John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
vacation, Audubon took full advantage of the family largesse: “In the very lap of comfort my time was happily spent,” he wrote. “I went out shooting and hunting, drew every bird I procured, as well as many other objects of natural history and zoology.”29 He also studied taxidermy with a family friend and physician, Charles Marie D’Orbigny, developing a skill that would become professionally useful in the decades to come.
But in addition to his further bird research, Audubon’s trip to France in 1805–1806 produced two important results that would shape his return to the United States. First, he got his father’s tentative permission to marry Lucy Bakewell. Despite Jean Audubon’s initial doubts about the possible gold-digging ambitions of the Bakewells, he yielded on the marriage question, insisting only that young Audubon find some means to support a wife. Second, the elder Audubon arranged for young Ferdinand Rozier, the son of a family friend, to form a business partnership with his own son, whereby the two would go to the United States, try to make the Mill Grove lead mine a viable venture, deal with Dacosta, then seek out whatever other sort of business they could find to turn a profit.30
All the two young Frenchmen had to do, then, was to get out of France before Napoleon conscripted them. Rather than let the young men get snatched away into the military, the elder Audubon used his pull to help them get passports (albeit somewhat bogus-looking ones) and book passage on an American ship, the Polly, bound for New York. After a handful of harrowing oceanic adventures—enduring a ransacking at the hands of a British privateer, then making a close escape from a pair of British frigates, and finally running aground during a violent storm in Long Island Sound—the Polly managed to make it safely to New York Harbor in late May 1806. And there the two young Frenchmen disembarked and set out to begin what Audubon would later call “a partnership to stand good for nine years in America.”31
Audubon in Business
As in many partnerships, the first few years were the most uncertain, but in some ways also the best. Audubon and Rozier initially had ambitious intentions of taking up residence at Mill Grove, making a go of the mining operation and the farm as well, and perhaps ousting Dacosta in the process. Unfortunately, neither had any experience in operating a lead mine, and neither had any interest at all in doing the difficult field labor that the farm required. They did, however, still have the obstacle of Dacosta, who, as a result of his earlier arrangement with Audubon’s father, also held title to a large portion of the whole Mill Grove estate. He would be hard to move. Realizing they would probably not be able to beat Dacosta, then, and certainly not wanting to join him, the two young Frenchmen decided to sell him the remainder of Mill Grove.
That decision also led them in slightly different directions for a while: Rozier, who was not at all fluent in English, became a clerk in a French-owned importing business in Philadelphia, while Audubon went to New York to work for another wholesale import house, this one owned by Benjamin Bakewell, the uncle of Lucy Bakewell, the young beauty Audubon already knew he wanted to marry. Audubon stayed with the Bakewell business for about a year, from the fall of 1806 until the late summer of 1807, and he did a good-enough job to stay in Bakewell’s good graces, a useful boon to Audubon’s matrimonial aspirations. Since the elder Audubon needed some assurance that his son could support himself and a wife, the job with Bakewell certainly helped. It also helped Audubon pursue his other passion. During his time in New York he spent what free time he could away from the countinghouse, scouring the shoreline and wooded areas of the city for birds to draw. He also developed a friendship with Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, a New York naturalist who allowed Audubon to practice taxidermy on his specimen collection, stuffing birds and mammals. On the whole, Audubon’s brief stint in New York seemed reasonably well spent. Bakewell provided both income and indulgence, helping Audubon learn something about business, but also letting him roam the streets in search of birds.32 Indeed, trying to balance business and birds became the main theme of Audubon’s early days in the United States.
In August 1807, he and Rozier decided to go back into partnership again, this time getting away from the main East Coast cities and setting up a retail shop in the distant river town of Louisville, Kentucky. Having arranged for a starting stock of store goods, bought from Benjamin Bakewell on generous terms, they headed west by stage on August 31. By the latter part of September, they had started in business—but, as luck would have it, just before Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807 disrupted trade everywhere, even for small-time operators like Audubon and Rozier.
Audubon couldn’t do much about the bigger picture, and he had other business on his mind anyway: He wanted to marry Lucy. In March 1808, after he had been in Louisville for just over six months, he took the trek back to Pennsylvania to ask Mr. Bakewell for Lucy’s hand, and on April 8, 1808, they were married at Fatland Ford. With that, the young couple headed off for Louisville, following the same rough route Audubon and Rozier had taken the previous year. After enduring almost two weeks of stagecoach bumps and flatboat exposure, they arrived in Louisville and settled in an extended-stay hotel, the Indian Queen. Surveying her new situation, Lucy sent her English cousin some hopeful-seeming words about the Louisville environment (“The country round is very flat, but the land is very fertile”), the inhabitants (“very accommodating”), and the houses (“some of them are very prettily laid out indeed”). Still, she confessed to being “very sorry there is no library here or book store of any kind for I have very few of my own and as Mr. Audubon is constantly at the store, I should often enjoy a book very much whilst I am alone.”33
Being alone became a big part of the story of Lucy’s life. As she would soon find out, her husband’s habit of being “constantly at the store” would quickly dissipate, and he would spend as much time thinking about birds as business. Over the coming years, in fact, birds would become his business, and in pursuit of that business he would leave her alone for long stretches of time, most notably a three-year stint in England, 1826–1829, to begin producing The Birds of America. In the early years of their marriage, though, Audubon and Lucy would be together enough to have four children: two boys, Victor Gifford (born 1809) and John Woodhouse (born 1812), both of whom would turn out to be important assistants in their father’s work; and two girls, Lucy (born 1815) and Rose (born 1819), both of whom died in infancy. Beyond being a mother, though, Lucy’s main role in life eventually meant being a quiet contributor to the Great Work that defined Audubon’s career and truly became a family business. Before any of that would happen, however, she had to adjust, many times over, to being married to a man whose head so often seemed to be in the clouds, his eyes typically turned to the tops of trees. Like Audubon’s father, Lucy probably never expected her husband to become a bird artist.
She probably also never suspected that his life would become so affected by his first meeting with another—really, the other—bird artist in America.
Louisville Encounter
Every field has its famous, even defining moments, and there’s a much-told Audubon story that merits a place in the apocrypha of early American art and science. The incident in question seems so implausible and yet so perfect that no one would dare have the gall to invent it completely—not even Audubon himself. And because the story comes from two sources, not just Audubon but the other main character as well, we might well assume it actually happened, even if not exactly as it has been told by either of them. Perhaps the best thing to say is that the story is close to being true, and it points to larger truths beyond the specific narrative details.
Audubon tells it this way: “One fair morning” in March 1810, he writes, he happened to be working behind the counter of the Audubon-Rozier store in Louisville, when “I was surprised by the sudden entrance into our counting-room of Mr. Alexander Wilson, the celebrated author of the ‘American Ornithology.’” From the beginning, the story sets up a much-repeated contrast, with Audubon trying to take care of business but being distracted by birds or, in this case, pictures of birds. When Audubon took a look at Wilson’s work, he saw something that filled his artist’s eye with admiration, perhaps even envy—two large, leather-bound books with a total of eighteen engraved, hand-colored plates and over three hundred pages of accompanying text, volumes that were physically impressive in heft and visually striking in appearance.34
In those first few lines of his narrative,