The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the champion's warmest friends.
BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP."
In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was engaged to run a steamboat called the Talisman, after Sir Walter Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam. Here a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed the Talisman off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of the dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and get over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row") Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to Beardstown. I am sure I got that!"
THE INITIATOR INSTALLED.
As a fruit of incessant study Abraham Lincoln fitted himself to accept the post of clerk at Offutt's store, in New Salem, in 1831. It was a responsible position, requiring strict honesty, intelligence, glib talk, attention, and courtesy to the few dames in the population of twenty households, "with the back settlement to hear from." In fact, Lincoln's gifts and cultivated acquirements made him such a favorite that the list of customers from out of town was extensive. This promotion of a newcomer nettled the bad element of the region. They were located from congeniality in a suburb termed Clary's Grove. Like the tail which undertakes to wag the dog, this tag constituted itself the criterion and proposed "initiating" any accession to the inhabitants. To take the conceit out of the upstart who had leaped from the flatboat deck to behind the counter at the store--the acme of a bumpkin's ambition--they selected their bully. This Jack Armstrong was held so high by Bill Clary, "father" of the Grove boys, that he bet with Offutt, over-loud in praise of his help, that Jack could beat Abe, "and your Abe has got to be initiated, anyway!"
Abraham refused under provocation to have anything to do with "rough-and-tumble" fighting--as also known as "scuffle and tussle," and "wooling and pulling"--in short, these agreeable features promise to include all brutalities save gouging, which was unfashionable so far to the North. But a man could not live quietly on the frontier without showing to such ruffians that his hands could shield his head. For the honor of the store, the clerk had to stand up to the opponent.
The bout came off. In the first attack, Lincoln lifted the foe, though heavier, clean off his feet, but he was unable to lay him down in the orthodox manner, consisting in placing him flat on his back, with both shoulder-blades denting the earth. The semi-victor amicably said: "Let's quit, Jack! You see I cannot give you the fall--and you cannot give it me."
The gang shouted for a resumption of the "sport," thinking this was weakness of the competitor. They joined again, but Armstrong, having his doubts, resorted to foul play--kicking or "legging," as the localism stands. Indignantly, Lincoln drew him up again and shook him in mid-air as a terrier does a rat. The rowdies, seeing their champion bested, shouted for him to make a fight of it, and probably they would have "mixed in" and made a "fight for all" in another minute. But Jack had his doubts set at rest as to the prospect of overcoming a man who could hold him out and off at arm's length; and, begging to be set down, grasped his antagonist's hand in friendship and proclaimed him the best man "who had ever broke into" that section. The two became friends, and the gang gradually dwindled by this recession from their ranks of their Goliath.
THE HORRORS FOR THE THIRD TIME!
When Abraham Lincoln was a poor young lawyer from Springfield, attending the perambulatory court down at Lewiston, Illinois, he found the place crowded by a Methodist meeting as well as the court having an attractive case to try. He was obliged--because of exclusion from the inn--to put up at the sheriff's house. Mrs. Davidson herself could only offer him shares with Mr. Stephen A. Douglas, also a rising man, and Peter Cartwright, the noted preacher--on the floor, but on a feather bed. At that period the wild goose flew low. It may be supposed that the student of Shakespeare might quote "When shall we three meet again?" on rising between the famous border worthies in the dawn. The hospitality was so refreshing that the trio spent the next night there. They sat up by the large fireside, capping stories. The enmity of lawyers, and even of politicians, is but skin-deep, and Steve and Abe clashed not at all to meet the minister's reproof. Lincoln rocked while story-telling in a cane-bottomed chair, taken from the steamboat celebrated in Spoon River annals as its first navigator. Lincoln was the more interested, as he had been boatman and pilot on his river, the Sangamon. In the 1820's, this toy boat, the Utility, struggled into the high water of Spoon River. It is a tributary of the Illinois. Now, though the county is named Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the population in hearing when she ascended the virgin Spoon.