintained that an “error corrected” equals a truth told. But he died almost immediately after viewing Jefferson’s “moose.”
Jefferson had been less good-humored in responding to Buffon’s claims that American Indians were impotent and cowardly. He denounced Buffon’s characterization of the Indians as an “afflicting picture indeed which, for the honor of human nature, I am glad to believe has no original.” Unlike Buffon, Jefferson had firsthand knowledge of Indians, whom he described at length as being brave and intelligent and passionate—and quite obviously members of the same species as Europeans. This argument, especially when coupled with Jefferson’s racist discussion of American slaves—in which he weakly endorsed limited emancipation but described blacks as being in most respects inferior to whites—muddled the meaning of Notes on the State of Virginia for many American readers. But for the generation of naturalists who arrived in its wake, Jefferson’s little book was a revelation. Jefferson had identified the limits of European understanding of New World natural history. In doing so, he had established two fundamental principles that would guide the future study of native fauna.
First, Jefferson proved the importance of direct observation. Buffon, relying on secondhand information and poorly preserved specimens collected on the opposite side of the world, had got many things wrong. North American fauna were not the shrimpy, defective creatures Buffon had pronounced them to be. Animals could not be correctly identified and described from afar, but only through actual contact with them in the field. Logically, only Americans could accurately classify American fauna. Second, Jefferson showed that America was a robust environment, home to many species not found elsewhere in the world—including some that were perhaps no longer walking around. The Linnaean system was woefully short of genera and severely underestimated species diversity. American naturalists had already discovered and described species previously unknown to science that demanded new nomenclature. And Jefferson had left open the door for the discovery of many more. Listing more than 120 species of North American birds, Jefferson anticipated this was only a beginning, as there were “doubtless many others which have not yet been described and classed.” Within a few decades, naturalists who were curious about fauna that Jefferson scarcely considered—mollusks, insects, fishes—would fan out across the country and find new species at an astonishing pace.
Twenty years after Notes on the State of Virginia was published, Jefferson, recently reelected to the presidency, received a fan letter from a citizen just back from a visit to Niagara Falls. The letter was brief, consisting mostly of praise for the president, a man “so honourable to Science and so invaluable to the republican institutions of a great and rapidly increasing Empire.” Somewhat apologetically, the writer also mentioned two birds he had shot on his trip, one of which seemed to be an unknown species of jay. Based on his observation of this and several more exotic species in the region, the writer wished to alert the president that “many subjects still remain to be added to our Nomenclature in the Ornithology.” If it was not too much of an impertinence, the writer wished the President to accept a drawing, which accompanied the letter, of the two birds.
The letter was signed “Alexander Wilson.”
4
LESSONS
Falco plumbeus: The Mississippi Kite
He glances toward the earth with his fiery eye; sweeps along, now with the gentle breeze, now against it.
—Ornithological Biography
Wilson’s letter to Thomas Jefferson was less about his respect for the president—though that was real enough—than it was about his recently formed determination to produce an ornithology of American birds. Only months before, he had begun practicing his drawing by making repeated likenesses of a stuffed owl. Untrained as an artist, Wilson knew his initial efforts looked comical—a crude owlish head sitting atop a body that more closely resembled a lark’s. But his technique improved rapidly, and the drawing he sent to Jefferson was a competent rendering of a handsome gray bird perched on a branch, its tail angled sharply downward and its head cocked forward as if it were studying something on the ground below. Wilson acknowledged that this unknown species of jay was similar to the Canadian jay, which had already been described and classed by Linnaeus. But he thought the plumage and shape of the bird’s crest sufficiently different that it must be considered a separate species. Wilson’s claim of having seen many other birds not yet formally described echoed Jefferson’s prediction two decades earlier in Notes on the State of Virginia.
The president was impressed, and wrote back to say he admired the “elegant” drawing he’d received. He also asked Wilson for assistance in identifying a bird he had spent twenty years wondering about. This bird, Jefferson wrote, was found everywhere in America but was difficult to observe. It was almost always perched on the highest branches of the tallest trees in the forest. Despite having chased them—on occasion through “miles” of woods—Jefferson had never gotten a good look at one. He’d also offered to reward anyone who could shoot him a specimen, but none of the young woodsmen he knew had managed it. The elusive bird appeared to be about the same size as a mockingbird and was generally brownish, with a lighter coloring on its breast. What was most notable, however, was its song, which Jefferson described as a glorious serenade, not unlike the nightingale’s.
In retrospect, this exchange is an amusing demonstration of the primitive state of American natural science at the time. The jay Wilson “discovered” was in fact a Canadian jay and not a new species at all—as he was later pained to learn. As for the bird that so beguiled Jefferson, Wilson could only conclude that it was the ordinary wood thrush, a common bird also known as a “wood robin” that was not mysterious to anyone who spent time in the forest. Jefferson was, however, rightly smitten with the song of the wood thrush, which was so lovely that it taxed Wilson’s descriptive powers a couple of years later when he completed an essay on the bird and its habits for American Ornithology:
With the dawn of the succeeding morning, mounting to the top of some tall tree that rises from a low thick shaded part of the woods, he pipes his few, but clear musical notes, in a kind of ecstasy; the prelude, or symphony to which, strongly resembles the double-tonguing of a German flute, and sometimes the tinkling of a small bell; the whole song consists of five or six parts, the last note of each of which is in such a tone as to leave the conclusion evidently suspended; the finale is finely managed, and with such charming effect as to soothe and tranquilize the mind, and to seem sweeter and mellower at each successive repetition.
This lyrical, overwrought style, characteristic of the times and also of Wilson’s poetic sensibility, contrasted with his drawing of the wood thrush—a frozen profile in which Wilson showed the bird’s beak open, as if it were caught singing. Like all of his images, this one bore the caption “Drawn from Nature.” But it was nature flattened, as though the bird had been pressed onto the paper like a flower preserved between the pages of a book. Nature was less vivid in Wilson’s drawings than it was in his prose, and in this Wilson was a reflection of the moment in which he lived. America was then the epicenter of several worlds in collision—a country of revolution and radicalism premised on the triumph of reason, a civil nation thinly established on the shore of an immense land where the raw power of nature flooded the senses. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia had in effect been a second declaration of American independence, this time from the tyranny of European science. In answering Jefferson’s call to arms, Wilson was awed by what he saw in nature and by the responsibility of rendering it properly. But he wasn’t ready, or talented enough, to throw away tradition. This limitation added a sorrowful tinge to the graceful but immovable images in American Ornithology, which was so much like its creator—ambitious yet bound by convention. Wilson allowed his writing to soar, but not his birds.
Wilson’s interest in ornithology arrived late in his short life, after years of struggle and restlessness. In the summer of 1803 he wrote to a friend back in Scotland that he was determined to “make a collection of all our finest birds.” He was just shy of his thirty-seventh birthday. He would be dead in ten years.
In the summer of 1794, Philadelphia, which had so impressed Wilson and his nephew when they first saw it sprawled on the opposite shore of the Delaware River, was in reality a devastated city just coming back to life. Still the provisional seat of government—Philadelphia was the federal capital under the Articles of Confederation—the city had been decimated by yellow fever the previous summer and fall. The fever was a terrifying, frequently fatal disease that produced rashes, lethargy, breathing difficulties, black vomit, and a ghastly yellowing of the skin. It turned up initially along the riverfront but spread quickly, sending panicked citizens fleeing to the countryside. Many who left did so on the advice of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the city’s most prominent physician. Rush, who was also a political leader and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was among the handful of doctors who first realized an epidemic was under way. He believed that the fever was caused by airborne poisons given off by putrefying garbage—especially the spoiled cargoes that were sometimes dumped on the wharves along the Delaware and left to rot. Rush thought that a great load of ruined coffee, lying out under the August sun and fouling the air over the city immediately before the outbreak of fever, was particularly suspect.
As the city emptied, those who stayed behind saw the hellish effects of the fever. City officials commandeered deserted homes and stables to house the sick. In reeking hospitals the dying and the dead were confined together and then abandoned by their physicians, left to be tended only by ill-trained nurses, some of whom stole their patients’ food and took no notice of the filth accumulating around them. The sky itself turned black, as buckets of tar were burned in the streets in hopes of sanitizing the air.
Rush no doubt saved many lives with his advice to get out of town—mainly because people who left were more likely to escape his own widely practiced treatment for the fever. Rush adhered to an old-fashioned, two-stage remedy that began with a massive dose of purgatives, which doubtless exhausted and dehydrated an already desperately ill patient. This was followed with a heavy bleeding of the victim. Rush, who greatly overestimated the amount of blood in a typical human body, advised the removal of several quarts from fever sufferers. In both phases of the treatment, Rush emphasized that it was important not to err on the side of caution, but to take the most aggressive measures possible. This approach, which by itself could be enough to kill a healthy person, contributed to the deaths of many fever patients.
Yellow fever was actually transmitted by mosquitoes. It probably arrived in Philadelphia with infected refugees who’d fled the recent uprising in Saint-Domingue—and who also seemed somewhat resistant to the disease. All of this was the subject of keen speculation, but nobody at the time really understood how the fever spread or what to do about it. A few doctors who were more familiar with tropical diseases prescribed fluids and cool baths, and their fortunate patients survived at higher rates. But the disease ran rampant. Racing through the city in a matter of months, it left five thousand dead—about one out of every ten Philadelphians. The following spring the city still appeared deserted. Weeds grew in the streets. Many businesses were boarded up; some had been looted or burned out.
But by midsummer, as Wilson and his nephew hiked along the Delaware toward the city, things were returning to normal and a general cleanup had restored a sense of well-being. Wilson, shocked as he was at the prices of almost everything and by the number of Caribbean refugees wandering the streets, still perceived the wealth and opportunity pulsing in the city. When he couldn’t find work as a weaver right away, he accepted a position at an engraving shop—where he got a taste of the printmaking business in which he would one day make a name. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Wilson felt happy. In letter after letter home, he wrote about the wonder of America, and how grand a city Philadelphia was.
Philadelphia was then America’s most successful seaport, prospering on a brisk export trade in agricultural produce—principally flour—and on the import of manufactured goods. Built on an orderly grid of tree-lined avenues fronted by sturdy, somewhat unimaginative brick buildings, the city was dominated by a burgeoning class of merchants and seamen. Market Street, which ran east–west from the Delaware waterfront, bisected the downtown area. It was twice as wide as the other streets, and the roofed stalls of meat and produce sellers occupied the center of the boulevard. Newcomers gaped at the abundance on display in the marketplace and at its tidiness. The butchers, especially, were immaculate. They dressed in sparkling white smocks and sawed the bones as they cut meat—an appetizing improvement over the European practice of breaking the bones. Every inn and hotel in the city served feastlike meals daily, though the rough table manners of the Americans offered a challenge to anyone too dainty to grab a portion.
By day the streets were clean and quiet, and it was generally agreed that no city in the world was better lit at night. Philadelphia looked rich, and it was—a city triumphant in the wake of a revolution launched from where it stood. Wilson said that coming to America was like being a tree that had been transplanted. After a period of adjustment to his new environment, he could feel himself blooming anew amid the bounty of the New World. Any of his old friends who dreamed of coming here should do so at once, he thought. No matter what a man’s occupation was, there were “a thousand other offers” of employment to contemplate in America, and it was all but assured that you could “live ten times better” here than in Scotland. For Wilson, one recurring measure of the young country’s greatness was how well Americans ate. “When I look round me here on the abundance which every one enjoys,” Wilson wrote to a friend back in Paisley, “when I see them sit down to a table loaded with roasted, boiled, fruits of different kinds, and plenty of good cyder, and this only the common fare of the common people, I think on my poor countrymen, and cannot refrain feeling sorrowful at the contrast.”
