In the summer of 1832, John James Audubon and his family visited New York City only for a short time to escape an outbreak of cholera in the town. From New York City on July 31, 1832, the Audubon family traveled by steamboat to New London, Connecticut. They then took a stagecoach from New London to Boston on the evening of August 1. Audubon labeled Boston “the Athens of our Western World.” Out of the “Athens of our Western World,” there were seven subscribers to Birds of America. While visiting and meeting with subscribers and birdwatchers, Audubon was introduced to Thomas Nuttall.
Thomas Nuttall was born in England in 1786. He was trained to be a printer. Nuttall travelled the first time to North America in March of 1808. He quickly found work in a printing shop in Philadelphia. When not in the printing shop, Nuttall took out for the fields and forests around Philadelphia. His curiosity about the plants of North America led him to the University of Pennsylvania and the opportunity to study under Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815). As one of the first professors of natural history in the United States, Barton built the largest collection of botanical specimens in the country. In 1803, Barton published Elements of botany, or Outlines of the natural history of vegetables. Given his interest in plants and his desire to collect specimens, it was not long before Nuttall became a paid assistant to Barton.
Nuttall worked alongside Barton for a year and then was assigned to collect specimens in such areas as the Delaware and the Chesapeake Bay and areas south of the Great Lakes known as the “Old Northwest.” In the fall of 1810, Nuttall decided against returning to Philadelphia and work for Barton in order to join Wilson Price Hunt (1783-1842) and others recruited by John Jacob Astor (1863-1848) to establish routes across the northwest American territories for the empire Astor wanted to build in the trade of furs and hides.
Leaving from St. Louis with the Hunt party, Nuttall chose to improve his chances for sighting an unfamiliar plant or animal by staying on foot and out front or to the side rather than riding towards the back on horseback or on a wagon. Most of the rest of the party were French speaking riders and hunters from Canada who started calling Nuttall traipsing from plant to plant “le fou.” If Nuttall was considered the crazy, he was not the first nor the last eccentric botanist to earn such a title.
In the summer of 1811 at Fort Mandan (present-day Mobridge, South Dakota), Hunt decided to go west overland rather than stay along the Missouri River and chance confrontations with the Blackfoot and other fierce Native American warriors. As it turned out, Native American warriors were the least of the problems for Hunt and his hunting party. Of the approximate 60 men who continued travelling west with Hunt, about half lost their lives to starvation, exposure, and accidents. Nuttall was not among them. Instead of continuing west with Hunt, Nuttall joined Manual Lisa (1782-1820) and his trading party who were also camped at Fort Mandan to accompany them back to St. Louis.
Once in St. Louis, Nuttall learned that disputes between the French, English, and Native Americans were escalating into the likelihood of a full-blown war. Instead of making his way eastward back to Boston, Nuttall arranged transport for him and his vast collection of specimens and documentation south down the Mississippi River and then passage back to England. On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain to begin the War of 1812.
Nuttall waited for the Treaty of Ghent in 1815 to end the War of 1812 before returning to the United States. Upon landing in the United States, Nuttall went to work publishing The Genera of North American Plants, and a Catalogue of the Species, to the Year 1818. The 834 species of flora that Nuttall listed in the book were the first in North America to be categorized according to the taxonomic system as developed by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) in Systema Naturea. Not to rest in one place too long, Nuttall then asked to join Stephen H. Long (1784-1864) to be a part of his attempt to build a fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Before settlers and American governments pushed Native Americans “into oblivion,” Thomas Nuttall kept pushing to explore the western frontier of North America and places “no naturalist had ever traversed.”
Ultimately, Stephen H. Long excluded Nuttall from his expedition, in all likelihood, due to lingering suspicion between the Americans and the English. Nuttall then decided to strike out on a solo discovery that covered 5,000 miles across the southeastern United States. Nuttall first traversed the Appalachian Mountains to Pittsburgh, floated down the Ohio River and Mississippi River, rambled through Arkansas and Oklahoma, and then east through Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Once safely back in Philadelphia, Nuttall worked in the herbarium at the Academy of Natural Sciences while writing about “the wisdom and beauty of creation” in A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the year 1819, with occasional Observations on the Manners of the Aborigines.
In 1822, Harvard University invited Nuttall to work as a lecturer in natural history and to serve as the curator for a botanical garden that the school had established in 1807. Much of the popularity in the lectures that Nuttall gave was by heading into the woodlands near the campus of the school to look for and talk about plants and animals. When not lecturing or tending to the botanical garden, Nuttall worked on and completed in 1827 An Introduction to Systematic and Physiological Botany.
In 1832, Nuttall began publishing the Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada. Nuttall was very familiar with the bird studies of Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon. Yet Nuttall felt there remained the demand for “A compendious and scientific treatise on the subject, at a price so reasonable as to permit it to find a place in the hands of general readers, seemed, however, still a desideratum.” Like Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), Nuttall used woodcuts to create images of birds for his book.
As opposed to the tension and rivalry that came between Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, a common interest and friendship allowed Thomas Nuttall and John James Audubon to maintain frequent correspondence and made possible numerous additions to Birds of America. The first of which occurred while on a walk close to the campus of Harvard University on August 8, 1832, a bird materialized that Nuttall was the first to identify for science. Nuttall named the bird the Olive-sided flycatcher. Spotting the bird coincided with the rare occasion that Audubon was in the field without his shotgun. Meanwhile, Nuttall rarely carried a shotgun or any form of firearm. If he did, he preferred to use the chamber of the gun for storing plant seeds.
But for the sake of Birds of America, Audubon was adamant that an effort be made to collect a specimen of the Olive-sided flycatcher. Nuttall and Audubon agreed that Audubon would continue tracking the bird while Nuttall ran house-to-house knocking on doors and asking whether there might be a shotgun he could borrow. What Nuttall was able to find for Audubon was “a large musket, a cow’s horn filled with powder, and a handful of shot nearly as large as peas.” Audubon went about preparing the pea-sized shot for such a small and delicate bird until he realized that the shotgun was “flintless.” The hunt for the Olive-sided flycatcher resumed after Audubon accompanied Nuttall in search of another shotgun. The gun that they were able to borrow was the one that John James Audubon used to bring down the birds that appear in his drawing of the Olive-sided flycatcher for Birds of America.