242.  Summary.—­In January, 1848, gold was discovered at Captain Sutter’s saw-mill at Coloma, California.  Soon after that, Mexico let us have California and New Mexico, and they were added to the United States.  Thousands of people, from all parts of the country, hurried to California to dig gold, and so that state grew more rapidly in population than any other new part of the United States ever had in the same length of time.  Before Captain Sutter died we added the Gadsden Purchase and Alaska.

Who was Captain Sutter?  Where did he live?  Tell how he lived.  What did he begin to build at Coloma?  Tell what Marshall found there, and what was said about it.  Tell how Marshall took the shining dust to Captain Sutter, and what the captain did.  What made them both certain that the dust was gold?  Was the captain pleased with the discovery?  What did he think would happen?  What is said about our war with Mexico?  What did we fight about?  What did we get at the end of the war?  What happened in May, 1848?  Then what happened?  How many people went to California?  What happened to Captain Sutter?  What is said about Marshall?  What land did we buy in 1853?  What in 1867?

How long ago did the Revolution end?  How many states did we have then? [Can any one in the class tell how many we have now?] What land did we buy in 1803?  In 1819?  What did we add in 1845?  In 1846?  In 1848?  What did we buy in 1853?  In 1867?  How many such additions have we made in all?  What could the giant do?  What has “Brother Jonathan” done?  Where is one foot?  Where is the other?

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(1809-1865).

243.  The tall man from Illinois making his first speech in Congress; how he wrote his name; what the people called him.—­Not many days before gold was found at Sutter’s saw-mill in California (1848), a tall, awkward-looking man from Illinois was making his first speech in Congress.  At that time he generally wrote his name

[Illustration:  A. Lincoln.]

but after he had become President of the United States, he often wrote it out in full,—­

[Illustration:  Abraham Lincoln.]

The plain country people of Illinois, who knew all about him, liked best to call him by the title they had first given him,—­“Honest Abe Lincoln,” or, for short, “Honest Abe.”  Let us see how he got that name.

244.  The Lincoln family move to Indiana; “Abe” helps his father build a new home; what it was like.—­Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809, in a log shanty on a lonely little farm in Kentucky.[1] When “Abe,” as he was called, was seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, moved, with his family, to Indiana;[2] there the boy and his mother worked in the woods and helped him build a new home.  That new home was not so good or so comfortable as some of our cow-sheds are.  It was simply a hut made of rough logs and limbs of trees.  It had no door and no windows.  One side of it was left entirely open; and if a roving Indian or a bear wanted to walk in to dinner, there was nothing whatever to stop him.  In winter “Abe’s” mother used to hang up some buffalo skins before this wide entrance, to keep out the cold, but in summer the skins were taken down, so that living in such a cabin was the next thing to living out-of-doors.