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.