The Kentucky Warbler

"Now it happened that near his school was a botanical garden owned by an American naturalist. The American, seeing the stranger cast down by his aimless life, offered him his portfolio of drawings and suggested that he try to draw a landscape, draw the human figure. The Scotch weaver, the American school-teacher, tried and disastrously failed. As a final chance the American suggested that he try to draw a bird. He did try: he drew a bird. He drew again. He drew again and again. He kept on drawing. Nothing could keep him from drawing. And there at last the miracle of power and genius, so long restless in him and driving him aimlessly from one wrong thing to another wrong thing, disclosed itself as dwelling within his eyes and hands. His drawings were so true to life, that there could be no doubt: the road lay straight before him and ran clear through coming time toward eternal fame.

"All the experience which he had been unconsciously storing as a peddler in Scotland now came back to him as guiding knowledge. The marvelous memory of his eye furnished its discipline: from early boyhood through sheer love he had unconsciously been studying birds in nature, and thus during all these wretched years had been laying up as a youth the foundation of his life-work as a man.

"Genius builds with lavish magnificence and inconceivable swiftness; and hardly had he succeeded with his first drawings before he had wrought out a monumental plan: to turn himself free as soon as possible into the vast, untravelled forest of the North American continent and draw and paint its birds. Other men, he said, would have to found the cities of the New World and open up its country. His study was to be the lineaments of the owl and the plumage of the lark: he had cast in his lot with Nature's green magnificence untouched by man."

The lecturer paused, as a traveller instinctively stops to look around him at a pleasant turn of his road. It had, in truth, been a hard, crooked human road along which he had been leading his young listeners – a career choked at every step by inward and outward pressures. He had not failed to notice the change in every countenance, the brightening of every eye, as soon as his audience discovered that they were listening to a story, not of mere weaknesses and failures, but of the misfortunes and mistakes of a man, who at last stood out as truly great. This hapless weaver, this aimless wanderer through the forests of two worlds, after all had success in him, strength in him, genius in him, fame in him! He was a hero. Henceforth they were alive with curiosity for the rest of the story which would bring the distant hero to Kentucky, to their Lexington.

The lecturer realised all this. But he had for some time been even more acutely aware that something wholly personal and extraordinary was taking place: one of the pupils of the high school was listening with an attention so absorbed and noticeable as to set him apart from all the rest. Just at what point this intense attention had been so aroused, had not been observed; but when once observed, there was no forgetting it: it filled the room, the other listeners were merely grouped around it as accessories and helped to make its breathless picture.

The particularly interested pupil sat rather far back in the school-room, near a window – as though from a vain wish to jump out and be free. The morning light thus fell across his face: it was possible to watch its expression, its responsive change of light at each turn of the story. He seemed to hold some kind of leadership in the school: other pupils occasionally turned their faces to glance at him, to keep in touch with him: he did not return their glances – being their leader; or he had forgotten them for the story he was hearing.

The lecturer became convinced that what had more than once happened to him before as a teacher was happening again: before him a young life was unexpectedly being solved – to its own wonderment and liberation, to its amazement and joy.

That perpetual miracle in nature – the contexture of the generations – the living taking the meaning of their lives from the dead! You stand beside some all but forgotten mound of human ashes; before you are arrayed a band of youths, unconsciously holding in their hands the unlighted torches of the future. You utter some word about the cold ashes and silently one of them walks forward to the ashes, lights his torch and goes his radiant way.

Thus the Geologist felt a graver responsibility resting on him – placed there by one of them, more than by all of them: the words he was speaking might or might not give final direction to a whole career. He went on with his heroic narrative more glowingly, more guardedly:

"For a while he must keep on teaching in order to live: he taught all day, often after night, barely had time to swallow his meals, at the end of one term tells us he had as large a sum as fifteen dollars. Often he coloured his first drawings by candle light, drew and painted birds without knowing what they were. Drawing and painting by candle light! – but now he had within himself the risen sun of a splendid enthusiasm. That sun kindled his schoolboys. They found out what he wanted and helped. One boy brought him a large basketful of crows. Another caught a mouse in school and contributed that – the incident is worth quoting by showing that the boy preferred a mouse to a school-book.

"Take one instance of the energy with which he was now working and worked for the rest of his life: he wished to see Niagara Falls, and to lose no time while doing it he started out one autumn through the forest to walk to the Falls and back, a short trip for him of over twelve hundred miles. He reached home 'mid the deep snows of winter with no soles to his boots. What of that? On his way back he had shot two strange birds in the valley of the Hudson! For ten days – ten days, mind you! – he worked on a drawing of these and sent it with a letter to Thomas Jefferson. You may as yet have thought of Jefferson only as one of America's earliest statesmen: begin now to think of him as one of the first American naturalists. And if you wish to read a courteous letter from an American President to a young stranger, go back to Jefferson's letter to the Scotch weaver who sent him the drawing of a jaybird.

"Pass rapidly over the next few years. He has made one trip from Maine down the Atlantic Seaboard to the South. He has returned and is starting out again to cover the vast interior basin of the Mississippi Valley: he is to begin at Pittsburgh and end at New Orleans.

"Now again you see that he is coming nearer – nearer to you here.

"Look then at this bold, splendid picture of him outlined against the background of early American life. All such pictures are part of our richest heritage.

"The scene is Pittsburgh. He has ransacked the winter woods for new species, he has found only sparrows and snow-birds. That was the year 1810; this is the year 1916 – over a hundred years later in the history of our country. Gaze then upon this wild scene of the olden time, all such pictures are good for young eyes: it is the twenty-fourth of February: the river, swollen with the spring flood, is full of white masses of moving ice. A frail skiff puts off from shore and goes winding its way until it is lost to sight among the noble hills.

"They warned him of his danger, urged him to take a rower, urged him not to go at all. Those who risked the passage of the river floated down on barges called Kentucky arks or in canoes hollowed each out of a single tree, usually the tulip tree, which you know is very common in our Kentucky woods. But to mention danger was to make him go to meet it. He would have no rower, had no money to hire one, had he wished one. He tells us what he had on board: in one end of the boat some biscuit and cheese, a bottle of cordial given him by a gentleman in Pittsburgh, his gun and trunk and overcoat; at the other end himself and his oars and a tin with which to bail out the skiff, if necessary, to keep it from sinking and also to use as his drinking-cup to dip from the river.

"That February day – the swollen, rushing river, the masses of white ice – the solitary young boatman borne away to a new world on his great work: his heart expanding with excitement and joy as he headed toward the unexplored wilderness of the Mississippi Valley.

"Wondrous experiences were his: from the densely wooded shores there would reach him as he drifted down, the whistle of the red bird – those first spring notes so familiar and so welcome to us on mild days toward the last of February. Away off in dim forest valleys, between bold headlands, he saw the rising smoke of sugar camps. At other openings on the landscape, grotesque log cabins looked like dog-houses under impending mighty mountains. His rapidly steered skiff passed flotillas of Kentucky arks heavily making their way southward, transporting men and women and children – the moving pioneers of the young nation: the first river merchant-marine of the new world: carrying horses and plows to clearings yet to be made for homesteads in the wilderness; transporting mill-stones for mills not yet built on any wilderness stream; bearing merchandise for the pioneers who in this way got their clothing until they could grow flax and weave to clothe themselves. Thus in the Alps of the Alleghenies he came upon the river peddlers of America as years before amid the Alps of Scotland he had come upon the foot peddlers of his own land. On the river were floating caravans of men selling shawls and muslins. He boarded a number of these barges; as they approached a settlement, they blew a trumpet or a lonely horn on the great river stillness.

"The first night he drew in to shore some fifty miles down at a riverside hovel and tried to sleep on the only bed offered him – some corn-stalks. Unable to sleep, he got up before day and pushed out again into the river, listening to the hooting of the big-horned owl echoing away among the dawn-dark mountains, or to the strangely familiar crowing of cocks as they awoke the hen roosts about the first American settlements in the West.

"He records what to us now sounds incredible, that on March fifth he saw a flock of parrokeets. Think of parrokeets on the Ohio River in March! Of nights it turned freezing cold and he drew liberally on his bottle of cordial for warmth. Once he encountered a storm of wind and hail and snow and rain, during which the river foamed and rolled like the sea and he had to make good use of his tin to keep the skiff bailed out till he could put in to shore. The call of wild turkeys enticed him now toward the shore of Indiana, now toward the shore of Kentucky, but before he reached either they had disappeared. His first night on the Kentucky shore he spent in the cabin of a squatter and heard him tell tales of bear-treeing and wildcat-hunting and wolf-baiting. All night wolves howled in the forests near by and kept the dogs in an uproar; the region swarmed with wolves and wildcats 'black and brown.'

"On and on, until at last the skiff reached the rapids of the Ohio at Louisville and he stepped ashore and sold his frail saviour craft which, at starting, he had named the Ornithologist. The Kentuckian who bought it as the Ornithologist accepted the droll name as that of some Indian chief. He soon left Louisville, having sent his baggage on by wagon, and plunged into the Kentucky forest on his way to Lexington.

"And now, indeed, you see he is coming nearer.

"It was the twenty-fourth of March when he began his first trip southward through the woods of Kentucky. Spring was on the way but had not yet passed northward. Nine-tenths of the Kentucky soil, he states, was then unbroken wilderness. The surface soil was deeper than now. The spring thaw had set in, permeating the rich loam. He describes his progress through it as like travelling through soft soap. The woods were bare as yet, though filled with pigeons and squirrels and wood-peckers. On everything he was using his marvellous eyes: looking for birds but looking at all human life, interested in the whole life of the forest. He mentions large corn fields and orchards of apple and of peach trees. Already he finds the high fences, characteristic of the Kentuckians. He turned aside once to visit a roosting place of the passenger pigeon.

"It was on March twenty-ninth that, emerging from the thick forest, he saw before him the little Western metropolis of the pioneers, the city of the forefathers of many of us here today – Lexington. I wish I could stop to describe to you the picture as he painted it: the town stretching along its low valley; a stream running through the valley and turning several mills – water mills in Lexington a hundred years ago! In the market-place which you now call Cheapside he saw the pillory and the stocks and he noted that the stocks were so arranged as to be serviceable for gallows: our Kentucky forefathers arranged that they should be conveniently hanged, if they deserved it, as a public spectacle of warning.

"On a country court day he saw a thousand horses hitched around the courthouse square and in churchyards and in graveyards. He states that even then Kentucky horses were the most remarkable in the world.

"He makes no mention of one thing he must have seen, but was perhaps glad to forget – the weavers and the busy looms; for in those days Kentuckians were busy making good linen and good homespun, as in Paisley.

"He slept while in Lexington – this great unknown man – in a garret called Salter White's, wherever that was: and he shivered with cold, for you know we can have chill nights in April. He says that he had no firewood, it being scarce, the universal forest of firewood being half a mile away: this was like going hungry in a loft over a full baker-shop.

"And I must not omit one note of his on the Kentuckians themselves, which flashes a vivid historic light on their character. By this time he rightly considered that he had had adventures worth relating; but he declares that if he attempted to relate them to any Kentuckian, the Kentuckian at once interrupted him and insisted upon relating his own adventures as better worth while. Western civilization was of itself the one absorbing adventure to every man who had had his share in it.

"Here I must pause to intimate that Wilson all his life carried with him one bird – one vigourous and vociferous bird – a crow to pick. He picked it savagely with Louisville. But he had begun to pick it with Scotland. He had picked it with Great Britain and with New Jersey and Virginia. In New England the feathers of the crow fairly flew. In truth, civilization never quite satisfied him; wild nature alone he found no fault with – there only was he happy and at home. He now picked his crow with Lexington. Afterward an indignant Kentuckian, quite in the good Kentucky way, attacked him and left the crow featherless – as regards Lexington.

"On the fourteenth day of April he departed from Lexington, moving southward through the forest to New Orleans. Scarcely yet had the woods begun to turn green. He notes merely the white blossoms of the redroot peeping through the withered leaves, and the buds of the buckeye. With those sharp eyes of his he observed that wherever a hackberry tree had fallen, cattle had eaten the bark.

"And now we begin to take leave of him: he passes from our picture. We catch a glimpse of him standing on the perpendicular cliffs of solid limestone at the Kentucky River, green with a great number of uncommon plants and flowers – we catch a glimpse of him standing there, watching bank swallows and listening to the faint music of the boat horns in the deep romantic valley below, where the Kentucky arks, passing on their way southward, turned the corners of the verduous cliffs as the musical gondolas turn the corners of vine-hung Venice in the waters of the Adriatic.

"On and on southward; visiting a roosting-place of the passenger pigeon which was reported to him as forty miles long: he counted ninety nests in one beech tree. We see him emerging upon the Kentucky barrens which were covered with vegetation and open for the sweep of the eye.

"Now, at last, he begins to meet the approach of spring in full tide: all Nature is bursting into leaf and blossom. No longer are the redbud and the dogwood and the sassafras conspicuous as its heralds. And now, overflowing the forest, advances the full-crested wave of bird-life up from the south, from the tropics. New and unknown species are everywhere before his eyes; their new melodies are in his ears; he is busy drawing, colouring, naming them for his work.

"So he passes out of our picture: southward bound, encountering a cloud of parrakeets and pigeons, emerging from a cave with a handkerchief full of bats, swimming creeks, sleeping at night alone in the wilderness, his gun and pistol in his bosom. He vanishes from the forest scene, never from the memory of mankind.

"Let me tell you that he did not live to complete his work. Death overtook him, not a youth but still young; for, as a Roman of the heroic years deeply said: 'Death always finds those young who are still at work for the future of the world.'

"I told you I was going to speak to you of a boy's life. I asked you to fix your eyes upon it as a far-off human spark, barely glimmering through mist and fog but slowly, as the years passed, getting stronger, growing brighter, always drawing nearer until it shone about you here as a great light and then passed on, leaving an eternal glory.

"I have done that.

"You saw a little fellow taken from school at about the age of eleven and put to hard work at weaving; now you see one of the world's great ornithologists, who had traversed some ten thousand miles of comparative wilderness – an imperishable figure, doing an imperishable deed. I love to think of him as being in the end what he most hated to be in the beginning – a weaver: he wove a vast, original tapestry of the bird-life of the American forest.

"As he passed southward from Lexington that distant April of 1810, encountering his first spring in the Ohio valley with its myriads of birds, somewhere he discovered a new and beautiful species of American wood warbler and gave it a local habitation and a name.

"He called it the Kentucky Warbler.

"And now," the lecturer said, by way of climax, "would you not like to see a picture of that mighty hunter who lived in the great days of the young American republic and crossed Kentucky in the great days of the pioneers? And would you not also like to see a picture of the exquisite and only bird that bears the name of our State – the Kentucky Warbler?"

He passed over to them a portrait engraving of Alexander Wilson in the dress of a gentleman of his time, his fowling-piece on his forearm. And along with this he delivered to them a life-like, a singing portrait, of the warbler, painted by a great American animal painter and bird painter – Fuertes.