In order to extend the sphere of their operations, Audubon is said to have purchased at this time a tract of 1,200 acres of government land,[225] and to have engaged a band of stalwart Yankees to fell and deliver the timber. According to one account, they were a party of emigrants who had come to Henderson with their families and encamped on the river bank. For a time all went well, but one day when they failed to deliver their usual supply of logs, it was found that they had decamped and fled down the river towards the Mississippi, taking on their flatboat Audubon's draft oxen and in fact all the plunder that they could lift. Nothing was ever recovered and but one of the fugitives was ever seen again; this man boarded a river boat on which the naturalist happened to be traveling, and it is said that upon being recognized he jumped into the river and swam to the shore like a frightened deer. When Bakewell finally withdrew, Audubon appears to have been left stranded, and the business was taken over by a new set of men, including another brother-in-law, Nicholas Berthoud, and Benjamin Page of Pittsburgh, who continued it under the name of J. J. Audubon & Company.[226] Agents were also secured at various points on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Excepting, as we must assuredly do, his ever staunch friend, Nicholas Berthoud, Audubon believed that he was "gulled by all of these men." In 1818 a new era of building and general prosperity seemed to dawn in the valley of the Ohio. A new bank was chartered at Henderson, and the woodwork of its brick structure was furnished by Audubon's mill.[227] This bank, however, failed in the course of two years, and forty others scattered throughout that section broke in rapid succession, after having done little more than add to the flood of worthless paper notes that was demoralizing business and sending hundreds into bankruptcy. The mill was in operation barely two years. The machinery, of which a wooden bolting shaft and wooden cog wheels remained as a curiosity to recent times, seems to have worked badly from the start. But aside from the inexperience of the builders and the financial troubles of the day, the enterprise was foredoomed to failure in a district which raised but little wheat, and in which the demand for lumber was then comparatively slight. "How I labored," said Audubon, "at that infernal mill! But it is over now; I am old, and try to forget as fast as possible all the different trials of those sad days."