236 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



laden with merchandise and dollars, he quite lost sight of 

 the pack saddles and the cash they bore, in watching the 

 motions of a warbler. But few coaches, said Audubon, 

 were available in those days, and the post roads were 

 often unfit for lighter carriages. To cover the distance 

 from Louisville to Philadelphia on horseback required 

 about twenty days, and only a capable animal and rider 

 could make forty miles a day; when steamer traffic on 

 the Ohio 2 was well in hand this time was reduced to six 

 or seven days, in performing a journey which the mod- 

 ern railroad has shortened to not far from as many hours. 

 Discouraged by the gloomy prospects which their 

 business at Louisville presented, Audubon and Rozier 

 determined in the spring of 1810 to move 125 miles 

 down the river to Henderson. 3 Loading the residue of 

 their stock on a flatboat, they resolutely set out for the 

 new field, but great was their surprise to find, in place 

 of the thriving settlement which their imaginations had 

 pictured, only a cluster of log houses on the river bank, 

 with a population of less than 200 people and a demand 

 for little else than whisky, gunpowder and coarse woolen 

 goods. When the partners arrived, the little town was 

 eighteen years old, as the first log cabins were built 

 there in 1792, but the whole country above and below 



2 The first steamboat on the Ohio was the Orleans, a vessel of 200- 

 400 tons, built at Pittsburgh in the summer and fall of 1811, by Robert 

 Fulton and Robert M. Livingston; her first voyage, when she touched at 

 Henderson, was signalized, as it seemed to many, by the great earthquakes 

 of that year. The first Kentucky steamer was built at Henderson in 1817, 

 the same year that a small vessel was constructed by Samuel Bowen 

 and J. J. Audubon at the same place (see Chapter XVI). Compare 

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

 186). 



3 Known first as Redbank or Redbanks, to distinguish it from Yellow- 

 bank, or Owensboro, on a similar bend farther upstream; called also 

 Hendersonville, but this term had no official standing. The population of 

 Henderson in 1810 is given as 159, and that of the entire county, then 

 larger than at present, as 5,000. See Starling, op. cit. 



