There is ample evidence that John James Audubon drew inspiration from Lewis and Clark’s writings. Between 1839 and 1852, already famous for his beautiful paintings in The Birds of America (4 vols., 1827–38), John James Audubon (1785–1851), aided by his sons John Woodhouse and Victor, and the naturalist John Bachman, published the 3-volume Quadrupeds of North America. It included 150 plates lithographed by the talented William Hitchcock and hand-colored by J. T. Bowen under the artists’ supervision.
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Drouillard spotted the first “Deer with black tales” on 5 September 1804, on the cliffs upstream from the mouth of the Niobrara River in northeast Nebraska. By 10 May 1805 Lewis had seen enough specimens to write an 800-word description of the new species.
They didn’t get credit for it, but Lewis and Clark were the first to describe these wily canine predators.
One of the most confusing terms in Lewis and Clark’s lexicon of quadrupeds was the adjective long-tailed—or longtailed. At the Three Forks on 29 July 1805, he compounded the ambiguity.
America’s greatest ornithologist, John James Audubon, was just starting his career when Lewis and Clark returned, and there is ample evidence that he drew inspiration from Lewis and Clark’s writings.
After the night of 3 June 1804, just past the Moreau River in present-day Kansas, Clark and Ordway reported that a loud bird sang all night. They called it a nightingale, but no such species lives in North America. Just what type of bird did they hear?
The species remained nameless until John James Audubon dubbed it neglecta because, he wrote in 1840, although “the existence of this species was known to the celebrated explorers of the west, Lewis and Clark . . . no one has since taken the least notice of it.”
September 13, 1803
Marietta, Ohio
Marietta, OH At sunrise, Lewis sets out down the Ohio River. They lift the barge over a few riffles and see a large flock of passenger pigeons. Lewis writes a letter to President Thomas Jefferson describing river conditions thus far.
Lewis got his first close look at that “large hare of America,” when one of the Corps’ ace hunters, Private John Shields, bagged the first specimen more than 1,100 miles (by Clark’s estimate) up the Missouri River.
Lewis had no reason to write about the common or fallow deer of the East Coast, although in using it for the purpose of comparison, he gave quite a clear picture of it. John Godman’s 1828 description relied partly on Lewis and Clark’s journals.
This secretive, primitive little rodent, which somewhat resembles the woodchuck and the muskrat, belongs to the same mammalian order, Rodentia, as the beaver, Castor canadensis, but otherwise they have nothing in common.
Lewis’s conviction that the “black tailed fallow deer of the coast” and the “common fallow deer” were two distinct species was sufficient to urge later investigators to try to clarify them.
En route to the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark saw both species of eagles that are native to North America: the black-and-white one called the bald eagle, and the brown-and-gold one commonly known as the golden eagle, but which the explorers knew as the grey eagle.
