John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

stayed and suffered the economic consequences.

      In addition to the steam-powered mill, Bakewell had involved Audubon in yet another steam-based misadventure, a partnership in a new steamboat named, with a striking lack of imagination, the Henderson. “This also proved an entire failure,” Audubon later wrote with considerable understatement.⁶⁸ Thanks to Bakewell’s quick exit from the scene, Audubon became embroiled in a complicated, shaky-seeming financial arrangement with another Henderson investor, a man named Samuel Bowen. The question of who owned what and who owed what to whom soon became all but moot when Bowen absconded with the Henderson and headed for New Orleans, with the intention of selling it. Audubon quickly took pursuit all the way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, chasing after Bowen in his own small skiff, along with two slaves, to recover his boat and his money, but he never saw either again. He sold the skiff and the slaves in New Orleans and went home. Then, in June 1819, when he and the evasive Bowen next encountered each other back in Henderson, both men felt wronged, enraged, and ready to kill each other—which they nearly did, in a street fight in broad daylight, not far from the behemoth Audubon-Bakewell steam mill. Audubon soon found himself under arrest for assault and battery, and even though he was quickly acquitted for acting in self-defense—the judge agreed that Bowen was a “damned rascal” who deserved to die—the Henderson era of Audubon’s life had taken on a decidedly unhappy appearance.⁶⁹

      Audubon avoided jail in the Bowen fracas, but he soon faced incarceration because of an even larger financial crisis, the Panic of 1819. At a time when specie had become scarce because of the contraction in the European economy, largely unregulated local banks in all parts of the United States issued paper currency almost at will, and free-flowing money and other forms of paper-based credit seduced investors to take a shot at seemingly anything.⁷⁰ Audubon had been one of them—but only one. Unrealistic expectations had led to unbridled expansion everywhere, until the chain of debt began to weaken and eventually snap, leading to the downfall of people all over the country, at all levels of economic life. When the Panic of 1819 hit the Henderson region, the town’s bank—which had been built with lumber from the Audubon-Bakewell sawmill barely two years earlier—collapsed, at least financially.⁷¹ The crisis also struck Audubon especially hard, delivering what seemed to be the final financial blow. By that time, his money troubles amounted to much more than had been at stake in the Bowen imbroglio, and he “had heavy bills to pay which I could not meet or take up,” his creditors came after him with a vengeance, and he “was assailed with thousands of invectives.”⁷²

      On one level, there was nothing altogether disgraceful about financial failure in early nineteenth-century America, perhaps least of all in the volatile ups and downs of the 1810s, when businesses big and small hit the wall. (Audubon may have taken note of the fact that the Philadelphia firm of Bradford and Inskeep, Alexander Wilson’s publisher, had declared bankruptcy in 1814–1815, soon after it printed the last volume of American Ornithology.⁷³) On the other hand, looking at the larger financial situation still offered little solace when the pain became personal. Being a fellow sufferer in a national financial calamity couldn’t pay an individual’s bills, nor could it keep a struggling businessman out of jail.

      As a consequence of this financial collapse, Audubon had to sell almost all the family possessions—his share of the mill, the house and its now-numerous furnishings, his musical instruments and much of his artistic equipment, Lucy’s books, some farm animals, and, not to be overlooked, the remaining seven slaves—to his more successful and certainly supportive brother-in-law Nicholas Berthoud.⁷⁴ Even that was not enough. When Audubon went from Henderson to Louisville to try to clear up his financial situation, his creditors still hounded him, he was arrested for debt and put in jail, and he got out only by declaring bankruptcy. He left jail, he said, “keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun.”⁷⁵ Those last two possessions proved critical, soon becoming essential keys to his future.

      They had perhaps been a bit underutilized in the recent past. Over the years he spent in his “never-to-be-forgotten residence at Henderson, on the banks of the fair Ohio,” Audubon always kept his good eye for birds—his ability both to shoot them in the bush and to render them on paper—and the region proved to provide the avian abundance Audubon needed.⁷⁶ Some thirty of his later written descriptions of birds in Ornithological Biography have a connection to his Henderson days, as did some of the images drawn during that period, which later made their way into the finished version of The Birds of America. Unfortunately, though, not many of the latter survived. In fact, he had probably suffered a net loss in the number of drawings, most famously when, as he recounted in the introduction to Ornithological Biography, a pair of Norway rats took up residence in a box of his work and gnawed the papers into nesting material. He was understandably distraught at the loss—“reader, feel for me”—but then, in classic Audubon fashion, he turned near-tragedy into triumph: “I took up my gun, my note-book, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened … and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, I had my portfolio filled again.” He may indeed have done so, but very few images from the Henderson era now survive. It might even seem that instead of neglecting his business for the birds, as Audubon so often liked to tell it, he had actually done just the opposite.⁷⁷

      But again in classic Audubon fashion, he cast the collapse of his business and the attendant economic agonies of 1819 as an artistic epiphany, a realization that “nothing was left to me but my humble talents.” “Were those talents to remain dormant under such exigencies? Was I to see my beloved Lucy and children suffer and want bread, in the abundant State of Kentucky? Was I to repine because I had acted like an honest man? Was I inclined to cut my throat in foolish despair?” To those rhetorical questions, Audubon had an emphatic answer: “No!! I had talents, and to them I instantly resorted.”⁷⁸ And with them he moved on to the next step in his career.

      Cincinnati Respite

      After the debacle of bankruptcy, Audubon’s immediate prospects had only one way to go, of course, and up they went—at least a bit, at least for a while. He did indeed resort to his artistic talents to support his family, taking on portrait commissions for around five dollars a head. Although he had little training (and even less interest) in portraiture, he gained a good reputation for doing the work quickly and effectively for his clients, drawing both the living and, when family members of a soon-to-be-lost loved one wanted one last likeness, the dying. He even did one posthumous portrait of the disinterred son of a Kentucky clergyman, which, he said, “I gave to the parents as if still alive, to their intense satisfaction.” (As it happened, Audubon suffered the loss of a child of his own soon afterward: Lucy gave birth to Rose, named after Audubon’s own half-sister in France, in 1819, soon after Audubon got out of jail in Louisville, but the infant girl died in early 1820, just seven months old.) Whatever his general disgruntlement over the less-than-agreeable artistic calling of producing quick portraits, Audubon kept himself sane with his unstoppable pursuit of birds. “In this particular there seemed to hover round me almost a mania,” he later explained, “and I would even give up doing a head, the profits of which would have supplied our wants for a week or more, to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe.”⁷⁹

      Better still, he suddenly got a good, bird-related break. He heard that Dr. Daniel Drake, a prominent physician and president of the new Medical College of Ohio, in Cincinnati, needed an artist and taxidermist for the natural history collections he was helping assemble for another new institution in that city, the Western Museum. With a few letters of reference quickly sent to Cincinnati, Audubon soon found himself with a promising job offer—working on the museum’s specimen collections for a decent-seeming salary of $125 per month. With a patron like Drake, Audubon might well begin to imagine a new future.

      Drake was a man of lofty intellectual and civic ambitions.⁸⁰ Born in the same year as Audubon, 1785, he had had quite a bit more success in life, with a solid career in medicine and teaching already to his credit, along with several memberships in prominent learned societies, including, since 1818, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society.

      But the Philadelphia institution that Drake wanted most to emulate in Cincinnati was Charles