In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious
minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little
damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water
navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was
engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir Walter
Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon
River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which
Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a
good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best
he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the
experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam. Here
a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place
called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to
wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the
spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in
his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water
had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed
the _Talisman_ off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting
an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of
the dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and
get over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row")
Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to
Beardstown. I am sure I got that!"
* * * * *