Under a Wild Sky (20 page)

At the end of April, Wilson was stuck in Nashville. It had rained steadily for a week. He gave up on his plan of continuing from there to St. Louis. With the season so far advanced, he was dubious of finding any
new birds on that route, and was also skeptical of finding many subscribers in that remote town. He decided, instead, to ride to Natchez. This would take him through an unsettled and only rarely traveled section of wilderness:

I was advised by many not to attempt it alone; that the Indians were dangerous, the swamps and rivers almost impassable without assistance, and a thousand other hobgoblins were conjured up to dissuade me from going alone. But I weighed all these matters in my own mind; and attributing a great deal of this to vulgar fears and exaggerated reports, I equipped myself for the attempt. I rode an excellent horse, on which I could depend; I had a loaded pistol in each pocket, a loaded fowling-piece belted across my shoulder, a pound of gunpowder in my flask, and five pounds of shot in my belt. I bought some biscuit and dried beef, and on Friday morning, May 4th, I left Nashville.

For a man unworried about his safety, it must be said that Wilson went into the wilds very well armed. Most of the difficulties he met with, however, were topographical.

Eleven miles from Nashville, I came to the Great Harpath, a stream of about fifty yards wide, which was running with great violence. I could not discover the entrance of the ford, owing to the rains and inundations. There was no time to be lost, I plunged in, and almost immediately my horse was swimming. I set his head aslant the current, and being strong, he soon landed on the other side. As the weather was warm, I rode in my wet clothes without any inconvenience. The country to-day was a perpetual succession of steep hills and low bottoms; I crossed ten or twelve large creeks, one of which swam my horse, where he was near being entangled among some bad drift wood. Now and then a solitary farm opened from the woods, where the negro children were running naked about the yards.

Most of the people Wilson encountered were poor settlers and miners, plus several parties of ragged boatmen who were making their way back north overland after delivering cargoes to New Orleans. They
warned him of bad roads ahead and marveled that he should be traveling by himself, especially without any whiskey. About seventy miles from Nashville, Wilson stopped at a travelers' way station called Grinder's Inn, which had been the site of a bizarre suicide the previous fall. Wilson, the first reliable reporter on the scene, questioned Mrs. Grinder, the main witness to the event.
He later gave a full account of the affair in an issue of
The Port Folio.

It seemed that a guest who had come there in October spent the evening behaving oddly, pacing and talking to himself, asking for spirits but drinking little. He didn't eat much, and when it was time for bed, announced that he preferred to sleep on the floor on his own bearskin and buffalo robe. But he did not lie down. Instead, he paced his room for several hours, talking loudly to himself—“like a lawyer,” according to Mrs. Grinder. Then there was a shot, followed by the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor. There was another shot. After a few minutes, the man staggered back to the kitchen and asked for water, pleading with Mrs. Grinder that she “heal his wounds,” which were grim. Part of his forehead was blown away, exposing his brain, and there was a hole in his side. The man careened about the camp all through the night, searching for water while the terrified Mrs. Grinder hid in her room. He died in the morning, while begging someone to shoot him and end it.

The man was Meriwether Lewis. Wilson inspected his shallow grave, which was marked only by a few logs laid over it. He gave Mrs. Grinder some money to fence the gravesite so as to preserve it from hogs and wolves. Then he went on, now in a melancholy mood that was “not much allayed by the prospect of the gloomy and savage wilderness which I was just entering alone.”

In the summer of 1811, Wilson was introduced to George Ord, a wealthy young Philadelphia businessman with a lively interest in natural history.
Two years later, Ord got Wilson elected to membership in the fledgling Academy of Natural Sciences, and the two men became frequent partners on shooting expeditions outside the city and across the Delaware in the swamps and along the coast of New Jersey.
American Ornithology
became the model for illustrated books about North American fauna, solidifying the academy's prestige and inspiring its members—like the brilliant young entomologist Thomas Say.
Say, a founder of the academy
who was rumored to sleep in its museum under the skeleton of a horse, went on to describe much of the New World's insect fauna. He also discovered several species of birds in the West, and was the first to describe the coyote.

Publication of subsequent volumes of
American Ornithology
came in fits and starts. There were many delays. Wilson was never satisfied with the colorists hired to finish the plates, and they were expensive as well.
In the end, he colored most of the plates himself. Volumes three and four came out in 1811.
The original run of two hundred copies soared to five hundred, and Wilson had booked something like $60,000 in subscriptions—much of which would never be collected.
Many of his early subscribers were tradesmen in Philadelphia who ultimately fell off the list. Others defaulted or reneged as the project crept forward.
Volumes five and six were delivered in 1812, the latter showing a profit to Bradford of $12,000.
Wilson had by then quit his job on the encyclopedia and moved to Bartram's Garden to work on the ornithology.
The seventh volume was finished in the spring of 1813, and the eighth was near completion that summer when Wilson came down with an illness that began when he'd gotten chilled swimming after a bird. He had completed seventy-six plates, depicting more than 250 species.
He was now owed by his subscribers $48,000, but his share was being devoured by the mounting production costs.
His physical condition deteriorated, and on August 24, 1813, Wilson died. He was forty-seven years old.
George Ord, who'd been away from the city, returned to find he'd been made co-executor of the will, which Wilson wrote eight days before his death. The estate consisted of three copies of
American Ornithology
. Wilson left two to his father back in Scotland and the remaining one to his nephew, William Duncan.

American Ornithology
was a literary work as much as it was a scientific one. Wilson got some things wrong—his nomenclature required extensive revision later on and he sometimes mistook birds with immature or seasonal plumages for distinct species. But he got the story of America, and in his simple, elegant drawings, he got America's birds. As a natural history,
American Ornithology
was an original—one that would serve as a template for Audubon. It was mostly words—just 103 engraved plates were interspersed with the lively, personal descriptions of birds and their habits that Wilson gleaned from years of observation. He claimed to have written virtually all of it in the field. Wilson was as happy describing the searching flight of a hawk as he was telling how a boy had fallen from a
tree after he reached into a woodpecker's nest for its babies and found instead the large black snake that had just eaten the little birds.

In the final days of his short, strange life, Wilson no doubt thought about the enormity of the New World and the portion of it he had seen. Certainly the delirium of his illness must have seemed familiar, must have reminded him of the malaria-like fever that had overtaken him on his trip through the West years before.

Wilson had crossed the Tennessee River and was angling across what would later be the northwest corner of the state of Mississippi. The way was difficult, as what passed for a road took him through a succession of miserable swamps that left him damp and caked with mud. In places, he could not tell whether his horse was walking or swimming. Wilson was abruptly overcome by a “constant burning thirst.” He grew weak. He stopped every few minutes to drink from the fetid waters he rode through. At intervals, he soaked his hat for relief from the broiling sun. Soon he could barely ride. When he camped for the night, Wilson was so parched and feverish that he barely slept. The next morning he managed to buy some eggs along the road. He ate them raw and felt a little better for it. For the next week, eggs were all he ate. Wilson thought his fever had ebbed but he could not get over his all-consuming thirst. Now he was in cane swamps so awful that drinking from them was unthinkable. It got hotter. The sun was a constant torture. Exhausted and hallucinating, Wilson began to lose sense of where he was and what he was doing. He was desperate for water. There was none.

After ten days of this, as he rode barely clinging to his horse, Wilson noticed the wind begin to stir the trees around him. The sun disappeared, as if in answer to a prayer. He found a meadow and rode into the open. The wind continued to rise. The sky was an odd color. A massive wall of clouds formed above him, and it began to revolve, moving lower as it turned. The wind increased. Wilson dismounted, dropping the reins. His horse skittered sideways, eyes wide with terror. Wilson walked a few steps to stand alone. This was America. He was very far from home. The Seedhills and his poetry and his weaving seemed to belong to another world, another life. There were no birds here, no learned friends, no welcoming hearth, only this wild, terrible moment. Wilson steadied himself. On either side of the clearing, the trees bent in opposite directions. Lightning stabbed at the forest canopy. The air fizzed and the ground shook beneath long, shuddering waves of thunder. Now the
wind shrieked. Wilson turned slowly, amazed, and watched as trees exploded and debris lifted and spun toward the sky all around him. The world was coming apart, rising to the heavens. He looked up. A great black cloud was coming right at him. And for an instant, Wilson, who was so rarely happy to be alive, was only that. He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, and raised his arms high.

It began to rain.

II

THE BIRDS OF AMERICA

9

AT THE RED BANKS

Scolopax minor
: The American Woodcock

Now and then, the American Woodcock, after being pursued for a considerable time, throws itself into the centre of large, miry places, where it is very difficult for either man or dog to approach it; and indeed if you succeed, it will not rise unless you almost tread upon it.

—Ornithological Biography

F
erdinand Rozier wanted to move on. After two years by the Falls of the Ohio with Audubon it seemed that, even though Louisville kept growing, their business was a dead end. Settlers passed by on the way west, an endless thread of humanity pushing America ever farther into the continent. Surely, Rozier reasoned, opportunity lay in that direction. Audubon, who at best had only a vague concept of their stagnating fortunes, was not immediately enthusiastic about a move. He loved Louisville. He may even have convinced himself that Lucy and Victor loved their hotel room. But Rozier persisted, and eventually Audubon agreed to have a look at the place where Rozier thought they might have a better chance. It was a tiny town called Henderson, perched on a bluff on the south side of the Ohio, more than two hundred miles downriver.

Henderson's origins predated the Revolutionary War, when it had been conceived as a primary outpost in America's early westward push. It was named for Richard Henderson, a North Carolina judge and land speculator.
In the years just before the colonies declared their independence from Britain, Henderson became interested in opening up land in Kentucky after listening to Daniel Boone's reports of the richness and beauty of this wild region west of the mountains.
Boone was one of the self-styled “long hunters” who prowled the forests along the frontier for years at a time.
In the summer of 1774, Henderson and a group of
investors formed the Transylvania Company, intent on buying a large tract of land in Kentucky from the Indians who lived there. The following spring, a party including Henderson and Boone met with 1,200 Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in what is now the state of Tennessee. The meeting lasted twenty days, though the actual negotiations apparently occupied only a small part of that time, the rest being devoted to feasts and general merriment—with a promise of liquor all around once the deal was completed. In the end, Henderson cut the most one-sided bargain since the Dutch bought Manhattan for less than $30. The Transylvania Company acquired 20 million acres of central Kentucky for well under a penny an acre.

Daniel Boone and thirty men were dispatched to begin construction of a road into Kentucky. Within a month Boone had established a fort on the Kentucky River. Another month later, Henderson held a meeting at Boonesboro, as the settlement was called, at which time measures were adopted to bring order to the territory.
These mainly dealt with courts and militia, but one fortuitous provision called for Kentuckians to engage in horse breeding.
In September of 1775, Henderson's company petitioned the Continental Congress to make Transylvania the fourteenth colony. The request was rejected, however, and on New Year's Eve of 1776, Virginia nullified the Transylvania Company's claim in Kentucky and took control of its holdings.
Two years later the Virginia House of Delegates returned 200,000 acres, and in 1783 the state of North Carolina added back another 200,000 acres. But Richard Henderson died just two years after that, at the age of forty-nine. His name was still inseparable from the Transylvania Company's interests when it looked to secure its new holdings along the Ohio River, just below the mouth of the Green River. Well to the south and west of Louisville, this was considered a dangerous stretch of the frontier, a place where the Indians were unfriendly and river pirates lurked.
In the spring of 1797, agents from the Transylvania Company paddling pirogues arrived at a place called the Red Banks, where they surveyed and platted a new town to be called Henderson. A small settlement there had already been established, mostly occupied by German squatters who were offered free lots if they would stay.