Having a letter from Dr. Muhlenburgh to a Clergyman in Hanover, I passed on through a well cultivated country, chiefly inhabited by Germans, to that place, where a certain Judge Hustetter took upon himself to say, that such a book as mine ought not to be encouraged; as it was not within the reach of the commonalty; and therefore inconsistent with our Republican institutions! By the same mode of reasoning, which I did not dispute, I undertook to prove him a greater culprit than myself, in erecting a large elegant three story Brick house, so much more beyond the reach of the Commonalty as he called them, and therefore grossly contrary to our Republican institutions. I harangued this Solomon of the Bench more seriously afterwards, pointing out to him the great influence of Science on a young rising Nation like ours, till he began to show such symptoms of intellect, as to seem ashamed of what he had said.
At Pittsburgh Wilson met Audubon's old employer and relative by marriage, Benjamin Bakewell. The picture which he then drew[179] of that growing hive of industry will be read with interest:
On arriving at the town, which stands on a low flat, and looks like a collection of Blacksmith shops, Glass houses, Breweries, Forges, and Furnaces, the Monongahela opened to the view on the left running along the bottom of a range of hills so high that the sun at this season sets to the town of Pittsburgh at a little past four. This range continues along the Ohio as far as the view reaches. The ice had just begun to give way in Monongahela, and came down in vast bodies for the three following days. It has now begun in the Alleghany, and at the moment I write it is one white Mass of rushing ice. The country beyond the Ohio to the west appears a mountainous and hilly region. The Monongahela is lined with Arks, usually called Kentucky Boats, waiting for the rising of the river, & the absence of ice, to descend. A perspective view of the town of Pittsburgh at this season, with the numerous arks and covered keel boats preparing to descend the Ohio, the grandeur of its hills, and the interesting circumstance of its three great rivers—the pillars of smoke rising from its Furnaces Glass works &c. would make a noble picture. I began a very diligent search, in the place the day after my arrival for subscribers and continued it for four days. I succeeded beyond expectation having got 19 names of the most wealthy and respectable part of the inhabitants. The industry of the town is remarkable; every body you see is busy; & as a proof of the prosperity of the place an eminent lawyer told me that there has not been one suit instituted against a mercht. of the town these three years! The Glass Houses, of which there are 3, have more demands for Glass than they are able to answer. Mr. Bakewell the proprietor of the best, shewed ... yesterday a Chandelier of his manufacture highly ornamented, ... for which he received 300 dollars. It would ornament the ... in Philada. and is perfectly transparent.
Eight days after he had reached Pittsburgh, Wilson bravely launched a little skiff, which he christened the Ornithologist, and began an arduous and perilous journey to Cincinnati, Louisville and New Orleans, a distance of two thousand miles. "In this lonesome manner," he wrote, "with full leisure for observation and reflection, exposed to hardships all day, and hard berths all night, I persevered from the 24th of February to Sunday evening, March 17th, when I moored my skiff safely in Bear Grass Creek, at the rapids of the Ohio, after a voyage of seven hundred and twenty miles."
Cincinnati, then a town of five hundred houses, was reached on the ninth of March; while there Wilson made the acquaintance of Dr. Daniel Drake, who was later Audubon's friend, and examined a collection of Indian relics which had been taken from a freshly opened mound. He left Cincinnati convinced that its well-to-do class must be a very thoughtful people, so many of them, when approached for a subscription to his work, having replied that they would "think about it." Upon nearing Louisville at nightfall he became alarmed lest he should be drawn into the suction of the Falls, as no lights could be seen on the banks: cautiously coasting along the shore, where he encountered many logs and sawyers, at last he entered the Creek and secured his skiff to a Kentucky boat; then, "loading myself with my baggage," he wrote, "I groped my way through a swamp up to the town."[180] When Wilson had seen the Falls by daylight, he felt that his fears of the night before had been groundless, and declared that he should have no hesitation in navigating them single-handed.
It will be interesting to follow Wilson's journey a little further, before returning to the Louisville visit. After passing a few days in Audubon's town, he struck out into the heart of Kentucky, calling at Shelbyville, Frankfort and Lexington, and eventually reaching Nashville, Tennessee. Not far from the latter place he met a landlord of admirable discrimination, Isaac Walton by name, who showed himself worthy of his illustrious ancestor by declaring that Wilson was evidently traveling for the good of the world, and added: "I cannot, and will not charge you anything. Whenever you come this way, call and stay with me; you shall be welcome."
At Nashville Wilson wrote to Miss Sarah Miller, the lady to whom he was engaged but whom he did not live to marry: "Nine hundred miles distant from you sits Wilson, the hunter of birds' nests and sparrows, just preparing to enter on a wilderness of 780 miles—most of it in the territory of Indians—alone but in good spirits, and expecting to have every pocket crammed with skins of new and extraordinary birds before he reach the City of New Orleans." Continuing on his course in search of new birds and subscribers, Wilson arrived at Natchez on May 18, and, passing through Louisiana, on the sixth day of June he entered New Orleans, where his spirits were immediately raised by the accession of sixty new names to his list. After six months of continuous effort, traveling now in a small boat, now on the back of a horse, but frequently on foot, drenched by torrents of rain or scorched by the unaccustomed heat, often compelled to drink the poisonous water of cane brakes in Mississippi (to which must be attributed an attack of malarial fever, which he was able with difficulty to throw off, but from which, in all probability, he never fully recovered), he returned to New York by sea, and on September 2, 1810, was again in Philadelphia.
On this journey Wilson was a pioneer in much of the territory which Audubon had hardly begun to explore, but which later became the scene of his wanderings and adventures for many a year. At Louisville the two naturalists met, but they did not become good friends; though devoted to the same objects, differences in temperament might in any event have kept them apart. Unfortunately, the feelings of jealousy which were then aroused, or which were stirred up at a later day, were fostered by some of Wilson's injudicious friends to such an extent that from the moment Audubon's work became known, and long before he had published a line, they became as thorns in his path, and they continued to vex him for thirty years. It is not easy to reach a fair judgment in this matter now, and it would be impossible to do so without a better understanding of the man who suddenly appeared upon Audubon's horizon at Louisville in 1810 and then vanished. Because of the peculiar relations which existed between these two pioneers, we must follow the history of the elder man a little more closely.
Alexander Wilson was the son of a weaver at Paisley, Scotland, where he was born in 1766; he was thus Audubon's senior by nineteen years. His father, who was esteemed for his honesty and intelligence, had tasted prosperity, but irremediable poverty fell to his lot in later life. Alexander, the younger son, was motherless at ten, and the stepmother that soon appeared seems to have shown him scant sympathy, or, at all events, never won his affection. Alexander Wilson's youth unhappily coincided with an era of bad feeling in his native land; the times were hard in bonny Scotland, education was stagnant, and the public morals were debased. Wilson was a child of his times; like thousands of other youths, he was bound to suffer from the conditions of his early environment, but unlike many thousands of his day, he was possessed of talents and ambition which bitter adversity tended to sharpen and could never repress.
At thirteen young Wilson was taken from school and apprenticed to a weaver, William Duncan, his brother-in-law, and for three years he was no stranger to hard work and the birchen rod. For nearly three years more, as master weaver, he knew little beyond the grind and grime of the factory and the society of factory hands. At eighteen, however, his rebellious spirit struck, and for ten years he appeared in the rôle of itinerant peddler, poet and orator, and as socialist to the extent of championing the oppressed weaver class. At one time Wilson came into correspondence with Robert Burns and later made his acquaintance. His best dialect poem, "Watty and Meg, or The Taming of a Shrew," published anonymously as a penny chap-book in 1782, was his one popular success in the character of poet; according to report it was attributed to Burns, who admitted that he would have been glad to have written the verses, which sold so freely that a hundred thousand copies were disposed of in a few weeks.[181] In the disputes between capital and labor which arose at Paisley, Wilson took an active part. In connection with them he published a number of lampoons in verse, for which he was convicted of libel and was compelled to burn his satires at the town cross. In one instance, which occurred in February, 1793, a petty tyrant whom he had riddled exacted the fine,[182] and because of his inability to pay Wilson was sent to jail, where he languished for over three months.