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,” * 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. 
“T 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 ° tells us, was laid out orig- 
* 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. 
