and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the
river, he insisted on their joining him. John Johnston was afterwards
added to the party, probably at the request of his foster-brother, to
share in the golden profits of the enterprise; for fifty cents a day,
and a contingent dividend of twenty dollars apiece, seemed like a
promise of immediate opulence to the boys. In the spring, when the
rivers broke up and the melting snows began to pour in torrents down
every ravine and gully, the three young men paddled down the Sangamon
in a canoe to the point where Jamestown now stands; whence they walked
five miles to Springfield, where Offutt had given them rendezvous.
They met him at Elliott's tavern and far from happy. Amid the
multiplicity of his engagements he had failed to procure a flat-boat,
and the first work his new hands must do was to build one. They cut
the timber, with frontier innocence, from "Congress land," and soon
had a serviceable craft afloat, with which they descended the current
of the Sangamon to New Salem, a little village which seems to have
been born for the occasion, as it came into existence just before the
arrival of Lincoln, nourished for seven years while he remained one of
its citizens, and died soon after he went away. His introduction to
his fellow-citizens was effected in a peculiar and somewhat striking
manner. Offutt's boat had come to serious embarrassment on Rutledge's
mill-dam, and the unwonted incident brought the entire population to
the water's edge. They spent a good part of the day watching the
hapless flat-boat, resting midships on the dam, the forward end in the
air and the stern taking in the turbid Sangamon water. Nobody knew
what to do with the disaster except "the bow-oar," who is described as
a gigantic youth "with his trousers rolled up some five feet," who was
wading about the boat and rigging up some undescribed contrivance by
which the cargo was unloaded, the boat tilted and the water let out by
boring a hole through the bottom, and everything brought safely to