Audubon's western journal: 1849-1850 Being the MS. record of a trip from New York to Texas, and an overland journey through Mexico and Arizona to the gold-fields of — A Closer Reading

A Naturalist’s Eye in a Miner’s World

Though Audubon traveled to California for gold, his journal entries dwell on the natural world with a naturalist’s precision. He notes the American Avoset, long-billed curlew, Canada crane, and red-shafted woodpecker, and describes a rattlesnake nest unearthed near a cactus patch: “a tolerably large female, which had in her nest nine young; beautiful little creatures, about a foot long.” He also records the behavior of a small lizard with a banded tail that “curls its tail on its back, and waves it gently four or five times most gracefully.” These observations align with the Audubon family legacy, yet the journal is not a scientific catalog; it is a personal record where wildlife appears alongside the mundane struggles of travel.

The Texture of Daily Hardship

Audubon’s entries repeatedly emphasize scarcity and discomfort. On September 17, 1849, near Papago villages, he writes: “we sat down to our supper of bread and water, our sugar, coffee and all other matters culinary having been used up, and the country affords no game.” The party rises at 5 a.m. and marches until 7 p.m., yet the promised antelope proves “like the meat of a poor two-year-old beef, hardly so good.” Water holes are “filled with animalculæ, and contained many turtles and snakes.” The journal does not romanticize the overland journey; instead, it conveys a persistent sense of depletion—of food, energy, and morale—punctuated by small transactions, such as buying a cow for four dollars and refusing the seller’s later demand for seven.

Encounters with People and Place

Audubon’s descriptions of indigenous peoples are brief but telling. Of the Papagos, he notes: “fifty Papagos would count all we have seen, and they are fast passing away judging from the dilapidations of the towns, and the numbers of empty houses.” He observes their diet of turtles and game, their horses ridden “with only a rope around the neck,” and their burial mounds where “kettles and culinary articles” are left for the dead. The landscape itself is rendered in stark colors: “strips of red gravel,” “dried parched-up white clay,” and mountains of “blackish stone, looking in the distance almost purple.” These passages suggest a traveler attentive to both human and physical geography, though his judgments are filtered through the assumptions of his era.

Readers approaching this journal should expect a document that is neither a complete narrative nor a systematic natural history. The editorial additions—the memoir, introduction, notes, and index—provide context but do not fill the gaps in the manuscript. Audubon’s voice is direct, often weary, and occasionally sharp. The value of the text lies in its unpolished details: the price of beef, the color of a lizard’s tail, the emptiness of a Papago house. It is a record of what one man noticed while crossing a continent in search of gold, and what he noticed was rarely the gold itself.

It’s funny how a journal can feel like a hand on your shoulder. That old Audubon trip stayed with me long after I closed it—the quiet weight of all that open land. It made me think of Through Glacier Park: Seeing America First with Howard Eaton — Reading Companion, which has that same unhurried feeling of moving through a place that asks nothing of you but to notice.