280 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
furrows, like the ruffled waters of a lake.” For 
“November” he should have written “January” of the 
year 1812.° 
This series of memorable earthquakes was followed 
in 1813 by a hurricane, more terrific than destructive, 
which swept the lower part of Henderson County, Ken- 
tucky, and cut a wide swath through the virgin forests, 
without causing any loss of life. Audubon’s account 
of this event ® is that of a close observer who escaped 
destruction by a hair’s breadth and who related only 
what he himself had experienced. Critics inclined to be 
supercilious have complained that he exaggerated the 
importance of a merely local event and stretched the 
course of the storm some 800 miles until it had covered 
several states. “Sir,” said Waterton, in pointing a dart 
through Audubon to another target, “this is really too 
much even for us Englishmen to swallow, whose gullets 
are known to be the largest, the widest, and the most 
elastic, of any in the world.” What Audubon said was: 
“T have crossed the path of this storm, at a distance of 
a hundred miles from the spot where I witnessed its 
fury, and, again four hundred miles farther off, in the 
State of Ohio. Lastly, I observed traces of its ravages 
on the summits of the mountains connected with the 
’ These historic earthquakes, which were most destructive of life and 
property in the lower Mississippi Valley, began on December 16, 1811, 
and therefore before Audubon and Nolte had reached the western country. 
They were noted for their remarkable frequency and persistence, 221 
shocks having been recorded in a single week at Henderson, Audubon’s 
home at that time; though their force was mostly spent after the first 
three months, they did not wholly die away in the Ohio Valley until 
December 12, 1813, when the last feeble vibration was recorded by Dr. 
Daniel Drake at Cincinnati; the worst shocks at this point were experi- 
enced on December 16, 1811, on January 23 and February 7, 1812. See 
Daniel Drake, Natural and Statistical View of Cincinnati, and the Miami 
Valley; with an appendix, containing observations on the late Earth- 
quakes, (Cincinnati, 1815); and Edmund L. Starling, History of Hender- 
son County, Kentucky (Bibl. No. 186). 
®°“The Hurricane,” Ornithological Biography, vol. i, p. 262. 
