Behind the Bastards - The Audubon Guy Was A Monster

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Robert sits down with David Bell to discuss John Audubon, namesake for the birdwatching society, naturalist and racist monsterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, I'm the podcast man. Here to deliver pods to your earcast. Beautiful. Beautiful intro. Thanks, David. You know, what they say about being a professional is, you should never learn how to do even the basic parts of your job at any point,

and just kind of muddle through. And that is the key to success. Right, because when you do like a fraction of it, then everybody is like, oh my god, they did it. Amazing. You keep everybody's expectations low. You keep everybody's look. Exactly. It's like when I'm, you know, driving, you know, I'm not going to use turn signals.

I'm not going to turn my headlights on, you know. Right. Because that way, when I eventually slam on my brakes and narrowly miss running through a crosswalk, people are like, wow, pretty good guy. He didn't. He didn't hit that crosswalk. Didn't hit that crosswalk. Yeah, people, yeah.

They're all ready for death. Yeah, they were like, wow, he was pretty drunk, but he wasn't so drunk that he blew through that crosswalk. That's the way in which I approach my career. Dave, you have podcasts. You're David Bell. This is behind the bastards, by the way. But you have a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed, where you talk about movies and media and stuff.

Got a bunch of shows on there. That's true. What? I mean, I feel like the plug. I think we did it. I think we're all set. Yeah, we're good to go. You've been on the show.

Yeah, I'll plug our Patreon, patreon.com. Gamefully Unemployed. But really just search for Gamefully Unemployed wherever you get a podcast. Find it. And check us out. We have a bunch of exclusive ones on our Patreon. Bop it. Yeah, bop it.

Yeah, pull it. Pull it. Twist it. Is tug it one? Tug it. Absolutely. Yeah. Treat it like a nipple.

General rule of advice. Burn it. Just like a nipple. Dave, how do you like birds? Lukewarm. Lukewarm on birds. Depends on the bird, to be honest. I like the...

I like them in theory. Theoretically. I'm missing against them, you know? But again, it's really going to depend on the birds. Yeah, I don't have anything against birds categorically. I will say the animals I have most often had negative relationships with have been birds. Particularly chickens. Yeah.

Which are monstrous creatures. Oh, yeah. When I was a child, I apparently brought a chicken into my house, like holding it. And I still think back at that, like, how did I not get attacked by that chicken? Well, they're bad at that. If you pick them up right, which you must have done. Yeah. Apparently.

You may be a savant, a chicken savant. Dave. Yeah. You know much about the Audubon Society? No. Okay. Well, today's episode is called John James Audubon Bird Monster. And we're going to talk about the namesake, not the founder.

It was founded years and years after his death. Okay. But the namesake of the Audubon Society. This guy sucks a lot more than you would expect, Dave, a lot more than you would expect. Okay. I mean, I don't know who this is. Yeah. You know, the Audubon Society is like people who like birds a bunch, you know, bird watchers.

That's their group is the Audubon Society. Like the NRA is for guns and the Audubon Society is for people who like going into the woods and being like, look, I saw a bird and then telling other people like, I found this bird here. Okay. That's their whole thing. No matter what my view of birds are, I do find bird watchers highly sinister. It is.

It is unsettling, right? Yeah. Like they could be doing anything with those binoculars, you know? It feels like when someone says, what are you doing? And they say bird watching, that sounds like an excuse. Uh-huh. You're the FBI. Like I already know right away.

You're doing some skull tuggery. Right. Because the one thing I do know about birds, they're not fun to watch. Like who would watch? But there's like a lot of people like to watch birds. Apparently. I don't get it. But also I will spend like hours just watching my cats live their lives.

So everybody's got animals they like to stare at like a creep. Yeah, that's fine. And that Audubon Society likes to do that with birds, which is fine. Broadly speaking, not a bad. But the guy they're named after, real shitty. So John James Audubon was born Jean Rabine, like, you know, French John. Right. Like spelled like genes, but without the S.

But not like Sean Luke, Sean. No, no, that one. Oh. Yeah, J-E-A-N. Jean. Jean Rabine. Sean. Yeah.

And San Domain, which is modern Haiti, right? Like he's born in what is today Haiti, what was then the slave colony that. Oh, no. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I did a video about Haiti for some news. It was, it's bleak.

So he's born 1785, which is not all that long before, well, before the cool thing happens, which is like the Haitians, the Haitian slaves are like, yeah, let's kill everybody who's want slaves to exist. Right. But that's not a great time to be the illegitimate son of a French sea captain. You know, a mixed time. And like slave trader, his dad is who is also named Jean is a slave trader and a sea captain and owns a plantation.

Now, depending on who you believe Jean Rabine's mother is either a sugar plantation owner who died in the slave uprising that led to the creation of Haiti or a mixed race chamber maid named Catherine Bouffard or a French chamber maid named Jean Rabine, which is basically the same as his name. So there's a couple of different theories and one of them is that he's a mixed race kit, that he, that he has black ancestry. And that's going to become very relevant later because of some of the things this guy chooses to do with his life.

Whoever his mother was and whether or not he was mixed race, he was born able to pass as white. So if he is, if he is mixed race, he like white people in like the U S and Europe don't notice that when they look at him, right? Got it. Which is handy in this period of time, right? Right. Why, why are we not sure who his mother is?

Well, because he's, he's illegitimate. Like his dad is a pretty well off guy and he has a wife back in France and he's just whoever he has his son with, it's not his wife. You know, it's also the 1780. So it's not like, it's not like if he'd wanted to know who his mom was, he could have gone and done a DNA test at some point, but there's really not many options. So the most likely case is that his mom was, was J E A N N E Rabine as opposed to Jean Rabine.

I'm sorry, they're French. So this, this part's going to be kind of confusing. When she died of an infection, basically as soon as her baby came into the world, probably as a result of having a baby, not an uncommon story in 1785. So James's dad, Jean Audubon, decided to leave the island shortly thereafter. He was not a dumb man and he saw that tensions in Haiti and by tensions, I mean all of the angry people freeing themselves from plantations and getting weapons were on the rise, right? So he's, as a rich white guy looking at Haiti in the late 1780s and like, probably got to

get out of here, probably ain't going to be, this ain't going to be good for me anymore. No, no, no, no, they're not going to be, they're not going to be nice to him. Yeah. I probably don't want to be hanging around Haiti too much longer. So the rumors that Jean may have been mixed race are mainly significant again for things that come up later. It's worth noting that his father may necessarily, if he was mixed race, his father may not necessarily have seen this as a big deal.

Well this would have been like a thing in the United States as a time. Again, if you have like one drop of blood that isn't white and kind of the parlance of the time in the U.S. in this period, it can be a huge issue for you. Right. If I remember correctly, not to say Haiti's progressive during this time, but like the revolution that happens in Haiti. France, you mean? Yeah.

Oh, sorry, France. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like also the revolution that happens in Haiti, like they pretend it doesn't happen, right? In a lot of places. France does and for a long time that's basically their policy. But within kind of the France itself and France outside of the islands where they own a lot of slaves, the late 1700s are a period in which, again, you've had this revolution.

There's all of these kind of radical ideas about equality. It is starting to become normalized for people who are not white to get the rights of citizens in the French Empire. Okay? Okay. So there's this period where like there's still slavery, but also people who are mixed race are getting their citizenship. Right.

I was thinking of the U.S. because the U.S. it was like they didn't want to talk about what was going on in Haiti because. The French didn't either. Like again, they don't, once Haiti rebels, France doesn't really want to acknowledge it, right? They invaded a couple of times and the U.S. doesn't want, no one wants to acknowledge it because the idea of a slave rebellion is very frightening to everybody. But you have in the same period, because it's post-revolutionary France, all these discussions

about well, mixed race people and black people should be citizens too. Like if we're going to say everybody's equal, then these people have to be equal as well. And it's like this process going on and this, not to like whitewash the horrible colonial crimes of the French government, but this process does happen in France. And there are rights for people who are not white, but are French citizens in France. That does not happen in the United States for like another 70 years, you know. And arguably a lot longer than that, right? Obviously.

Whereas in France, they do actually start to get functional citizenship. All mixed race Frenchmen receive citizenship in 1792. So the fact that like Jean Rabin may have been kind of mixed race would not have been a huge issue growing up in France, as it would have been in the United States. Now his dad does buy a farm in the United States, 284 acres outside of Philadelphia. And at this point, again, normally we would call it something else. It's not Philly yet. You know, it's Philadelphia.

It's not the gritty city that we know and love at this point. I wanted to make a joke about the first sports related riot in U.S. history here, like in that being the thing that made it Philly, because I was going to be, I was pretty sure the first U.S. sports riot would have happened in Philadelphia, but I was wrong about that. Yeah. It's not. Where was it? Yeah.

It was the Johnson-Jeffreys riots of 1910. And those happen in a bunch of cities, but not Philadelphia. There's like a shitload of U.S. cities that have riots in 1910 over this. It's a boxing match. None of them are Philly. A boxing match. Jesus. Yeah.

It's what you'd expect. Jack Johnson becomes the first black world heavyweight champion. So he becomes heavyweight champion, and all the white people in America are really pissed, and so they like find this white boxer to come out of retirement to fight him in 1910. That's Jeffreys, who they call the great white hope. And then he gets his ass kicked. Amazing. Yeah.

So there's, I mean, it's not, I mean, there's horrible, horrible race riots. The aftermath sucks. Black people. It's a nightmare, but yes, the basic story is kind of funny. Yeah. Anyway, this was all, because I wanted to make a joke about Philadelphia and sports riots, which wound up not being at all relevant, so sorry for the digression, but back to Jean. So in 1791, his dad takes him away from Haiti.

They go to France, and they buy this farm in Philadelphia. It's mainly an investment farm so that they can make money, so that's kind of where the family money is coming from while Jean and his dad and his dad's wife, who's not his mom, raise him in Nantes in France. And I should say that his dad's wife, Anne-Moinette Audubon, isn't biologically his mom. I do think she agrees, she is basically his mom, like she raises him and stuff. So credit to her for that. She seems to not, as far as I know, doesn't take out on him the fact that his dad was

just sleeping around with whoever the fuck, you know, in Haiti. So that's good for her. Yeah, maybe they had like a kink. Maybe they had a thing, you know, maybe they had a thing. Maybe she was, who knows. They were French, you know, anything's possible. Yeah. Yeah.

So Anne was a pretty attentive mother as far as we knew. Jean-Jacques, which is what he starts to become known as, so he's born Jean-Ribin. He starts to be known when they moved to France. They just treat him as their normal son and call him Jean-Jacques Audubon. So that's his name now. He goes through a couple of names at this point. I know it's kind of confusing. He has a pretty pampered upbringing.

He's able to explore a wide variety of interests. He becomes fascinated by nature and spends long hours hiking through the countryside, drawing increasingly detailed depictions of landscapes and wildlife. And he had a particular fascination with birds, so he just loves hiking and drawing birds. Okay. Yeah, fine so far. Fine so far.

Yeah. I mean, hiking is great. Hiking is wonderful. Being in nature, it's one of those things not enough people get to do anymore. And it really does like it like resets you, you know, it balances you. I don't know why you'd look at a bunch of stupid birds and not, I don't know, get high or something, but like good for him. Yeah, good for him.

Except he's doing fine. So in 1803, some dude named Napoleon gets all like empire-y and kind of gets into all these fights with basically everybody, you know, he's one of these, one of these guys you get every now and then in Europe, every 80 years or so, who's like, you know what, I want to start a fight with everyone. Everybody in Europe. You know what? I want all of this now.

Yeah. I want to try. I'm going to go for it. Will it work out? I'm just going to go for it. Yeah. You know, for a while. Yeah.

Yeah. He got closer than most. Yeah. It does usually work out for a while. So during the period while it's working out in order to make it keep working out, Napoleon's like, well, I got to conscript people, right? I need more young men to throw at Prussian guns and do eventually leave starving in the snow outside of Moscow, right?

It's a standard. We've all been there, you know, where Napoleon is. I can't blame him for it. But John's father is like, well, I don't really want my son to die a pointless death in the snow outside of Moscow fighting for a dictator. So I'm going to just send him to the U.S. It seems like a better place for him, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah. It's fine. Like I support draft dodging as a general rule. And that's what, yeah. I can see him looking at his son outside drawn birds and being like, yeah, he's going to, he's going to die immediately. Yeah.

He's not going to do well in this war thing. I've got a sensitive boy here. I'm not really, I'm not feeling like the steps of Russia are a good spot for him. So Jean-Jacques lives on the family farm, you know, he moves to Pennsylvania and he lives on the family farm in Milgrove. And he's essentially a child of the aristocracy, right? His family's not crazy rich, but they're well off and he does not need to work for a living as a young man.

He's like 18 at this point. And so he takes up hiking and hunting with gusto. He gets real into hunting when he moves to the U.S. and he becomes an excellent shot, which is not easy. The guns at the time are not rifled, which is like rifling at these little lines that they have going down the inside of a barrel that makes the bullet spin. And it's like with, watch someone throw a football, the spin makes it go straight. They don't know how to do that yet.

So shooting stuff is not easy. Right. It's just like a stupid musket with like a ball in it. You have to like take 15 minutes to load and then it fires like 15 feet and maybe explodes in your face. Suck at this point. Yeah. But he's good with them.

So he's good with them. I mean, they have enough money for the better guns at the time. So that's probably a factor. So he starts drawing the birds. He starts both shooting and then drawing birds and he's using a shotgun for this. So it's easier to hit. But yeah. So he'll shoot birds and then he'll sketch them.

And this becomes like his hobby, which is, I don't know. Yeah. A little creepy, right? Yeah. I was about to say that's a bird serial killer. That is what you're describing. That is what... Jude Lawn wrote to Perdition taking photographs of his kills.

It is one of those things because he gets very scientific about it and he has a huge impact on like the development of biology as a science because of what he does here. And it's worth acknowledging that. And it's also worth being like, but this is also like pretty close to stuff we get like serial killers do. He's not torturing them to his credit. Like he's not extending their suffering, but... Having known people with interest in like medical stuff, there is a very fine line between

a serial killer and a doctor or something that's interested in anatomy or like nature or a biologist where it's like they're kind of doing... It's the Venn diagram, you know, like there's some similar things. If his parents had hit him a couple of times more, he probably would have been a lot worse to those birds and then we might have gotten a real different story for John Jack Coddabon, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I feel like if Jeffrey Dahmer was doing what he was doing to like monkeys in a lab,

we wouldn't have even thought twice about it. Well, some of it. Because he was... Some of it. There's a lot of sex stuff. Probably wouldn't have been okay. Not all of it. Although it depends on what kind of lab.

If it's like a lab that likes to party. You're right. If it's one of those like fucking, I don't know enough about colleges to make a good joke here actually. Arizona State. Oh, that's solid. Yeah. That's solid.

There we go. Yeah. I mean, we don't know what goes on in those labs. Nobody does. Nobody does. Yeah. Break into a lab. Film them secretly, you know?

See what happens. Exactly. So, white people in this period of time know very little about North American wildlife, right? Obviously, indigenous people knew quite a bit about North American wildlife, but white people, it's all this gigantic mystery too. So Jean-Jacques decides that he's going to study wildlife a lot more than anyone has before.

And one of the things he's curious about, he keeps seeing these birds and he notices that like, oh, these Eastern Phoebes, which is a type of bird, like there's birds here of that type every year at this time. I wonder if they're the same birds, right? Because people don't know, at least white people don't know that like migration is a thing in detail. Right? I think there's people theorizing it.

Right. I mean, why would we? Yeah. Yeah. Why? Because you just see like, who knows if it's the same birds? Maybe they all die. I don't know.

There's a bunch of things that are possible. Yeah. So he's like... So he's like, well, that's exactly what he decides. He's like, well, I'm going to tie strings to the legs of a couple of different examples of this bird. And then if next year any birds with strings on their legs come back, oh, no, it's the same birds and they're migrating in a set pattern.

And this is what he does and it works out great. Like they come back the next year and he's like, oh, shit, these are the same birds. You know, I have done a science. And this is a huge step forward. He's the first person to ever do this, at least that we have any kind of documentation of. And this is a massive, like basically all modern like avian science is pretty much descended from this experiment.

Wow. It's a big deal, you know, like establishing just like how birds work kind of for the first time in a systemic way. Well, let me tell you, right now this guy, he seems to be fine. He's fine right now. Then this is bad so far. Yeah. He's learning about birds.

Yeah. Very curious to know how this goes horribly wrong. Well, it does because he's a terrible person, but not, he's also a terrible person that does a bunch of, broadly speaking, his impact is more positive than negative, although that's quite debatable. We'll see how we feel about it. You know what? We'll have that conversation at the end of this.

Depends on how much you give a shit about birds. But you know who's impact on the world is definitely more positive than negative, Dave? It's me. Oh, well, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. It won't so far. No one's... It's me.

Yeah. And you, Dave, are the primary sponsor of Behind the Bastards. It's true. Not a lot of people know that. Cut to these ads from companies you own, companies like HelloFresh and the Washington State Highway Patrol, all the personal property of David Bell. Exactly. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You don't have great goggles or glasses and it's not easy to get a good look at a bird to draw it while it's alive. So you shoot it and then what bird nerds are doing at this period of time is they shoot the birds and then they're preserving their corpses with arsenic and stuffing them with

frayed rope and then trying to sketch them. And they don't look great when you do that to them, Dave. I don't know if you've ever stuffed two corpse with ropes, but it doesn't quite look like it does when it's alive. No, probably not. You know what bird nerds are called, right? Birds. Man, okay, sorry, I'm waiting for you to get to the part where he's like, you know what

I could also shoot and stuff. Childish. That's not as far from what winds up happening, but he's not shooting them. So I don't know. But yeah, so he's like the dead birds here look like shit that I have to sketch from and that's why kind of all anatomical sketches of birds look like shit. They all look gross and like fucked up and not like actual birds. So he decides, well, the best thing, like what you got to do is you've got to sketch

them right away as soon as you shoot them. You can't like waste the time to preserve them, but if you do that, they're just kind of like limp and flopping around because they're dead. So he builds this. Oh, no. Yeah. He builds what he calls a wire armature in order to pose the corpses of birds so that he can draw them looking like they did before he shot them.

Amazing. And he does this at age 20, which again, very important for biology leads to the people who are like into birds will say to this day, he's still maybe the best at drawing avian wildlife there's ever been. And again, if you're into medical stuff, this isn't that unusual. It's not unusual. It is. I had a friend who was into survivalism and he would do stuff like tan hides and tanning

hides in my garage right now. I have a bunch of like pieces of animals that I've got in forex. Yeah. It's what you got to do. But the building and armature to pose their corpses to pay it is a little like, okay, so that's where your head goes, huh? And I guess good. In this case, it's good.

He draws some really pretty birds. He does this when he's 20, so again, you know, that's just where this guy's head is. So he falls in love around the same time with a woman named Lucy Bakewell, which is like the most fifties wife name you could possibly have. Yes. It's incredible. She's the daughter of an English dude who owned a nearby estate called Fatland Ford. Huh.

It's pretty funny. I mean, that sounds like a dealership. Yeah, it does sound like a dealership. Yeah. So before her family moved to North America, she'd spent some of her childhood in England cared for by a friend of the family who happened to be Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, which does not really have much impact on the story. It's just kind of weird that there's this connection between Autobahn and Darwin.

Right. It's like a cinematic universe now. Yeah. Yeah. It's the guys who figured out how to do science on animal cinematic universe. Exactly. And Darwin and Autobahn will have one very specific thing in common, but we're building to that. Um, so the Bakewells are a lot wealthier than the Autobahn's and their family farm featured

one of the first experiments and steam powered agricultural machines. So they're rich. They're into science. Uh, obviously she falls for Jean-Jacques Autobahn, uh, who is now going by John James Autobahn, because he, he Americanizes his name. Right. All right. Don't want to be too French in the United States.

Jean-Jacques, I think Autobahn is, if your last name is Autobahn, I don't think it matters what you do with the first part. Yeah. It's going to sound like, you know, foreign, you know, European. Yeah. Yeah. So both families seem to have been pretty happy when, when Lucy and, and John get hitched. Uh, her brother Will writes this about his future in law at the time.

So this is like one of the earliest writings we have about John James Autobahn. A bond entering his room, I was astonished and delighted to find that it was turned into a museum. The walls were festooned with all kinds of birds eggs carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The chimney piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons and opossums and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens among which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards and other reptiles.

Besides these stuffed varieties, many paintings were arrayed on the walls chiefly of birds. He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer, a clever writer, possessed of great activity and prodigious strength and was notable for the elegance of his figure and the beauty of his features. And he aided nature by a careful attendance to his dress behind. Besides other accomplishments, he was musical, a good fincer, danced well and had some acquaintance with ledger main tricks, worked in hair and could plate willow baskets. So he's doing fine.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so he's complimenting his like collection of stuffed animals. Yes. He's making baskets and stuffing corpses. I feel like these days that's the equivalent of like a DVD collection, right? Yeah. Like that's what these guys would be doing these days.

You go over to John James's house to like watch his dead animals. Yeah. And you're like, oh, look at all these dead animals. Which we put on tonight, just, you know, man, I've had a rough week. Just put on. I know we watched Fox last week, but just put Fox up again. Yeah. Why not?

I mean, I know, I know every part of Fox, but like, I still like it. Yeah. It's just nice to fall asleep too. Yeah. So after marrying in 1808, the couple decided to leave the family farm and strike out for a mysterious and untrodd land, Kentucky. Oh, no. Yeah.

It's good. Yeah. This is where the problems start, Dave. As they always do. In Kentucky. Sure. In Kentucky. So they set up a house together and for a time they get up every morning and they swim

together across the Ohio River. A write up by the Audubon Society notes, Lucy Bakewell was a tower of strength to her husband while he struggled to find his calling. Now this means that she stays home and raises the two sons that they have together while he tries to make money. Now, despite his clear skill with all things birds, John James first tries his hand as a businessman. He starts a general store in Louisville where they live and this does well enough that he

expands to a second location on the frontier, which is just a slightly further west part of Kentucky at this point, right? That's as far as where people have really gotten on the East Coast. So keeping this business stock keeps him heavily engaged and his agreement with his business partner necessitates that he keeps the cooking pot filled with wild game, a write up in Smithsonian magazine explains, quote, as he hunted and traveled, he had improved his art on American birds and kept careful field notes as well. His narrative of an encounter with a flood of passenger pigeons in Kentucky in autumn

1813 is legendary. He gave up trying to count the passing multitudes of the grayish blue pink breasted birds that numbered in the billions at the time of the European discovery of America and are now extinct. The air was literally filled with pigeons. He wrote of that encounter, the light of noon day was obscured as by an eclipse. The dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

My goodness. Yeah. There were so many of these birds. We killed all of them. Wow. Yeah. That description, it's like the classic film Birdemic. It is like the classic film Birdemic.

Yeah. The only film about bird attacks I can think of. And like with Birdemic, the only solution to passenger pigeons was genocide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So paperpins and like colors and stuff are not cheap at this time and this is his hobby. Like he doesn't, he's not making enough money to both take care of his family and take care

of his hobby. So in order to make extra cash, he gets involved in the kind of business that's going to make him his extra art money. Dave, you know, we've all been there, right? Like, you know, you want to make a small short films or something, but you need extra cash so you get a side gig. Yeah. Yeah.

You did that, right? What did you get into, Dave? Did you buy enslaved people and travel with them in order to sell them elsewhere in the state? Oh. Here it comes. Did you become a slave dealer to make your films? No.

I didn't do that. I did not. Really? Really? No. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, buddy. Oh, boy. You were just stuffing birds. You were just drawing and stuffing birds. Now he's selling human beings. You like surprisingly stayed out of history because it's like, you know, these aren't great times. No, he delves right into the not great part.

Oh. It's fun because like the early biographies of him by like the Ottoman society will just say that like he did not have a problem with slavery. It's a little bit more direct than that. He was neutral on slavery. And he's like, he's not just a slave dealer. He's specifically like an exploiter of trends in the slave market where he's like traveling to places where the slaves are dying because it's the frontier and is like, look, I brought

some fresh slaves, but because it's far away, you got to pay me more. You know, he's he's like, fuck, you know, that's not there's no, yeah, there's no situation where this is good. But the fact that it's to fund a bird watching, it's to help fund this bird watching. Oh. Yeah. Well, it's shit. Dude, nice pencils aren't cheap today.

Robert. No. That's true. They're not. Look, you got to. We've all done horrible things for good watercolor pencils. You know, I mean, I've at least shoplifted that. For sure.

I'll steal. Nice. They are expensive. Have I ever trafficked, you know, a shipping container filled with human beings from Canada in order to pay for, for, for nice pastel markers? No. But, you know, I'm glad you got that on record. Yeah, I'm glad you got that thorough no on record.

No. No, I have not. Right. So the Audubon's also kept slaves at home, which allowed Lucy to work part time as a teacher. So at least. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty bad.

Another write up by Audubon dot org notes, they took a stand for slavery by choosing to own slaves. And in the 18 teens, when the Audubons lived in Henderson, Kentucky, they had nine enslaved people working for them in their household. But by the end of the decade, when faced with financial difficulties, they had sold them. In early 1919, for instance, Audubon took two enslaved men with him down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a skiff. And when he got there, he put the boat and the men up for sale.

So this is like, you know, he's, he's, he's maximizing his profits. Uh, yeah, he's, they're just any other commodity to him, really. That's the way he treats this. Yeah. So it's so like, I mean, it's insidious about the entire time. It's the whole time. Right. It's just like this is a, this is a really good, like example, like, like this is something

I would want kids to learn about to show how mundane this horrifying thing was that this guy is like, I'm trying to just make a living, work my, do my bird watching hobby. And it's just like you said, like I'm going to sell the boat and the slaves. Like no difference there. And that is, yeah, that's all he thinks about. That's all he thinks about it, um, which again, I don't want to separate him from like the mainstream, but there's also like a lot of Americans who are saying this is horrible in the time, um, including like prominent dudes like Ben Franklin.

Uh, so it's, it's not like everyone is in agreement that this is fine either. Like he's picking a side, you know? Yeah. Um, so in 18, 19, the bottom falls out of the economy and James businesses, uh, business collapses. Uh, this is not really his fault. The panic of 18, 19, as it was called, was caused by the end of a century long period of warfare between France and Great Britain.

Like we don't talk about this that much, but they were at war for like a hundred years in this period. Like the US revolution is kind of a sideshow in this century long war between France and Great Britain and Great Britain kind of part of why they don't do more to stop the US revolution is like, they got a lot on their plate, you know, there's a bunch of shit going on. Um, so this series. Stories of wars had caused a huge demand for US agricultural products because like, uh, they, they're needed, right?

When you're fighting all these wars, you're getting all your men conscripted to go fight these wars. You don't have as many much, you can't spend as much time farming. So the fact that the US is producing a lot of food, they're able to sell a shitload of it in, in Europe. Um, and when these wars end, it's terrible for the US economy. A write up in Ohio history central explains during the various, various British French Catholics, United States goods, especially agricultural products were in high demand

in Europe. The US public had purchased Western land at an extravagant rate. In 1815, people in the US purchased roughly one million acres of land from the federal government. In 1819, the amount of land had skyrocketed to three and a half million acres. Many people in the United States could not afford to purchase the land outright. The federal government did allow buying land on credit. As the economy ground to a halt in 1819, many people in the US did not have the money to

pay off their loans. The bank of the United States as well as state and private banks began recalling loans demanding immediate payment. The bank's action actions resulted in the banking crisis of 1819 and helped lead to the panic. So, you know, it's like, it's, it's a mortgage crisis basically. Yeah. Yeah.

It's this thing that keeps happening. Um, the resulting cluster fuck is particularly devastating in Kentucky where the frontier is active and people have been buying a lot of land. Um, it was also like devastating in Ohio for the same reasons and it, it destroys basically anyone with a business, right? Like the, the, the bottom falls out of the currency and the Audubon's lose everything. James even goes to jail for his debts and is forced to declare bankruptcy in order to get out of being locked up.

Damn. Um, yeah, it's rough, rough times. The only meaningful possessions he has left at the end of this period are his art supplies and the portfolio of bird drawings he'd accumulated over the years. So the first stage of life, business doesn't work out, but thanks to all the slaves selling he has art supplies. Um, I don't feel bad for him, but like rock bottom does look a lot like walking around with a bunch of pictures of birds and nothing else.

That's rock bottom for this guy. Yeah. That makes sense. All he's got is his birds and his pencils. Um, so that's how he decides to get his family back on his feet. He starts by drawing portraits for five bucks ahead, um, of just like whoever's got $5. I'll draw your portraits and he's good enough that his friends help him find work painting museum exhibits and doing taxidermy for a museum in Cincinnati.

Um, he gets a gig at the Peel Museum in Philadelphia where he's hired to mount and stuff birds on natural backgrounds and he, he's better at this than anybody else alive is. So he gets connections very quickly to wealthy and influential naturalists. And notice is like, Oh wow, these are the only stuffed birds that don't look like shit. Right. Um, so a well off young artist related to the Philly Museum Keeper tells Audubon that there's a job opportunity exploring the uncharted by white people lands beyond the Mississippi. The Cincinnati Museum needed more birds, specimen samples of the new species that were

waiting out in the wild. People have been like, I documenting these animals, but like all you have is crude drawings really. Well, I want some shot and stuffed and, and documented and brought back to the museum. So James goes out into the frontier and he just starts shooting and documenting a fuckload of birds. He spent since so many specimens back to the museum that they owe him $1,200, which is like 30 grand in modern money, um, which would have been enough to get his family in good

financial health. But Cincinnati is a town full of liars and cheats and the museum, it refuses to pay him. Wow. Scumbag museum. Museums. That's why I don't go in them. Don't do it. This is why the motto of the show is burn every museum.

Yeah. Mm hmm. All of them. That's it's right. No. No. It's behind the bastards burn every museum. Every one of them.

No. Um, I mean, honestly, depending on the museum, it's like, I mean, it's just fill of stolen shit anyway. That's true. The last, the last museum I was in was, uh, in, in Brussels and they had an exhibit of those terracotta soldiers and I almost got into a fist fight with those terracotta soldiers. Oh, nice.

What do you fucking do in this museum? Fucking museum ass piece of shit. Yeah. What I said to the terracotta soldier. I got shit faced in the gutter outside the London museum and went in drunk and that was a blast. Oh. Yeah.

Cause there's no, like, there's no rule against being, you can be as drunk as you want. No. No. No. I, I, they'll serve you alcohol in the Lubra and well, at least I brought alcohol into the Lubra in any case, I was drunk in the, in the, um, it's liberating. So he gets fucked over by this shit museum and he has to send his family to live with

relatives while he sets off into the wild again to try and find, make even more money. And he takes an 18 year old boy with him. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Um, they gather a bunch of specimens. I didn't think it wasn't fine until you said it like that. I mean, it's one of those things I've never heard any allegations.

It wasn't. It's just, you know, when you say what's happening, yeah. These were the days where like, if we existed back in the day, we'd have like an 18 year old boy. Yeah. You have a boy. Who doesn't have a boy? We'd have a podcasting boy.

We do have a podcasting boy here at, so with an 18 year old, uh, he goes into the woods and things are fine. He gets a lot of specimens to see if he can sell them to a museum that's not run by Crooks and he, he shoots and he poses and he sketches just thousands of animals. Uh, Smithsonian magazine notes quote, after drawing, he often performed an anatomical dissection then because he usually worked deep in the wilderness far from home. He cooked and ate his specimens. Many of the descriptions in his ornithological biography mention how a species tastes testimony

to how quickly the largely self taught artist drew the flesh of this bird is tough and unfit for food. He writes of the Raven. The green winged teal on the other hand has delicious flesh. Probably the best of any of its tribe. And I would readily agree with any Epicurean saying that when it has fed on wild oats at Green Bay or on soaked rice in the fields of Georgia and the Carolinas for a few weeks after its arrival in those countries, it is much superior to the canvas back in tenderness,

juiciness and flavor. There's a lot of extinct birds that we know how they taste because he shot them and ate them. I love how this episode is behind the bastards for humans and for birds. Yeah. Like birds can listen to this episode if they want to. Yeah. Yeah.

This is all of my content is meant for human beings and for crows. Right. But I do get the use of also noting how tasty they are because that is a thing they're going. You should be eating them. People are going to want to know. Yeah. Yeah.

If you're going to shoot them, you should also eat their meat. Like he's not. For sure. It's just to get more. This guy is like a hare's breath away from going serial killer. Yeah. No. No.

Again, it feels like at any second, he'll be like next. This story could turn and it does turn, but in a, I mean, it does turn even more than it has. So the mid to late night, 1820s is a time in which natural sciences in America and Europe are undergoing a period of what's called institutionalization. Previously the work of documenting and studying animals had been done by volunteers who were like gentlemen scientists. Right.

They're rich dilettantes with hobbies. Right. And that's what Audubon is. He's a rich kid who because he doesn't have to like struggle as a child and a young man is able to just kind of like spend a lot of his time focusing on naturalism. Right. And it, and it feels like during this time it's less about like academic knowledge and more like, who will go out and stuff a bunch of birds?

Yeah. Like who will do like the work, you know? Who has the time and the relative freedom to be able to do that kind of stuff. Hey you rich guy. Yeah. Stick your head in all these holes. Yeah. And just see what's in there.

Well, yeah. And then like write it down in this notebook. Bring it back to us and we'll figure out what to do with that information. Yeah. So that's starting to change in the 1820s and there's kind of a solidifying body of scientific elites in this period that increasingly expresses contempt for what they call amateurs. Which is silly because also at this time none of the scientists are really that much better than the amateurs.

Right. But in 1824 Audubon has rejected for membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences because they're like, well, you're an amateur and we aren't because we've spent less time in the woods shooting birds. It doesn't make a lot of sense in this period. So no. And if only they knew that like birds feels like it's keeping them from, you know, worse things.

Yeah. Yeah. But you really want to encourage this guy to spend time with birds. Yeah. This is, this feels like his art school, you know? Yeah. It's just like, you know, keep them focused on the birds. If he's been stopped.

Yeah. But you know who won't be stopped? Me. That's right. That's right. Yeah. You never will be. Often though we try, nothing stops.

David Bell. I'm like a mist. I'm like a fine mist coming under your doors. That's right. Like a fog sweeping in through, yeah, your doors. The doors. Look, you've got it right. Mainly the doors.

So here's a pot episode ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. I'm the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're back and Sophie is complaining about things that I've done, which is fine. Which is fine. Just know that I'm 100% right, 100%.

You usually are, but does it matter, Sophie? No. It's like all those people who protested the invasion of Iraq, but it still happened. Just like this podcast. This is the Iraq of podcasts about the founder of ornithology. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is.

Throw a shoe at you at some point. Yep. That's right. That's right. Dave, you will form a terrorist group after I incarcerate you in a prison and take over large chunks of Syria and Iraq. Oh, wow. That's me.

You're going to be the ISIS of this story. I'm the ISIS? Yeah. This has gotten away from me. I'm going to be honest with you. That's fine. I mean, I was going to accept like Rumsfeld or something. I'm perfectly happy with ISIS over here.

That's fine. Better to be ISIS than Donald Rumsfeld. That is the general truth about history. All right. Write that down. So his drawings, he gets rejected kind of initially by the scientific community, but his drawings are just so good that he's able to build a solid career. Like they can't, like they don't like that he's this kind of dilettante scientist, but

nobody's better at drawing birds. So he continually builds a name for himself. And eventually he's able to. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. That's the thing I realized. My dad, who's an artist in like the seventies, he used to like draw schematics and stuff. And you realize during that time, it's like, yeah, I mean, how else are they going to

get them? Yeah. Like there's no computers. You just need to hire someone who can draw shit. And that was important. That was important. And he does well enough at this that finally, Dave, he's able to buy more human beings for his wife and children.

He's able to do it. He gets back. And finally, after, you know, it's like pawning, you know, your car or your TV, that's human beings for him. Right. Finally. We've made it again. It's Kevin Smith buying back his comic book collection.

Yeah. After making clerks. Yeah. Good. Not. Nope. Nope. Nope.

This is bad, bad. The fact that he has slaves again allows him to continue spending the vast majority of his time nowhere near his family, gunning down and drawing birds in the wilderness. In a writeup for Audubon.org, Gregory Nobles notes, quote, although never fully acknowledged, people of color, African Americans and Native Americans had a part in making that massive project possible. Audubon occasionally relied on these local observers for assistance in collecting specimens and he sometimes accepted their information about birds and incorporated it into his writings.

But even though Audubon found black and indigenous people scientifically useful, he never accepted them as socially or racially equal. He took pains to distinguish himself from them and writing about an expedition in Florida in December 1831, Audubon noted that he set out in a boat with six enslaved black men, hands as he called them, and three white men. His emphasis clearly underscoring the racial divide in the boat and his place on the white side of it. So he writes in this that we set out with six hands and three white men.

He's very consciously not referring to the black people as humans. Right. He's a racist. Yeah. He sucks. Yeah. So by 1826, John James had realized that he had a purpose on this earth. His great work, which is what he calls it, would be to decisively identify name and sketch

every single bird species in the parts of North America controlled by the U.S. government. He called this book, The Birds of America, and it was to be a four-volume, massive work of art and science. There would be engraved images of 490 species, each drawing the actual size of life of the bird itself. This is like a massive, massive. You can see some of them in museums. It's like a person-sized book.

Most experts agree that even today he has not been surpassed in depicting birds in this manner. He's the best there's ever been at drawing birds. So no one in the U.S. cares to fund his ridiculous giant bird book. So he leaves his family behind and he sails to Europe for several years, and he brings with him a plan. He knew Europeans were obsessed with big new animals no one had seen before. So Audubon brought with him a drawing of a brand new species of North American eagle

he called the bird of Washington, which he claimed to have sketched in the Pacific Northwest. Now this bird didn't exist. It never has. He made it up. Okay. So this I can get behind. I can 100% get behind. He should have been doing this from day one.

He should have been lying way more about birds. He didn't even need to go shoot anything. Just draw some fake birds, man. Yeah. Fake. No human suffering. Just draw fake birds, claim you saw them. We would have believed, we would be believing him now.

Oh, there would be people if he had just like been like, oh yeah, there's like a four-winged bird in Michigan. Yeah. A ton of them. Yeah. There would be people whose whole life would revolve around hiding in the, like waiting in the woods for that bird. Right.

And be carved stone statues of them out in front of like rest stops in the middle of nowhere. We just assume that we like killed them all. You know? Yeah. We could have killed our pollution or whatever. Yeah. Like you could have, this is the time.

He doesn't, maybe he doesn't know it, but this is the time to invent birds. It's a shame. This is prime bird inventing. We could have so many more cryptids if he had really, if he'd gone really gone for it. Yeah. So, you know, there is some debate over whether or not he made a mistake or lied, but most experts seem to agree that he was just kind of forging a bird in order to drum up more

excitement about his book. For one thing, by this point, it was the standard scientifically that when you proposed the existence of a new species, you provided physical evidence, you would like shoot it and preserve it. Right. And be like, look, here's this, like there's a new bird and here's the pieces of it. And he did this for a lot of other birds, like he was doing this for hundreds of animals. He doesn't do this for the bird of Washington. And so a lot of people will note that like, well, maybe that's evidence that he was just,

this was just a con from the beginning. Right. So, yeah, and this, the bird of Washington is the first bird that Audubon would display when he would like sit in front of gatherings of wealthy people to try to get him to pay money. And he succeeds. He drums up a lot of huge amounts of money enough to fund the birds of America. So that's good.

Oh my fucking God. Yeah. It's just this, everything, everything sucks about this time. Yeah. Like mostly the slavery. Mostly the slavery. But also the fact that like you could commit bird forgery to get funding from wealthy people who are like, yes, I will fund your bird exposition to like, like, we're still at that point

in the world where it's just like, I would like to know about all the birds that's around. Like, God damn. Motherfucker, again, to your point earlier, if it's that easy to con rich people out of money by making up birds, why didn't you make up more birds? Right. Come on. Come on, man. Come on.

As a lover of, think of the X-Files episodes we could have gotten if he'd made up like a bird with claws. Oh, all the birds that Mulder would have went after. The Jersey Devil episode was pretty damn good. We could have had like two or three more. It would have been amazing. We could have gotten a whole more other season at Adjust Birds. Yeah.

There could have been a spin-off called Agent Mulder Bird Hunter. Yeah. And he just, he just fights man-sized birds all the time. What a tragedy. Yeah. That would be incredible. He makes, he gets, people give him a bunch of money and he returns to North America and he finishes his great work.

And while he's doing this, he's able to mix his two passions at this point, which you should know are lying and racism. Right. And I'm going to quote from Gregory Nobles again. Audubon also, through his writing, manipulated racial tensions to enhance his notoriety, the tale of the runaway, one of the episodes about American life he inserted into his 3,000-page, five-volume ornithological biography, a companion to Birds of America, spins the tale of an encounter with a black man in a Louisiana swamp.

Audubon, who had been hunting woodstorks with his dog, Plato, had a gun. But so did the black man. After a brief face-off, both men put down their weapons. Even as he described the tension easing, Audubon had already hooked into the fears of his readers. Published three years after Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, the runaway presented the most menacing image imaginable for many white people. The sudden specter of an armed black man, Audubon knew how to get people's attention.

He also knew how to put himself in the most favorable light. The man and his family had escaped slavery and were living in the swamp, and as the tale unfolds, Audubon spent the night at the family's encampment, companionably but also quite at their mercy. It was the fugitives, however, who were really the most vulnerable. The next morning, Audubon took them back to the plantation of their first master and convinced the planter to buy the enslaved people back from the masters to which the family had been divided and sold.

And that was that, reunited but still enslaved. The black family was rendered as happy as slaves generally are in that country. That's Audubon's words. Exactly what happy men Audubon did not say. In the span of a single story, true or not, in many of Audubon's episodes were not, Audubon portrayed himself as both a savior of a fugitive family and a defender of slaveholders' claims to human property rights. Bleak, it's a really bleak story.

It's bleak if he made it all up, it's also bleak if he took this family who had freed themselves after getting split up back to a slave owner where they were surely split up again. Right. To quote unquote, like save them. Yeah, it's pretty bad, that's a bleak story. The Birds of America and the works that followed made Audubon a household name among people who liked birds.

He traveled back and forth to Europe where he was a celebrity and he doubled and trebled down on his racism. In 1834 he wrote his wife to complain when the British government made slavery illegal, arguing they had quote, acted imprudently and too precipitously. Now in his later life Audubon seems to have taken personal umbrage at the idea of enslaved people, some of whom may well have been his ancestors, freeing themselves. In a letter written for his sons he described his birth mother, who he had never known as a lady of Spanish extraction from Louisiana, which is not true.

He claimed she had gone back to San Domain with his father and become quote, one of the victims during the ever to be lamented period of Negro insurrection on that island. So he lies and claims that his mom had been murdered during a slave uprising. When the reality is that his mom may have been uh, if not just mixed race, possibly even an enslaved person. Right. Yeah. Involved in something.

Yeah. Possibly. He doesn't love his parentage, but we know that he is lying about this. And Gregory Nobles, who is, he's writing for the Audubon Society, Nobles is a black member of the Audubon Society and suspects that Audubon may have made this claim because quote, having a European mother killed by black rebels reinforced a white identity. And in an American society where whiteness proved and still proves the safest form of social identity, which you know, makes sense.

Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. Yeah. And in the story, it just shows like, yeah, I just think it's, it's an amazing example of how slavery and racism is just was fucking like you can put an asterisk like under basically any invention that started during this time and saying like, yeah, and it was built upon the suffering of a bunch of people like fucking bird watching. Yeah.

Gotta pay for those pencils somehow, Dave. Right. It's ridiculous. Like, it seems like you could have avoided this. A person could have avoided inventing bird watching without brutalizing a bunch of people. People would have figured out how to draw birds, right? Yeah. Like we would have gotten that down without the slavery.

Yeah. In 1843, John James set out on what was to be his last adventure into the wilds. He went up the Missouri River and out the Yellowstone. At 58 years old, he was just on the verge of being too old to handle the rigors of the journey. His project this trip was a catalog of specimens and engravings to be called Quadrupeds of North America. This was a worthy scientific undertaking.

Yet John James embarked on another much less worthy endeavor. The 1840s was a period in which Dr. Samuel George Morton was beginning to lay out the underpinnings of what would become scientific racism. He believed that cranial capacity and thus in his belief intelligence must mirror his preconceptions about the intelligence of races. Thus black, indigenous, Hispanic people, et cetera, must have less cranial capacity than white people. Now this is the branch of science that becomes phrenology and eventually a bunch of even

worse shit besides. John James Audubon was super into it and he was also way into Morton who had become his patron. A write up in commonplace online notes. Morton was a generation younger than Audubon, but the friendship between the two men ran back through the 1830s. Morton, with his institutional connections, helped to share Audubon a place in the country's scientific establishment.

He settled some of Audubon's debts when the artist was in England and soothed his worries about upstart rivals. In return Audubon looked for skulls for Morton. European craniologists weren't ready to share their skulls with the Americans, although Audubon did find Morton a portfolio of sketches. So while he's shooting and drawing squirrels, he visits indigenous villages, villages of the Mandan and Essiniboyn indigenous peoples and these villages have been like smallpox is like killed most of the people there, right?

So he's stumbling into these villages after watching them get wiped out. And I'm going to quote from commonplace online again about what he does next. The epidemic had been devastating Audubon knew during the week spent at Fort Union. He penned an account of the fearful ravages of smallpox. He must have known that a people nearly exterminated left few to help bury the dead. The skulls Audubon collected for Morton that summer earned casual mentions in his journal. On June 18th, he and his companions puzzled over when it might be best to take away the skulls, some six or seven in number, all Essiniboyn Indians.

On June 22, walking over the prairie, I found an Indian skull and put it in my game pouch. And on July 2nd, he and a companion walked off with a bag of instruments to take off the head of a three-year-old dead Indian chief called the White Cow. They tumbled the coffin out of a tree burial and found a body wrapped in two buffalo ropes and enveloped in an American flag. They took the head Audubon wrote and left the rest on the ground. Morton's catalog also credited Audubon with contributing the skull of a 50-year-old Blackfoot man named Bloody Hand, along with the heads of two Upsaruka men, both about 40 years old,

and two skulls, 1230, Essiniboyn Indian of Missouri, woman, estimated 20 years old, Essiniboyn woman, estimated, like, yeah, they're 85 years old. He gives all these, like, different, that's all they become, like, numbers 1230 and 1231 from JJ Audubon Esquire, you know, like, AD 1845, like, the year it's found the number of the skull and the guy who found it, no attempts to find the numbers of the human beings these belong to. Yeah, and it's one of those things, it's also just, like, bad anthropology, because it's not about anthropology, it's about proving racism, because they're-

Right, it's for shitty science. It's all, it's grave robbing for bad science. Yeah, because they, like, find this, not that it would have been good if they had, like, done what, you know, Egyptologists do, and, like, you find this chief who's been buried in the specific way with artifacts, and you, like, take the whole thing to a museum, like, that would have been bad, too. But they're not even doing that, they're just, like, ripping the skull out and leaving the rest on the ground.

Right, they just need skulls. Yeah, it's, like, even worse than normal grave robbing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, none of it's great, like, like you said, even if it was for a science that, like, made sense. Yeah. Even if it was getting useful scientific data, it would be bad, and it's absolutely not. Yeah.

So Audubon was not quite as prolific at skull stealing as he was at shooting random animals and sketching them, but he was still pretty prolific. Right. Morton's skull collection is listed in one of his books, and in 1840, it contained a lot of Audubon's stolen skulls. And not all of them belonged to indigenous people. I'm going to quote now from Morton's, like, skull diary, number 555, Mexican soldier with three cicatrix gunshot wounds in the right parietal bone, slain at San Jacinto, 80,

1836, J.J. Audubon Esquire, 556, Mexican soldier with cicatrix depression of frontal and nasal bone, slain at San Jacinto, 1836, J.J. Audubon Esquire, like, he goes to battlefields and he just digs up corpses of Mexican soldiers and takes their skulls. But there are worse ways to get skulls. But not many. But not many. Like, not a lot. I'm mostly thinking of the one other way.

But like, yeah, this is pretty scummy. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad, like, just going to a battlefield and digging up dead men and taking their fucking bones to give to your friend in New York or where I feel you, I think. So obviously, John Audubon is not the only racist naturalist who would play a foundational role in white America's concept of the great outdoors. We will one day talk about John Muir, who plays a huge positive role in a lot of aspects of the national park system and stuff.

He's got a great park near San Francisco named after him. Also, just the most racist dude you can show. And there's a huge... Yeah, it'd be hard to think that the person who established parks wasn't a massive racist. Right. There's a lot of that in the idea of the idea that develops of the great outdoors, which is nearly always a place in which, well, it's just white people who are supposed to be partaking in that.

Yeah. And obviously, it's also worth noting, John James Audubon is not even the only famous birdwatcher in this period to steal indigenous people's skulls. It's a way to make extra money if you're a naturalist is like, well, you can also steal some skulls, you know? Yeah. It's just a sense of the sense of like, so when you're playing a video game, they often have the like, go collect these items and this items, and you can do both at once.

So it's like, yeah, I'm out in the woods collecting bird stuff. Yeah. I'll get some extra XP, you know? I can grab some skulls while I'm at it, because skulls are a review too. Yeah. Right. If they were saying like, pick some berries, they would do that. Yeah.

But no, they want skulls. So they're picking skulls. John Kirk Townsend was a pioneering ornithologist in 1834, he won a grant from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and he crossed over the Pacific Coast to gather specimens, many of which were then sketched by Audubon, so he and Audubon would work together. Researcher Matthew Holly recently discovered a letter from Townsend to Morton, which gives good insight in how he and Audubon went about their grim work. Quote, I was enjoying the society of civilized beings again, and believe me, my dear doctor,

said this was no small treat to me after having been compelled to sojourn for such a length of time among savages little better than brutal beasts. I send you a few skulls. One of a cliquitat Indian, you will observe the characteristic flat osseput, and some quadrupeds and birds. It is rather a perilous business to procure Indian skulls in this country. The natives are so jealous of you that they watch you very closely while you are wandering near their mausoleums, and instant and sanguineous vengeance would fall upon the luckless white

who should presume to interfere with the sacred relics. I have succeeded in hooking one, however, such as it is, and no doubt in the course of the winter I shall get more. There is an epidemic raging among them, which carries them off so fast that the cemeteries will soon lack watchers. I don't rejoice in the prospect of the death of the poor creatures, certainly. But then you know it will be very convenient for my purposes. Oof.

Yeah, that's pretty bad. Oof. Poor creatures. Yeah. Yeah, he's treating them just like animals. He's like, oh, well, they're all dying, but that's going to be good for me. He's treating them like birds. But he also, he calls himself a white, which is like a ghoul, like stealing from a graveyard.

So he knows kind of what he's doing. Right. Yeah. But it makes sense because he doesn't think of them as people. So it's kind of like, we talk about animals where we're like, yeah, we're kind of like they're boogeymen, you know? And so he's, because he's dehumanized them, he could kind of be like, yeah, I'm kind of an asshole.

I'm kind of a little bit of a boogeyman to these people, but fuck it. Yeah. But they're not people, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's exactly his attitude. Yeah. Now, obviously, Dave, it was not terribly long before large numbers of people began to consider the mass theft of indigenous human beings remains to be evil. And in the article he writes on this process, Halley does a good job of summarizing how

modern institutions have protected the collection of these stolen skulls, which both Audubon and Townsend contributed towards. The skulls mentioned in this letter and others stolen by Townsend and Audubon were in the collection of the A&SP until the mid-20th century when they were transferred to the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Museum. The institutions that were culpable in the assembly of the Morton Collection have not publicly apologized, to my knowledge, to the tribes that the materials were stolen from. Rather, they have passed the buck of responsibility.

Penn, unsurprisingly, considers the collection an exceptional historic resource and has delayed the repatriation of the materials. According to the Native American Graves Project and Repatriation Act, institutions that take federal funding, as Penn did in 2005, for the expansion and improvement of the Penn-Cranial database, must repatriate materials with provenance at the tribe's request. It is true that some remains from the Morton Collection have been repatriated, but nearly 30 years have passed since Nagbro was signed into law. Penn is moving at a glacial pace considering the magnitude of the infraction, and the institutions

that helped to assemble the racist skull collection are tight-lipped. And I have read, there's a book I found about the bone trade in stolen bones called Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip Colwell, who's like, doing part of his job is to like sit in a museum and put together groups of bones to send back to the tribes they were stolen from. And he describes in very stirring detail what this process is like, because there's kind of a ritual element to it, because it's essentially kind of a funerial right. It's this whole thing, it is proceeding slowly now.

But it's kind of worth noting how much work different colleges put into not doing this. Yeah, they're really dragging ass on returning the bones. Why do they need the goddamn bones? How what use could they possibly have now, if not just shame, where they're like, we don't want to admit that we have all these bones. I don't want to give them up, you know. Just give back the bones. Give back the bones.

There's only one acceptable way to get a skull. And is to ask the person, can I have your skull if you die before me? And then you write it down, you have it written down, and then you get a skull. And I'm sorry that if that sounds inconvenient to all you skull collectors, I don't know what to tell you. That's how that's the only way to get a skull. I don't know. I feel like winning them in battle is okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Winning them in battle. If you take a skull in battle, you get to keep it. Those are the two ways, but it's got to be like hand to hand, you know. You can't be like shooting people for the skulls. You got to be like fist fighting. If you fist fight a dude and take a skull, you get to keep it.

Yeah, and you better, you got to take the skull yourself. You got to take that skull yourself. Yeah. That's on you. That's on you. Yeah, that is a way to earn a skull. But pretty much... Two ways.

Two ways. Yeah. Although I do feel like you'd want to, because it's two, it's two very different skulls, right? Right. Like, if I have a skull that I just politely asked for, I don't want to like misrepresent how I got that skull. No.

Yeah. Because then I feel like a fraud. But yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So, give the bone back. Give the bones back.

That's it. Give them back. Give them back. Yeah, it's not hard. Yeah. So, the Audubon Society gets formed in 1851, or sorry, the Audubon Society gets formed years after John James Audubon dies in 1851. Right.

So, from a purely scientific standpoint, like, obviously, he did a lot for birdwatching. And you know, for a while they tried to ignore this. There's biographies published that really whitewash all the racism in skull stealing. Right. The Audubon Society really didn't start to grapple with it in a major open way until May of 2020. Man, I... Of course.

Can you guys why? Yeah. And actually, a big part is, you remember when that black birdwatcher in New York got like accosted by a white woman who like called the police on him after, that was like a big inciting incident in the Audubon Society being like, we should probably deal with... We should probably acknowledge some of this. Right. I don't know.

Man, just to... I don't... It's another thing. It's like returning the bones. It's like, just acknowledge it. Yeah. That's what we're asking. It's...

Yeah. If you're ancestors or you're... Like, everything was built upon fucking slavery and racism in this country. It's not gonna shock anybody. It's like when Ben Affleck paid to have that PBS show ignore that he was the descendant of slave owners and it's like, did you think you're the only one? It's... We're built upon shame.

We have to own it because that's the only thing you can do, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's ridiculous. It would have been... And it's one of the... Especially with the Audubon Society, it's a good comparison because they were founded after his death.

It's not like the Audubon Society is personally responsible for John James Audubon's sins. They just thought he was a good dude to name themselves after. You could change the name and we'd be like, okay, well, I guess bird watching probably isn't complicit in racism much beyond that. Right. It'd be wild if you looked into it and you're like, oh, I guess they're also all racist? Like the Audubon Society is also like a white supremacy society. That would be one thing.

They're just fucking bird watchers who named their thing after some racist guy. And it's... I recommend the article on Audubon.org that I've quoted from by Gregory Noble, which is like he writes this right after that altercation where the woman tries to have cops kill a black bird watcher. It's probably the best thing they've done in terms of like pivoting to acknowledging the problematic past. I assume there's a lot more that could be done again.

If you want to read the articles, we'll list the sources. You can get a better idea of like some of the things that people are asking and pushing. Right. But yeah, that's the story. That's a hell of a story. Yep. Thanks for telling me about it. I'm glad I heard about it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's... Yeah. Again, what I said is it's shocking but not because it's like, of course, everything is fucking built up on this shit. It's more... It's like almost more surprising when it's not.

Yeah. It's fucked up. This guy sucks. Yeah. I will... I'm gonna go steal his skull. Yeah. I do feel...

That's something we can do, Dave. Find where he's buried and take his bones. Yeah. I think there's no shame in that, right? And stealing this guy's bones and then like putting it in contraption and drawing pictures of it. Yeah. Put it in a contraption, but also like make it like a flat Stanley where we just like

mail it around. Ooh, yeah. Like you never know when you're gonna get this guy's fucking bones, but when you get him, you can do whatever with him, you know? Right. It's like everybody in America has a chance of getting this guy's bones. Yeah. Getting this dude's bones.

It's like cherry duty or something where you get him. Yeah, you got the bones. Can you go... You wanna go out this weekend? No, I got the bones this week. Right. I gotta take pictures of it and figure out who to send it to. Yeah.

Oh, God. That's... Man. We should do that with all the problematic people. Yes. Just pass their bones around for whatever. For whatever. Yeah.

For whatever you feel like doing with those bones. Hey, man. They're your bones for a day. My friend got George Washington's bones. We're gonna do blow off his skull. You wanna come over for a party? Like absolutely. Yeah, that sounds dope.

I would do so much. I would die doing cocaine off of George Washington. Absolutely. Those bones. You've never done coke if you haven't done coke off of the stolen skull of George Washington. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's do that right now.

You're right, Dave. Let's go grave robin. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or don't. Yeah, any bones. Fuck it. Yeah, any bones.

Fuck it. Wait, no, no, no, no. Dave, that's what got everyone into this. Damn it. All right. Bones. You gotta plug anything. I don't know, man.

I never plugged my Twitter at MovieHooligan. As mentioned, I have with Tom Raimann a podcast network and I'm the head writer over at what's it called? Some more news. So check all those things out. Check them out. Which I feel like most people know about most of that stuff. Yeah.

What do they do? Check them out. Yeah. And grave rob. But only bad people. Only bad people. Yeah. And steal the corpses of racists.

All right. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

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