John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

P.M. and felt a Tear gushing involuntarily, every Moment draws me from all that is Dear to Me My Beloved Wife & Children.”¹⁶

      Audubon’s longing for his family, and no doubt the guilt he felt for leaving them, continued to hang heavily on his heart. Sundays on the flatboat were a time for renewal of sorts, when Audubon would shave and wash—“anxious to See the day Come for Certainly a Shirt worn One week, hunting every day and Sleeping in Buffaloe Robes at night soon became soild and Desagreable”—but moon over Lucy: “On Sundays I Look at My Drawings and particularly at that of My Beloved Wife—& Like to spend about one hour in thoughts devoted to My familly.”¹⁷ Sometimes those thoughts made him imagine the worst: “While Looking at My Beloved Wife’s Likeness this day I thought it was Altered and Looked sorrowfull, it produced an Imediate sensation of Dread of her being in Want.”¹⁸ He tried to write letters back home, but the river offered few opportunities for regular mail service, and letters could take six weeks or more to reach a recipient, no matter how beloved. Sometimes he could cheer up for a bit by remembering his mission, telling himself that “so Strong is my Anthusiast to Enlarge the Ornithological Knowledge of My Country that I felt as if I wish Myself Rich again and thereby able to Leave my familly for a Couple of Years.” Still, it was almost never that easy to take the long view, especially with his family so far off in the distance. By Christmas of 1820, when he had been away for two and a half months, he wrote of his “hope that My Familly wishes me as good a Christmas as I do them.… I hope to have Some tidings of them Tomorrow.”¹⁹

      As it happened, he did get some mail from Lucy the next day, a couple of letters posted in early November. Perhaps just as promising, he also happened upon, quite by surprise, his Kentucky friend Nicholas Berthoud, who was on a stopover while taking his own keelboat to New Orleans, Audubon’s anticipated destination. Berthoud invited Audubon to join him on his keelboat for the rest of the trip downriver, giving him a welcome upgrade over Aumack’s flatboat. But by New Year’s Day, any encouraging effects of Lucy’s correspondence and his improved accommodations had worn off, and Audubon could not avoid coming to terms with the dispiriting reality of his situation: “I am on Board a Keel Boat going down to New Orleans the poorest Man on it.”²⁰

      Ever the Observer

      Poor as he was, Audubon had plenty of impoverished company in the Mississippi region, and he took note of the condition of the ordinary people he encountered, forming impressions that would later find a place on the pages of his published works. When he looked at riverside society, he frequently recoiled at the low state of the people’s lives in their squalid communities. Landing at New Madrid, in Missouri Territory, one afternoon in November, he noted that “this allmost deserted Village is one the poorest that is seen on this River bearing a name,” and the inhabitants looked shiftless and slovenly: “They are Clad in Bukskin pantaloons and a Sort of Shirt of the same, this is seldom put aside unless So ragged or so Blooded & Greased, that it will become desagreable even to the poor Wrecks that bear it on.”²¹ (Audubon neglected to note in his journal the possible economic aftershocks of the massive earthquakes that devastated New Madrid in 1811–1812, which may well have rendered it still a less desirable location for residence nine years afterward. Some years later, however, he did take note of the power of the earthquakes in the Mississippi region, when he wrote in Ornithological Biography about how “the earth was rent asunder in several places, one or two islands sunk for ever, and the inhabitants fled in dismay towards the eastern shores.”²²) A few days after passing New Madrid, he came upon two men and a woman in a skiff, “Too Lazy to Make themselves Comfortable, Lie on the Damp earth, near the Edge of the Watter, have Racoons to Eat and Muddy Watter to help that food down.” Later still, he saw “two Women the remainder of a party of Wandering Vagabonds … these Two Wretches, Never Wash, Comb, or Scarcely clad themselves,” barely surviving by doing a little sewing and washing and otherwise relying on the generosity of neighbors. Audubon painted, on the whole, a depressing picture of human jetsam washed up on the banks of the river, people who apparently headed westward “to proceed to the Promised Land” but wound up hopelessly stuck in the Mississippi mud. Still, he could hardly hold himself above them: “To Look on those people, and consider Coolly their Condition, then; compare it to Mine, they are certainly More Miserable to Common Eyes—but, it is all a Mistaken Idea, for poverty & Independance are the only friend that Will travel together through this World.”²³

      Like many other American travelers of the time, Audubon made an exception for native people. “The Indian is More decent, better off, and a Thousand time More happy” than the wretched-seeming white people in the same region, he wrote, and he idealized their own “poverty & Independence” as a positive virtue: “Whenever I meet Indians I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the Man Naked from his Hand and Yet free from Acquired Sorrow.” But rather than truly finding a model for life in the native inhabitants, Audubon instead saw them, as he did almost everyone, as useful sources of ornithological information. He heard about an Indian chief on the Arkansas River who had shot three swans, one with a nine-foot wingspan, but “these Indians had Left when We arrived—a View of Such Noble Specimen would have been very agreeable.”²⁴

      “New Orleans at Last”

      When Audubon eventually reached the end of his Mississippi trip—“New Orleans at Last,” he wrote on January 7, 1821—he found little that would immediately improve his mood. On his first day in the city, he received an invitation to a dinner party with some “good, well disposed, Gentlemen,” but the loud talk and too much wine left him with a “bad head Hake.” On the second day he walked around town “absolutely to Kill time, the whole City taken with the festivals of the day” in commemoration of the Battle of New Orleans, but someone picked his pocket, leading him to write acerbically that he would “remember … the 8th of January for ever.” On the third day he made the rounds of a few acquaintances to begin looking for work, but when nothing turned up, he went back to Berthoud’s keelboat and “remained on board … opposite the Market, the Dirtiest place in all the Cities of the United States.” “My Spirits very Low,” he wrote, and over time, Audubon’s experience in New Orleans would take him lower and lower.²⁵

      The city itself shouldn’t have been the problem. By the time Audubon got there, New Orleans was the fifth largest city in the United States—behind New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—having come into the United States in the same year Audubon had, 1803, when Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase added the whole Louisiana Territory to the new nation. Throughout the eighteenth century, since the city’s founding by the French in 1718, New Orleans had developed a remarkably mixed population, with some of the region’s original Native American inhabitants, primarily Caddos and Choctaws, who remained on the scene; Europeans, above all French and Spanish, but also immigrants from all over the continent, particularly southern Europe; people of African descent, both slave and free; and more recent arrivals from the West Indies, including several thousands from Saint-Domingue, slaveowners and slaves alike, refugees from the rebellions that had rocked the region at the turn of the century. The United States’ acquisition of Louisiana created yet another influx of immigrants in the years before Audubon’s arrival, making the city’s 27,176 inhabitants the most diverse population of any other urban area in the nation.²⁶

      Some observers celebrated the city’s mix. One of the best accounts of a newcomer to New Orleans comes from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the British-born architect, who came to New Orleans in January 1819, exactly two years before Audubon arrived. Almost immediately, Latrobe’s artistic eye quickly took in the sights of the exciting city, beginning with the main outdoor market, where he beheld a remarkable array of goods: “wretched meat & other butchers meat,” but also fresher fare, “wild ducks, oysters, poultry of all kinds,” along with a great variety of vegetables and fruits, including bananas, oranges, apples, sugar cane, potatoes, “& all sorts of other roots,” and then “trinkets, tin ware, dry goods … more and odder things … than I can enumerate.” But the goods were not the only things on display. Latrobe also described an energetic and cacophonous scene of five hundred or more people, “sellers & buyers, all of whom appeared to strain their voices, to exceed each other in loudness,”