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” 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.? 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 
?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). 
* 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. 
