made from a rail which he had split on his father's
farm.

The next important record of Lincoln's career connects him with Mr.
Denton Offutt. The circumstances which brought him into this relation
are thus narrated by Mr. J.H. Barrett: "While there was snow on the
ground, at the close of the year 1830, or early in 1831, a man came to
that part of Macon County where young Lincoln was living, in pursuit of
hands to aid him in a flatboat voyage down the Mississippi. The fact was
known that the youth had once made such a trip, and his services were
sought for this occasion. As one who had his own subsistence to earn,
with no capital but his hands, he accepted the proposition made him.
Perhaps there was something of his inherited and acquired fondness for
exciting adventure impelling him to this decision. With him were also
employed his former fellow-laborer, John Hanks, and a son of his
step-mother named John Johnston. In the spring of 1831 Lincoln set out
to fulfil his engagement. The floods had so swollen the streams that the
Sangamon country was a vast sea before him. His first entrance into that
county was over these wide-spread waters in a canoe. The time had come
to join his employer on his journey to New Orleans, but the latter had
been disappointed by another person on whom he relied to furnish him a
boat on the Illinois river. Accordingly all hands set to work, and
themselves built a boat on that river, for their purposes. This done,
they set out on their long trip, making a successful voyage to New
Orleans and back."

Mr. Herndon says: "Mr. Lincoln came into Sangamon County down the North
Fork of the Sangamon river, in a frail canoe, in the spring of 1831. I
can see from where I write the identical place where he cut the timbers
for his flatboat, which he built at a little village called Sangamon
Town, seven miles northwest of Springfield. Here he had it loaded with
corn, wheat, bacon, and other provisions destined for New Orleans, at
which place he landed in the month of May, 1831. He returned home in
June of that year, and finally settled in another little village called
New Salem, on the high bluffs of the Sangamon river, then in Sangamon
County and now in Menard County, and about twenty miles northwest of
Springfield."

The practical and ingenious character of Lincoln's mind is shown in the
act that several years after his river experience he invented and
patented a device for overcoming some of the diffic