At the approach of spring in 1812 Audubon was hard pressed for funds, and Rozier's notes to him being then overdue he set out on foot for Ste. Geneviève to collect his money in person. He went out with a party of friendly Osage Indians, but returned, still afoot and unpaid, with his faithful dog as his only companion.[216] The prairies were then flooded and converted into vast lakes, but Audubon, anxious to reach his home, pressed on, walking, as he said, "one hundred and sixty-five miles in a little over three days, much of the time nearly ankle-deep in mud and water." It was probably on this journey, though it may have been in the previous year, that an incident occurred which he has related in "The Prairie,"[217] when, as he declared, for the first time in the course of his wanderings for upwards of a quarter of a century, his life was in actual danger from his fellow man. When at last he had obtained some ready money, Audubon rode to Louisville, where he purchased on the half-cash, half-credit basis a small stock of goods, and again set up a retail shop at Henderson. This modest venture promised so well that he bought land with the intention of making that town his permanent home. "I purchased," said he, "a ground-lot of four acres, and a meadow of four more at the back of the first." On the latter, to follow this account, were several buildings and an excellent orchard, "lately the property of an English doctor, who had died on the premises and left the whole to a servant woman as a gift, from whom it came to me as a freehold": other land, he added, adjacent to the first, was later secured. [Illustration: LETTER OF AUDUBON TO FERDINAND ROZIER, SIGNED "AUDUBON & BAKEWELL," AND DATED OCTOBER 19, 1813, DURING THE FIRST PARTNERSHIP UNDER THIS STYLE. From the Tom J. Rozier MSS.] These curiously embroidered statements regarding land transactions at Henderson in 1813 are not in harmony with the existing records of that frontier town. Henderson, as its historian[218] tells us, was laid out originally in 1797 into 264 one-acre lots, of which comparatively few had been sold at the time of which we speak, though nominal prices were asked and a few had been given away to encourage settlement.[219] Audubon is recorded as having purchased four one-acre lots from the town, two in 1813 and two in the following year, while a long lease was taken upon land adjacent to the river where later rose his famous mill.[220]