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 anticipated him. Acting upon advice, he was prepared for an encounter with this man, who as his neighbors declared, 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 received 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 Henderson 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."[229] "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.[230]
When the mill was finally closed and the company dissolved in 1819, Audubon as usual was the heaviest loser. Arrested and sent to the Louisville jail for debt, he was able to obtain release only by declaring himself a bankrupt in court. "I paid all I could,"[231] he said in his journal of the following year, "and left Henderson poor and miserable in thought. My intention to go to France and see my mother and sister was frustrated, and at last I resorted to my poor talents to maintain you and your dear mother, who fortunately became easy at her change of condition, and gave me a spirit such as I really needed, to meet the surly looks and cold reception of those who so shortly before were pleased to call me their friend." "I parted," to revert to his later account, "with every particle of property I held, to my creditors, keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun." Without a dollar in his pocket he left Henderson and walked to Louisville alone; "this," he said on reflection, "was the saddest of all my journies, the only time in my life when the Wild Turkeys that so often crossed my path, and the thousands of lesser birds that enlivened the woods and the prairies, all looked like enemies, and I turned my eyes from them, as if I could have wished that they never existed."