John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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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 prospects seemed promising for a while in Henderson, which, despite the economic 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