One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.
He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip
little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic nature
what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the
pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of
barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water;
the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with
its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign
speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds
besides Pigeon Creek!

What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey
we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his life
in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" was within
fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana
which received early in the century many families of much the same
estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the edges
of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located on good
land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its
rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such
settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower
class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though
it retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance
was evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the
camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social event,
the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours:
a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a
prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and
outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted
by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by