Books › Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941 › scan 5
Scan 5
Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941
13 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1(Continued from page 1)
2feeling one with them, or the storm of the crows in a wild autumn sky, or the clash of the corn blades. So they, too, are we.
3We say we built the Union Pacific, when we mean that Chinese coolies built it, starting from Sacramento, and Irish paddies built it, starting from Omaha, till they stared at each other across the Golden Spike in Mormon country. We built the Constitution, yes—out of Maine pine and Georgia oak, and we caulked it with North Carolina pitch and manned it with seafaring men of Massachusetts. It is not by one blood or language, one culture or religion, that we are unified. Something else than these has moulded us, in the clenching of a great palm.
4And that something is America. It is the air we breathe and some horizon we see. It is the great grass plains, and the long lake waters, the arc of the sky, and the depth of the loam; it is the timber that made our cradles and musket-butts; it is the flying birds, and the herds snuffing and stamping.
5These are America, as it was, as we remember it, as, in some measure, it still is. Who can say why our sky is not the same as Europe's? Why our soil is not like China's good earth, why are the prairies not the steppes? Perhaps we cannot answer, but we feel the difference in our bones. The canyons are carven deep in us, and the broad rivers run in our blood.
6Not that any one of us is by the smallest fraction equal to the land we inhabit. It is America, the continent, which has been decisive in the story of Americans. It has, violent and beautiful, spacious and demanding, brought out the best and the worst in the men who came to it. To describe it is to recount our history.
7And the materials of history are, in the last analysis as in the first place, the accounts of eye-witnesses. Hearsay, second-hand accounts, are not evidence. The source of history is the narratives of those who lived it. Every written word of the settlement of Virginia, the exploration of the Northwest Territory, the saga of Texas or the Santa Fe Trail, is precious to us. And anyone who could turn up the missing journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition would have American treasure.
8Now of all those who ever lived here, traveled and greatly adventured, none could bear more fascinating testimony than John James Audubon. He had the advantage of being a foreigner (as Crève-cœur and Tonti and Marquette and Lord Bryce were foreign commentators). So that he took nothing for granted, and in the perspective of a more mature culture, all things American struck him as fresh. He had the further advantage that he was a genius, and a genius of art at that, so that to observe, to depict what he saw, was habitual and instinctive.
9But Audubon had, too, a genius for the art of living. He lived with zest for the adventure, and with personal ardors. He savored everything, even the unsavory. He saw almost everything, from 1803 to 1849, from Florida to Labrador, from New York City to Fort Union on the borders of Montana. He lived among Pennsylvania Quakers, in Kentucky among pioneers from Virginia, in New Orleans among Creoles, in Mississippi among planters, in North Dakota among Indians. He explored Maine and South Carolina, Texas and Florida. He knew all types; he was the friend of Daniel Boone and Daniel Webster.
10In the nearly fifty active American years of Audubon's life what other individual had such a variety of experience? No one, certainly, who was at once so sensitive and so lusty. No one with his pen and his brush. One thinks of Mark Twain. But Clemens was a child when Audubon was old. Clemens went down the Mississippi in a gilded steamboat, as a light-hearted adventure. But Audubon made the same journey years before in a flatboat, and his life's success seemed to depend on the venture.
11One thinks perhaps of Lincoln. But Lincoln left no personal narrative. Of Whitman, who certainly left plenty of self-exposition, but it was the work of an introspective, an impressionist. No one would dream of suggesting that Emerson knew his America as Audubon knew it, or that Thoreau did, or Cooper or Parkman. The only comparable character I can think of is André Michaux, a man whose nationality, adventures and gifts parallel Audubon's. Beside Audubon, Michaux is a short shadow.
12Fame as an ornithologist has obscured Audubon's value as a witness to our heroic age. His painter's art has overshadowed his abilities as a writer. For besides being a detailed diarist and an inveterate correspondent, Audubon was a professional writer. He wrote to sell, and did sell. I am not saying that he knew how to write history like the learned Parkman, or style like the choice Thoreau, or that he thought as an equal with
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.