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.
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