INDIANA
[Sidenote: 1818.]
By the time the boy Abraham had attained his seventh
year, the social condition of Kentucky had changed
considerably from the early pioneer days. Life
had assumed a more settled and orderly course.
The old barbarous equality of the earlier time was
gone; a difference of classes began to be seen.
Those who held slaves assumed a distinct social superiority
over those who did not. Thomas Lincoln, concluding
that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined
to seek his fortune in Indiana. He had heard
of rich and unoccupied lands in Perry County in that
State, and thither he determined to go. He built
a rude raft, loaded it with his kit of tools and four
hundred gallons of whisky, and trusted his fortunes
to the winding water-courses. He met with only
one accident on his way: his raft capsized in
the Ohio River, but he fished up his kit of tools
and most of the ardent spirits, and arrived safely
at the place of a settler named Posey, with whom he
left his odd invoice of household goods for the wilderness,
while he started on foot to look for a home in the
dense forest. He selected a spot which pleased
him in his first day’s journey. He then
walked back to Knob Creek and brought his family on
to their new home. No humbler cavalcade ever invaded
the Indiana timber. Besides his wife and two
children, his earthly possessions were of the slightest,
for the backs of two borrowed horses sufficed for
the load. Insufficient bedding and clothing, a
few pans and kettles, were their sole movable wealth.
They relied on Lincoln’s kit of tools for their
furniture, and on his rifle for their food. At
Posey’s they hired a wagon and literally hewed
a path through the wilderness to their new habitation
near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half east of
Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.
Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and
children, built a temporary shelter of the sort called
in the frontier language “a half-faced camp”;
merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates
on three sides from foul weather, but left them open
to its inclemency in front. For a whole year
his family lived in this wretched fold, while he was
clearing a little patch of ground for planting corn,
and building a rough cabin for a permanent residence.
They moved into the latter before it was half completed;
for by this time the Sparrows had followed the Lincolns
from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given up
to them. But the rude cabin seemed so spacious
and comfortable after the squalor of “the camp,”
that Thomas Lincoln did no further work on it for
a long time. He left it for a year or two without
doors, or windows, or floor. The battle for existence
allowed him no time for such superfluities. He
raised enough corn to support life; the dense forest
around him abounded in every form of feathered game;
