'deep snow' of Illinois."

II

Flatboat--New Salem--Election Clerk--Store and Mill--Kirkham's
"Grammar"--"Sangamo Journal"--The Talisman--Lincoln's Address, March 9,
1832--Black Hawk War--Lincoln Elected Captain--Mustered out May 27,
1832--Reenlisted in Independent Spy Battalion--Finally Mustered out, June
16, 1832--Defeated for the Legislature--Blacksmith or Lawyer?--The
Lincoln-Berry Store--Appointed Postmaster, May 7, 1833--National Politics

The life of Abraham Lincoln, or that part of it which will interest
readers for all future time, properly begins in March, 1831, after the
winter of the "deep snow." According to frontier custom, being then
twenty-one years old, he left his father's cabin to make his own fortune
in the world. A man named Denton Offutt, one of a class of local traders
and speculators usually found about early Western settlements, had
probably heard something of young Lincoln's Indiana history,
particularly that he had made a voyage on a flatboat from Indiana to New
Orleans, and that he was strong, active, honest, and generally, as would
be expressed in Western phrase, "a smart young fellow." He was therefore
just the sort of man Offutt needed for one of his trading enterprises,
and Mr. Lincoln himself relates somewhat in detail how Offutt engaged
him and the beginning of the venture:

"Abraham, together with his stepmother's son, John D. Johnston, and
John Hanks, yet residing in Macon County, hired themselves to Denton
Offutt to take a flatboat from Beardstown, Illinois [on the Illinois
River], to New Orleans; and for that purpose were to join
him--Offutt--at Springfield, Illinois, so soon as the snow should go
off. When it did go off, which was about the first of March, 1831, the
county was so flooded as to make traveling by land impracticable, to
obviate which difficulty they purchased a large canoe, and came down the
Sangamon River in it. This is the time and the manner of Abraham's first
entrance into Sangamon County. They found Offutt at Springfield, but
learned from him that he had failed in getting a boat at Beardstown.
This led to their hiring themselves to him for twelve dollars per month
each, and getting the timber out of the trees and building a boat at Old
Sangamon town on the Sangamon River, seven miles northwest of
Springfield, which boat they took to New Orleans, substantially upon the
old contract."

It needs here to be recalled that Lincoln's father was a carpenter,