When nine years of age, he lost his mother, the family having, two years previously, removed to what was then the territory of Indiana, and settled in the southern part, near the Ohio river, about midway between Louisville and Evansville. The thirteen years which the lad spent here inured him to all the exposures and hardships of frontier life. An active assistant in farm duties, he neglected no opportunity of strengthening his mind, reading with avidity such instructive works as he could procure--on winter evenings, oftentimes, by the light of the blazing fire-place. As satisfaction for damage accidentally done to a borrowed copy of Weems’ Life of Washington--the only one known to be in the neighborhood--he pulled fodder for two days for the owner. At twenty years of age, he had reached the height of nearly six feet and four inches, with a comparatively slender yet uncommonly strong muscular frame--a youthful giant among a race of giants. Morally, he was proverbially honest, conscientious, and upright. In 1830, his father again emigrated, halting for a year on the north fork of the Sangamon river, Illinois, but afterwards pushing on to Coles county, some seventy miles to the eastward, on the upper waters of the Kaskaskia and Embarrass, where his adventurous life ended in 1851, he being in his seventy-third year. The first year in Illinois the son spent with the father; the next he aided in constructing a flat-boat, on which, with other hands, a successful trip to New Orleans and back was made. This city--then the El Dorado of the Western frontiersman--had been visited by the young man, in the same capacity, when he was nineteen years of age. Returning from this expedition, he acted for a year as clerk for his former employer, who was engaged in a store and flouring mill at New Salem, twenty miles below Springfield. While thus occupied, tidings reached him of an Indian invasion on the western border of the State--since known as the Black Hawk war, from an old Sac chief of that name, who was the prominent mover in the matter. In New Salem and vicinity, a company of volunteers was promptly raised, of which young Lincoln was elected captain--his first promotion. The company, however, having disbanded, he again enlisted as a private, and during the three months’ service of this, his first short military campaign, he faithfully discharged his duty to his country, persevering amid peculiar hardships and against the influences of older men around him. With characteristic humor and sarcasm, while commenting, in a Congressional speech during the canvass of 1848, upon the efforts of General Cass’s biographers to exalt their idol into a military hero, he thus alluded to this episode in his life: