petulance are his only faults, and if you have the goodness to give him the indispensable, he will soon feel the necessity of making friends with you, and he can be of great service if you use him for your own benefit.
If Dacosta followed this advice, Audubon said, his son could be “reclaimed” and would be fit to assume the duties at Mill Grove that he had thus far ignored. If this could be accomplished, the elder Audubon said, he would be “under every obligation” to Dacosta, adding, “This is my only son, my heir, and I am old.”
Unfortunately, both Dacosta and young Audubon ignored all this advice. In late February, Audubon announced he was going to visit his father to set things straight. He demanded funds for the trip, and Dacosta complied with a “letter of credit” Audubon was to use to book his passage in New York. The letter was bogus—Audubon was laughed out of the bank to which Dacosta had sent him—but he successfully prevailed on Lucy’s father to arrange a loan of $150. On March 12, he boarded the Hope, bound for France.
Audubon stayed with his family at their big house near Nantes for just over a year. After recovering from the surprise of his son’s unexpected return, the elder Audubon soon perceived that Dacosta thought he was in some way being swindled. He undertook to settle matters at Mill Grove once and for all. While his son hunted and explored the countryside—taking care not to be recognized by anyone who might report him for conscription—the elder Audubon replaced certain papers of agreement that had apparently miscarried en route to Dacosta, and agreed to some much-needed repairs at Mill Grove. Short of funds, he also sold a portion of his share in Mill Grove to his neighbors in France, a family named Rozier.
The Roziers had a son, Ferdinand, who had once visited young Audubon at Mill Grove and wanted to go back to America. The elder Audubon, sensing the advantage to his son of being associated with Ferdinand—who was hardworking, serious, and eight years older than John James—encouraged a joint venture. In March 1806, John James Audubon and Ferdinand Rozier formed a legal partnership. In ten written “articles of association,” they agreed to proceed to the New World and to enter into commercial ventures as equal proprietors. Much of the agreement centered on Mill Grove, where they would now jointly control half of the plantation. But it also stipulated that they would work together in whatever business seemed suitable and at whatever place they chose, “whether inland or maritime.”
On April 12, 1806, Audubon and Rozier sailed aboard the Polly, an American ship bound for New York. Audubon’s papers gave his home as Louisiana. Rozier’s said he was from Holland. The crossing was eventful. A man was killed in a duel over a lady’s bonnet, the ship was looted by a British privateer, and a storm drove them temporarily aground in Long Island Sound.
Audubon and Rozier spent most of the next year haggling with Dacosta while they tried their hands at business. Rozier found work with an importer in Philadelphia. Audubon, in a monumental mismatch of vocation and personality, took a job as an apprentice clerk in a countinghouse in New York. The business was owned by Lucy’s uncle, Benjamin Bakewell. This friendly arrangement probably prolonged Audubon’s employment in a position for which he was clearly unsuited. He visited Mill Grove and Lucy when he could, and continued to seek his father’s approval for their marriage. Audubon corresponded now in his own peculiar English, blending odd formalisms with imaginative spellings, as in this letter to his father in the spring of 1807:
I am allways in Mr. Benjamin Bakewell’s store where I work as much as I can and passes my days happy; about three weeks ago I went to Mill Grove . . . and had the pleasure of seeing there my Biloved Lucy who constantly loves me and makes me perfectly happy. I shall wait for thy Consent and the one of my good Mamma to Marry her. Could thou but see her and thou wouldst I am sure be pleased of the prudency of my choice . . . I wish thou would wrights to me ofnor and longuely. Think by thyself how pleasing it is to read a friend’s letter.
Audubon and Rozier grew restless. Convinced they would never devise a workable partnership with Dacosta, they decided instead to sell him most of their share in Mill Grove for just under $4,000 and a promise of future payments when the mine came in. They mortgaged what was left for $10,000. Rozier, meanwhile, considered returning to France. Then they started to discuss something entirely different. Why not go west? Settlers were making their way into new territories west of the Alleghenies. Some took a southern route by way of the Wilderness Road. The road followed the old trace blazed by Daniel Boone in the 1770s along Indian trails and bison tracks from the Cumberland Gap in Virginia, across southeastern Kentucky, angling north all the way to the Ohio River. The trace was now becoming a busy turnpike. The other way west was to travel overland to Pittsburgh and then float down the Ohio and into whatever future was out there. The fast-growing town of Louisville sounded promising.
Rozier and Audubon agreed that there were likely to be commercial opportunities in Kentucky. Audubon encouraged this view, while thinking to himself how fine the hunting would be and how many birds must live in the wilds of America. He said goodbye to Lucy—who said she’d be waiting for him to return once he found them a home in the West. There are discrepancies in the record as to when they actually left Philadelphia, and whether they were much delayed on the way to Pittsburgh, but sometime between the end of August and the start of October 1807, Audubon and Rozier headed off. At first they made splendid time, reaching Lancaster, a distance of more than sixty miles from Philadelphia, in one day. The roads were good and lined with pleasant taverns. Crops of hemp grew in the fields. But the roads worsened. A team of six horses was needed to keep their coach moving over increasingly rough terrain. The jostling ride was exhausting. Sometimes, they got out and walked, finding a faster pace that was also easier on their aching backsides. In a place called Walnut Bottom, beyond Harrisburg, they had a wonderful meal in a clean tavern where they were served, Rozier happily noted, by “pretty girls.” Rozier was likewise impressed by a species of tree he’d never seen before, called a hackberry. On the third day of November, bone-chilling rains commenced just as the stage entered the steepest section of mountains. The passengers all commented on the treacherousness of this stretch. Four days later, as the rain abated and the afternoon turned unusually hot for that time of year, they descended a final time—cautiously on foot now—and arrived in Pittsburgh.
Audubon and Rozier spent twelve days in Pittsburgh, staying at the Jefferson Hotel. Despite its captivating location, the town was a dismal place. It had been built in the shadow of British Fort Pitt in the 1760s, and was situated in a lovely valley where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers met and the surrounding hills formed a kind of natural amphitheater. The two rivers merged there to form the mighty Ohio, whose broad beginnings wandered north from the city before turning south and west and heading into the forever and ever of the frontier. But the town itself was a grimy black scar. Smoke and ash from coal fires powering the businesses and warming the homes occupied by four thousand residents rose in a towering pall. More smoke poured from several nearby coal mines that had caught fire years before and continued to smolder. Every surface exposed to the air was coated in soot. People choked and wheezed and went grimly about their business beneath a perpetual dark cloud hanging over the narrow streets and the low, ugly buildings.
But business was good. Pittsburgh was already becoming a manufacturing center and was sending a diversifying assortment of supplies down the Ohio on the heels of the settlers who would buy these goods at the other end. The trade included nails, cloth, glassware, wire, buttons, rope, iron implements, and lead. There were eight boat and barge builders in town, and so many keelboats, arks, and Kentucky flatboats now regularly descended the Ohio from Pittsburgh that nobody could keep count. With fair weather and high water, it was possible to reach Louisville in as little as ten days. The estimated value of all trade passing through Pittsburgh exceeded a million dollars a year, and with the promise of regular steamship travel arriving soon, there was talk of a coming boom. Audubon and Rozier were elated at all of this, and also at discovering several French-speaking merchants with whom they arranged to acquire inventories. Rozier considered these people honest and easy to deal with.
The two men bought passage on a flatboat for $15, which included the transport of a small
