CHAPTER XXXVI
AFTERWORD: AUDUBON'S FAMILY IN AMERICA

Bachman completes his text on the Quadrupeds—Victor Audubon's success in canvassing—John Woodhouse Audubon's family—New houses at "Minnie's Land"—Second octavo edition of the Birds—Victor Audubon's illness and death—Attempt to reissue The Birds of America in America—The residual stock of this imperfect edition—Death of John Woodhouse Audubon—His career and work as an artist and field collector—Mrs. Audubon resumes her old vocation—Fate of "Minnie's Land"—Death of Mrs. Audubon—Her share in her husband's fame—Story written on Audubon's original drawings—Fate of the original copper plates of the Birds—A boy comes to the rescue—"Minnie's Land" today—The "Cave"—A real "Audubon Park."

After the death of the elder Audubon, his sons, under the leadership of Bachman, continued the work on the Quadrupeds until the third and last volume of the letterpress was completed in 1852. On March 13 of that year Bachman wrote to Edward Harris:[229]

When Victor was canvassing the South for the second or composite edition of this work, Bachman wrote to a friend in Savannah, on March 25, 1852:[230]

On the 9th of April Bachman wrote to his son-in-law: "Will you not return to New York by the way of Charleston and sail from here, take a manuscript volume in your pocket, and four hundred good and true names on your list?"

The reception accorded to the illustrations and text of this work had encouraged the brothers to do for the Quadrupeds what their father, with their aid, had so successfully accomplished for the Birds, by presenting text and plates, as Bachman said, in "Miniature." In this they succeeded as admirably as before, John reducing all the large plates, by the aid of the camera lucida, for the octavo edition which was published in 1854.

The following historical evidence of the appreciation which Audubon's works have received at the hands of the National Government I owe to Mr. Ruthven Deane, to whom the reader of these pages is already indebted for many illuminating facts. Dr. Theodore S. Palmer was recently inspecting governmental records at Washington, when he accidentally came upon the following entry:

In John Woodhouse Audubon's family there were two sets of children, two by his former wife, Maria R. Bachman, and seven by Caroline Hall, to whom he was married on October 2, 1841. Victor Gifford Audubon, who had no children by his first wife, May Eliza Bachman, was married on March 2, 1843, to Georgiana Richards Mallory, an Englishwoman, and six children were born to them between 1845 and 1854. Of the naturalist's fifteen grandchildren, six are believed to be now living (1917).[231]

In 1852-3 Audubon's sons built houses for their growing families on their mother's estate; Victor's was placed just north of the original homestead, and John's not far away. On the slope behind John Audubon's house, a small building, later known as the "Cave," was specially constructed for the safer keeping of the famous copper plates, which had already passed through fire,[232] and not wholly unscathed. Mr. John Hardin, now (1915) a serene and clear-eyed man of eighty-four, who settled in that neighborhood in 1852 and who was intermittently employed by the younger Audubons for a decade, has told me that he boxed with his own hands all of the copper plates, after wrapping each in tissue paper, and stored them in that building; whenever John Audubon wanted a plate, John Hardin would go to the "Cave" and get it for him.

In 1856 Victor Audubon published a second reduced edition of his father's Birds of America, in which the text and plates of the first octavo were reproduced with little or no change. At about that time Victor suffered an injury to the spine,[233] and after 1857 he was completely invalided; he died in his own home, August 18, 1860.

To quote the daughter of John W. Audubon:[234]

In 1858 or 1859 John W. Audubon entered upon an ambitious project, which the outbreak of the Civil War, aided, it is believed, by the unscrupulous dealings of business partners, rendered disastrous. In association with Messrs. Roe Lockwood, & Son, New York, and the lithographers, Messrs. J. Bien & Company, Number 180 Broadway, with whom considerable money had been invested, a second and American edition of his father's great folio on The Birds of America was attempted. An atlas of 106 double elephant plates, reproduced in colors on stone with slight but numerous changes from the original copper plates, was completed as Volume I in 1860;[235] the war, which broke immediately afterwards, completely ruined the enterprise, so that but few copies of the work were dispersed and an immense stock of plates was rendered useless; the burden of debt was undoubtedly increased by the issue of seven octavo volumes of text.[236]

Many years later, hundreds of persons who knew of Audubon's work only through its great reputation, and who had never learned to discriminate between a hand-colored copper-plate engraving and a lithograph, were deceived by an adroit, but essentially spurious advertisement of these inferior reproductions when they were being exploited by a firm of Boston book dealers. The original bulk of these large lithographs must have been vast indeed, if the following story, which was attributed to a member of the firm in question, be true: "We bought the entire stock of those plates, many years ago," so this man is reported to have said, "and, though the sales of every succeeding year since have been sufficient to cover the original cost, the number of plates has not appreciably diminished."

When this larger venture failed, one of the publishers, who was not satisfied with the surplusage of books and plates left on his hands, is said to have placed encumbrances upon the Audubon estate. At about this time John W. Audubon's health broke down; "Worn out," as his daughter has said,[237] "in body and spirit, overburdened with anxieties, saddened by the condition of his country, it is no matter of surprise that my father could not throw off a heavy cold which attacked him early in 1862." He died at the age of forty-nine, on the 18th of February of that year.

John Woodhouse Audubon, like his brother, Victor, had inherited decided artistic abilities, and from a youth had been his father's assistant, field companion and friend. Victor Audubon, on the other hand, was never a field collector, but aided his father more in a financial and secretarial capacity. Both in adult life were fond of music and good cheer, and at one time John was probably as devoted to adventure and sport as his father had ever been in his palmiest days. One of his youthful pranks is thus guardedly referred to by the senior Audubon when writing at American Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, June 25, 1833:[238] "The young men, who are always ready for sport, caught a hundred codfish in half an hour, and somewhere secured three fine salmon, one of which was sent to the 'Gulnare' with some cod." Whether the fishermen at American Harbor, who had obstinately refused to sell, ever missed those fine salmon from their pounds, is not recorded. Another adventure has been related by Mr. Fraser,[239] whose family was on intimate terms with the Audubons and MacGillivrays at Edinburgh, when John Audubon, John MacGillivray (William MacGillivray's eldest son), and himself were caught in the Ravelston woods while shooting birds; the boys, he said "were rather roughly handled," but got off by giving up their guns.

Under his father's tuition John Audubon became an observant and self-reliant collector in the field, and an animal painter and draughtsman of no mean powers. At twenty-one, as we have seen, he accompanied his father's expedition to Labrador, was with him and Harris in Florida and Texas in 1837, made successive visits to England, and traveled again in Texas and in Mexico, all in the interests of his father's works. He painted nearly one-half of the large plates of the Quadrupeds of North America, besides reducing all the drawings for the smaller editions of the Birds and Quadrupeds, an enormous labor in itself, representing the redrawing, with numerous alterations, of 655 elaborate octavo plates. After his return from California in 1850, he began to bring out an account of his western travels, —projected for ten monthly numbers, but this never advanced beyond the first part.[240]

If not a "business man" by instinct or training, John Audubon in emergencies could turn his hand to many things. For a time he superintended the building of houses, including his own and Victor's, which were completed in 1853, as well as another that was built on the Audubon estate for Mr. Hall, a brother-in-law; he also took charge of lighting the streets, and at another time was superintendent of a quarry in Vermont. "He was a bluff, gruff, but friendly man," writes George Bird Grinnell,[241] and was always willing to talk about birds, mammals, or, indeed, any natural history object, to any boy who asked him questions." On the other hand, an ardent sportsman, who had lived with the family for years,[242] has described him as a lovable companion, "genial in speech, full of anecdote, and a capital conversationalist;... in person of more than median height, and of commanding appearance, his face told plainly of the humanity of the man; he was as tender-hearted as a girl, and his expressive voice could command any key of which the vocal organs were capable; to the last he retained the Southern habit of softly clipping the ends of words."

John Woodhouse Audubon will be remembered chiefly as his father's aid and companion, although in his Western Journal,[243] written in his thirty-eighth year but not published until forty-two years after his death, he has left a record of which anyone could be rightfully proud.

Mrs. John James Audubon was very active in body and mind for a long period after her husband's death, and in 1857, when in her seventieth year, she returned in a degree to her old vocation of school teaching, which had been so successfully followed in Ohio and Louisiana when her husband was on the threshold of his extraordinary career. Her pupils now consisted of some of her numerous grandchildren and a few others drawn from the neighborhood; among the latter was the well known writer and father of the original Audubon Society, George Bird Grinnell, who pointed out to me the room in Victor Audubon's old house where his revered and venerable teacher had gathered her little flock. "She loved to read, to study, and to teach," said one who had known her, and "she knew how to gain the attention of the young, and to fix knowledge in their minds. 'If I can hold the mind of a child to a subject for five minutes, he will never forget what I teach him,' she once remarked; and, acting upon this principle, she was as successful, at three score and ten years, in imparting knowledge, as she had been in early life when she taught in Louisiana."

Mrs. Audubon's own house was rented and eventually sold. Meanwhile, it seems, she lived for a number of years with the family of her eldest son, and it was at Victor's house, as just noticed, that she started a small school. Finally, in 1863, at the age of seventy-five, bereft of children and fortune, she left the scenes of her once happy home, then "Minnie's Land" no longer, and for a considerable period lived with a granddaughter at Washington Heights, as that section on the river, including Carmansville, came to be called, and a little later at Manhattanville, a short distance below; there at the home of the Reverend Charles Coffin Adams, who prepared the original draft of the Life of her husband, the history of which has been given,[244] she passed a number of years after 1865.

In a letter written to a relative from "Washington Heights, N. Y., July 11, 1865," Mrs. Audubon spoke thus of the present, while memories, not untinged with sorrow, filled the retrospect:

After Mrs. Audubon had passed her eightieth year she left New York and again made her home in the West. In 1874, when with a granddaughter at Louisville, she dictated and signed the following letter to a gentleman who had asked for an autograph of her husband:

Mrs. Audubon to William R. Dorlan

Mrs. Audubon's closing days were spent at the home of her sister-in-law, Mrs. William G. Bakewell, at Shelbyville, Kentucky, where she died, with her mental faculties unimpaired, at the age of eighty-six, June 13, 1874, having outlived this sister-in-law and her younger sisters, Mrs. Alexander Gordon, of New Orleans, and Mrs. Nicholas Augustus Berthoud, of St. Louis.

Not long after John W. Audubon's death, his family disposed of their house on what had been the "Minnie's Land" estate, and lived successively at Harlem, New Haven, Connecticut, and Salem, New York, where Mrs. John W. Audubon died, and where her daughter, Maria Rebecca, the biographer of her father and grandfather, with a sister, still resides. Victor Audubon's family, with some of their kinsfolk, remained at the Hudson River place, which was included in the section known as "Audubon Park," until May, 1878, when they took a house in New York, where Mrs. Victor Audubon died in 1882.

A brother of Mrs. Victor Audubon, Mr. E. Mallory, in writing to a friend in Buffalo from "Audubon Park, August 31, 1874," said that it was a source of deep regret to Mrs. John James Audubon that her last years were not passed with them, under the shadow of her old home on the Hudson; and he continued: "She was a kind and good friend, very intelligent, and much beloved here; I remember her telling a young lady, who asked her if she had read some fashionable novel, that she had no time; 'at my age,' said she, 'I must make the most of my time.' As she was a wide reader, it was a great trial when, in age, her eyesight completely failed her. The minister who pronounced her eulogy[245] said:

Mrs. Audubon, during the period of her husband's greatest activity, had traveled much and met people distinguished in every walk of life. If, as some have thought, when Audubon was struggling for recognition, he was somewhat oblivious of the privations which his wife endured, in the sunshine of later years, when fame and fortune had smiled upon him, he showed by every token of affection how fully he realized his debt. Let it also be remembered that the monument by which Americans have signalized their appreciation of his labors, is honored by the ashes of his beloved Lucy, which rest by his side.

The original drawings of the plates of The Birds of America were sold by Mrs. Audubon on June 2, 1863, to the Historical Society of New York,[246] and a few of them are now displayed in its building in that city; it is still hoped that a fire-proof and adequately lighted hall can be constructed so that the whole of this great series of pictures may be exhibited under more perfect conditions. The artistic beauty and historical value of these drawings, with the added charm which personal association has so richly supplied, would render Audubon's "Book of Nature" one of the most unique and interesting exhibits in the New World. The collection appears to be nearly complete, although some notable pieces, such as the Wild Turkeys, are lacking, but there are other drawings, and some of early date, which were never reproduced; all are inclosed in the original portfolios, scarred by hard knocks and the tooth of time, massive, leather-bound containers, which two strong arms would raise with difficulty from the ground. Most of these originals are mounted on a gray backing, with plate margins in each case indicated by ink lines. As was noticed in an earlier chapter, many original legends and notes written by Audubon's pencil or pen still remain on the drawings, though many have been trimmed off or erased; these include names of localities and dates, and directions to the engraver for changes in the background and composition or for any improvement of the whole or a part.

As a further illustration of the care which Audubon exercised over the minute details of his great undertaking, we will reproduce the penciled orders on the drawing of the Great White Heron (Plate cclxxxi), which shows an adult male performing the gymnastic feat of seizing a large striped fish, a view of Key West forming the background: "Keep closely to the sky in depth & colouring! have the water a Pea-green tint. Keep the division of the scales on the leg in fact white in your engraving—The colouring over these will subdue them enough! finish the houses better from the original which you have; have the upper back portion very mellowing in the outline." Again, on the drawing of the Great Cinereous Owl (Plate cccli), we read: "Raise the bird about 4 inches on the copper—higher than in the Drawing, and put in a landscape below of Wild Mountains," a direction which in this instance was not followed, for the bird was eventually shown on a branch against the sky.

In many instances towards the end of his work, Audubon furnished Havell with drawings of the birds only, with directions to supply "an old rotten stick" for perch, or to "amend this rascally sky and water"; as we have already seen, he often depended upon him to combine several detached pictures into one plate, but not always with happy results. The following note was written on a drawing of the Carolina Parrot, reproduced in a very striking plate (No. xxvi), in which seven gaudy individuals of this nearly extinct species are represented feeding on a favorite weed, the cockle-bur: "The upper specimen was shot near Bayou Sarah, and appeared as very uncommon having 14 Tail feathers all very distinct—uniformly affixed in 14 distinct receptacles that I drew it more to exhibit one of those astonishing fits of nature than anything else—it was a female.—The Green headed is also a Singular although not so uncommon a variety as the above one. Louisiana—December (1821?) J. J. Audubon." The upper bird, which is here referred to, is noticed in his "Biography" of the species as "a kind of occasional variety."

On the drawing of the Swamp Sparrow (Plate lxiv), which was published in 1829, Audubon wrote, evidently with the wish of having his wife's name appear: "Drawn from Nature by Lucy Audubon, Mr. Havell will please have Lucy Audubon name on this plate instead of mine...!"

Vandalism is always short-sighted, but seldom has its vision been more myopic and sinister than in the case of the copper plates of The Birds of America, most of which were sold for old metal and converted into copper bars. Had they been preserved to this day, their value would have been an hundred-fold greater than that of the few paltry tons of metallic copper which they were supposed to represent. Mr. Ruthven Deane, whose researches in the field of "Auduboniana" have added greatly to this subject, has given a history of these plates,[247] and of the interesting way in which a remnant came to be snatched, as it were, from the very mouth of the furnace, through the persistence and enthusiasm of a lad of fourteen. To follow this writer's account, it seems that shortly after the death of her son John, Mrs. Audubon sold the copper plates to a firm in New York, where they remained until about 1865, stored in the warehouse of Messrs. Phelps, Dodge & Company. Not far from that time the plates were sorted and a few were given away; the large remainder was sent to a brass and copper company, of which William E. Dodge was president, at Ansonia, Connecticut. How some of these were fortunately rescued, in about the year 1873, is told in a letter to Mr. Deane from Mr. Charles A. Cowles, of Ansonia:

It was thought possible that some of these plates had been sold in New York City before the bulk of them were condemned as junk and sent to Connecticut, but in 1898 Mr. Deane was able to give the designation and resting place of only thirty-seven;[248] among these, however, were the Wild Turkeys, Canada Goose, Great Northern Diver, Raven, American Robin, and Ruby-throated Hummingbird, all among the finest of the original 435.

Under the guidance of Mr. George Bird Grinnell, on April 6, 1916, I paid a visit to "Audubon Park," now "Minnie's Land" no longer, where country roads have given way to business streets and forests to subways and skyscraper apartment houses. Notwithstanding the momentous changes which the extension of upper New York City has effected both above and below ground during the recent era of rapid transportation, the old Audubon houses still remain, like boulders amid stream, the impact of the city which has flowed around and beyond them being checked for the moment by a rampart of solid masonry, the retaining wall of the far-famed Riverside Drive, which rises above Audubon's old house close to its rear veranda and there makes a wide turn. For Mr. Grinnell this was a return to the scenes of his boyhood; the home of his father, Mr. George Blake Grinnell, stood on the hill just above the Audubon house, not far from the present "Riviera" building at One Hundred and Fifty-Seventh Street; the Grinnell apartment house which towers aloft close at hand stands in their old cow pasture, while their garden site is marked by the present entrance to the subway station on Broadway.

The first part of Audubon's original tract to be sold was the easterly section, extending from what is now the east side of Broadway to the Bloomingdale Road, and between the present One Hundred and Fifty-sixth and One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Streets; on that portion John Woodhouse Audubon built a large frame structure which, for a number of years, served as a boarding house for workmen employed in the sugar refinery of Messrs. Plume & Lamont that stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the present One Hundred and Sixtieth Street. Victor and John W. Audubon also built three houses on the hill, one of which, between One Hundred and Fifty-sixth and One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Streets, was occupied by Mr. Grinnell; another, at one time the dwelling of Henry A. Smythe, a former Collector of the Port of New York, was on land now covered by the Numismatic Building, while a third, which was occupied by Wellington Clapp, was on a part of the Archer M. Huntington estate, south of One Hundred and Fifty-sixth Street, and stood a little easterly of the present Riverside Drive; all of these houses have disappeared. In September, 1842, the Corporation of Trinity Parish acquired from Richard F. Carman, in Carmansville, the tract of land later known as "Trinity Cemetery"; this extended from Bloomingdale Road to the River, and between the present One Hundred and Fifty-third and One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Streets.[249]

The original Audubon house, standing in the angle nearly opposite One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, is all but concealed, except from the river side, but may be approached by a lane which leads off from One Hundred and Fifty-eighth Street. In 1913, when this old landmark was in imminent danger of demolition, the Commissioner of Public Parks made an eloquent plea for its preservation to the Audubon Societies and to lovers of birds and nature everywhere. It was then suggested that instead of permitting the historic structure to be destroyed, the city should acquire it, float it up the Hudson River to Fort Washington Park, and re-establish it there as a permanent memorial to the naturalist; it was also noticed that the public interest was enhanced by the fact that the father of telegraphy, Samuel F. B. Morse, had worked upon his invention while Audubon's guest, and that the first message to be received from Philadelphia came over a wire which entered his room at the northwest corner of the building.

An early engraving[250] represents the naturalist's house essentially as it appeared during his lifetime, surrounded by goodly forest trees of oak and chestnut, but these, when standing at all, are now reduced to gaunt and scarred remnants. A later print[251] shows the three Audubon houses, the river, and between it and the lawn "that eye-sore of a railroad,"[252] which was built not long after Audubon settled upon his estate. The original house was sold before 1862,[253] and about eight years later its new owner occupied it, after having given it a mansard roof and made numerous changes which were sanctioned by an era of bad taste. The naturalist's house overlooked the river and commanded a grand view from its high veranda on the front, while Victor's, which later adjoined it to the north, owing probably to the encroachments of the railroad, was built to face the hill-slope opposite; a top studio, at a corner of its roof, is an addition of a later purchaser.[254]

Adjoining Victor's house on the north was that of his brother, John, and on the east side of this was built the "Cave" and a barn since converted into a dwelling; at one time the loft of this barn was piled with boxes of bird skins and the surplus stock of the Ornithological Biography, good copies of which now bring from $30 to $50.

The three houses which were built and occupied by the great nature lover and his two sons, though in dire neglect, are not beyond repair; if such a project were practicable, they should be converted into a museum, and their walls once more ornamented with those beautiful pictures of birds and beasts which father and sons united to create. The triangle of ground between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River should be spared by the proud city that for years was the home of America's pioneer naturalist and animal painter, as well as the scene of his youthful experiments in trade, and converted into a true "Audubon Park." Such a memorial would contribute to the instruction and pleasure of all the people, for every generation of Americans that is to come.