The nearest Lincoln ever came to a fight was when he was in the vicinity
of the skirmish at Kellogg’s Grove, in the Black Hawk War. The rangers
arrived at the spot after the engagement and helped bury the five men
who were killed.
Lincoln told Noah Brooks, one of his biographers, that he “remembered
just how those men looked as we rode up the little hill where their camp
was. The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they
lay, heads toward us, on the ground. And every man had a round, red spot
on the top of his head about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had
taken his scalp. It was frightful, but it was grotesque; and the red
sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.”
Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat
irrelevantly, “I remember that one man had on buckskin breeches.”
“ABE” WAS NO DUDE.
Always indifferent in matters of dress, Lincoln cut but small figure in
social circles, even in the earliest days of Illinois. His trousers were
too short, his hat too small, and, as a rule, the buttons on the back of
his coat were nearer his shoulder blades than his waist.
No man was richer than his fellows, and there was no aristocracy;
the women wore linsey-woolsey of home manufacture, and dyed them in
accordance with the tastes of the wearers; calico was rarely seen, and a
woman wearing a dress of that material was the envy of her sisters.
There being no shoemakers the women wore moccasins, and the men made
their own boots. A hunting shirt, leggins made of skins, buckskin
breeches, dyed green, constituted an apparel no maiden could withstand.