In the early spring of 1843, John James Audubon, perhaps the greatest naturalist America has ever produced, traveled up the Missouri River. He had embarked on a project that he hoped would rival the success of his Birds of America.
This time he was after quadrupeds—scrappy, furry, resilient creatures that lived on, or under, the ground. But the West turned out to be much different from what he expected. The Indians, disease-ridden and unimaginably poor, did not at all look like the proud, colorfully attired tribal leaders George Catlin had painted a mere 10 years earlier. And the large-scale slaughter of the buffalo, despite the fact that he too contributed to it, left Audubon dispirited about the future of his adoptive country. At age 58, with no teeth left to eat the meat he craved, Audubon himself had entered his twilight years.
At Fort Union, Audubon and the other members of his party were the guests of trader Alexander Culbertson and his Blackfoot wife. It was during his stay there that Audubon drew a memorable representation of two 13-lined ground squirrels—”Leopard Spermophiles,” he called them—perched on a small, nearly bare hill, tails bent in nervous anticipation, their heads cocked as if they were looking at us. For the print, he added a view of Fort Union in the distance, likely provided by his son Victor: unmemorable, flat, a mere dot in a landscape where the animals, not we, are the real residents. That was Audubon’s way of teaching us humility.
Or was it? Daniel Patterson, an English professor at Central Michigan University, would probably have concerns about such a reading. If you think Audubon really cared that much about the environment, think again, he says in this new book about the naturalist’s last expedition. After Audubon’s death in 1851, Maria Audubon, embarrassed by her grandfather’s rough frontier manners and execrable grammar, went over his papers, changed what she saw fit, and freely destroyed what she felt should not be shared. The journal Audubon kept during his Western trip wasn’t spared, either. Hence, the only coherent narrative we have about his experiences is one that passed through Maria’s filter, and the environmental concerns he voiced—about the passing of the last buffalo and the disappearance of the great auk—are hers, not her grandfather’s.
Here, Patterson wants to set the record straight. He collects entries from three “forgotten” manuscripts that survived Maria’s editing fury—portions of the original, complete manuscript held by the Newberry and Beinecke libraries, as well as a field journal still in private hands—and supplements them with accounts provided by members of Audubon’s team, including the amateur naturalist Edward Harris. This is a herculean task that almost makes us forgive him for inflating his claims: Audubon’s field journal, for example, rather than being forgotten, appeared prominently in the 2000 exhibit “John James Audubon in the West” at the Buffalo Bill Hill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.
To be sure, this is not the first time Patterson has tried his hand at capturing the true Audubon. In 2011, he published Audubon’s 1826 journal, edited with the help of a microfilm copy of a manuscript owned by the Field Museum. But The Missouri River Journals, a curious hybrid of edition, biography, and diatribe, is a more ambitious project: Patterson’s main target is all those fans of Audubon who have tried to squeeze their hero’s life into the shape of a neat conversion narrative, in which Audubon, the great shooter of birds, seeing the Western plains littered with dead bison, saw the light and began to worry about the future.
The real Audubon, contends Patterson, wasn’t really a conservationist—which is not exactly shocking news for anyone who has, like this reviewer, tried to explain Audubon’s industrial-style killings to schoolchildren. But Patterson does have a consolation prize for us, and for support he turns to Audubon’s 3,000-page collection of bird essays, finished years before his Western trip, Ornithological Biography (1831-39). Instead of paying attention to what Audubon did, Patterson wants us to listen more closely to what he wrote. Patterson calls this the difference between a “lived” and a “written” ethic, and he traces the evolution of the latter—a beautiful vision of a partnership between animals and humans—through the five volumes of Ornithological Biography.
The only problem with this rather academic argument is that Audubon’s essays, wonderful as they are, were written in close collaboration with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray, who (as Audubon himself said) “smoothed down the asperities” of his style and, as surviving drafts show, made a lot of other changes as well. It’s mystifying that Patterson, who is intent on recovering the original, unadulterated Audubon, treats the highly edited pieces in Ornithological Biography as authentic utterances from the oracle. (And why offer these reflections on Audubon’s ornithological work in a volume dedicated to a trip Audubon undertook in search of quadrupeds?)
While Patterson’s theoretical musings often overreach, his transcriptions strike me as underprepared. Yale’s Beinecke Library has made a digital copy of Audubon’s journal publicly available, so it’s easy to compare Patterson’s work with the original. Mistakes abound. Some of them are due to simple carelessness or haste—for example, J. K. Mitchell’s poem on Audubon was published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier not on March 15 but on March 18, 1843 (which was, appropriately, a Saturday). Other errors are more serious and affect the readability of Patterson’s text, such as the nonsensical word “Minnidens” he offers in his transcription of a passage written on August 9, where Audubon admits that he is weary of Native Americans, both “Chiefs & Murmidons” (an alternative spelling of “Myrmidons” or warriors).
And consider this almost-comical sentence from the entry for August 5: “They had seen no ‘Fuchs of the plain.’ ” Was Patterson thinking of the German word for “fox”? Audubon’s scribe had clearly written—and that is how the much-maligned Maria Audubon read it too—”Cocks of the plain,” a term for sage grouse. On yet another occasion, in his transcription of the entry for August 8, 1843, Patterson leaves out a crucial word, rendering a sentence more difficult than it needs to be. The passage in question involves, in fact, those wonderful Leopard Spermophiles: “We killed a sperm hoodii, which . . . entered its hole and Harris had shot it, had to draw it out by the hind legs.” The transcription would have made more sense had Patterson included the “who” that is clearly present in the original: “. . . and Harris who had shot it.”
This is not scholarly nitpicking, since Patterson’s case for representing a version superior to that of Audubon’s bowdlerizing granddaughter rests on the absolute accuracy of his own efforts.
In sum, The Missouri River Journals is a head-scratcher. It is, perhaps, best treated as a resource—a convenient, if unreliable, gathering place for information about Audubon’s final great expedition. I detest as much as the next person what Maria Audubon did to her grandfather’s manuscripts, and Patterson is right to call her out on inserting anachronistic references to extinction into his journals. But my own familiarity with the man, now of several decades’ standing, compels me to point out that Audubon, who all his life told the most ridiculous lies about himself, would have found the very notion of authenticity laughable. His all-consuming passion was for his art, and he took what he needed—from nature, science, his family, and friends—to realize it.
Because he was such a great artist, Audubon was ultimately able to transcend his own limitations and give us a vision of something others could not see as well as he: a glimpse of the world as it would look if an animal as small as a ground squirrel saw it, discovering that the strangest and most disconcerting thing in the world is, in fact, us.
Christoph Irmscher, provost professor of English at Indiana University, is the author, most recently, of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.
