• CHAPTER SEVEN •

RUTLEDGE DAM

Thomas Lincoln liked the piece of land selected for them in central Illinois; it was timberland along the Sangamon River, with level prairie beyond. Lincoln, Hall, and Dennis chose portions of land, and helped each other build cabins. Abe and his father then plowed, fenced, and planted ten acres of corn. Thomas Lincoln went at this work briskly, confident that his fortunes had improved.

Even before his work was finished Abe Lincoln was offered a job. Illinois was rapidly being settled; more than one hundred thousand people had moved into the state between 1820 and 1830. Every family had to build a home, and farmers needed help in plowing and fencing. As soon as he could be spared at home, Abe began hiring out. Usually he boarded where he worked and returned between jobs to give his father a lift.

La Grange Lock and Dam on the Illinois River in Versailles, Illinois.

Now that he had passed his twenty-first birthday, he could keep his earnings. Often he worked for clothing instead of for money. He split four hundred rails for each yard of homespun jeans-cloth, and then more rails when the farmer’s wife made the cloth into breeches. He gained a reputation for strength and speed, and one employer recommended him to another.

“Hire that tall feller,” a newcomer was advised. “He splits rails like a giant.”

“Jest give that Abe Lincoln some folks to watch him and he’ll split rails fit ter kill,” another remarked. But some were more observing.

“That Abe, he works till he gits men watchin’ and then he rests his ax and tells a tale,” a man who had hired Abe explained. “But ye kaint help but like his yarns. Hit haint what he tells, hit’s his way of talkin’. Yisterday I laughed till my sides ached—don’ know what at! Jest him, I reckon.”

Abe Lincoln made droll tales of his adventures in Indiana forests, on the Ohio River, and in New Orleans—and told them with zest and a grin.

But by late summer the Lincoln family fortunes took a turn for the worse. “Chills and fever” made much illness in central Illinois, and the following winter a terrible snowstorm killed stock and ruined stored crops. Snow was five feet deep on the prairie, and drifts buried entire cabins. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero, the coldest ever remembered. Thomas Lincoln was very ill and Abe had to stay home and help out, though he had taken on a big job for the winter.

Major Warnick, who had a farm across the Sangamon, had hired Abe to split three thousand rails. Abe had planned to live at home and tend stock for his board. He had built a canoe for going back and forth to work. As soon as his father recovered, Abe pushed across the swollen river to Warnick’s. Ice floes overturned his boat in midstream, and he barely got it and himself to shore. When he reached the farmhouse his feet were numb.

“Abe Lincoln! You’ve frozen your feet!” Mrs. Warnick exclaimed when she opened the door. “You’ll be lucky if you save them!” She rubbed his feet with snow, dressed them with ointment she had made, and bandaged them. Soon the misery of returning circulation was almost more than Abe could endure.

For two weeks Abe suffered agony while his feet healed. The Warnicks were kind, but he was lonely. He missed old friends and the talk at Jones’s store. At night he sat for hours— his back propped against an overturned chair, his feet itching and throbbing—and wondered what to do with his life.

“Here I am,” he mused, “soon twenty-two years old; and since I started drappin’ pumpkin seeds fer Pappy I’ve farmed enough to last me a lifetime—but what else kin I do? I’ve seen no books around here—met no lawyers. Likely they’s plenty of both in Illinois, but how kin I find ’em? I reckon I kaint do anything but hire out.”

One such night he recalled an event of the previous summer. A stranger had happened by while several men were working, Abe among them. The man had made a political speech; when he finished, John Hanks spoke up.

“My partner here kin talk better’n him,” John had boasted. “Show ’em, Abe.”

Abe promptly laid aside his ax, mounted a stump, and made a talk about improving the channel of the Sangamon River. The men had applauded his words: they understood his ideas better than the stranger’s vague generalities.

“I liked makin’ that speech,” Abe remembered now. “I like to talk. But a feller kaint earn a livin’ talkin’—not as I ever heard of.”

In the morning he realized that his first task was to split rails. He must do more than the three thousand because he owed Warnick for two weeks’ board.

Abe was still splitting rails when a new man named Denton Offutt came to Warnick’s. Offutt was well dressed in a flashy style; he was a loud talker, full of ideas and grand plans. He offered Abe a job, taking produce to New Orleans; and Abe accepted for himself and for his stepbrother, seventeen-year-old John Johnston.

“You boys meet me and John Hanks at Portland Landing soon as the ice goes out,” Offutt ordered. (This place was the point on the Sangamon nearest to the town of Springfield.) “I’ll have a boat and cargo there ready for the trip. You’ll make good pay.” And he swaggered away.

When Abe had finished Warnick’s rails, he and young Johnston hollowed out a cottonwood log and floated down to Portland Landing. Offutt was not there. So they walked the six miles to Springfield, where they found him in a tavern. He had no flatboat and no cargo.

Abe and John hated to give up their bright prospects, so they offered to build a boat. Offutt promised to pay them twelve dollars a month and told them to build it on the Sangamon. He hired John Hanks to help them.

Abe Lincoln elected himself cook at their camp and so managed to avoid some hard work at mealtimes. Weather was warmer now. Cardinals and catbirds darted through the pussy willows; prairie chickens cackled among the buttercups and violets. Abe snagged game and cooked corndodgers, which went well with the honey he discovered in a stump. With twelve dollars a month for each, the boys didn’t rush the work. Word of their boat got around and quite a crowd gathered for the launching. Whigs and Democrats came and made political speeches, and a juggler turned up to amuse the crowd.

“Any feller got a hat I kin use?” he asked in the middle of his performance.

“Take Abe Lincoln’s!” a youngster shouted. The boy had admired the low-crowned, broad-rimmed hat Abe was wearing. (The coonskin cap with dangling tail had been discarded as the weather warmed.)

Abe hesitated but, when urged, passed up his precious headgear. The magician cooked two eggs in it and returned it with a flourish.

“You see, ye got yer hat back,” he twitted.

“My hesitation, sir, was out of respect for your eggs, not for my hat,” Abe explained with great dignity. The crowd roared.

The next day the builders loaded the flatboat with cargo Offutt had purchased—sacks of corn, barrels of bacon and hams, and live hogs. At the last minute John Hanks could not take the whole trip. But Offutt decided they could manage without him and soon they were rounding the bend of the river and approaching the town of New Salem.

Here, two years earlier, James Rutledge and his nephew John Camron had built a strong dam with wooden crates filled with a thousand loads of gravel. They had also built a two-story gristmill and sawmill, and developed a prosperous business. On the bluff above Rutledge Dam was the little village of New Salem. Already, in this spring of 1831, it was the size of Chicago, a small village near Fort Dearborn on Lake Michigan. Settlers were boasting that before long New Salem would grow to be a big city.

The crew of the flatboat were looking at the bluff when the boat hit that dam with a bang. The prow tilted high, the stern sank and filled with water. Hogs squealed. Barrels rolled. Sacks of corn tumbled helter-skelter. The pandemonium brought villagers to stare at the scene. Rutledge and Camron stopped the mill.

“Get off that dam!” Rutledge shouted. Camron shook his fist threateningly.

Small boys slid down the hillside while older youths came out in small boats to lend a hand. Abe pushed up his breeches, waded in, and lifted squealing hogs onto these boats. The flatboat didn’t move, though the load was lightened. Offutt was not in sight, so Abe followed his own hunch.

“Could I borry an auger?” he asked the crowd.

“Henry Onstot, the cooper, has one,” a mannerly voice answered. Abe saw that the speaker was a dignified gentleman of medium height who, unlike the others who were dressed in homespun, wore a neat black suit and a white shirt. Beside him was a golden-haired girl who held a bit of sewing in her hands.

Abe stared—but this was not the time to look at fashions or pretty girls. Those hogs were squealing! A youngster fetched the auger; Abe splashed back to the flatboat and went to work at the prow.

“He’s boring a hole!” a boy shouted.

“An’ hit stickin’ in the air!” another scoffed.

Abe didn’t glance toward shore. A hole made, he leaped onto the flatboat and yelled to John Johnston.

“Roll ’em forward!” he said as he began moving barrels. John sprang to help. When six barrels had been moved forward the prow tipped downward a few inches.

“That’s the idear!” the crowd now approved. “Move ’em all.” Soon the prow sank—lower and slowly lower. Water drained forward and out through the hole as the boat fell forward—and over the dam—while Abe thrust a plug into the hole.

“I never thought they’d get it over,” Camron was saying as Abe splashed by to return the auger and reload the hogs. Offutt returned when the work was done and they pushed off.

“Mighty nice little place, that New Salem,” Offutt announced agreeably, as they floated away, “right on the road between Springfield and Monmouth. Did you boys notice the good level land on the bluff? A fine site for a town.”

Abe grinned. Offutt knew he had not been sight-seeing.

“They’ve got a tavern, a cooper shop, and two or three stores. I hear that on Saturdays fifty horses are tied up on that hill, the men waiting a turn at the mill. They ought to have more stores for such a town. I bought a lot and paid ten dollars to have my store built. I wasn’t idling while you got us over the dam, Abe.

“How’d you like to clerk in my store when we git back from New Orleans?”

“I’d like hit right well,” Abe admitted.

They floated to the Illinois River, to the Mississippi, and down to New Orleans. While Offutt sold his cargo and the boat, Abe revisited the city. He saw a slave girl on the auction block—a sight that stayed with him always, and marred his pleasure in the city. Soon they traveled north by steamer to St. Louis. Offutt hired young John to help him there as he assembled goods for the new store. Abe walked the hundred miles home; as he followed the prairie trail, he wondered how he would find his family. His father had vowed he would move.

Thomas Lincoln had kept his word; he had bought land in Coles County, about fifty miles to the southeast. Abe helped them move, build a good cabin, plant and fence a field. Then he said good-by to his parents and left for New Salem.

As Abe tramped west over the prairie, he thought with pleasure of his new job. He was through with hiring out to farmers, through with being only a son in the house of a man who thought that reading was a waste of time. He stayed overnight at John Hanks’s house and pushed off the next morning in the canoe he’d had the year before. The rest of his journey would be easy—just floating down the Sangamon.

Hot July sun beat down while Abe thought over his life and his prospects. In New Salem he might find books. Offutt had said that the well-dressed gentleman was a schoolmaster and that the townfolk were fine people. The Illinois men Abe had met had faith in the future of the country and in the prospects of the common man. “An American can do anything!” was a phrase heard daily.

Anything? If he had the choosing, what would he be, Abe wondered, and was surprised to find the answer, ready in his mind. “I’d be a lawyer!” He thought of Attorney Pitcher and Squire Pate, and suddenly a picture flashed before his mind—a remembered scene, vivid as a man recalls a scene of early childhood. He saw himself and Sarah sitting on a woodpile and a man passing by. He seemed to hear his mammy’s voice saying, “That man’s a lawyer. He knows the law of the land.”

As though her hand was on his shoulder, Abe Lincoln felt assured of his destiny. His mammy would have said that God was guiding him.

His faith in himself was strengthened. He knew no more than before what he would do and how he would do it. But now he knew that there was a place in the world for him and that he was going to it.