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“house raisings, log rolling corn shucking and workings of all kinds.” To be sure, he got bored easily and on many of these occasions, as Dennis Hanks remembered, “would Commence his pranks—tricks—jokes stories, and ... all would stop—gather around Abe and listen.” At the age of seventeen he, together with Dennis Hanks and Squire Hall, got the idea of making money by selling firewood to the steamers plying the Ohio River, and they set to work sawing logs at Posey’s Landing, only to find that demand was slack and money was scarce. They were finally able to swap nine cords of firewood for nine yards of white domestic cloth, out of which, Hanks reported, “Abe had a shirt made, and it was positively the first white shirt which ... he had ever owned or worn.” Next he hired out to James Taylor, who ran a ferry along the Anderson River in the same vicinity; when he was not helping on the river, he plowed, killed hogs, and made fences, doing what he remembered as “the roughest work a young man could be made to do.” He earned $6 a month, with 314 extra on days when he slaughtered hogs. In what spare time he had, he built a little flatboat, or rowboat. When two men asked him to row them out into the river so that they could take passage on a steamer that was coming downstream, he sculled them out, helped them aboard, and lifted their heavy trunks onto the deck. As they left, each of them tossed a silver half-dollar on the floor of his boat in payment. “I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money,” Lincoln recalled nearly forty years later. “I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”
    The lure of the river was irresistible, promising escape from the constricted world of Little Pigeon Creek. In 1828, when James Gentry, who owned the local store, decided to send a cargo of meat, corn, and flour down the rivers for sale in New Orleans, Lincoln accepted the offer to accompany his son, Allen, on the flatboat, at a wage of $8 a month. They made a leisurely trip, stopping frequently to trade at the sugar plantations along the river in Louisiana, until the dreamlike quality of their journey was rudely interrupted. “One night,” as Lincoln remembered, “they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then ‘cut cable’ ‘weighed anchor’ and left.” New Orleans was by far the largest city the two country boys had ever seen, with imposing buildings, busy shops, and incessant traffic. Here they heard French spoken as readily as English. In New Orleans, Lincoln for the first time encountered largenumbers of slaves. But neither boy made any record of their visit to the Crescent City; perhaps it was too overwhelming.
    Returning to Indiana, Lincoln dutifully handed over his earnings to his father, but he began to spend more and more time away from home. He liked to go to the village of Gentryville, about a mile and a half away, where he occasionally helped out at James Gentry’s store, and he worked sometimes with John Baldwin, the local blacksmith. As always, he was full of talk and plans and jokes and tricks, and he gathered about him all the young men who were about to come of age and were restless in the narrow society of southern Indiana.
    In the spring of 1829, Lincoln and his little gang pulled off the most imaginative, and longest remembered, of their pranks when two sons of Reuben Grigsby—Reuben, Jr., and Charles—were married. The Lincolns had been carrying on something of a feud with the Grigsby family since Sarah’s death, and when Abraham was not invited to the wedding celebration, he “felt miffed—insulted.” Through a confederate he arranged that when the party was over and the bridegrooms were brought upstairs to their waiting brides, they would be led to the wrong beds. The