"The village of New Salem, the scene of Lincoln's mercantile career," writes one of our correspondents who has studied the history of the town and visited the spot where it once stood, "was one of the many little towns which, in the pioneer days, sprang up along the Sangamon River, a stream then looked upon as navigable and as destined to be counted among the highways of commerce. Twenty miles northwest of Springfield, strung along the left bank of the Sangamon, parted by hollows and ravines, is a row of high hills. On one of these--a long, narrow ridge, beginning with a sharp and sloping point near the river, running south, and parallel with the stream a little way, and then, reaching its highest point, making a sudden turn to the west, and gradually widening until lost in the prairie--stood this frontier village. The crooked river for a short distance comes from the east, and, seeming surprised at meeting the bluff, abruptly changes its course, and flows to the north. Across the river the bottom stretches out, reaching half a mile back to the highlands. New Salem, founded in 1829 by James Rutledge and John Cameron, and a dozen years later a deserted village, is rescued from oblivion only by the fact that Lincoln was once one of its inhabitants. His first sight of the town had been in April, 1831, when the flatboat he had built and its little crew were detained in getting their boat over the Rutledge and Cameron mill-dam, on which it lodged. When Lincoln walked into New Salem, three months later, he was not altogether a stranger, for the people remembered him as the ingenious flatboat-man who, a little while before, had freed his boat from water (and thus enabled it to get over the dam) by resorting to the miraculous expedient of boring a hole in the bottom."[B]