was mounted on a superb horse, for which he had paid three hundred dollars, and a servant on horseback led another as a change. I was then an utter stranger to him, and when I approached and praised his horse, he not very courteously observed that he wished I had as good a one. Finding that he was going to Bedford to spend the night, I asked him what hour he would get there: "Just soon enough to have some trouts ready for our supper, provided you will join when you get there." I almost imagined that Barro understood our conversation; he pricked up his ears, and lengthened his pace, on which Mr. Nolte caracolled his horse, and then put him to quick trot, but all in vain; for I reached the hotel nearly a quarter of an hour before him, ordered the trouts, saw to the putting away of my good horse, and stood ready at the door to welcome my companion. From that day to this Vincent Nolte has been a friend to me.
Audubon added that they rode together as far as Shippingport, now a part of Louisville, where his brother-in-law, Nicholas Berthoud, was then living.
We shall now follow the equally circumstantial but widely divergent account of this meeting and the subsequent journey as given by the other traveler. Nolte had sailed from Liverpool in September, 1811, and landed in New York after a perilous voyage of forty-eight days. He had no servant, but was accompanied by a young Englishman, named Edward Hollander, whom he had engaged in a business capacity while in London and with whom he was making his way to New Orleans. Hollander had been sent in advance to Pittsburgh to purchase two flatboats, for in addition to their horses they had planned to carry 400 barrels of flour, from the sale of which in the South they expected to defray the expenses of their journey. Having purchased a fine horse in Philadelphia, Nolte left that city in December, and with saddle-bags strapped to his horse's back, rode on "entirely alone." He crossed the highest point of the Alleghany ridge at ten o'clock of a winter's morning and later in the same day reached a small inn "close by the Falls of the Juniata River." "The landlady," to quote his narrative, "showed me into a room, and said, I perhaps would not mind taking my meal with a strange gentleman, who was already there." This stranger, who immediately struck him as "an odd fish," "was sitting at a table, before the fire, with a Madras handkerchief wound around his head, exactly in the style of the French mariners, or laborers, in a seaport town." In the course of the conversation which then ensued he declared that he was an Englishman, but Nolte was the last person to be deceived on a question of nationality and remarked at once that his speech betrayed him. "He showed himself," to quote our senior traveler again, "to be an original throughout, but at last admitted that he was a Frenchman by birth, and a native of La Rochelle. However, he had come in his early youth to Louisiana, had grown up in the sea-service, and had gradually become a thorough American." When asked how this account squared with his earlier statement, said Nolte, "he found it convenient to reply in the French language: 'when all is said and done, I am somewhat cosmopolitan; I belong to every country.' This man," to conclude, "who afterwards won for himself so great a name in natural history, particularly in ornithology, was Audubon, who, however, was by no means thinking, at that time, of occupying himself with natural history."
In the interview as thus far recorded, Audubon was clearly chaffing his new acquaintance, for not one of the statements attributed to him was true, if we accept the fact of his French extraction. Nolte, to be sure, writes as a somewhat vain and garrulous man, and after a lapse of forty-three years, but he professes to speak the truth and there is no reason to suppose that his narrative is pure invention. Nolte further informs us that Audubon's father-in-law, Mr. Bakewell, "formerly of Philadelphia," was "then residing and owning mills at Shippingport," which was not the case. To continue, finding that Audubon, who was bound for Kentucky, was a companionable man and devoted to art, a field which he had cultivated himself, Nolte proposed that they should travel together, and offered the naturalist a berth on one of his flatboats.
He thankfully accepted the invitation, and we left Pittsburgh in very cold weather, with the Monongahela and Ohio rivers full of drifting ice, in the beginning of January, 1812. I learned nothing further of his traveling plans until we reached Limestone, a little place in the southwestern corner of the State of Ohio.[252] There we had both our horses taken ashore, and I resolved to go with him overland, at first to visit the capital, Lexington, and from there to Louisville, where he expected to find his wife and parents-in-law.... We had hardly finished our breakfast at Limestone, when Audubon, all at once, sprang to his feet, and exclaimed in French; "Now I am going to lay the foundation of my establishment." So saying, he took a small packet of address cards from his pocket, and some nails from his vest, and began to nail up one of the cards to the door of the tavern, where we were taking our meal.
Later they rode on together as far as Lexington, where they appear to have parted company.
The discrepancies between these accounts could hardly be greater, and they serve to illustrate the liberties which Audubon sometimes took with facts in composing his "Episodes." The travelers met, not on horseback, but at the supper table of a country inn; Nolte was then alone and had but one horse, while the greater part of the return journey was made by flatboat with Audubon as his guest; corn blades, pumpkins and trout suggest any other season than midwinter, with heavy snows on the mountains and rivers choked with ice. Audubon in this instance, as already explained, combined the incidents of two different journeys and colored the narrative to suit his fancy. There was no apparent motive to mislead the reader, and one of his readers he must have known would probably be Vincent Nolte, though he was not a subscriber to The Birds of America; Nolte did read the story, and was pleased with the "flattering acknowledgment of the little service" that he was able to render Audubon at that time as well as later in his career.
Both travelers felt the great earthquakes while making this journey, but probably not until they had parted company at Lexington. Audubon has given a vivid account of this experience in a characteristic sketch, but as usual there are no dates.[253] He was overtaken, as he said, while "traveling through the Barrens of Kentucky ... in the month of November," when he thought his terrified "horse was about to die, and would have sprung from his back had a minute more elapsed, but at that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots; the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled waters of a lake." For "November" he should have written "January" of the year 1812.[254]
This series of memorable earthquakes was followed in 1813 by a hurricane, more terrific than destructive, which swept the lower part of Henderson County, Kentucky, and cut a wide swath through the virgin forests, without causing any loss of life. Audubon's account of this event[255] is that of a close observer who escaped destruction by a hair's breadth and who related only what he himself had experienced. Critics inclined to be supercilious have complained that he exaggerated the importance of a merely local event and stretched the course of the storm some 800 miles until it had covered several states. "Sir," said Waterton, in pointing a dart through Audubon to another target, "this is really too much even for us Englishmen to swallow, whose gullets are known to be the largest, the widest, and the most elastic, of any in the world." What Audubon said was: "I have crossed the path of this storm, at a distance of a hundred miles from the spot where I witnessed its fury, and, again four hundred miles farther off, in the State of Ohio. Lastly, I observed traces of its ravages on the summits of the mountains connected with the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, three hundred miles beyond the place last mentioned. In all these different parts, it appeared to me not to have exceeded a quarter of a mile in breadth." Audubon was doubtless mistaken in his hasty inference that marks of forest devastation observed at such widely separated points were due to the same storm, but this would only illustrate a lack of caution which he sometimes displayed.