In the spring of 1831 Lincoln set out to fulfil his engagement.  The floods had so swollen the streams that the Sangamon country was a vast sea before him.  His first entrance into that county was over these wide-spread waters in a canoe.  The time had come to join his employer on his journey to New Orleans, but the latter had been disappointed by another person on whom he relied to furnish him a boat on the Illinois river.  Accordingly all hands set to work, and themselves built a boat on that river, for their purposes.  This done, they set out on their long trip, making a successful voyage to New Orleans and back.”

Mr. Herndon says:  “Mr. Lincoln came into Sangamon County down the North Fork of the Sangamon river, in a frail canoe, in the spring of 1831.  I can see from where I write the identical place where he cut the timbers for his flatboat, which he built at a little village called Sangamon Town, seven miles northwest of Springfield.  Here he had it loaded with corn, wheat, bacon, and other provisions destined for New Orleans, at which place he landed in the month of May, 1831.  He returned home in June of that year, and finally settled in another little village called New Salem, on the high bluffs of the Sangamon river, then in Sangamon County and now in Menard County, and about twenty miles northwest of Springfield.”

The practical and ingenious character of Lincoln’s mind is shown in the act that several years after his river experience he invented and patented a device for overcoming some of the difficulties in the navigation of western rivers with which this trip had made him familiar.  The following interesting account of this invention is given: 

“Occupying an ordinary and commonplace position in one of the show-cases in the large hall of the Patent Office is one little model which in ages to come will be prized as one of the most curious and most sacred relics in that vast museum of unique and priceless things.  This is a plain and simple model of a steamboat roughly fashioned in wood by the hand of Abraham Lincoln.  It bears date 1849, when the inventor was known simply as a successful lawyer and rising politician of Central Illinois.  Neither his practice nor his politics took up so much of his time as to prevent him from giving some attention to contrivances which he hoped might be of benefit to the world and of profit to himself.  The design of this invention is suggestive of one phase of Abraham Lincoln’s early life, when he went up and down the Mississippi as a flatboatman and became familiar with some of the dangers and inconveniences attending the navigation of the western rivers.  It is an attempt to make it an easy matter to transport vessels over shoals and snags and ‘sawyers.’  The main idea is that of an apparatus resembling a noiseless bellows placed on each side of the hull of the craft just below the water line and worked by an odd but not complicated system of ropes, valves, and pulleys.  When the keel of the vessel grates