Under a Wild Sky (14 page)

Audubon and Rozier spent twelve days in Pittsburgh, staying at the Jefferson Hotel.
Despite its captivating location, the town was a dismal place. It had been built in the shadow of British Fort Pitt in the 1760s, and was situated in a lovely valley where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers met and the surrounding hills formed a kind of natural amphitheater. The two rivers merged there to form the mighty Ohio, whose broad beginnings wandered north from the city before turning south and west and heading into the forever and ever of the frontier. But the town itself was a grimy black scar. Smoke and ash from coal fires powering the businesses and warming the homes occupied by four thousand residents rose in a towering pall. More smoke poured from several nearby coal mines that had caught fire years before and continued to smolder. Every surface exposed to the air was coated in soot. People choked and wheezed and went grimly about their business beneath a perpetual dark cloud hanging over the narrow streets and the low, ugly buildings.

But business
was
good.
Pittsburgh was already becoming a manufacturing center and was sending a diversifying assortment of supplies down the Ohio on the heels of the settlers who would buy these goods at the other end. The trade included nails, cloth, glassware, wire, buttons, rope, iron implements, and lead. There were eight boat and barge builders in town, and so many keelboats, arks, and Kentucky flatboats now regularly descended the Ohio from Pittsburgh that nobody could keep count. With fair weather and high water, it was possible to reach Louisville in as little as ten days.
The estimated value of all trade passing through Pittsburgh exceeded a million dollars a year, and with the promise of regular steamship travel arriving soon, there was talk of a coming boom.
Audubon
and Rozier were elated at all of this, and also at discovering several French-speaking merchants with whom they arranged to acquire inventories. Rozier considered these people honest and easy to deal with.

The two men bought passage on a flatboat for $15, which included the transport of a small amount of merchandise with which they planned to open a store.
The boat moved swiftly down the smooth current, but it was crowded and uncomfortable. Rozier and Audubon slept in the open, with only their coats for blankets. Rozier found the monotony of river travel almost unbearable.
Occasionally the boat careened to a sudden halt when it ran aground and the passengers were forced into the chilly November water to drag it off a sandbar. Rozier thought the boat's captain, a man named Morris, singularly unpleasant.
He treated the passengers roughly, invented additional charges that he collected by threat of force, and used the foul language of “a low class.”

Louisville waited for them just over seven hundred miles downstream.
It stood on the slightly elevated south bank of the Ohio, immediately below the mouth of Bear Grass Creek, at a mile-wide bend in the river. Here the velocity of the current increased forcefully over a two-mile stretch. Boats lazing along at a gentle three miles an hour suddenly shot forward at ten to thirteen miles an hour, pitching violently through a section of almost invisible but dangerous rapids, as the water suddenly dropped twenty-two feet in elevation.
The “Falls of the Ohio,” as this place was called, were caused by immense submerged rock shelvings that lay in terraces across the river bottom. In periods of high water, a skilled pilot could run the rapids on almost any line. But when the river was low, the jagged ledges emerged and the channel divided into frothy chutes that funneled through openings in the rock, and only the most experienced and daring local rivermen could bring a boat through.

The town of Louisville had been laid out in the 1770s, when General George Rogers Clark first built a fort there during his campaign against British and Indian forces in the Revolutionary War.
About twenty families of civilian pioneers had tagged along with Clark's small flotilla of boats when he descended the Ohio from Fort Pitt—somewhat to Clark's astonishment, as he gave them no encouragement in what seemed to him an incautious adventure into a wild country still being contested by several armed factions.
By the time Audubon and Rozier landed at Louisville—probably sometime before Christmas—they found a civilized-looking town of about thirteen hundred citizens. There were at least two hundred
sturdy brick homes, some three stories high. Many of these were on a busy-looking Main Street, which was also lined with shops and commercial operations.

Audubon and Rozier liked what they saw.
Businessmen—many of them French settlers—were making fine livings in Louisville. Thanks to the Falls, which naturally slowed the passage downstream and necessitated overland transfer for anyone or anything going upstream, Louisville was the principal trading city between Pittsburgh and New Orleans.
Some sixty thousand tons of goods now moved annually downriver to New Orleans. About one-tenth as much came back north—on keelboats that were sailed, rowed, poled, and sometimes dragged upstream.
There was already talk of building a lock and canal on the south bank of the river that would have one terminus near the little waterfront community of Shippingport, which was home to fewer than a hundred people, though several were well-established French merchants and boat builders. Audubon and Rozier found store space for rent in town, and also got acquainted with the French in Shippingport.
Audubon listened excitedly to their accounts of the local bird shooting, which featured great slaughters of migrating passenger pigeons and waterfowl.

In March the partners returned to Philadelphia for more goods, and so that Audubon and Lucy could be married.
The wedding took place on April 5, 1808, at Fatland Ford, with a Presbyterian minister presiding. A few days later, Rozier, Audubon, and Lucy boarded a stagecoach for Pittsburgh. This time the trip seemed harder. With his new wife along, Audubon now took more notice of how horrible the roads were the farther they got from Philadelphia, especially in the mountain passages, where they were little more than ruts winding through the rock and mud.
Lucy quietly endured the coarse language and drunken behavior they encountered at the taverns along the way. The inns—usually little more than saloons with a couple of sleeping rooms above—were crowded with unsavory travelers. Strangers shared their beds with one another and with the host of bedbugs that thrived between the infrequently washed sheets.
A young woman who made the journey across Pennsylvania in 1810 said the physical hardships were only exceeded by the threat of unwanted attention from wagoners, who sometimes skulked about the sleeping quarters after long nights of drinking. Few settlers returned from the West, she speculated, not because the land there was so wonderful but because coming and going between civilization and the frontier was so arduous.
But Lucy made no complaint and seemed perfectly enchanted by her dashing new husband and the great adventure they were on.
One day, as they climbed a steep, rocky section of road, with Audubon walking behind and Lucy riding inside to stay out of a cold rain, the coach overturned and was dragged on its side some distance before the team could be brought under control. Audubon pulled Lucy, bruised and shaken, from the coach, then helped set it upright. On they went, that day and the next and for many after that, over the mountains and then down the river to their new life.

6

THE FORESTER

Colymbus glacialis
: The Loon

When it has acquired its perfect plumage, which is not altered in colour at any successive moult, it is really a beautiful creature; and the student of Nature who has opportunities of observing its habits, cannot fail to derive much pleasure from watching it as it pursues its avocations.

—Ornithological Biography

A
spell of Indian summer came to Pennsylvania in October 1804. Alexander Wilson, desperate to escape the smother of his schoolhouse and now eager to see the country and all its birds, organized a small party of travelers. There were three, to be exact: himself, his nephew William Duncan, and a young man from Milestown—probably a former student—named Isaac Leech. On a warm morning, they met beside the Schuylkill River and set out. Their destination was Niagara Falls.

Duncan, hardened and countrywise from his years on the farm in upstate New York, served as unofficial guide. Wilson believed his nephew, carrying only a walking stick and a small knapsack, would find his way over field and swamp and mountain. In any terrain, Duncan seemed able to divine a path even where none was apparent, and he could read the signs of animals that might afford either a meal or a threat. Leech was an eager, rosy-cheeked boy, dressed in spanking new oilcloth and evidently sure of his safety so long as he was in the company of Alexander Wilson. Wilson himself was elated—even under an impressive load. He carried his trusty double-barreled gun, and a leather belt heavy with shot, flasks of powder, and a stout dagger. His knapsack contained clothes, some cakes and cordials, plus his drawing kit of crayons, pencils, and paper.

They walked that day through a gilded land. Leaves skittered across the path as they passed by orchards heavy with fruit and rattling fields of corn drying on the stalk. The sun shone sulfurously through the wood-smoke from farmhouse chimneys, and masses of blackbirds swept across the sky. They spent their first evening on the road in a snug tavern. At dinner the guests sat facing each other at a long table heaped with meats and bread and hunks of bacon. A pint of beer was passed around, everyone drinking in turn. They were off again before dawn, waking to Venus shining in the east and a canopy of stars hanging overhead like a shimmering veil. Wilson, sobered at the natural beauty around him, thought ruefully of his school and the endless drilling of the A-B-Cs that was surely a torture to student and teacher alike.

Wilson and his companions carried on. One day they came to what had been a towering forest, long since leveled by a storm. Many of the trees had burned from lightning strikes so that their remains lay in a charred and twisted mass. The deadfall was so thick that the path entered under the trunks of the downed trees, which made a tunnel only wide enough for the travelers to walk single file. In the midst of this hellish scene, the group paused to look around in amazement. Suddenly there was a commotion nearby and a bear rushed at them. The animal skidded to a halt as the men shouldered their guns, hearts racing. After a long moment the bear ran off as fast as it had appeared. For the rest of the day, they watched every stump and bush apprehensively. The forest grew ever gloomier, until they came at last to a house where they were put up for the night, comforted by a roaring fire and the pleasant faces of three plump children—though the owner's tales of hunting wolves and wildcats in the area troubled their thoughts when they finally lay down to sleep. As they walked off down the road the next morning, a grouse flushed close by, going up on pounding wings, cackling as it rose into the chilly air. Wilson, snapping his gun up, brought the bird down in a roar and a puff of feathers that drifted slowly to the ground.

In a maple wood, near the banks of the Susquehanna River, the party came into a glen filled with spice and dogwood. Brilliant yellow leaves lay on the path. Wilson, stepping smartly along this shimmering carpet, was startled when the ground in front of him shifted oddly. In an instant he saw a shape at his feet twist into life as a rattlesnake, perfectly camouflaged on the trail, slithered away at an angle. It looked to be at least nine
feet long. When Wilson jumped back and reflexively brought up his gun, the snake stopped short and threw itself into a threatening coil, tail buzzing ominously. Wilson squinted down the length of his barrels and thumbed one hammer. The rattling tail moved so quickly it was an almost invisible blur. Blood pulsed in Wilson's temples. But then he felt Duncan next to him. Don't shoot, Duncan pleaded. Rattlesnakes don't want trouble, he said, only to be left in peace. We're the ones who don't belong here, Duncan whispered, not him. Wilson took a deep breath and lowered his gun.

Days passed in a hypnotic rhythm of long marches and dazzling scenery. Sometimes the trio walked easily along smooth trails through agreeable woods; other days they scrambled up sheer mountains. They came to streams alive with trout, and upon finding a small boat on the shore of a marsh-fringed lake, whiled away a few hours shooting ducks. They spent a nervous night surrounded by howling wolves, and once thought they heard a panther creeping into their camp. They met with a few Indians and many farmers, and platonically eyed one or two of the farmers' daughters. They endured a wild ride on a small ship that bore them across Lake Ontario. At last they reached Niagara Falls, covering the final miles enveloped by a growing roar they could scarcely believe.

Wilson and his friends stood transfixed before the cataract. The falling waters rose back up from the river far below in a great billow of white, roiling vapors. The noise was deafening, and rainbows hovered in the mist. Bald eagles and ravens and vultures soared above the falls. They were feasting on fish in the river, and also on carrion from the many animals that must have tried to swim the river above the falls and were instead carried over the precipice. The three friends made a harrowing descent to the base of the falls by means of a slippery, chancy-looking ladder that was hung from a tree root at the edge of the chasm. Then Wilson and Duncan walked hand-in-hand along the glistening rocks until they entered into the dark, wondrous space behind the falls, between the trembling earth and the crushing waters—a place Wilson later described as the “porch of death,” where they stood paralyzed amid whirling floods and terrible sounds, and where they could not see or hear or even breathe.

Wilson's return from Niagara was a remarkable trek. He and Leech parted company with Duncan at Aurora, New York, on the shore of Lake Cayuga, north of Ithaca. It was now mid-November. The travelers washed in an
icy stream, then found a tavern where they could warm up by a fire. Wilson was annoyed at the drunken tradesmen carousing there until late at night. At five the next morning they were on their way again. Wilson set a brutal pace, taking Leech's gun from him when the boy fell behind. They held to this for several days, with Leech grunting and struggling to keep up. The road worsened, and it began to snow. Wilson sang to encourage his young friend onward, ignoring his own condition, which was not so good. Wilson's threadbare pantaloons had worn through and the soles of his boots were gone, leaving him all but barefoot in the icy slush. One evening they arrived on the east bank of the Mohawk River, where Wilson shot a medium-sized bird he could not recognize. He skinned it for a closer inspection after he got home. The next day the road became a muddy rut, and it was all Wilson could do to keep Leech moving. At noon he shot three more birds—these were like jays—including the one he later drew for Thomas Jefferson.