The flatboat built and loaded, the party started for New Orleans about
the middle of April. They had gone but a few miles when they met with
another adventure. At the village of New Salem there was a mill-dam.
On it the boat stuck, and here for nearly twenty-four hours it hung,
the bow in the air and the stern in the water, the cargo slowly
setting backward--shipwreck almost certain. The village of New Salem
turned out in a body to see what the strangers would do in their
predicament. They shouted, suggested, and advised for a time, but
finally discovered that one big fellow in the crew was ignoring them
and working out a plan of relief. Having unloaded the cargo into a
neighboring boat, Lincoln had succeeded in tilting his craft. By
boring a hole in the end extending over the dam the water was let out.
This done, the boat was easily shoved over and reloaded. The ingenuity
which he had exercised in saving his boat made a deep impression on
the crowd on the bank. It was talked over for many a day, and the
general verdict was that the "bow-hand" was a "strapper." The
proprietor of boat and cargo was even more enthusiastic than the
spectators, and vowed he would build a steamboat for the Sangamon and
make Lincoln the captain. Lincoln himself was interested in what he
had done, and nearly twenty years later he embodied his reflections on
this adventure in a curious invention for getting boats over shoals.
[Illustration: WILLIAM G. GREENE.
William G. Greene was one of the earliest friends of Lincoln at New
Salem. He stood on the bank of the Sangamon River on the 19th of
April, 1831, and watched Lincoln bore a hole in the bottom of the
flatboat, which had lodged on the mill-dam, so that the water might
run out. A few months later he and Lincoln were both employed by the
enterprising Denton Offutt, as clerks in the store and managers of the
mill which had been leased by Offutt. It was William G. Greene who,
returning home from college at Jacksonville on a vacation, brought
Richard Yates with him, and introduced him to Lincoln, the latter
being found stretched out on the cellar door of Bowling Green's cabin
reading a book. Mr. Greene was born in Tennessee in 1812, and went to
Illinois in 1822. After the disappearance of New Salem he removed to
Tallula, a few miles away, where in after years he engaged in the
banking business. He died in 1894, after amassing a fortune.]