John James Audubon - Starting Out in Business

Starting Out in Business

Audubon and Ferdinand Rozier moved their business partnership west at various stages, ending ultimately in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, the first European settlement west of the Mississippi River. Shipping goods ahead, Audubon and Rozier started a general store in Louisville, Kentucky and also in Elizabethtown, Kentucky; on the Ohio River, Louisville was the most important port between Pittsburgh and New Orleans and Elizabethtown was just South on the Louisville & Nashville Turnpike. Soon he was drawing bird specimens again. He regularly burned earlier efforts to force continuous improvement. He also took detailed field notes to document his drawings. Because rising tensions with the British resulted in President Jefferson's embargo of British trade, Audubon's business was not thriving.

In 1810, Audubon moved the business further west to the less competitive Henderson, Kentucky area. He and his small family took over an abandoned log cabin. In the fields and forests, Audubon wore typical frontier clothes and moccasins "and a ball pouch, a buffalo horn filled with gunpowder, a butcher knife, and a tomahawk on his belt."

He frequently turned to hunting and fishing to feed his family, as business was slow. On a prospecting trip downriver with a load of goods, Audubon joined up with Shawnee and Osage hunting parties, learning their methods, drawing specimens by the bonfire, and finally parting "like brethren." Audubon had great respect for Native Americans: "Whenever I meet Indians, I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the man naked from His hand and yet free from acquired sorrow." Audubon also admired the skill of Kentucky riflemen and the "regulators", citizen lawmen who created a kind of justice on the Kentucky frontier. In his travel notes, he claims to have encountered Daniel Boone.

Audubon and Rozier mutually agreed to end their partnership at Ste. Genevieve on April 6, 1811, as Audubon decided to work at ornithology and art, as well as to return to Lucy and their son. Rozier agreed to pay Audubon $3,000 (equivalent to ~$120,000 in 2010 dollars), with $1,000 in cash and the balance to be paid over time.

The terms of the dissolution of the partnership include those by Audubon:

I John Audubon, having this day mutual consent with Ferdinand Rozier, dissolved and forever closed the partnership and firm of Audubon and Rozier, and having Received from said Ferdinand Rozier payment and notes to the full amount of my part of the goods and debts of the late firm of Audubon and Rozier, I the said John Audubon one of the firm aforesaid do hereby release and forever quit claim to all and any interest which I have or may have in the stock on hand and debts due to the late firm of Audubon and Rozier assign, transfer and set over to said Ferdinand Rozier, all my rights, titles, claims and interest in the goods, merchandise and debts due to the late firm of Audubon and Rozier, and do hereby authorize and empower him for my part, to collect the same in any manner what ever either privately or by suit or suits in law or equity hereby declaring him sole and absolute proprietor and rightful owner of all goods, merchandise and debts of this firm aforesaid, as completely as they were the goods and property of the late firm Audubon and Rozier. In witness thereof I have set my hand and seal this Sixth day of April 1811 John Audubon Ed D. DeVillamonte

Audubon witnessed the 1812 New Madrid earthquake while out riding, which was among the most severe to strike the mid-continent. When Audubon arrived home, he was relieved to find no major damage, but the area was shaken by aftershocks for months. Upon his horse in western Kentucky on December 16, 1811, Audubon experienced the great New Madrid earthquake. By today's standards, the quake ranged from 8.4 to 8.8 on the Richter Scale, slightly stronger than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Audubon writes that while on horseback he believed the distant rumbling to be that of a tornado, “but the animal knew better than I what was forthcoming, and instead of going faster, so nearly stopped that I remarked he placed one foot after another on the ground with as much precaution as if walking on a smooth piece of ice. I thought he had suddenly foundered, and, speaking to him, was on point of dismounting and leading him, when he all of a sudden fell a-groaning pieteously, hung his head, spread out his forelegs, as if to save himself from falling, and stood stock still, continuing to groan. I thought my horse was about to die, and would have sprung from his back had a minute more elapsed; but as that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots, the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled water of a lake, and I became bewildered in my ideas, as I too plainly discovered, that all this awful commotion was the result of an earthquake. I had never witnessed anything of the kind before, although like every person, I knew earthquakes by description. But what is description compared to reality! Who can tell the sensations which I experienced when I found myself rocking, as it were, upon my horse, and with him moving to and fro like a child in a cradle, with the most imminent danger around me.” He noted that as the earthquake retreated, "the air was filled with an extremely disagreeable sulphurous odor."