As soon as the boat was completed, a partial cargo of barrel-pork, hogs, and corn was taken on board, and the craft started down the river. Offutt went in the capacity of merchant, to make purchases along the way. Just below New Salem, of which we shall hear and see much hereafter, the boat stuck fast on Rutledge’s dam through one night and part of a day—“one end of it hanging over the dam and the other sunk deep in the water behind.”

“A pretty fix now,” cried out Offutt; “it will take longer to get out of this scrape than it did to build the boat.”

“Guess not,” replied Abraham, who took in the situation at a glance. “We must unload, though.”

“Into the river, I s’pose,” responded Offutt.

“Borrow a boat, and transfer the cargo to it, and let us see what can be done,” continued Abraham.

This was in the morning, after the boat had “stuck” through the night. Nearly all the people of New Salem had assembled on shore watching the movements.

“Your boat will sink or break in two pieces, if you are not in a hurry,” cried out a looker-on. And such a result seemed inevitable. For the cargo was sliding backwards, and the peril increased with every passing minute. But, under Abraham’s direction, the cargo was soon shifted to a borrowed boat, when he immediately bored a large hole in the bottom of that part of the boat extending over the dam. Then he erected “queer machinery” for tilting the part of the boat under water, and holding it in position until the water was emptied through the hole bored. Stopping up the hole after the water had run out was the work of only a few minutes, when the relieved craft was pushed over the dam, and glided into the deep pool below, amidst the hurrahs of the many beholders. Offutt was particularly elated.

“That’s real skill, Abe,” he cried; “one in a thousand couldn’t do that. Three cheers for Abe Lincoln,” he shouted, swinging his hat, and leading the cheers vociferously.

It was a hearty tribute to Abraham’s ingenuity, in which the observers joined without reserve.

“When I get back from New Orleans,” shouted Offutt, turning to the beholders on shore, “I’ll build a steamboat to navigate the Sangamon River, and make Abe captain. I’ll build it with runners for ice and rollers for shoals and dams, and, by thunder, it will have to go, with Abe for captain!”

This funny way of putting it awoke another burst of applause from the spectators, while the tall, awkward Abraham shook his sides with laughter.

This mishap to their craft set Abraham to thinking of ways to overcome the difficulties of navigating Western rivers. It was several years, however, before his thoughts and studies thereupon took tangible shape in the form of an invention. After he was elected President, the Washington correspondent of the Boston Advertiser wrote as follows concerning it:—

“Occupying an ordinary and common-place 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 at once one of the most curious and one of the 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 in 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 much 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 flat boatman, 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