his passion for birds while letting pretty much everything else go. He was, he admitted, neither assiduous nor successful in his various business ventures, always having his eye more on the skies than on the bottom line: “Birds were birds then as now,” he wrote, “and my thoughts were ever and anon turning toward them as the objects of my greatest delight. I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only; my days were happy beyond human conception, and beyond this I really cared not.”49 But he had to care about his life beyond birds, of course, because he had obligations to a wife and children and, for a while, to his friend and business partner, Rozier—but only for a while.
While Audubon’s family always remained a source of emotional, sometimes even sentimental, attachment, Rozier soon fell from grace in Audubon’s narrative of his Kentucky days. Rozier never took on quite the treacherous aspect of the despised Dacosta, but he did serve as a money-focused foil to Audubon’s emerging self-portrayal as a man with a higher-seeming focus on art and science, too busy with the birds to spend time with business.
Soon after the in-store encounter with Alexander Wilson, Audubon wrote, he and Rozier “became discouraged at Louisville, and I longed to have a wider range.” He would readily admit the fundamental flaw in the management of the original mercantile operation: “Louisville did not give us up, but we gave up Louisville. I could not bear to give the attention required by my business, and which, indeed, every business calls for, and, therefore, my business abandoned me.”50 He made only a tepid confession about his lack of attention, however, pointing instead to his fascination with pursuing his larger calling, all the while using the more practical-seeming Rozier to make the comparative point: “I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting its habits, Rozier meantime attending the counter,” Audubon wrote. “I could relate many curious anecdotes about him, but never mind them; he made out to grow rich, and what more could he wish for?”51 All Audubon seemed to wish for was being out of the store.
Instead, they both got out of the town and into another store, this one 125 miles farther down the Ohio River, in an even newer and less developed town, Henderson, Kentucky. One early observer unkindly described Henderson as a town of “about twenty houses, and inhabited by a people whose doom is fixed.”52 To be sure, Henderson had a population of only 159 in 1810, but doom did not seem to be the town’s destiny, at least in Audubon’s eyes at the time. The village was “quite small,” Audubon admitted, “but our neighbours were friendly.… The woods were amply stocked with game, the river with fish; and now and then the hoarded sweets of the industrious bees were brought from some hollow tree to our little table.”53 Into that scene of Arcadian simplicity and contentment, Audubon added only a brief, half-sentence reference to Rozier: “I had then a partner, a ‘man of business.’” The quotation marks around “man of business” served to separate Rozier’s commercial inclinations from the “sports of the forest and river” preferred by Audubon, who “thought chiefly of procuring supplies of fish and fowl.”54
Audubon did not belabor the difference any further in Ornithological Biography—he never mentioned Rozier again, certainly not by name—but in the more private space of the autobiographical “Myself,” he offered an extended anecdote about their different approaches to business and perhaps to life in general. Soon after arriving in Henderson, Audubon writes, he and Rozier took a flatboat-load of whiskey and other goods down the Ohio River, headed to the Mississippi River to sell Kentucky’s best beverage to settlers in the Missouri Territory. Starting out in a snowstorm in late December 1810, they had traveled only three days, to a few miles above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, before learning that the Mississippi was covered with ice, meaning that their journey would have to wait for a thaw. In the meantime, they camped with some Shawnee Indians, and Audubon quickly made the most of the cross-cultural encounter: “I understood their habits and a few words of their language, and as many of them spoke French passably, I easily joined with their ‘talks’ and their avocations.” The Shawnee people also joined Audubon in his own avocation, “and as soon as they learned of my anxiety for curiosities of natural history, they discovered the most gratifying anxiety to procure them for me.” While Audubon became the center of attention in this lively exchange of information, his partner sulked on the sidelines: “My friend Ferdinand Rozier, neither hunter nor naturalist, sat in the boat all day, brooding in gloomy silence over the loss of time, &c. entailed by our detention.”55 Again, the contrast with Rozier and his fretting over the loss of time and, presumably, money seems critical to the narrative.
Audubon goes on to describe a six-week icebound stay with native people—first Shawnees, then Osages—during which he happily hunted birds and bears with his newfound “Indian friends,” played the flute for their amusement, sketched a “tolerable portrait of one of them in red chalk,” and always carried on his study of birds and mammals, recording the results every night by the light of the fire: “I wrote the day’s occurrences in my journal, just as I do now,” he recalled almost two decades later, “and well I remember that I gained more information that evening about the roosting of the prairie hen than I had ever done before.”56
Once the weather warmed and the ice on the Mississippi broke up enough to get their flatboat through, Audubon and Rozier eventually made their way up the river to Ste. Genevieve, where they quickly disposed of their cargo at a handsome rate of return: “Our whiskey was especially welcome, and what we had paid twenty-five cents a gallon for, brought us two dollars.” But Ste. Genevieve, “an old French town, small and dirty,” seemed not such a promising business site, at least not for a restless yet homesick man like Audubon. He quickly decided “it was not the place for me; its population was then composed of low French Canadians, uneducated and uncouth.”57
Rozier apparently liked the people there just fine, and he decided to stay, so he and Audubon dissolved their partnership in April 1811, with Rozier buying Audubon out for a combination of cash and bills of credit. Rozier went on to do quite well in Ste. Genevieve, marrying a young woman of the town, fathering ten children, and eventually, in 1864, dying a prosperous pillar of the community at the age of eighty-seven.58
Audubon opted to take the money, such as it was, and run. Actually, he bought a “beauty of a horse” and rode back home to Henderson, back to Lucy and their infant son, Victor Gifford, and back to business. For a while, he would occasionally badger Rozier for more money, even going back to Ste. Genevieve a couple of times to try to collect—once walking all the way, he claimed, 165 miles in just over three days, “much of the time nearly ankle deep in mud and water,” but never with much success.59 Instead, he turned his attention toward new enterprises—but, again, never with much success.
The subsequent history he gives of his various financial ups and downs—mostly downs—in his Henderson years can best be compressed into a fairly (and perhaps mercifully) short narrative. But even a brief summary suggests that, for all his self-avowed aversion to the world of commerce, Audubon had an active, if not always canny, business sense. He may have sniffed disparagingly at Rozier as a “man of business,” but his own entrepreneurial turn toward new ventures put him squarely amid the economic innovation—and turbulence—of his era.
Soon after parting with Rozier, for instance, Audubon formed a new business partnership with Lucy’s brother, Thomas Bakewell, a young man of seemingly unwavering ambition. In 1811, Bakewell hatched a promising-seeming plan for opening an import-export operation in New Orleans, and he wanted to bring Audubon into it, seeing the value of both his Francophone-language abilities and his financial resources. Unfortunately, neither Bakewell nor Audubon could do much to control the context of larger global politics. Just as their new venture stood on the verge of opening its doors, the increasingly apparent prospect of war with Great Britain threatened to cut off the Atlantic trade, and the Audubon-Bakewell business went bust before it was ever really born. Audubon lost money—“My pecuniary means were now much reduced”—but he still kept faith in his brother-in-law, who moved to Henderson and joined Audubon in business there.60
Business
