canvas-covered moving wagons wound their slow way over new roads into
still newer country; while the older settlers, left behind, watched
their progress with longing eyes. It was almost as if a spell had been
cast over these toil-worn pioneers, making them forget, at sight of such
new ventures, all the hardships they had themselves endured in subduing
the wilderness. At last, on March 1, 1830, when Abraham was just
twenty-one years old, the Lincolns, yielding to this overmastering
frontier impulse to "move" westward, left the old farm in Indiana to
make a new home in Illinois. "Their mode of conveyance was wagons drawn
by ox-teams," Mr. Lincoln wrote in 1860; "and Abraham drove one of the
teams." They settled in Macon County on the north side of the Sangamon
River, about ten miles west of Decatur, where they built a cabin, made
enough rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and cultivated the
ground, and raised a crop of corn upon it that first season. It was the
same heavy labor over again that they had endured when they went from
Kentucky to Indiana; but this time the strength and energy of young
Abraham were at hand to inspire and aid his father, and there was no
miserable shivering year of waiting in a half-faced camp before the
family could be suitably housed. They were not to escape hardship,
however. They fell victims to fever and ague, which they had not known
in Indiana, and became greatly discouraged; and the winter after their
arrival proved one of intense cold and suffering for the pioneers, being
known in the history of the State as "the winter of the deep snow."
The severe weather began in the Christmas holidays with a storm of such
fatal suddenness that people who were out of doors had difficulty in
reaching their homes, and not a few perished, their fate remaining
unknown until the melting snows of early spring showed where they had
fallen.

In March, 1831, at the end of this terrible winter, Abraham Lincoln
left his father's cabin to seek his own fortune in the world. It was the
frontier custom for young men to do this when they reached the age of
twenty-one. Abraham was now twenty-two, but had willingly remained
with his people an extra year to give them the benefit of his labor and
strength in making the new home.

He had become acquainted with a man named Offut, a trader and
speculator, who pretended to great business shrewdness, but whose chief
talent lay in boasting of the magnificent things h