"Half artist, half man of action": John James Audubon and The Birds of America

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Richard Rhodes. John James Audubon: The Making of an American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xvii + 516 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00 William M. Souder. Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America. New York: North Point Press, 2004. xvi + 369 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper). "In looking at our present knowledge of the natural history of any vast country," Sir William Jardin warned in 1832, "we generally lose sight of a very important circumstance." In their perpetual rush to embrace current information, Jardin feared that Americans habitually undervalued the work of "early naturalists, and their sources of information."1 Such malpractice meant that important texts were too readily dislodged from the cultural memory. More than just another Jacksonian era admonition against the rush to celebrate progress, Jardin's caution registers a concern over the cost of losing a nuanced record of change over time. By advocating for a historically informed consciousness, Jardin suggests that the development of a nation's natural histories may reflect much more than a simple trajectory of ever expanding scientific information. By attending to how naturalists formulated their interpretations, a reader may discover a record of the relationship between cultural development and scientific inquiry. A country's outdated catalog of natural history texts, Jardin implies, may well be an unrivaled repository of information about the growth of the nation itself. While Thomas Jefferson was mistaken about wandering herds of mammoths in the western portions of North America, his assumptions concerning their existence are telling. For Jefferson, the economy of nature was such that extinction was impossible; thus, the presence of fossilized mammoth bones evidenced their continued existence. Yet, what is tantamount to a minor aside about mammoths in Notes on the State of Virginia, serves as an example of Jefferson's unwillingness to concede how changes in an environment might led to the elimination of indigenous populations. Seen in this light, his denial [End Page 169] of extinction haunts his representations of the "abandoned" Native American burial mounds he considers later in Notes. By continuing to read Notes on the State of Virginia, instead of tossing it aside in favor of a more accurate natural history, we not only gain insight into Jefferson's vision of the natural world, but also crucial access to how his conceptions of naturalism shaped his actions. Jefferson's conclusions concerning the implausibility of extinction, his steadfast belief that the mammoths must have been displaced into the West, afford us an opportunity to examine his complex figurations of Native Americans from a different perspective. By reading the work of a superannuated naturalist, as Jardin implies, we can more fully consider the complex history of national development. As the opening lines of a biographical sketch of Alexander Wilson, Jardin's remarks were, in part, a defense of Wilson's failing reputation. The serial publication of John James Audubon's illustrated ornithology The Birds of America in the late 1820s had damaged Wilson's standing as the preeminent American ornithologist. Since Jardin's sketch served as the preface to a new addition of Wilson's American Ornithology, his arguments about the need to preserve the history of American naturalism might be dismissed as self-serving. Yet, his lament about possibly erasing records of cultural production is also an enjoinder to bear in mind how the work of one naturalist, even as his labors were supplanted by the work of others, is part of a larger record of a nation's cultural history. By calling our attention back to the importance of Wilson's work (in the midst of Audubon's rise to popularity), Jardin suggests that thick description provides a better means of interpreting the American scene than simply subscribing to the most recent acts of interpretation. As Jefferson's belief in the existence of...