It was in March, 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one years of
age, that he moved from Indiana to Macon County, Illinois. He spent
his first spring in the new country helping his father settle. In the
summer of that year he started out for himself, doing various kinds of
rough farm work in the neighborhood until March of 1831, when he went
to Sangamon town, near Springfield, to build a flatboat. In April he
started on this flatboat for New Orleans, which he reached in May.
After a month in that city, he returned, in June, to Illinois, where
he made a short visit at his parents' home, now in Coles County, and
in July went to New Salem, to take charge of a store and mill owned by
Denton Offutt, who had employed him on the flatboat.[A] The goods for
the new store had not arrived when Lincoln reached New Salem. Obliged
to turn his hand to something, he piloted down the Sangamon and
Illinois rivers, as far as Beardstown, a flatboat bearing the family
and goods of a pioneer bound for Texas. At Beardstown he found
Offutt's goods waiting to be taken to New Salem. As he footed his
way home he met two men with a wagon and ox-team going for the goods.
Offutt had expected Lincoln to wait at Beardstown until the ox-team
arrived, and the teamsters, not having any credentials, asked Lincoln
to give them an order for the goods. This, sitting down by the
roadside, he wrote out; and one of the men used to relate that it
contained a misspelled word, which he corrected.