Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/55

Rh the bulk of his liquid fortune found a watery grave. He rescued a portion of it, however, with much exertion, and, getting afloat again with his cargo of whiskey, succeeded in navigating the Ohio River to a point in Indiana called Thompson's Ferry. Here he left his goods at a cabin, and started through the trackless forest on foot, in quest of a site wherecn to found his new home. Sixteen miles distant, he came to a place which suited his fancy, although it is not unlikely that the setting sun and the cravings of hunger, warning him to seek a shelter, had some bearing upon his choice of a location.

The "numbers" of his claim were Southwest quarter of Section Thirty-two, Town Four South, Range Five West. The place thus selected was near to both Big and Little Pigeon Creek, in what was then Perry, but thereafter became Spencer County. Having "notched" the trees upon the boundaries of his claim, and made the improvement required by "squatter" law, viz.: to pile up brush as an inchoate clearing, and thus completed his "claim," he returned to Knob Creek on foot. Loading his bedding, kitchen utensils, and other portable property on two borrowed horses, and gathering his little family about him, he then began his hegira from a State where the aristocracy of negro ownership was the passport of respectability, to a State where

The honest man, though e'er sae puir,

Is king o' men, for a' that!

Many scenes, replete with pathos, are presented in the realistic drama of the American pioneer; and this was one of them. The fall had set in; the nights were cold, and the adjuncts to