Audubon's unfortunate business relations with his brother-in-law, Thomas W. Bakewell, began in the autumn or winter of 1811, when the naturalist was in the East and Bakewell was about to return to New Orleans in the employ of a firm of Liverpool merchants who dealt in cotton. Bakewell, who had seen much of the South since the failure of his uncle in New York, induced Audubon to join him in an independent commission business, with the assurance that his French nationality would help their undertakings. According to Vincent Nolte, when they were descending the Ohio in December, 1811, Audubon displayed a business card, showing the firm name of "Audubon and Bakewell," and indicating that they were to deal in such homely products as pork, lard and flour. Thomas Bakewell, we are told, taking with him all the disposable funds of Audubon, who continued to send him "almost all the money" that he could raise, opened their business at New Orleans in the winter or spring of 1812, just in time for the war, which broke out in June, to destroy it. When he returned north, in August of that year, Thomas Bakewell, said the naturalist, suddenly appeared one day at "Meadow Brook Farm," while he was making a drawing of an otter, and after bewailing their misfortune in trade, departed.
At the approach of spring in 1812 Audubon was hard pressed for funds, and Rozier's notes to him being then overdue he set out on foot for Ste. Geneviève to collect his money in person. He went out with a party of friendly Osage Indians, but returned, still afoot and unpaid, with his faithful dog as his only companion.[216] The prairies were then flooded and converted into vast lakes, but Audubon, anxious to reach his home, pressed on, walking, as he said, "one hundred and sixty-five miles in a little over three days, much of the time nearly ankle-deep in mud and water." It was probably on this journey, though it may have been in the previous year, that an incident occurred which he has related in "The Prairie,"[217] when, as he declared, for the first time in the course of his wanderings for upwards of a quarter of a century, his life was in actual danger from his fellow man.
When at last he had obtained some ready money, Audubon rode to Louisville, where he purchased on the half-cash, half-credit basis a small stock of goods, and again set up a retail shop at Henderson. This modest venture promised so well that he bought land with the intention of making that town his permanent home. "I purchased," said he, "a ground-lot of four acres, and a meadow of four more at the back of the first." On the latter, to follow this account, were several buildings and an excellent orchard, "lately the property of an English doctor, who had died on the premises and left the whole to a servant woman as a gift, from whom it came to me as a freehold": other land, he added, adjacent to the first, was later secured.
LETTER OF AUDUBON TO FERDINAND ROZIER, SIGNED "AUDUBON & BAKEWELL," AND DATED OCTOBER 19, 1813, DURING THE FIRST PARTNERSHIP UNDER THIS STYLE.
From the Tom J. Rozier MSS.
These curiously embroidered statements regarding land transactions at Henderson in 1813 are not in harmony with the existing records of that frontier town. Henderson, as its historian[218] tells us, was laid out originally in 1797 into 264 one-acre lots, of which comparatively few had been sold at the time of which we speak, though nominal prices were asked and a few had been given away to encourage settlement.[219] Audubon is recorded as having purchased four one-acre lots from the town, two in 1813 and two in the following year, while a long lease was taken upon land adjacent to the river where later rose his famous mill.[220]
The old Audubon store for general merchandise, built of hewn logs, in a single story, stood at the corner of Main and Mill Streets (now Second Street), fronting the latter, at a point where a modern departmental establishment has since risen. Adjoining this primitive store, on the main street, was his log dwelling,[221] of one and a half stories, with a square porch at the entrance. Immediately opposite, on the two-acre strip of land purchased in 1814, lay a small pond which Audubon is said to have stocked with turtles in order to gratify his special fondness for this delicacy.
Audubon's winning manners made him a popular figure among the early settlers of this region, and for the space of three years he enjoyed life as never before; "the pleasures," he said, "which I have felt at Henderson, and under the roof of that log-cabin, can never be effaced from my heart until after death." But in a community of exacting business men he could never have made a permanent success; he was too good a target not to be riddled by many who were ready to take advantage of his liberality and easygoing ways. Traveling from Frankfort to Lexington in 1810, Wilson complained that the people were all traders but no readers, even of the newspaper; every man, he said, had "either some land to buy or sell, some law-suit, some coarse hemp or corn to dispose of; and if the conversation does not to lead to any of these, he will force it."