who sought the miracle of nature as the Red Indian sought a deer or the White Indian a westward pass.
The interests and personalities of such naturalists as Bartram, Audubon, Parkman, Emerson, and Thoreau were as varied as their origins: one was a pre-eminent philosopher, one a pre-eminent historian, and the others were regarded as more quaint than profound by their contemporaries.
But in different ways these five were land-conscious men who owed a debt to the Old World and shared a desire for fresh insights into the nature-man equation. Likewise, they shared a deep interest in, and respect for, America’s aborigines, and they rejected the common notion that the European emigrants had nothing to learn from the natives.
Some were basically pastoral men (although, by Jed Smith’s standards, most of them were greenhorns and backyard bird watchers); others were more at home in parlors; but as a group they were bent on seeking out the larger meaning of nature and making it part of the woof of life.
Only two of them were intimates, and the paths of some never crossed, but they shared a virgin continent as a common laboratory, and viewed it with an eye of discovery that probed beyond the obvious. In a much different way they were as individualistic as the mountain men, and each contributed to new currents of thought that reshaped our thinking about the American land.
It began, perhaps with the Bartrams. Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, and William Bartram, naturalist, were bom within ten years—and died within six—of each other. While Jefferson stood on the portico of Monticello contemplating the agrarian advance, while Boone shaded his eyes at the summit of Cumberland Gap, William Bartram was down in a valley somewhere, on shank’s mare, inspecting palmated chestnut leaves, bird nests, vines, and berries. Jefferson knew Europe, and spent a lifetime borrowing its sophistications; Boone had shed Europe as a spring snake sheds its old skin; William Bartram depended upon Europe for his bread and butter, and his self-appointed task was to win respect for the Old World’s new art of nature study.
Bartram’s father, John, once the King’s botanist, had created America’s first botanical garden on the banks of the Schuylkill River. After one five-week jaunt of over 1,100 miles, John complained that no one would “bear the fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations.” He was elated when his son William acquired his thirst to witness and describe every facet of nature. William, whose long stride matched his inquisitive eye, wandered thousands of unfenced miles on the eastern side of the Appalachians, and his journals bubbled over with the richness of a countryside teeming with “frogs in springly places,” “gay, vociferous and tuneful birds,” “myriads of fish, of the greatest variety and delicacy, sporting in the crystalline floods,” and “Elysian springs and aromatic groves.”
He wrote so eloquently that his Travels, published in 1791, received high praise in Europe. Carlyle wrote Emerson that all libraries should have “that kind of book . . . as a kind of future biblical article.” Chateaubriand in France, and Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, used the Travels as a basic wild-land reference book. Jefferson turned to Bartram when he needed strawberries and other plants for Monticello, and years later asked him to join Lewis and Clark’s expedition, but William, old and walked-out, regretfully declined.
As a self-taught disciple of Professor Linnaeus, William Bartram made botany popular, and he broadcast abroad—through his writings and exchanges of plants and seeds—the wonder of the American scene.
Science and institutions like the Smithsonian had a chance to grow in the United States once his work was under way, and the generation of nature writers and nature students which followed had a frame of reference from which it could measure its own insights.
Of Jefferson’s contemporaries, none achieved more popular fame than Haitian-born Jean Rabin, the naturalist whose name evolved to John James Audubon. Unlike his modern followers, who hunt with binoculars, Audubon took pleasure in shooting birds in order to identify them, and he chose the best for painting. In Florida he poked through the bayous and keys and boasted of shooting enough birds to make a feathered pile the size of “a small haycock” in a single day. From 1820 to 1826, Audubon hunted species after species, securing specimens and painting them with regal distinction for his Birds of America books.
His bird paintings were no sooner completed in 1839 than he began an ambitious work on North American quadrupeds and made a trek far up the Missouri in 1843 to gather facts firsthand. For two months Audubon was a guest at Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He rode with buffalo hunters, thrilled to the sound of “wolves howling, and bulls roaring, just like the long-continued roll of a hundred drums,” and commissioned trappers to bring him odd and unusual species. Passing Indians yelled with delighted recognition at the drawings he showed them from his portfolio, and he sketched night and day.
Audubon began the “Quadrupeds” collection at a time when it was impossible for a single naturalist to encompass all the fauna of the country. But he was indefatigable and saw his plan fulfilled after the Smithsonian was founded in 1846 and government survey parties shipped ponderous collections to Washington for analysis and classification.
Though Audubon never seems to have regretted his own big kills, in his later years he lashed out at the reckless raids on wildlife. He lamented the disappearance of deer in the East and denounced the “eggers of Labrador,” who slaughtered sea birds for fish bait. On witnessing the depredations of one fur company killing large numbers of mink and marten, he cried out “Where can I go now, and visit nature undisturbed?”
Audubon’s work heightened American interest in nature, and stirred the protective instincts of sensitive men. He was not a moralizer, nor did he seek to organize a crusade, but he became a symbolic figure in the fight for the preservation of wildlife, and after his death the society organized in his name set up a continuing protest against the slaughter he abhorred.
Audubon was a link between the mountain men and the naturalist-philosophers. Like the former, he was primarily a man of action rather than a prophet or profound thinker. Like the latter, he took delight in the systematic observation of wildlife and considered nature to be an object of study, not of conquest. His work is a manifestation of that same bedazzled love of the American scene that turned up in John Filson’s Kentucke and the works of William Bartram. Audubon did not merely record his creatures; he endowed them with his own enthusiasm. The best of his birds not only reflect their own beauty, but are alive with his excitement.
Three years after Audubon’s foray up the Missouri, amid the wagons-west tide of 1846, Wyoming was host to another Easterner—a Boston-bred collegian of twenty-three, Francis Parkman—who was to become America’s foremost interpreter of the encounter between Iron Age men and a virgin continent peopled with powerful native tribes. Wrapped up in his complicated life and character are all the contradictions and attractions of civilization and wilderness and their tragic, inevitable collision.
Francis Parkman, in his own words, was a man “haunted by wilderness images day and night.” This fact alone is an indication of how deeply the wilderness experience was beginning to invade the American consciousness. In background he shared nothing at all with outdoorsmen like Boone or Jed Smith. He had grown up among the merchant princes of Beacon Hill in the hub of American civilization, played beneath the benign eyes of portraits of Puritan and Revolutionary ancestors, and was clearly destined, from an early age, to enter the academic halls of Harvard College.
His life might have been rigidly conventional had he not found a wonderland of rocks, gorges, and pine woods near his grandfather’s farm when he was eight years old. This glacier-hollowed dell, ignored by colonial farmers, bore the intriguing name of Middlesex Fells. Here a protected city boy could shuck off his shoes and ramble around, could trap woodchucks and shoot at birds with an arrow, could poke his nose and fingers into all sorts of rocky recesses, and could put some timber in his spine. Francis had a second cousin, Henry Adams, who described the
