The drawings that Audubon created resulted from a lifelong collaboration with his wife, two sons, and long-time friend, John Bachman.  His youngest son, John Woodhouse Audubon, was also an artist and assisted his father in collecting specimens, researching them and painting.  Audubon’s eldest son, Victor Gifford Audubon, mainly managed business matters and oversaw the production of the lithographs, but he also painted backgrounds for the mammal series.

Red Texan Wolf
John James Audubon, Artist
John T. Bowen, Lithographer
Philadelphia, 1845

…the fact is well known that these animals follow the movements of armies, or at least are always at hand to prey upon the slain before their comrades can give them a soldier's burial, or even after that mournful rite; and if anything could increase the horrors displayed by the gory
ensanguined field, where man has slain his fellows by thousands, it would be the presence of packs of these ravenous beasts disputing for the carcasses of the brave, the young, and the patriotic, who have fallen for their country's honour!

Prairie Wolf
John James Audubon, Artist
John T. Bowen, Lithographer
Philadelphia, 1845

By its predatory and destructive habits, this Wolf is a great annoyance to the settlers in the new territories of the west.  Travellers and hunters on the prairies, dislike it for killing the deer, which supply these wanderers with their best meals, and furnish them with part of their clothing, the buck-skin breeches, the most durable garment, for the woods or plains.

Audubon was described by a reporter for the Buffalo Courier in 1843 as follows:

He can walk thirty-five miles a day with ease, for months; can sleep anywhere in the open air; endure all climates; his principal food being soaked sea biscuits and molasses on account of having lost all his teeth, from which he suffers and is obliged to boil his meat to rags.  He says he can live a hundred years with temperate habits, regularity, and attention to diet.

Audubon did not live to see The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America completed, dying at age 66 in 1851.