00:00:01 Speaker 1: With his international fame as the most American of artists. Naturalists, John James Audubon amazed the world with his life size paintings of nearly five hundred American birds, but by the time of his Western journey for a book on American mammals, he had grown depressed at the widespread destruction of nature in America. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each battle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsibly John James Audobon and Banishing America. In the eighteen fifties, late in his life, the famed American writer Henry David Thureaux looked back on the colonial past and early American history and felt personally injured. By then, the number of animals and birds that had disappeared or drastically declined in the East was shocking to anyone who paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the Great Auks, were entirely gone, driven to extinction. Whooping cranes and sandhill cranes were rarely, if ever seen. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys. Heath hens, passenger pigeons, trumpeter, swans, even pilliated woodpeckers and ravens had become I'm rare reading accounts like William Woods of the New England. They both shared, but two centuries apart in time. Threw sat down to his journal one morning in March of eighteen fifty seven, and his thought follow of thought, took up his pen and scribbled a stark, powerful line, I am that citizen whom I pity. I can imagine Thoreau, at first reflective as he sat at his desk in the morning twilight, becoming more irate by the minute when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated. Here he finally sat down in his ledger. The cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey. I cannot but feel as if I lived in attained, and as it were, emasculated country. As he went on, I imagine his mind growing ever darker. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it's but an imperfect copy that I possess, and have read that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. This experience, he realized, was like attending a symphony, then understanding that many of the finest instruments were missing their contributions to the score silence, or as he pushed the idea, like looking into the night sky only to discover that familiar constellations had vanished. No one else had put American history in quite this way, and no one since has said it so movingly. I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars thereau raged, I wished to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. One person who knew America's and the West's entire heaven and entire earth better than anyone, and gave anguished witness to its passing was the naturalist painter writer John James Ottobon. Like Threau, Autubon benefited from a strategic placement in the American story. Native peoples had spent twenty three thousand years studying and learning America's animals us stupendous body of oral knowledge, but one also badly damaged in the colonial disease epidemics that took away so many Native historians. Europeans and Africans, on the other hand, came from worlds away. Almost everything about America was brand new to them. The continent turned out not to yield up griffins or sirens, mermaids or unicorns, those chimerical beings out of medieval fantasies, although occasional rumors of such did pop up in the journals of European observers. In sixteen fourteen, a British ship's captain said he saw a siren of great beauty in New England waters, and in seventeen twenty, the French explorer Bernard de la Harp claimed a unicorn sighting in today's Oklahoma. But America's real flesh and bud creatures, unexpected and puzzling as they were, turned out to possess and enduring fascination all their own for old worlders. America's strangeness had begun with a new category of birds barely larger than bumblebees, whose hovering, diving, and buzzing earned them the name humbirds. There was a large and beautiful parrot, and an astonishing bird that mimicked to perfection every other bird song it heard. There was a mammal that carried its young in a stomach pouch, and a squirrel that flew like a bat. Endless rivers of wild pigeons flowed at fantastical speeds over the towering forests of America. Some colonists told stories of wild cattle with humpbacks and lion manes and tails carried like a scorpion stinger. Skeptics in Europe dismissed many of these stories, but those creatures all were real. So were America's poisonous snakes. From the first landings. Europeans were chilled to find that America possessed deadly snakes, and lluting one that telegraphed intention to strike with an angry, rattling warning. As one account put it, there are a thousand different kinds of birds and beasts of the forest which have never been known, neither in shape nor name, neither among the Latins, nor Greeks, nor any other nations. 00:07:22 Speaker 2: Of the world. 00:07:24 Speaker 1: This human interest in birds and animals is inherent and millions of years old in US. Even today, our evolutionary origins among other creatures leads us to expose human toddlers to images of birds and animals as a first step in learning about a diverse world. That's a bedrock foundation of human cultural training. We were made by our past to be naturalists, but for colonial Europeans, convinced by their religion that as a result of divine design, humans were accept l different from all other living things and possessed also of an economic system that regarded wildlife as potential sources of wealth. A fascination with America's biological diversity was never merely curiosity about never before seeing creatures. By John James Audubn's time he was alive from seventeen eighty five to eighteen fifty one, natural history had acquired a purpose. Europe's colonial age. Royal societies had given natural history the task of determining whether the new species emerging from the Americas and elsewhere held advantages for the colonial enterprise. One of the Age of Reasons breakthroughs was the so called scientific method, which rested on a critical assessment of evidence and conclusions that other disinterested researchers could test for validity. Western science's supposed purpose was to enable humanity to re establish the control over nature it had lost when God had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. By Ottobon's time, though, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, which revealed the universal force of gravity and the laws of motion, had transformed humanity's grasp of nature. Although Ottobon himself was not inclined to push at the philosophical edges of science, during his lifetime, natural history was hoping for a similar grand theory to Newton's. Unfortunately, he did not quite live long enough to learn about Charles Darwin's ground shattering insights into the diversity of life and humanity's true place in it. So pre Darwinian natural history occupied a separate hisay historical moment. Naturalists like Mark Catesby, John Lawson, Antoine Lapage du Pratz, William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Ottobon were doing their best to learn America by seeking out and engaging with the continent's remarkable and unique wildlife, aided by the natural history geniuses of the age. In the seventeen hundreds, caroless Linnaeus had established a universal system of species classification, and Alexander von Humboldt had laid out early ideas about ecology. Autobu and his fellows investigated and portrayed America's diverse life, never dreaming. The animals and birds they studied often had histories that stretched back millions of years. What Audobon and other early nationalists also chronicle, though, was the beginning of American nature's decline, a decline we now know would ultimately produced the loss of two million years of specially evolved genetics. This happened in the space of a mere four hundred years and was well underway in Audubon's time. Of all America's early naturalists, Audubon best answered the Old World's fantasy imagination of what a European become American nature man should be. With wavy's shoulder, linked chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the easy grace of an athlete. Automon remained lean and cut a striking figure all his life, speaking English with an accent. A visitor once asked him you are a Frenchman, sire. You look like a Frenchman, and you speak like one. Audoman was the very definition of romantic charisma, a rough hewn New world Byron of White Indian. As his own brother in law said of him, Audubon was not just a painter of nature subjects or noteworthy for the elegance of his figure. He was also an expert with guns, an excellent swimmer, and a fine fencer and dancer who had away with dogs and horses, and with women like the New Orleans beauty who asked to pose nude for him. Are women of high station all over Europe. Like Byron, Audobon actually shared many traits with the Native American deity Coyote. He was hugely talented and charismatic, but like Coyote, Audubon was also vain, jealous, and rarely generous. Destined to be one of early America's celebrity exports, Audubon was actually the out of wedlock son of a wealthy Frenchman, Captain Jean Ottobon. Audobon spent his entire life hiding the actual facts of his birth, but he came into the world in the Caribbean. His mother the captain's young mistress, Jean Reban, who died soon after giving birth. Audubon always denied his mother, claiming he was the offspring of a Spanish woman of good breeding, not the result of his father's fleeing with a peasant chambermaid. Raised in nat Along with another of Captain Otdobon's illegitimate children, Audobon dodged Napoleon's draft at age eighteen and fled to America in eighteen o three. By the time he arrived in Pennsylvania, he had anglicized his name and promptly fell in love with a well educated young neighbor named Lucy Bakewell. He'd been captivated by drawing and painting since childhood. Picturing nature was his first love, but for all his later mastery, he was self taught. He claimed to have studied under Jacques Luis da Vide in France, but there exists no evidence of it. In eighteen oh eight, when he quit his father's farm and fled with his new bride Lucy to Kentucky and then Louisiana, painting seems to have hovered in his mind like a beckoning evening star. The couple had two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse by eighteen twelve. To support them, Audubon tried farming, briefly utilizing slaves, which in our time has sometimes gotten him canceled. Then he tried business. He lost everything the family had accumulated in the great financial crash of eighteen nineteen, and that disaster led him to try, at age thirty four, to become a full time painter. It was the literal fulfillment of the notion of art as an act of desperation. Audubon's art interests had always been painting birds, but therein lay a problem. By eighteen nineteen, all nine volumes of the Bird Book done by his predecessor and rival, Alexander Wilson, were out. Wilson had passed away, but his work was widely respected. Of their meeting when the Scotsman was in Kentucky in eighteen ten, Audubon's version had it that after Wilson proudly showed his work, Audubon had laid some of his own paintings on the store counter, stunning Wilson into dismayed silence. Wilson's account of his Kentucky visit barely mentioned Audobon at all, no friendship ever developed between them, a pattern in Audubon's life. Audubon intended his opus The Birds of America to be a comprehensive book that would portray every bird in the United States life sized. That meant the natural has had to find, observe, collect, study, and paint every species, which brings up an unavoidable topic. All these early naturalists were shootests to capture and paint the iridescent color shadings of a hummingbird's wing, the bird had to be in hand. For the bird to be in hand, it had to be dead. Ottomon certainly observed and wrote about living birds, but to paint he needed specimens, which he wired in lifelike poses and tried to render rapidly with either hand and sometimes both, before death glazed their eyes and dull the vibrancy of their coloring. Ottomon didn't just paint, he wrote, which means that his great published works, along with the journals he kept, have left us some of the most profound descriptions of a long lost America. He inhabited an age though when much of the original while life abundance of the colonial period was disappearing. How could that be In the mid seventeen hundreds, a ninety year old American colonist had lamented to a visiting European that during his lifetime he had witnessed an orgy like slaughter of Atlantic seaboard wildlife. No one would even accept blame for such destruction. When the animals disappeared, everyone pointed fingers at someone else. It was the Indian's fault, the colonists claimed, or the fault of the French or the Spaniards. The European was a ghast. Why have none of your governments passed laws against such a thing? The old man's answer summed up and enduring American sensibility. The spirit of freedom in America, he told the visitor, would never brook such an infringement of individual rights. Killing as many animals as one wished, was an American franchise essential to freedom. Governments could pass all the laws they wanted, but his fellow citizens simply would not suffer them to be obeyed, he said. So. Automan lived, painted, and wrote in the decades when much of Original America was starting to wobble. Seriously, none of us alive now, for instance, has ever experienced anything like the full body impact of passenger pigeon flights that had characterized the continent for fifteen million years. They were a multisensory overload and often left people shocked in a state of nervous exhaustion. Millions of beating pigeon wings created a roar, like a tornado shaking down a forest or a hurricane hitting shore. The air they moved was a palpable wind against hair and skin. The flocks emitted a peculiar scent. Witnesses struggled to assign something like the smell of a very large poultry farm, but gameier with hearing touch smell all engaged to their limits. The visual impression then added the beautiful and the scarcely believed the flights. One of the continent's iconic natural spectacles resembled the windings of a vast and majestic river. Auburn said of these feathered rivers that when a hawk or falcon swooped into one, the whole body of birds proceeded to create a kind of grand curvilinear swerve through the sky. Then, like a snow melt stream routing around a boulder, all the succeeding flocks would reenact the same movement all day long. Auburn wrote that he saw one of these bird rivers that ran for three days. Then there was America's giant wooden pecker. From its dagger like bill to the stiff, forked tail that propped it upright on tree trunks, the ivory bill woodpecker was nearly a two foot tall woodpecker. In flight, its wingspan extended two and a half feet. The ivory bill was the second largest woodpecker in the world, exceeded only by its genetic kin, the Imperial woodpecker of Mexico. Native people had long admired its disposition and courage. Attired as if in a tuxedo, the ivory bill's black body was artfully set off by a pair of white stripes extending from its yellow eyes to a large patch of white feathers on its back. Matching white strips on both sides of the trailing wing edges made it easy to identify in flight. Both sexes had top not crests, but the males was a livid scarlet, giving the bird an air of formal, self aware magnificence. Beneath the crest was a skull like a compressible sponge built to absorb shocks. When not in use, the eight inch tongue recessed into storage. Around the back and top of its head. There were three eyelids, one of which was transparent and remained over the eye to protect it from flying debris. Its flight was direct and fast, with slight up and down undulations, wing beats, then glide, wing beats, then glide. All who wrote about seeing one mentioned the elegance of an ivory bill's passage through the forest and its strange primal toy trumpet cries. Automan famously said that every time he saw an ivory bill fly through the old growth Southern forest, its passage reminded him of an Anthony van Dyke painting the Great Auke. Notwithstanding he could not imagined that America would ever lose such a creature. And one more act of witnessing, when he was still an aspiring naturalist painter, Autobon left those of us down the timeline, a chilling account of how one other symbolic wild American animal experienced the war we were leveling at wildlife. That animal was the wolf, and the year was eighteen fourteen, by which time American attitudes towards wolves had become almost vicious. Spending the night with a farmer on the Vincennes Trace, Audobon accompanied his host to a capture pit that held three wolves. The wolf sin they had attacked the farmer's loose stock in a country by then bled of nearly all its deer, bison, and elk from his colonial forebears. This farmer had learned exactly how to respond. Climbing into the pit, he one by one severed the wolve's hamstrings with a knife, exhibiting as little fear as if he had been marking lambs, Audubon wrote. Then the farmer dragged the wolves out so his dogs could tear them to pieces. Audubon helped him pull up the largest, a black male wolf in the prime of life. Audubon described this beast of old world horror stories as motionless with fright, as if dead, its disabled legs swinging to and fro, its jaws wide open, and the gurgle in its throat alone indicating that. 00:23:43 Speaker 2: It was alive. 00:23:45 Speaker 1: Petrified with fear, the black wolf offered no resistance. It took the dogs less than a minute to stop the gurgling and extinguish his life, even as he witnessed such things, including what he called the dreadful havoc of the passenger pigeons slaughter. Audubon initially reacted like most Americans of his time. The great author of Nature, as he put it, would never allow something like extinction. Then, in the eighteen thirties, he came face to face with reality. Seeking out a pair of great Owks, the Northern Hemispher's penguins to paint for his Bird book, Audubon discovered that egg hunters already wiped out the last known American colony. He had to copy his ox from a prior painting by another naturalist. The experience forced him to reassess his faith in divinity and in human nature. To preserve for posterity the natural world he experienced, Audubon first had to and duct fuel work like that I've just described. After he'd labored over the paintings, he had to find an engraver and a team of printmakers, then enroll subscribers while he was writing the text that would become the final book. When no publisher in either Philadelphia or New York would take on his bird project, in eighteen twenty six, Audubon hauled four hundred of his bird drawings to England. Here at last, the handsome American was an immediate sensation. A long haired Akian someone wrote with Locke spilling down his back. Once the subscribers tore their eyes from Audubon his gorgeous paintings with the birds and dramatic animated poses, and everyone set in what the English called a landscape. Holy American trees, flowers, grass, even the tints of the sky and the waters worked their magic. He found his publisher in London, and he even merited advanced praise by the French, the Parisians, never expecting such genius from an American. Somehow Audubon completed all these tasks on both sides of the Atlantic in just twelve years. When it finally appeared in eighteen thirty nine, The Birds of America didn't just present beautiful birds shown in their habitats. Audubon had painted them life size. A showstopper, the book was stunning, at thirty by forty inches, the size of a small house window. Even so, the biggest birds like whooping cranes, wild turkeys, and great blue herons had to strike usual poses to fit the page without cropping legs or wings. The final version contained four hundred and thirty five plates, and with the eighty five Western birds birds whose skins he had acquired from other naturalists, enumerated four hundred eighty nine species of American birds. The world, especially the European world, where Audubon traveled, dined, partied, and soul subscriptions, was utterly entranced. No less than famous Parisian naturalists Georges Cuvier called The Birds of America the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature. It's fitting, then, that a final poignant story in Audubon's life as a nature witness took place in the West. In the summer of eighteen forty three, Audubon finally made it to the sunset side of the continent. While The Birds of America was gathering admirers and praise, he had launched an ambitious new project. Assisted by his son Victor and John Woodhouse and their able father in law, John Bachmann, Audobon's team had published the first volume of a new work the previous year. It had a less catchy title than the bird book. Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America was notably awkward, but the country beyond the Mississippi had now lured one of the world's premier nature artists aboard the steam vessel Omega to witness the fable bestiary of Western America, on what Audubon called the grand and last journey I intend to make as a naturalist. This was a world apart from anything Audubon had experienced before. The man had spent almost his entire life in nature. He'd witnessed what he had estimated were billions of passenger pigeons in flight, waterfowl, and unimaginable numbers migrating down the Mississippi Flyway, captive wolves terrified by the human hand. Yet his journal makes clear that he was in no way prepared for what unfolded in front of them as the Omega chugged up the narrowing Missouri River, their destination Fort Union, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri. The west stunning. In the east, the woods were alive with bird song, but mammals were often secretive and hard to see. But in this wide open country, animals were in sight almost constantly, and their diversity and strangeness were breathtaking. Two weeks before they arrived at Fort Union, not far from the eastern border of today's Montana. Automn set down these scenes in his journal. I've excised some of his other observations here so we can get to the pure experience of what he was seeing and feeling. We've passed some beautiful scenery, and almost opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or big horns. On the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore. Another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes, with many calves among them. They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canner, producing a beautiful picturesque view. We've seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we are now in. In fact, Autumn wrote, it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean like prairies, face to face with a spectacle equalled only by the Serengeti or the massaih Mara, marvelous aggregations of big grazers and their predators, all visible in the bright light and vast spaces he was reeling. 00:31:28 Speaker 2: He closed a. 00:31:29 Speaker 1: Letter to his wife that summer this way my head is actually swimming with excitement, and I cannot write anymore. Automon portrayed himself in eighteen forty three as hale and hearty, although by the time he went west his hair had gone white and many of his teeth were missing. But the eight month journey wore on him him he declined a buffalo hunt, because, as he said he was two near seventy, he had actually just turned fifty eight. He took on painting animals much as he had birds, by shooting them and wiring them into active poses, their eyes fixed. 00:32:19 Speaker 3: On the viewer. 00:32:21 Speaker 1: But of the one hundred and fifty plates in the Quadruped's three volumes, he would paint only half of them. His son, John Woodhouse, less talented did the rest. Perhaps Ottoman's age made him value life, all life more, But the artists had now begun to refer to himself as a two legged monster with a gun. And now in the West, he soured on seeing animals die. Thousands multiplied by thousands of buffaloes are murdered in senseless play. What a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for nothing or next to it. Ottovin's personal experiences in the West were rich, but the scientific returns were meager. Meriwether, Lewis Catlin, and Bodmer had already been in this country. Of the twenty seven mammals the party collected on the Missouri only the blackfooted ferret, a primary predator in prairie dog ecology, turned out to be a new discovery. They did at least add fourteen new birds to science. To approach the thoroughness of birds of America, John Woodhouse had to make a separate trip to Texas, where he collected an ocelot, a red Texan wolf, and heard stories of muscular jaguars, which seemed to range over most of the Southwest. What naturalists already knew of the animal life of the Southwestern Deaders and the West Coast the Audubons painted from specimens. The book was a heroic effort, but not nearly the cultural triumph of Birds, partly because Audubon could not complete it, partly because, as one reviewer put the difference, birds were exalting and spiritual, while mammals somehow seemed earthy and base. Because Audubon set it down in his journal, his lingering memory of how he experienced the trip remains. Here is his last impression of the West. As they headed down river, wolves howling, and bulls roaring. Just like the long continued role of a hundred drums thousands upon thousands of buffaloes, the roaring can be heard for miles. Four years after Audobon wrote that, his collaborator John Bachmann visited him at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and found Audubon's noble mind is all in ruins. As Bachmann said, the great naturalist was only sixty two. John James Ottoman passed away three years later. In the same decade, Thureau would write his Entire Heaven and Entire Earth passage, and Charles Darwin would publish his blockbuster on the origin of species. All three of them changed natural history and our sense of ourselves for the rest of time. 00:36:01 Speaker 4: I got two humming bird questions. I'm gonna give them to you both and you can take them. No hummingbirds in Europe. And two somewhere you wrote something, maybe it was in Wild New World about someone uh selling or buying four thousand hummingbird skins. 00:36:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, which everyone want to do first. 00:36:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, so they're no hummingbirds are a North and South American. 00:36:35 Speaker 3: A surprising little would be man. 00:36:39 Speaker 1: Yes, well, I mean that's and that's how the Europeans reacted. 00:36:44 Speaker 3: It was like, what in the hell. 00:36:46 Speaker 4: Is that I had never I'd never do that, man, I picture, I would have guess. They were everywhere, some version of them everywhere. 00:36:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, now they they were purely an American feature, and they were one of the things that Europeans immediately, i mean at once, began to describe and marvel over. And yes you are remembering correctly. That happened in the eighteen eighties at a time when the the use of bird feathers for fashion was a big deal, both in America and in Europe. And the actual figure is in one week in the London commercial rooms four hundred thousand, four hundred thousand hummingbird skins from America, from North America, from the United States. 00:37:37 Speaker 4: I feel like if you get some, I could get you maybe like three or four over the summer if I was really diligent about hanging out by my helping bird. 00:37:48 Speaker 3: How are they, like, what are they doing? They were using netting them or something. 00:37:54 Speaker 1: I think they were netting them. I think that's exactly what they were doing. I think they were catching them in what would be some sort of find butterfly net or something and just snagging them, skinning them out, and skinning them. 00:38:05 Speaker 3: So someone can have some little shit and feather like that on a. 00:38:08 Speaker 1: This on a hat on their clothing. 00:38:12 Speaker 4: Yeah, and you'd never like, I'm surprised with that volume, there'd be more accounts than mentions of it. 00:38:21 Speaker 1: Well, I've blurbed a new hummingbird book about two years ago, and according to this particular book, the trade in hummingbirds skins in Latin America is still a going enterprise. So hummingbirds evidently are still being killed and skinned to preserve their their feathers intact. And then apparently the skins are dried and they're used On. 00:38:48 Speaker 3: You know, I'm not. 00:38:49 Speaker 1: Sure exactly how they're used, but supposedly it's a going thing. 00:38:52 Speaker 4: I tell you, you want to get on my kid's bad side, you'd bring harm to a hummingbird. 00:38:59 Speaker 3: I think a lot of people would fail that. 00:39:02 Speaker 1: I think a lot of people would. 00:39:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, Audubon is one of those characters that from a contemporary perspective, there's a little bit of irony in what they do, and that he's killing these birds. You know, you think of the Audubon society. 00:39:17 Speaker 3: This is over. This is over people. You don't want this question, no, go ahead and ask it. Go ahead. I just is over observed. I feel over observed that killed birds. Well, it's like it's it's inconsequential in the scheme of things. 00:39:33 Speaker 2: I just I think what I'm interested in is this early I mean some he's not a scientist, he's he's working in the field of natural history, and I think like there's a really interesting distinction between natural history and and quote unquote modern science, where a lot of it just tests to do with description and collection and cataloging, and you know, inherently in that you're killing a lot of stuff, like up until the early twentieth century. There's a lot of people who are just collecting things. 00:40:11 Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's regarded that sort of collection is regarded as one of the things actually that contributed to the demise of the Carolina parakeet. No, there were naturalists collecting. 00:40:25 Speaker 2: For this question does get us somewhere new. 00:40:29 Speaker 1: There was a naturalist in about nineteen oh one collecting for it was either the Smithsonian or for the American Museum of Natural History, who found a flock of about forty Carolina parakeets because they existed in flocks, and he killed all but like two for the specimen collection for the museum he was working for. Now, I would say, in Autubn's time, Autobn's take to be able to paint these birds is, I mean, it's pretty paltry, it's small. 00:41:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a specimen. 00:41:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a specimen. 00:41:04 Speaker 4: But then one can almost say, thank god he did, because now you have these renderings and understandings of them that if he just said, like, I don't. 00:41:11 Speaker 2: Know, and we have the actual I just yeah, I mean I think like, I just think it's not that he contributed to the decline of these species, but it's it's sort of anathma to our contemporary sensibilities. So you're like, Hey, I'm into birds, let me kill a bunch of them and drama. 00:41:28 Speaker 3: It's not I have friends that work on entomology, surveys, aquatic invertebrates, baseline data collection, and stream systems. You'd be a ghast. 00:41:39 Speaker 4: You'd be a gast because they'll take those invertebrates and put them little vials of alcohol. 00:41:46 Speaker 3: Heavens, I told you, I told you to be a gas. 00:41:51 Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean so, I understand your question completely, Randall. 00:41:56 Speaker 3: And but. 00:41:59 Speaker 1: I think that this has been a feature of and of science for a long time. And autoban, I mean, Ottoman's not doing it specifically to preserve collections and museums, although I do have on my phone right now a photograph of the specimen, two of them in fact, that are just beautifully preserved Carolina parakeets that he collected on that eighteen forty three Western Oh where are those? 00:42:28 Speaker 3: Are they in New York? 00:42:30 Speaker 1: I think they're in New York. 00:42:31 Speaker 4: Yeah, I held one, you held well, they had everything. Man, it was at the Ornithological you know, the Cornell Cornell that's right, Yeah, they pull out that they kind of got like all the really good stuff in one tray. 00:42:46 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:42:47 Speaker 4: And they had Carolina parakeets that had passenger pigeon. Yeah, and that had that iverybild woodpecker I have I. 00:42:54 Speaker 1: Have not seen Yeah, wow, ivorybuild woodpecker a specimen of that? 00:42:57 Speaker 3: Am I making that upfill? 00:42:59 Speaker 1: So I you know. And so one of the things that's happening, which you know very well because you and I both are serving on a particular advisory board that does this kind of thing, scientists are going and looking at that those kind of specimens for DNA in order to possibly clone a line of say blackfooted ferris, which has actually happened that has additional genetic diversity so that the present population, which is based on only eight animals, is a little more diverse. So those specimens that were collected and Autumn certainly collected some of them have are actually turning out to be really important for modern science and maybe even for you know, preserving endangered species today. 00:43:45 Speaker 3: But yeah, he. 00:43:46 Speaker 1: Shot them and he wired the animals into poses to be able to paint them. And so when you look at those marvelous paintings that he did of birds, and later he did the same thing with the mammals when he went west. I mean, that's what they are. They're actually already dead. But he would wire them into these lifelike poses and then he would try to paint them really fast before they would start to lose the luster of the feathers and the eye, the liquid of the eye and all, because of course that vanishes really fast. And he learned to paint. George Callen did the same thing, learned to be ambidextrous painting them so he could paint with seriously. 00:44:26 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you know Audubon, I dodn't know. He died probably not as young in his time as would seem now, but sixty one sixty one. Yeah, his friend visited him. You mentioned his friend visit him and talks about his mind was in shambles or somewhere. 00:44:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, did he go did he go mad? Or did he have dementia? No, he had dementia. 00:44:47 Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, that's what Bachman, who was Bakman, both of Ottoman's sons that they married sisters, and so they had the same father in law, John Bachmann, who participated in that Western expedition. And Bachman was a very good naturalist himself, and that's where that comes from he went to see Autubun and what he meant by his mind as all in shambles is that he had dementia. He didn't recognize Bachmann or or kind of no, pretty much of anything at all. 00:45:18 Speaker 4: What was the understanding of that at that time period. 00:45:22 Speaker 1: Nobody really knew what it was, what caused it, But it was like cancer was which we also didn't understand. It was an observable thing. Yeah, and that was it was attributed just to old age, although I mean even then sixty one was not very old, and he's only sixty one years old when when he passes away, But you know, he had lived this really remarkable life, and as I tried to convey in the episode, I mean, he left us with this. So when you're trying to recreate a past world, somebody who both writes and also can come up with a visual representation of what they're seeing, in Ottoban's case, being able to paint things. I mean, that's a hell of a record to leave to the future. And so that's probably why people like that survive down through the timelines the way they do is that they have given us a way to access decades, sometimes centuries in the past, and I think his Autoban's writing is as compelling and as worthwhile as you know his art and rendering all these creatures. But his task that he set himself talked about Catland before Catland of course, wanted to preserve everything he could about American Indians before they were lost to time and history. And what Autoban's task was. He wanted to paint every animal, every mammal, and every bird that existed in North America. He wanted to get every one of them in his books. So he was trying to do a complete natural history. Of course he as we know, many many things have been discovered since Ottoman's time, but for his time, he was pretty thorough. 00:47:19 Speaker 3: I want to run any more questions by me for approval renal. 00:47:25 Speaker 2: I think so. 00:47:26 Speaker 3: One of the. 00:47:28 Speaker 2: One of the things that I picked up on the article in the episode is like I think of Audubon as being this very clinical, descriptive, methodical artist and writer, but he also has this sort of flare for the dramatic, and he's got this personality that kind of reminds me of Buffalo Bill. And then I recalled that when we were working on our Boon project. The story about Daniel Boone barking squirrels is written down by Audubon, who claims to. 00:48:02 Speaker 3: Have met him. 00:48:03 Speaker 2: Wilson, No, no, this is from Audubon. 00:48:06 Speaker 3: Well that was Audubon. 00:48:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, he claims to have met him when he went out west or when he went to Kentucky. But the dates for when Audubon claims to have met Boone don't really line up with when Boone was actually in Kentucky. 00:48:19 Speaker 3: Oh I had in my head for a minute that was that John Philson. Dude was a biographer. 00:48:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, Philson is the biographer, but Audubon is where we get the story of and it doesn't line up. 00:48:30 Speaker 3: Like Boone wasn't in the state that Audubon says he was in. 00:48:33 Speaker 2: Yeah, and so and there was you know the It made me wonder like, how are there other instances we know, like what other sort of colorful aspects are there to to Audubon's character, because remembering that anecdote made me think like maybe this guy uh had did this more often than not in terms of inventing things that happened to him or. 00:49:00 Speaker 1: Well he was Yeah, he was egotistical and so he wasn't beyond I think creating a story like that to sort of illustrate his you know, his presence in the world, how he got around, who all he met. I mean he you know, when you read about the years when he's in Europe, I mean he he claims to have met freaking everybody, you know, everybody who was in Europe. And so, yeah, it doesn't surprise me, Randall. I don't know that that particular story about the autoban writing about boon barking squirrels, but yeah, the fact. 00:49:44 Speaker 3: Even claims they sat down and had a dinner of squirrels. 00:49:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, he sat on the river bank with him for the afternoon. They got all they needed for dinner. But there are characters like that sort of when you peel back to Veneer, you realize that there's a lot of you know, fabrication maybe or self aggrandizement. 00:50:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think Ottoman was not above that. Yeah, as I you know, said he he was not generous about other people, anybody else who you know, who had any kind of success. Autobn tended to kind of detegrate their success, and so he. 00:50:30 Speaker 3: Wasn't even besides other painters, Yeah, even. 00:50:32 Speaker 1: Besides other painters. But I mean probably the most uh, you know, the most well known example of it is that meeting between him and Alexander Wilson. I mean, Alexander Wilson is the true beginning of American ornithology. This guy did nine He was a Scotsman who had immigrated to America and he did nine volumes of books about American birds. I mean he never went west or anything like that. But before where Auduburn was ever on the scene, Alexander Wilson was doing this and he was not nearly as good a painter as Oudobn was, but he was a pretty good scientific observer. And the scientists in America that's what they appreciated about him. But he and Audubon met at one point and when because Wilson was traveling around the country. When you had a book like that, what you did was you sold subscriptions to it, and you without a publisher, a marketing and publicity departments to help you sell your work. Now, you just went around the country and you knocked on here's a town that's got two doctors in it and a lawyer. Those people will have the money and the educations and the interest to want a book about birds, and so Wilson was traveling through Kentucky and he walked into a hardware store, apparently, and it was a hardware store that John James Oudoburn was running. And as Audubn tells the story, Wilson comes in and says, I'm selling subscriptions to a new book on birds. And of course Ottobon has already been working on his own, he's already And so Wilson opens up, you know, his portfolio and shows Audubon eight or ten of his paintings, and Audubon says, you know, he nods and everything, and yeah, that's really nice. And then he reaches out of the counter and pulls some of his own paintings out and puts them on the counter. And according to Audubon's version of things, Wilson was stunned into silence and gathered up his portfolio and turned around and marched out. 00:52:41 Speaker 3: Of the store immediately. 00:52:44 Speaker 1: Wilson's version is he hardly even recounts having. 00:52:47 Speaker 3: Met let alone, it being like a career ending. 00:52:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's like that. 00:52:54 Speaker 4: So you know, there's that, and there'll be blood. Daniel day Lewis's character has the line he says, there's a competitiveness in me. I don't want anyone else to succeed but me. 00:53:07 Speaker 1: I think Automat had that same feeling. 00:53:12 Speaker 3: All right, Well, thank you dan Oh, you bet