John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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that it would be a Valuable Acquisition.”1 He had big enough ambitions; he just hadn’t fully figured out a way to fulfill them.
In the meantime, the future must have seemed far overshadowed by the recent past: Audubon’s career had gone nowhere but down. The retail business had eventually been a bust, bankruptcy had been an embarrassment, and even his two interrelated loves, art and ornithology, held out precious little promise for financial support, much less success. Making quick portraits of people for five dollars a head seemed like hack work, and not very lucrative at that. Stuffing birds and animals as a museum taxidermist could hardly boost his imagination or reputation, and anyway, once the specimens went on display, that was the end of that. But for all the disappointments he had had to face, Audubon also had to face the reality that he had obligations to his wife, Lucy (who, with him, had suffered the recent loss of an infant daughter), and two young sons, eleven-year-old Victor and eight-year-old John. Even though Audubon’s family would have to stay behind, they stayed very much on his mind. As he made ready to head downriver, “the feelings of a Husband and a Father, were my lot when I Kissd My Beloved Wife & Children with an expectation of being absent for Seven Months.” Still, he stiffened his resolve and reminded himself that missing them would be a temporary loss in a longer-term process: “If God will grant us a safe return to our fammillies Our Wishes will be congenial to our present feelings Leaving Home with a Determined Mind to fulfill our Object.”2
Those brave words came on the first page of a journal Audubon kept on his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, with fairly regular entries from the day he left Cincinnati, October 12, 1820, until the end of December 1821. He wrote primarily for his sons—“My Journal gives you a rough Idea of My Way of Spending the tedious Passage … to New Orleans”—but the preserved journal also serves the modern reader quite well. While some passages seem sketchy and uneven, others are almost eloquent in their descriptions, giving us an ornithologically detailed list of the hundreds of birds Audubon watched (and shot) on the trip, the landscape he saw along the riverbanks, and the ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people he encountered both on the boat and on shore. In the end, Audubon’s 1820–1821 journal offers much more than a “rough Idea” of what he might have considered a “tedious Passage.” At its best, it can take its place alongside the more professionally polished travel narratives of the early nineteenth century.3
At its heart, however, the journal takes us into the unfolding inner journey of this mid-thirties man on a mission. In all of Audubon’s writings, his most significant subject is almost always himself, and even in his most successful written work, Ornithological Biography, he puts himself in the picture, right beside the birds. But in the case of the Mississippi River Journal, Audubon had not yet conceived, much less achieved, the sense of celebrity that would later shape his more self-conscious narrative of his life. Instead, he recorded the uncertain hopes and underlying vulnerabilities of a man whose commitment to a challenge far exceeded his confidence in its outcome.
The anxieties and frustrations that came to the surface in his Mississippi River Journal in 1820–1821 remained enduring concerns that would recur in Audubon’s writings throughout the rest of his life. He fretted, first of all, about his financial situation, knowing that he never bore the burden of poverty alone, but also laid it heavily on Lucy and his sons, left behind with no assurance of support in his absence. Money worries in turn had an effect on his sense of self-identity as an artist-naturalist. Before he could make his collection of avian art big enough and good enough to become a “Valuable Acquisition,” he would have to make a concession to other people’s notions of what it meant to be an “artist,” painting appealing portraits of whoever would pay the price and giving art lessons, largely to ladies and young girls.
And no matter what he did or where he went, Audubon always had an invisible companion in his mind: Alexander Wilson. By the time Audubon left on his Mississippi odyssey, Wilson had been dead seven years. In Audubon’s mind, though, Wilson remained a competitor, the man who set the existing standards of ornithological art, the man whose work Audubon would frequently consult and almost as frequently criticize, the man whom Audubon felt the compelling need to surpass in order to define the measure of his own success. Even Henry Clay had brought up the specter of the late “American Ornithologist.” In sending his generous letter of introduction for the Mississippi trip, Clay wondered if Audubon knew what he was getting into, given the possible expense of producing such an ambitious work: “Will it not be well for you … to ascertain the Success which attended a Similar undertaking of Mr. Wilson?”4 Audubon could never escape the comparison thus imposed on him by others, and he would never cease imposing it on himself. In this as in many other ways, the pages of Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal give us a preview of issues that would continue to dog him for years to come.
Flatboat Blues
If Audubon needed any reminder of the low state of his circumstances, all he had to do was to consider the boat he was taking downriver—a flatboat, several pegs down the scale of comfortable aquatic conveyance. In 1820, the year he decided to leave Cincinnati for the Mississippi River region, the steamboat was still a recently arrived marvel on the western rivers. The first steamboat to make the Pittsburgh–New Orleans trip did so in 1811 (owned and operated, coincidentally, by an acquaintance of Audubon’s, Nicholas Roosevelt), and just a few years later, in 1817, steamboats began regular mail and passenger service from Cincinnati to New Orleans, usually making their way downriver in just over a week. The fortunate few who could pay for stateroom accommodations, about $125, could enjoy room and board all but equal to that found in the best hotels. Those who could only afford the Spartan conditions on deck had neither room nor board—they had to scrounge whatever sleeping space they could find amid the cargo and fix their own food—but they paid about a fifth of the fare, and they still got to New Orleans at the same time as their more prosperous fellow passengers.5
Either way, Audubon couldn’t afford it. He couldn’t even afford flatboat fare. He made an arrangement with a flatboat owner named Jacob Aumack, who offered him free passage in exchange for being the boat’s hunter, shooting whatever he could to provide food for the others on board. One of those others was Audubon’s young traveling companion, Joseph Mason, a twelve-year-old former art student from Cincinnati whom Audubon had engaged to be, like himself, an unpaid flatboat employee. Mason came along to help Audubon with the hunting and background painting and, in addition, to help Aumack with whatever unpleasant but necessary tasks he could assign the boy.6 Traveling light, with only their guns and art supplies and a very few changes of clothing, Audubon and Mason joined Aumack and a handful of other men on the flatboat for what would turn out to be a long journey, both geographically and, for Audubon, psychologically.
The best thing to be said about a flatboat was that it made decent economic sense at the time—a cheap, simple, single-use, one-way vessel. Almost anyone could build this entry-level means of river transport for about fifty dollars or so, load it with upward of forty tons of goods, and then, once arrived at a downriver destination—typically after a month or more all the way to New Orleans—disassemble the boat and sell the scrap wood for whatever money it might fetch. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of flatboats floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—almost 1,300 in 1816 alone—and flatboat transportation would remain a part of the river economy well into the steamboat era.7
A flatboat also defined an enclosed social space, sometimes even the site of a downriver rite of passage for young farm boys who made the trip.8 One of the iconic genre paintings of the antebellum era, George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), shows a group of eight young men taking their leisure on top of a flatboat, one of them dancing, one playing a fiddle, another keeping time on a metal pan, and the other five variously lounging around and enjoying the show, their oars horizontally at rest. With slow-flowing water below and clear, blue skies above, the painting offers an idyllic image of men at ease on the water, making the most of their riverine relaxation.
Behind this image of romanticized sociability, however, lay a much rougher reality. A modern history of the flatboat trade has described the boatmen of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as being “as filthy as the dogs whose howls they imitated,” living on a daily diet of bacon and beans, and washing down their