John James Audubon's reputation rests almost exclusively on his achievement as the artist of the monumental The Birds of America, from Original Drawings (1827-1838); his sharply detailed, anatomically accurate, and dramatically conceived representations of North American birds won him unqualified admiration and revolutionized all subsequent ornithological art. More recently, however, students of American life and letters are discovering the journals Audubon kept during trips on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and, more notably, the "Episodes" or "Delineations." Interspersed with the "bird biographies" in his Ornithological Biography, or, An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America (1831-1839), the "Episodes" offer a firsthand, sometimes fanciful, account of the cultural life and times of the American borderland in the early nineteenth century. A mix of scientific information and personal anecdotes, they include data about the climate, flora, and fauna of different locales as well as...