Under a Wild Sky (22 page)

During the balmy interlude of a Kentucky summer, the Audubons lived in comfort. They were part of the social life of Henderson, such as
it was, and they also communed with the wilderness stretching in every direction beyond the town's limits. When Audubon was not out hunting or drawing, he and Lucy often took to the fields together. Lucy, who was now twenty-four, still kept up with her energetic husband.
Sometimes they would swim across the Ohio to the Indiana side and back, a mile-long round-trip. They enjoyed riding and were both in love with a remarkable horse named Barro.
Audubon bought the once-wild mustang for $50 after trying him and finding that the ungainly-looking animal was a good jumper, a strong swimmer, and would stand still when Audubon shot at game from the saddle.
Audubon rode him to Philadelphia and back on business, making side trips along the way that extended the distance to something like two thousand miles—at the end of which Barro appeared as fit as on the day they'd left.

The record of Audubon's comings and goings between Henderson and Philadelphia at this time is fuzzy. Evidently there were several trips, one of which was at Lucy's request.
She asked Audubon to take her east to visit her family and to introduce them to little Victor. Always eager to travel, Audubon said they could leave almost immediately—on horseback. Lucy gamely agreed.
Audubon rigged a seat on the front of his saddle where Victor, who was two, would ride. And they were off.
At Louisville, they stopped after getting word that Lucy's brother, Tom Bakewell, was coming downriver in hopes of going into business with Audubon. Worried they might pass him by on the river, the Audubons checked into their former home, the Indian Queen, and waited.

It was November of 1811 when Tom finally got to Louisville. He had an exciting plan. Tom had been working in a mercantile office in New York and was now determined to open his own operation in New Orleans as a consignment agent for a trading company in Liverpool, England. He thought Audubon's French connections would be an asset in New Orleans. Audubon and Lucy were ecstatic. The deal was done on the spot. The new firm was to be called Audubon & Bakewell. Tom headed south. Audubon, Lucy, and Victor climbed on their horses. The weather was turning cold and the road home to Pennsylvania was long and difficult. Three grueling weeks later, they rode up the drive at Fatland Ford. Lucy, a stoic traveler, admitted that the rocky climbs and steep descents through the mountains had been almost too much for her.

“I can scarcely believe that I have rode on horse back nearly eight hundred miles,” Lucy wrote to her cousin in England. “The country from
Louisville to Pittsburgh is flat rich woodlands; there are some cultivated farms which diversify the scene a little, but the chief part of the road is through thick woods, where the sun scarcely ever penetrates. We crossed a number of rivers and creeks. The rivers are all navigable and have their banks lined with great variety of Trees and Shrubs.”

Lucy, thinking her cousin might want to trace their journey on a map, listed the main towns and cities they passed through before arriving at Pittsburgh and beginning the hardest part of the journey, across the mountains and on toward Philadelphia. The boulder-strewn roads, Lucy said, were “dreadful at all seasons of the year” and only her eagerness to see her family had kept her going.

Audubon stayed just long enough to ask for a loan from Lucy's father that Tom wanted to help launch Audubon & Bakewell. Then he was away again on Barro—first to Kentucky, where he would arrange trading partnerships in Henderson, and then down to New Orleans to meet up with Tom.
It was on this ride that Audubon met a man named Vincent Nolte at a river crossing in the Alleghenies east of Pittsburgh. As Audubon told it, Nolte was riding a fancy horse that caught his eye. But when he drew near and complimented Nolte on his mount, Nolte impolitely suggested it was unfortunate that Audubon's was so inferior. Nolte then offered to meet Audubon for dinner at a hotel down the road, implying that he would wait for him to arrive. Unfazed, Audubon agreed. Nolte cantered off. Audubon gave Barro a kick and sped past, arriving at the hotel fifteen minutes ahead of Nolte—long enough to stable Barro and place two orders for trout for dinner.
Nolte remembered their introduction differently, writing that he met Audubon in a hotel over breakfast one morning and thought him a strange but intriguing man. They had ridden on together, Nolte said, and took themselves and their horses downriver on the same flatboat out of Pittsburgh. Whatever the truth, the meeting between Aubudon and Nolte later turned out to be far more important to Audubon than he could have imagined at the time.

Lucy, pleased that her husband's business was going to reconnect them with her family, amused herself back in Philadelphia by imagining how fine life in New Orleans would be after several years in lesser places.
But when Audubon reached Henderson, he was met with news from Tom that their venture was on hold. A growing likelihood of war with England threatened to halt trade between the two countries. Rather than continue downriver, Audubon returned to Philadelphia to wait with
Lucy.
For some reason he went by boat, reluctantly parting with Barro for $120.
In April, the Audubons learned they were expecting another child. Soon after that, in June of 1812, war was declared, and Audubon & Bakewell abruptly existed only in the minds of its proprietors. The following month, Audubon rode into Philadelphia to become a naturalized citizen.
In a moment of rare candor, he gave his place of birth as Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue.

10

KENTUCKY HOME

Plotus anhinga
: The Anhinga, or Snake-Bird

It gives a decided preference to rivers, lakes, bayous, or lagoons in the interior, always, however in the lowest and most level parts of the country. The more retired and secluded the spot, the more willingly does the Snake-Bird remain about it.

—Ornithological Biography

B
ack down the Ohio went the Audubons. They started out on an ark, accompanied by Lucy's younger brother, William. Lucy, now well along in her pregnancy, rode serenely as Victor smiled and played at her feet, while Audubon watched the forest passing by. It was fall now. The river was low, so at Louisville Audubon bought a light but spacious skiff and hired two black oarsmen to speed them toward home.

The weather was still warm. Audubon later recalled that it was October, though possibly it was earlier. The woods were beautiful—long vines heavy with colorful fruits hung among the changing leaves. Sunlight reflecting from the river lit the trees from beneath more beautifully, Audubon said, than any description a poet might render. Sometimes, in places where the river widened and filled with islands, Audubon imagined himself motionless on a vast lake. In the daytime they passed by many slow-moving flatboats. The Ohio valley was teeming with settlers. Near the mouth of a tributary, where the river passed by a beech woods, there was a sudden clamor onshore. It sounded like an Indian war party. Quickly, and anxious not to make a sound, they put the boat ashore on the opposite bank and waited to see what would happen. After a while Audubon laughed. It was only a group of Methodists holding a camp meeting. The rowers pulled at the oars again and they moved on. Audubon went ashore
periodically to shoot a turkey or a grouse. They ate well. At night they watched the moon rise and listened for owls ghosting by overhead. There were many deer swimming across the river, a sign, Audubon knew, that winter was coming. He could not have guessed the catastrophe awaiting them in Henderson when they arrived.

The Audubons again went to stay with the Rankins at Meadow Brook.
After a couple of days, Audubon opened the trunk in which he had carefully packed away more than two hundred of his drawings almost a year before. A pair of Norway rats was living in the chest, having raised a family of little rats that were now nested in the chewed and urine-soaked shreds of his drawings. Although some other drawings survived—how many isn't known—there were more than one thousand individual birds depicted on the ruined sheets in the chest, the bulk of all the work he had completed. Audubon could not believe his eyes. He felt a rush of heat and pain in his head as he staggered away from the trunk. For a few days he could not sleep and wandered around dazed. Finally, calling on a reserve of what he called his “animal powers,” Audubon picked up his gun and his pencils and walked toward the woods to start over. Quickening his pace over the brittle leaves, Audubon told himself he was lucky. He had lost a treasure beyond calculation. But fortune had invited him to remake his drawings. He would make them even better now.

The loss of his paintings marked a turning point in Audubon's life. And his response to the incident signaled that his drawing was more to him than an idle hobby. He was by nature an irrepressible personality, but Audubon's innate optimism had never before been tested so harshly. Yet within a matter of days, he bounced back and resumed drawing almost as if nothing had happened. Years later, after his work became celebrated across half the world, Audubon insisted that at this stage of his life he had still not considered the possibility of publishing his art. This can't have been true. There is evidence to the contrary, and on at least one occasion long before he attempted it, he admitted to an ambition to sell his work. Audubon knew how good he was and he knew, too, that there was a public appetite for the wild images of America that crowded his brain and filled his portfolio. What does seem believable is that Audubon did not then see drawing as his life's work. He still thought of himself primarily as a shopkeeper. Despite the setbacks he'd already experienced, Audubon had yet to suffer the abject failure at business that would force him to earn a living through his art. But it was coming.

In starting over, Audubon also crossed a creative divide. At Louisville, Audubon had still been consumed by technical considerations in his drawings—in mastering his pencil and chalk and watercolors—until he had at last made his birds look like the real thing. But at Henderson and during the months he'd spent in Philadelphia, Audubon's field of vision had widened.
He'd begun to set his birds in motion. For the first time, he'd made successful drawings of birds in flight. And his compositions became more complex. There were now more elements—more tree branches and flowers in the background, and more birds interacting with one another. With the loss of his earlier drawings, Audubon now began the long task of assembling a portfolio entirely in his new style.

Audubon then did something no one would have dreamed him capable of at this critical juncture. Just when it seemed he would most want immersion in his drawing, Audubon showed an interest in his business.
Tom Bakewell had arrived at Henderson about this time, having walked most of the way from New Orleans, where he had abandoned the Audubon & Bakewell trading company. But he still wanted a partnership with his brother-in-law, and together they set about reestablishing the store in Henderson. Surprisingly, business improved steadily.
In November, Lucy gave birth to a boy. They named him John Woodhouse. Unlike his sturdy older brother, John Woodhouse was delicate and fussy. This was hard on Lucy and also added to their imposition on the Rankins, who were now putting up the four Audubons plus Lucy's two brothers.
Audubon, determined at last to find Lucy a real home of her own and to be closer to his shop, bought a house in town recently owned by a doctor. It was a story-and-a-half log cabin with a big front porch.
Audubon bought several adjacent lots that included a small orchard and a pasture where they could raise some livestock and also maintain the ever-changing menagerie of wild animals that he brought home from his travels.

Audubon continued to hunt and draw, and to make long trading trips that usually turned into quests for new birds. But he was no longer the neglectful or inept merchant he'd been in his first years in Kentucky. Although its population was still well below one thousand, Henderson was beginning to grow.
The state of Kentucky named the town to its roster of tobacco inspection stations, and Henderson became one of the country's leading tobacco markets.
Audubon found domestic goods and hardware increasingly in demand, locally and from settlers passing by on their way down the Ohio.
Early in 1814, Audubon and Tom Bakewell opened a
second store at Shawneetown, Illinois, about thirty miles downriver. They hired a manager to run it and immediately began earning back several thousand dollars a year.
Audubon tried his hand at real estate speculation and did well, shrewdly subdividing lots in Henderson at a profit.
In a six-year period, Audubon bought and sold property worth $50,000. Lucy found that her husband's frequent long absences were now more tolerable.
They evidently acquired or at least had occasional ownership interests in several slaves who tended the Audubon compound. The Rankins built a house in town and became frequent guests of the Audubons, restoring Lucy's sense of social position.
She sent for her pianoforte, which was shipped from Fatland Ford, and also began acquiring a library.

In this small place, the Audubons loomed large. John James was known as a well-to-do man who was also a clever woodsman quick to accept a physical challenge of any kind.
Fencing wasn't a popular diversion on the frontier, but people in Henderson knew of Audubon's skill and were impressed when he once easily bested a traveler who had boasted of his prowess with the broadsword.
Another time, the whole town turned out to see one of the new steamboats plying the Ohio and were alarmed and then thrilled when Audubon dived off the ship's bow, disappeared for a time, and finally surfaced astern after swimming the length of the keel underwater. Lucy, meanwhile, was
one of Henderson's leading lights, an object of admiration and envy.