FINAL REVERSES IN BUSINESS 259 
Returning home, Audubon was obliged to walk from 
the mouth of the Ohio River to Shawnee Town. Upon 
reaching Henderson he found that Mr. Bowen had an- 
ticipated him. Acting upon advice, he was prepared for 
an encounter with this man, who as his neighbors de- 
clared, had sworn to kill him, and “whose violent and 
ungovernable temper was only too well known.” The 
anticipated encounter ensued. Audubon, who was then 
carrying his right hand in a sling from a recent injury 
received in his mill, waited, as he said, until he had re- 
ceived twelve severe blows from his assailant’s bludgeon; 
then with his left hand he drew a dagger and struck in 
his own defense. His assailant was felled to the ground, 
but happily the wound inflicted was not mortal. Mr. 
Bowen was carried away on a plank, and when the affair 
was settled in the judiciary court, according to a Hen- 
derson tradition, Judge Broadnax gravely left the 
bench, approached the man who had been under charge 
of assault, and said: “Mr. Audubon, you committed a 
serious offense—an exceedingly serious offense Sir—in 
failing to kill the d rascal.”** “Thomas Bakewell,” 
added the naturalist, “who possessed more brains than I, 
sold his town lots and removed to Cincinnati, where he 
has made a large fortune, and I am glad of it.” 
When the mill was finally closed and the company 
dissolved in 1819, Audubon as usual was the heaviest 
*See Dixon L. Merritt (Bibl. No. 226a), “Audubon in Kentucky,” 
The Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, vol. 10 (1909), p. 293. 
Thomas Bakewell later became a successful builder of steamboats, 
first at Pittsburgh, and after 1824 at Cincinnati, where he was an im- 
portant factor in the rising commerce of the Ohio Valley, and where 
he left his mark on the history of that city. As a theoretical mechanic 
in iron and wood he is said to have had no superior; his business was 
nearly destroyed in the panic of 1837, and he never regained his financial 
position. To his credit also it must be added that in 1860, at the age 
of seventy-two, he began at the bottom of the ladder again by engaging 
as a clerk with a paper company at Cincinnati, and, refusing the proffered 
