Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/58

28 novelty of a change from civilized life. For a mother and young children, during foul and fair weather alike, it was, however, the most cruel travesty of a home that can well be conceived.

Indiana had just been admitted as a State, and the new dignity was alluring settlers from the neighboring States of Kentucky and Ohio. So Thomas Lincoln, the pioneer of Pigeon Creek, made a journey to Vincennes to make his land entry from the government. He walked all the way, going and coming. Southern Indiana was then a dense virgin forest, having every variety of the hard woods indigenous to that zone. "Varmints," as the early settlers termed them—wildcats, opossums, raccoons, etc.—abounded; likewise deer, wild turkeys, grouse, quails, and pheasants. Indeed, most of the animal food was procured by the rifle.

Nearby the Lincoln settlement was a famous "deer lick"—a low place where saline water exudes from the ground, and to which wild animals were wont to repair for the salt, they themselves forming in turn objects of the hunter's quest. From this lick the Lincolns derived the chief part of their provender.

Here, in the forest primeval, on the backwater of civilization, this little family of four pursued their dull round of existence without a solitary bubble of the zest of life. They rose with the robin and commenced their weary round of drudgery. The father felled trees; the mother lopped off the branches; the little ones piled brush, hoed away weeds, and walked a mile to the nearest source of water supply, bearing back the heavy burden between them. There was not a pair of shoes among the four. Home-made