When Abraham Lincoln was a poor young lawyer from Springfield,
attending the perambulatory court down at Lewiston, Illinois, he found
the place crowded by a Methodist meeting as well as the court having an
attractive case to try. He was obliged--because of exclusion from the
inn--to put up at the sheriff's house. Mrs. Davidson herself could only
offer him shares with Mr. Stephen A. Douglas, also a rising man, and
Peter Cartwright, the noted preacher--on the floor, but on a feather
bed. At that period the wild goose flew low. It may be supposed that
the student of Shakespeare might quote "When shall we three meet
again?" on rising between the famous border worthies in the dawn. The
hospitality was so refreshing that the trio spent the next night there.
They sat up by the large fireside, capping stories. The enmity of
lawyers, and even of politicians, is but skin-deep, and Steve and Abe
clashed not at all to meet the minister's reproof. Lincoln rocked while
story-telling in a cane-bottomed chair, taken from the steamboat
celebrated in Spoon River annals as its first navigator. Lincoln was
the more interested, as he had been boatman and pilot on his river, the
Sangamon. In the 1820's, this toy boat, the _Utility_, struggled into
the high water of Spoon River. It is a tributary of the Illinois. Now,
though the county is named Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew
anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a
steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor
of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the
population in hearing when she ascended the virgin Spoon.
One Sam Jenkins had been on a spree for a week, and even he was roused
by the tremendous sound. As he rushed from his cabin, by the terrific
blaze from the high smoke-stack and the furnace burning pitch-pine, he
sank onto his shaking knees and yelled:
"Boys, I have got 'em for the third time! It is all up with me!"
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