250 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



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 jour- 

 ney, though it may have been in the previous year, that 

 an incident occurred which he has related in "The 

 Prairie," 4 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, Au- 

 dubon 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, adja- 

 cent to the first, was later secured. 



These curiously embroidered statements regarding 

 land transactions at Henderson in 1813 are not in har- 

 mony with the existing records of that frontier town. 

 Henderson, as its historian 5 tells us, was laid out orig- 



4 Ornithological Biography (Bibl. No. 2), vol. i, p. 81. In his bio- 

 graphical sketch of 1835 Audubon said that this occurred on his first 

 return from Ste. Genevieve to Henderson (in 1811), a contradiction char- 

 acteristic of his manner of dealing with biographical and historical details. 

 For an account of this "Episode," see Chapter XVIII. 



5 For early references to Henderson I am indebted mainly to Edmund 

 L. Starling, History of Henderson County, Kentucky (Bibl. No. 186), 

 who had access to all the town and county records. 



