uncertainties of the War of 1812, appeared to be heading into a business boom along with the rest of the region.61 Audubon and Bakewell shared in the excitement as small-town storekeepers, expanding their business to a few downriver towns and engaging in land speculation on the side. They “prospered at a round rate for a while,” and the Audubon family settled into comfortable-seeming circumstances, living in a well-appointed house, with handsome furniture, a piano, silver candlesticks, a substantial number of books indoors, and a newly dug pond outdoors, where Audubon could keep turtles for making turtle soup. (The pond was dug by Audubon’s slaves. By 1813–1814, he had done well enough to buy nine slaves for just over ten thousand dollars, and even though he never said much about them or the larger institution of slavery in his writings, the people of color in his possession represented yet another indication of his financial standing in the early Henderson years.) Audubon seemed financially set and well satisfied: “The pleasures which I have felt at Henderson … can never be effaced from my heart until after death.”62
Figure 3. Audubon’s mill, Henderson, Kentucky. From Maria Audubon, Audubon and His Journals (New York, 1899).
But the pleasures would be effaced soon enough by other means. Audubon’s young brother-in-law had ideas of going beyond mere storekeeping, and he took Audubon with him—down what eventually proved to be the path toward failure. First, young Bakewell got inspiration to embrace the cutting-edge technology of the era and “took it into his brain to persuade me to erect a steam-mill.” Henderson had nothing like it, a combination grist mill and sawmill, both parts powered by a steam engine, and Audubon and Bakewell built a considerable structure on the banks of the Ohio River, just two-tenths of a mile from their store. When it opened in 1817, the mill was, according to the town’s historian, “a great convenience” for the region, not to mention a showcase for Audubon’s art as well: “The walls of his mill presented the appearance of a picture gallery, every smooth space presenting to the view the painting of some one or more birds.”63
This huge project quickly became a huge headache, however: a slowly built, badly built, and ultimately overbuilt six-story structure that, even had it worked well, offered more capacity than the community needed. While other towns in the region enjoyed a better boom-time experience and became more important mercantile centers, Henderson remained a disappointment to its boosters.64 Two of them, Audubon and Bakewell, soon had to realize that the region had too few customers to supply adequate demand for such capital-intensive technology; they had overbuilt and overspent, and they had even bet on the wrong materials. Soon after their mill opened, so the local story goes, good clay for brickmaking was discovered nearby, and the ensuing “building boom” favored brick structures over wooden ones, causing the demand for milled lumber to fall sharply. Moreover, the steam-powered mill could not compete with water-powered gristmills, and the Audubon-Bakewell mill business collapsed.65 (The building lasted far longer than the business, and the town’s local historian called it “perhaps the strongest frame in the city.”66 Today, the stone steps still stand.) In general, Audubon and Bakewell faced a perfect storm of adverse circumstances, and even though Audubon would admit that “the great fault was ours,” he would also lament that “the building of that accursed steam-mill was, of all the follies of man, one of the greatest, and … the worst of all our pecuniary misfortunes.”67
The first-person plural reference to “our pecuniary misfortunes” soon became first-person singular, and Audubon’s alone. Soon after getting married in Henderson, Thomas Bakewell and his new bride decided that the town was not suitable for their social and financial aspirations, and so they moved away, leaving Audubon holding the almost empty bag of their joint business ventures. Glad as he may have been to see Bakewell go, taking his big ideas with him, Audubon stayed and suffered the economic consequences.
In addition to the steam-powered mill, Bakewell had involved Audubon in yet another steam-based misadventure, a partnership in a new steamboat named, with a striking lack of imagination, the Henderson. “This also proved an entire failure,” Audubon later wrote with considerable understatement.68 Thanks to Bakewell’s quick exit from the scene, Audubon became embroiled in a complicated, shaky-seeming financial arrangement with another Henderson investor, a man named Samuel Bowen. The question of who owned what and who owed what to whom soon became all but moot when Bowen absconded with the Henderson and headed for New Orleans, with the intention of selling it. Audubon quickly took pursuit all the way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, chasing after Bowen in his own small skiff, along with two slaves, to recover his boat and his money, but he never saw either again. He sold the skiff and the slaves in New Orleans and went home. Then, in June 1819, when he and the evasive Bowen next encountered each other back in Henderson, both men felt wronged, enraged, and ready to kill each other—which they nearly did, in a street fight in broad daylight, not far from the behemoth Audubon-Bakewell steam mill. Audubon soon found himself under arrest for assault and battery, and even though he was quickly acquitted for acting in self-defense—the judge agreed that Bowen was a “damned rascal” who deserved to die—the Henderson era of Audubon’s life had taken on a decidedly unhappy appearance.69
Audubon avoided jail in the Bowen fracas, but he soon faced incarceration because of an even larger financial crisis, the Panic of 1819. At a time when specie had become scarce because of the contraction in the European economy, largely unregulated local banks in all parts of the United States issued paper currency almost at will, and free-flowing money and other forms of paper-based credit seduced investors to take a shot at seemingly anything.70 Audubon had been one of them—but only one. Unrealistic expectations had led to unbridled expansion everywhere, until the chain of debt began to weaken and eventually snap, leading to the downfall of people all over the country, at all levels of economic life. When the Panic of 1819 hit the Henderson region, the town’s bank—which had been built with lumber from the Audubon-Bakewell sawmill barely two years earlier—collapsed, at least financially.71 The crisis also struck Audubon especially hard, delivering what seemed to be the final financial blow. By that time, his money troubles amounted to much more than had been at stake in the Bowen imbroglio, and he “had heavy bills to pay which I could not meet or take up,” his creditors came after him with a vengeance, and he “was assailed with thousands of invectives.”72
On one level, there was nothing altogether disgraceful about financial failure in early nineteenth-century America, perhaps least of all in the volatile ups and downs of the 1810s, when businesses big and small hit the wall. (Audubon may have taken note of the fact that the Philadelphia firm of Bradford and Inskeep, Alexander Wilson’s publisher, had declared bankruptcy in 1814–1815, soon after it printed the last volume of American Ornithology.73) On the other hand, looking at the larger financial situation still offered little solace when the pain became personal. Being a fellow sufferer in a national financial calamity couldn’t pay an individual’s bills, nor could it keep a struggling businessman out of jail.
As a consequence of this financial collapse, Audubon had to sell almost all the family possessions—his share of the mill, the house and its now-numerous furnishings, his musical instruments and much of his artistic equipment, Lucy’s books, some farm animals, and, not to be overlooked, the remaining seven slaves—to his more successful and certainly supportive brother-in-law Nicholas Berthoud.74 Even that was not enough. When Audubon went from Henderson to Louisville to try to clear up his financial situation, his creditors still hounded him, he was arrested for debt and put in jail, and he got out only by declaring bankruptcy. He left jail, he said, “keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun.”75 Those last two possessions proved critical, soon becoming essential keys to his future.
They had perhaps been a bit underutilized in the recent past. Over the years he spent in his “never-to-be-forgotten residence at Henderson, on the banks of the fair Ohio,” Audubon always kept his good eye for birds—his ability both to shoot them in the bush and
