It is out of this light and shade gathered by the Father of Waters--the
Mississippi--along its banks, that there comes silently one day in 1831,
the lank, bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of
twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same
tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four
inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly
as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in
prairie legends, however, that at the beginning of the voyage, his boat
being stuck midway across a dam, he had ingeniously managed to release it
and save all from shipwreck. It seems now an incident fraught with
prophecy. And it is said that many years later he made designs of a
contrivance that would lift flatboats over shoals and even let them
navigate on ice--an intimation of the resourcefulness of men left to fight
alone with the forces of nature.
He was not a "Yankee," as one writing me in Paris characterized the men of
that valley.
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