Originally posted by Des That is a fine, polite and informative response to my smart-arse question (which wasn't so smart anyway). Always such an education here. You prompted me to read more about Kentucky. I even learned that Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born there.
It is particularly interesting to me, that Lincoln had 3 "home states"! Kentucky, where he was born, spent his earliest days, and later revisited; Indiana, where he spent the second half of his childhood (and was encouraged in his education by his step-mother); and Illinois, where he grew into his adulthood and tried various careers (storekeeper, surveyor, postmaster, lawyer, legislator). They are all referred to in a verse of what is often thought of as his presidential campaign song:"Lincoln & Liberty," which goes in part:
...the son of Kentucky
The hero of Hoosierdom through
The pride of the Suckers, so lucky
....
Indiana folk call themselves "Hoosiers," as many people know, and in the mid-1800s Illinoisans proudly held onto the title of "Suckers" which had none of the negative connotations it picked up in the 20th Century. There are competing stories explaining its origins. One goes that many of the earliest Illinois pioneers arrived there around the same time of year that the suckerfish migrated up the Mississippi and its tributaries. My favorite is based on the story, that some Illinois pioneers crossing wide expanses of Illinois prairie in the driest and hottest weeks of late summer, only kept from dying of thirst by finding an active crawdad mound in the prairie, and taking a 9 or 10-foot long stalk of big bluestem grass, and threading it down the crawdad burrow, to the little pool of water at the bottom. A crawdad digs its burrow down to the waterline in the soil, so if the crawdad was still alive there would be water there. Now, just imagine what a powerful sucker you'd have to be to suck water up all that distance through a stalk of grass! And you couldn't be squeamish about sucking up a some crawdad "spit" in the process either. But anybody who could do that, to save their lives, had true pioneer determination. So that's what the song was saying about Lincoln's Illinois connection.
To bring us back to the topic of horses, Lincoln road many a mile horseback, as a circuit riding lawyer among several central Illinois counties, riding in all kinds of weather, to boot. Here's picture of the statue depicting this which is on view at the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois:
Here's a link to the website where the picture of the statue is found, among much other information:
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln.html
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