CHAPTER XVIII

EARLY "EPISODES" OF WESTERN LIFE

Methods of composition—"A Wild Horse"—Henderson to Philadelphia in 1811—Records of Audubon and Nolte, fellow travelers, compared—The great earthquakes—The hurricane—The outlaw—Characterization of Daniel Boone—Desperate plight on the prairie—Regulator law in action—Frontier necessities—The ax married to the grindstone.

Audubon's sketches of life and scenery in America, which he designated as "Episodes," were interspersed in his _Biography_ of birds[247] to brighten the narrative and beguile the reader. Extending to the number of sixty, and dealing mainly with events between the years 1808 and 1834, they abound in tales of adventure and graphic pictures of pioneer life which for their personal charm, local coloring, and human interest are worthy of high praise. Some of these sketches have been copied widely and some have been translated into Audubon's native tongue; some have even found their way into schoolbooks. While they have deservedly won the naturalist many readers, not a few have subjected him to harsh criticism on the score of too vivid coloring or historical inaccuracy, a fault to which he was particularly prone. Whenever Audubon went directly to nature to exercise his pencil or brush or wrote with his subject before him, he was truth itself, but in writing offhand and from memory of past events he was wont to humor his fancy, disregarding dates as readily as he did the accents on French words. This tendency is particularly apparent in the accounts of some of his early adventures in the western country, such as "Louisville in Kentucky" (1808-10), "The Prairie" (1812), "A Wild Horse" (1811-13), and "The Eccentric Naturalist" (1818), the history of which is detailed in the following chapter. We shall examine some of these stories at this point, though their composition belongs to a later period, in order to reach a just conclusion in regard to the author's method, as well as for the intrinsic interest of the narratives themselves.

During Audubon's early life in Kentucky, as we have seen, he frequently visited the East, whether in the interest of birds or business, traveling by way of the river and the forest roads. Incidents of these journeys frequently occur in the "Episodes," but since dates commonly are omitted and the order of events is liable to be blended or confused, they cannot be trusted always for historical accuracy. Thus, "The Wild Horse" episode[248] professes to be an account of a single journey from Henderson, in Kentucky, to Philadelphia and back again, whereas some of the events recorded occurred in reality at least two years apart, such as the meeting with Nolte at the Falls of the Juniata River in December, 1811, and the naturalist's return from Pennsylvania with the proceeds of "Mill Grove," which could not have been earlier than 1813, the date of its sale to Mr. Samuel Wetherill, Junior.[249]

Audubon visited Philadelphia in November, 1811, and returned to Kentucky in December of that year, but whether it was upon this or some other journey that he rode a wild horse through seven states in going from his home at Henderson to the Quaker city, or whether such a journey ever occurred, is immaterial to the interest of the narrative. In this instance, however, we have the advantage of comparing the notes of a fellow traveler, Vincent Nolte, then a merchant at New Orleans.[250] First to follow Audubon's account, as given in his "Episode," we are told that he rode a wild mustang, named "Barro," that had never known a shoe, having been recently captured near the headwaters of the Arkansas. In going east he diverged from the beaten track to extend his knowledge of the country and of its bird life. From Henderson he passed through the heart of Tennessee to Knoxville, thence to Abington, the Natural Bridge, and Winchester in Virginia, crossed the corner of West Virginia to Harper's Ferry, then to Frederick, Maryland, and on through Lancaster to Philadelphia; there, he said, he remained four days, and returned by way of Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Zanesville, Chillicothe, Lexington and Louisville, to Henderson. He estimated the whole distance traversed at "nearly two thousand miles," and at a rate of "not less than forty miles a day." Much is said in praise of his favorite bay horse, and its food and daily treatment are duly recorded. This horse was very docile, and would wade swamps, swim rivers, and clear a rail fence like an elk; corn blades as well as corn and oats entered into his daily ration, to which a pumpkin and fresh eggs, when procurable, were occasionally added.

It was upon his return journey that the naturalist met with Vincent Nolte, who twelve years later did his chance acquaintance a good turn, when the latter was about to sail for England in 1826.[251] Nolte, said Audubon,

was mounted on a superb horse, for which he had paid three hundred dollars, and a servant on horseback led another as a change. I was then an utter stranger to him, and when I approached and praised his horse, he not very courteously observed that he wished I had as good a one. Finding that he was going to Bedford to spend the night, I asked him what hour he would get there: "Just soon enough to have some trouts ready for our supper, provided you will join when you get there." I almost imagined that Barro understood our conversation; he pricked up his ears, and lengthened his pace, on which Mr. Nolte caracolled his horse, and then put him to quick trot, but all in vain; for I reached the hotel nearly a quarter of an hour before him, ordered the trouts, saw to the putting away of my good horse, and stood ready at the door to welcome my companion. From that day to this Vincent Nolte has been a friend to me.

Audubon added that they rode together as far as Shippingport, now a part of Louisville, where his brother-in-law, Nicholas Berthoud, was then living.

We shall now follow the equally circumstantial but widely divergent account of this meeting and the subsequent journey as given by the other traveler. Nolte had sailed from Liverpool in September, 1811, and landed in New York after a perilous voyage of forty-eight days. He had no servant, but was accompanied by a young Englishman, named Edward Hollander, whom he had engaged in a business capacity while in London and with whom he was making his way to New Orleans. Hollander had been sent in advance to Pittsburgh to purchase two flatboats, for in addition to their horses they had planned to carry 400 barrels of flour, from the sale of which in the South they expected to defray the expenses of their journey. Having purchased a fine horse in Philadelphia, Nolte left that city in December, and with saddle-bags strapped to his horse's back, rode on "entirely alone." He crossed the highest point of the Alleghany ridge at ten o'clock of a winter's morning and later in the same day reached a small inn "close by the Falls of the Juniata River." "The landlady," to quote his narrative, "showed me into a room, and said, I perhaps would not mind taking my meal with a strange gentleman, who was already there." This stranger, who immediately struck him as "an odd fish," "was sitting at a table, before the fire, with a Madras handkerchief wound around his head, exactly in the style of the French mariners, or laborers, in a seaport town." In the course of the conversation which then ensued he declared that he was an Englishman, but Nolte was the last person to be deceived on a question of nationality and remarked at once that his speech betrayed him. "He showed himself," to quote our senior traveler again, "to be an original throughout, but at last admitted that he was a Frenchman by birth, and a native of La Rochelle. However, he had come in his early youth to Louisiana, had grown up in the sea-service, and had gradually become a thorough American." When asked how this account squared with his earlier statement, said Nolte, "he found it convenient to reply in the French language: 'when all is said and done, I am somewhat cosmopolitan; I belong to every country.' This man," to conclude, "who afterwards won for himself so great a name in natural history, particularly in ornithology, was Audubon, who, however, was by no means thinking, at that time, of occupying himself with natural history."

In the interview as thus far recorded, Audubon was clearly chaffing his new acquaintance, for not one of the statements attributed to him was true, if we accept the fact of his French extraction. Nolte, to be sure, writes as a somewhat vain and garrulous man, and after a lapse of forty-three years, but he professes to speak the truth and there is no reason to suppose that his narrative is pure invention. Nolte further informs us that Audubon's father-in-law, Mr. Bakewell, "formerly of Philadelphia," was "then residing and owning mills at Shippingport," which was not the case. To continue, finding that Audubon, who was bound for Kentucky, was a companionable man and devoted to art, a field which he had cultivated himself, Nolte proposed that they should travel together, and offered the naturalist a berth on one of his flatboats.

He thankfully accepted the invitation, and we left Pittsburgh in very cold weather, with the Monongahela and Ohio rivers full of drifting ice, in the beginning of January, 1812. I learned nothing further of his traveling plans until we reached Limestone, a little place in the southwestern corner of the State of Ohio.[252] There we had both our horses taken ashore, and I resolved to go with him overland, at first to visit the capital, Lexington, and from there to Louisville, where he expected to find his wife and parents-in-law.... We had hardly finished our breakfast at Limestone, when Audubon, all at once, sprang to his feet, and exclaimed in French; "Now I am going to lay the foundation of my establishment." So saying, he took a small packet of address cards from his pocket, and some nails from his vest, and began to nail up one of the cards to the door of the tavern, where we were taking our meal.

Later they rode on together as far as Lexington, where they appear to have parted company.

The discrepancies between these accounts could hardly be greater, and they serve to illustrate the liberties which Audubon sometimes took with facts in composing his "Episodes." The travelers met, not on horseback, but at the supper table of a country inn; Nolte was then alone and had but one horse, while the greater part of the return journey was made by flatboat with Audubon as his guest; corn blades, pumpkins and trout suggest any other season than midwinter, with heavy snows on the mountains and rivers choked with ice. Audubon in this instance, as already explained, combined the incidents of two different journeys and colored the narrative to suit his fancy. There was no apparent motive to mislead the reader, and one of his readers he must have known would probably be Vincent Nolte, though he was not a subscriber to _The Birds of America_; Nolte did read the story, and was pleased with the "flattering acknowledgment of the little service" that he was able to render Audubon at that time as well as later in his career.

Both travelers felt the great earthquakes while making this journey, but probably not until they had parted company at Lexington. Audubon has given a vivid account of this experience in a characteristic sketch, but as usual there are no dates.[253] He was overtaken, as he said, while "traveling through the Barrens of Kentucky ... in the month of November," when he thought his terrified "horse was about to die, and would have sprung from his back had a minute more elapsed, but at that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots; the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled waters of a lake." For "November" he should have written "January" of the year 1812.[254]

This series of memorable earthquakes was followed in 1813 by a hurricane, more terrific than destructive, which swept the lower part of Henderson County, Kentucky, and cut a wide swath through the virgin forests, without causing any loss of life. Audubon's account of this event[255] is that of a close observer who escaped destruction by a hair's breadth and who related only what he himself had experienced. Critics inclined to be supercilious have complained that he exaggerated the importance of a merely local event and stretched the course of the storm some 800 miles until it had covered several states. "Sir," said Waterton, in pointing a dart through Audubon to another target, "this is really too much even for us Englishmen to swallow, whose gullets are known to be the largest, the widest, and the most elastic, of any in the world." What Audubon said was: "I have crossed the path of this storm, at a distance of a hundred miles from the spot where I witnessed its fury, and, again four hundred miles farther off, in the State of Ohio. Lastly, I observed traces of its ravages on the summits of the mountains connected with the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, three hundred miles beyond the place last mentioned. In all these different parts, it appeared to me not to have exceeded a quarter of a mile in breadth." Audubon was doubtless mistaken in his hasty inference that marks of forest devastation observed at such widely separated points were due to the same storm, but this would only illustrate a lack of caution which he sometimes displayed.

A contemporary writer[256] declared that Audubon's account of "Mason," the outlaw, whose name we are told should be spelled "Meason," was altogether fabulous; that he was not killed by a regulator party, nor was his head stuck upon a tree in the way described.[257] The same critic further discredited the naturalist's account of Daniel Boone, whom he had characterized as follows:[258] "The stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests approached the gigantic. His chest was broad and prominent; his muscular powers displayed themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise, and perseverance." "Boone," said this writer, "was under six feet high, probably not more than five feet, ten inches, and of that round, compact build, which makes little show. Though very active, he had the appearance of being rather slender and did not seem as large as he really was." In the case of the outlaw, Audubon no doubt retold a story that had passed from mouth to mouth, but he later learned to be wary of second-hand information, which in matters of natural history sometimes led him into more serious difficulties. In his description of Boone there was no more apparent motive to deceive than in the case of his own father, to whom his imagination had added nearly half a foot in stature.[259]

When Audubon was returning from Ste. Geneviève in the spring of 1812, an incident occurred in which, for the first time in the course of his wanderings for upwards of twenty-five years, he felt his life to be in danger from his fellow man.[260] Overtaken by night on the prairie, he approached the hearth fire of a small log cabin, which at first was mistaken for the campfire of some wandering Indians. On craving shelter, he was admitted by a tall, surly woman in coarse attire, who displayed both an evil eye and a repellent countenance; but she offered him a supper of venison and jerked buffalo meat and bade him to make his bed upon the floor. When she espied his gold watch and chain, her demeanor suddenly changed and she asked to take them in her hand; she put the chain around her brawny neck and by her manner betrayed every token of covetous desire. Meanwhile, a young Indian stoic, who was nursing a recent arrow wound, had been sitting in silence by the fire; though he spoke not a word, he cast an expressive glance in Audubon's direction whenever the woman's back was turned, and having drawn his knife from its scabbard, expressed in pantomime what the confiding stranger might eventually expect.

Audubon's suspicions were at last thoroughly aroused. He asked for his watch, and under pretense of forecasting the weather, took up his gun and sauntered out of the cabin; in the darkness outside he slipped a ball in each of the barrels of his gun, scraped the edges of his flints, renewed the primings, and returned with a favorable report of his observations. Then laying some deer skins on the floor in a corner and calling his faithful dog to his side, he lay down and to all appearances was soon asleep. Presently sounds of approaching voices were heard, and at length two sturdy youths, who were evidently the woman's sons, appeared bearing a dead stag, which they had slung to a pole; they asked at once about the stranger, and called loudly for whisky. Audubon tapped his dog, who showed by eye and tail that he was already alert. Observing that the whisky bottle was paying frequent visits to the mouths of the trio, he hoped that they would soon be reduced to a state of helplessness, but the woman was seen to take in her hands a large carving knife and go deliberately outside to whet its edge on a grindstone; then, calling to her drunken sons, she asked them to settle the stranger and bade them do their bloody work without delay. Audubon cocked both barrels of his gun, touched his dog again, and was resolved to shoot at the first suspicious move. At this dramatic moment the door suddenly opened and two burly travelers with rifles on their shoulders entered the cabin. Audubon sprang to his feet, and welcoming the strangers with open arms, lost no time in making known to them his desperate position. No parley was necessary, for, said he, they were regulators, who then and there took the law into their own hands. The woman and her sons were promptly secured, bound, and left until morning to sober off; they were then led into the woods and shot. "We marched them into the woods off the road," said Audubon, "and having used them as Regulators were wont to use such delinquents, we set fire to the cabin, gave all the skins and implements to the young Indian, and proceeded, well pleased, towards the settlements." Would you believe, he added, that not many miles from where this happened, "and where fifteen years ago, no habitation belonging to civilized man was expected, and very few ever seen, large roads are now laid out, cultivation has converted the woods into fertile fields; taverns have been erected, and much of what we Americans call comfort is to be met with? So fast does improvement proceed in our abundant and free country."

I have given a paraphrase of this "Episode" as a further illustration of Audubon's tales of adventure. There is doubtless a certain amount of invention, and it reads like the setting of a dime novel incident, but we see no reason to doubt the substantial truth of either the local coloring or the fact. In answer to the question of a recent commentator,[261] "Did remote prairie cabins have grindstones and carving knives?" we would reply that the knife and the ax have followed man to the frontier posts of civilization everywhere, and without the grindstone the ax is useless. As a concrete instance in point, compare this minute entered in the Proprietors' Book of Records of Perrytown, afterwards Sutton, New Hampshire,[262] for the third day of September, 1770: "Voted a grindstone of about 8 shillings to be sent up to Perrystown, for the use of the settlers there"; the first settler had entered that wilderness but three years before, and at the time this vote was taken the number was five.