Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/36

6 Indian. The eldest son, Mordecai, shot and killed the savage just as he picked up little Thomas and was starting to make off with his prize, and so the boy was saved to become the father of the President.

There is a dispute about the location of the scene of the tragedy. Mr. Nail writes:

The newspaper article stating that my great-grand- father Lincoln was killed on Lincoln's Run is altogether wrong: he was killed at "Beargrass" fort, as I got it directly from my grandmother, who was in the fort at the time, and knew what she was talking about. While he lived in the fort, he entered four hundred acres of land on Floyd's fork of Salt Run in what is now Bullitt County, Kentucky. . . . My great-grandmother, Mary Shipley Lincoln, moved with my grandfather, William Brumfield, who married her daughter Nancy, to Hardin County, Kentucky, and lived the balance of her long life with them, and died, when I was a good big boy, at the age of one hundred and ten years.

The grandmother and great-grandmother were both present at this tragedy, which must have impressed itself deeply upon their minds. So likewise must it have been ever present to the mind of his grand-uncle, Mordecai, who was one of the chief actors in that frontier tragedy; and the writer of the above, a highly intelligent and, in all respects, honorable man, professes to have heard it often talked of in the family circle. Under ordinary circumstances this would be historically conclusive, and certainly as well attested as historical facts usually are; while nobody fixes authoritatively any different locality.

As militating against the above theory is the following: Abraham Lincoln was killed in 1784. In May, 1780, the town of Louisville was chartered by the Virginia Legislature, and a tract of