Salemites another accomplishment.  An election was to be held, and one of the clerks was sick and failed to come.  Scribes were not plenty on the frontier, and Mentor Graham, the clerk who was present, looking around for a properly qualified colleague, noticed Lincoln, and asked him if he could write, to which he answered, in local idiom, that he “could make a few rabbit tracks,” and was thereupon immediately inducted into his first office.  He performed his duties not only to the general satisfaction, but so as to interest Graham, who was a schoolmaster, and afterward made himself very useful to Lincoln.

Offutt finally arrived with a miscellaneous lot of goods, which Lincoln opened and put in order in a room that a former New Salem storekeeper was just ready to vacate, and whose remnant stock Offutt also purchased.  Trade was evidently not brisk at New Salem, for the commercial zeal of Offutt led him to increase his venture by renting the Rutledge and Cameron mill, on whose historic dam the flatboat had stuck.  For a while the charge of the mill was added to Lincoln’s duties, until another clerk was engaged to help him.  There is likewise good evidence that in addition to his duties at the store and the mill, Lincoln made himself generally useful—­that he cut down trees and split rails enough to make a large hog-pen adjoining the mill, a proceeding quite natural when we remember that his hitherto active life and still growing muscles imperatively demanded the exercise which measuring calico or weighing out sugar and coffee failed to supply.

We know from other incidents that he was possessed of ample bodily strength.  In frontier life it is not only needed for useful labor of many kinds, but is also called upon to aid in popular amusement.  There was a settlement in the neighborhood of New Salem called Clary’s Grove, where lived a group of restless, rollicking backwoodsmen with a strong liking for various forms of frontier athletics and rough practical jokes.  In the progress of American settlement there has always been a time, whether the frontier was in New England or Pennsylvania or Kentucky, or on the banks of the Mississippi, when the champion wrestler held some fraction of the public consideration accorded to the victor in the Olympic games of Greece.  Until Lincoln came, Jack Armstrong was the champion wrestler of Clary’s Grove and New Salem, and picturesque stories are told how the neighborhood talk, inflamed by Offutt’s fulsome laudation of his clerk, made Jack Armstrong feel that his fame was in danger.  Lincoln put off the encounter as long as he could, and when the wrestling match finally came off neither could throw the other.  The bystanders became satisfied that they were equally matched in strength and skill, and the cool courage which Lincoln manifested throughout the ordeal prevented the usual close of such incidents with a fight.  Instead of becoming chronic enemies and leaders of a neighborhood feud, Lincoln’s self-possession and good temper turned the contest into the beginning of a warm and lasting friendship.