the frontier, and Mentor Graham, the clerk who was
present, looking around for a properly qualified colleague, noticed
Lincoln, and asked him if he could write, to which he answered, in local
idiom, that he "could make a few rabbit tracks," and was thereupon
immediately inducted into his first office. He performed his duties not
only to the general satisfaction, but so as to interest Graham, who was
a schoolmaster, and afterward made himself very useful to Lincoln.

Offutt finally arrived with a miscellaneous lot of goods, which Lincoln
opened and put in order in a room that a former New Salem storekeeper
was just ready to vacate, and whose remnant stock Offutt also purchased.
Trade was evidently not brisk at New Salem, for the commercial zeal of
Offutt led him to increase his venture by renting the Rutledge and
Cameron mill, on whose historic dam the flatboat had stuck. For a while
the charge of the mill was added to Lincoln's duties, until another
clerk was engaged to help him. There is likewise good evidence that in
addition to his duties at the store and the mill, Lincoln made himself
generally useful--that he cut down trees and split rails enough to make
a large hog-pen adjoining the mill, a proceeding quite natural when we
remember that his hitherto active life and still growing muscles
imperatively demanded the exercise which measuring calico or weighing
out sugar and coffee failed to supply.

We know from other incidents that he was possessed of ample bodily
strength. In frontier life it is not only needed for useful labor of
many kinds, but is also called upon to aid in popular amusement. There
was a settlement in the neighborhood of New Salem called Clary's Grove,
where lived a group of restless, rollicking backwoodsmen with a strong
liking for various forms of frontier athletics and rough practical
jokes. In the progress of American settlement there has always been a
time, whether the frontier was in New England or Pennsylvania or
Kentucky, or on the banks of the Mississippi, when the champion wrestler
held some fraction of the public consideration accorded to the victor in
the Olympic games of Greece. Until Lincoln came, Jack Armstrong was the
champion wrestler of Clary's Grove and New Salem, and picturesque
stories are told how the neighborhood talk, inflamed by Offutt's fulsome
laudation of his clerk, made Jack Armstrong feel that his fame was in
danger. Lincoln put off the encounter as long as he could,