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Updated: June 22, 2025
But Clary's Grove was at last brought down upon him by the indiscretion of his friend and admirer, Offutt, who was already beginning to run him for President, and whose vauntings of his powers made a trial of strength inevitable. A wrestling match was contrived between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, and money, jackknives and whiskey were freely staked on the result.
The success of the expedition to New Orleans had won the admiration of his employer, Denton Offutt, and he now offered Lincoln a clerkship in his prospective store. The offer was accepted partly because it gave him some time to read, and it was here that he came to know the two great poets, Burns and Shakespeare.
The business of Offutt had gone to pieces, and his clerk was out of employment, when Governor Reynolds issued his call for volunteers to move the tribe of Black Hawk across the Mississippi.
When, therefore, Offutt began to brag about his new clerk the Clary Grove Boys made fun at him; whereupon the storekeeper cried: "What's that? You can throw him? Well, I reckon not; Abe Lincoln can out-run, out-walk, out-rassle, knock out, and throw down any man in Sangamon County." This was too much for the Clary Grove Boys.
Offutt who had hired Lincoln to be one of his flat-boat "boys," gave him another opportunity for work.
A man named Denton Offutt, one of a class of local traders and speculators usually found about early Western settlements, had probably heard something of young Lincoln's Indiana history, particularly that he had made a voyage on a flatboat from Indiana to New Orleans, and that he was strong, active, honest, and generally, as would be expressed in Western phrase, "a smart young fellow."
As he was trying to make alliance between Offutt and certain Milwaukee interests which wanted the race-track plot, most of his time was taken up in waiting for telephone calls.... Sitting on the edge of his bed, holding the portable telephone, asking wearily, "Mr. Sagen not in yet? Didn' he leave any message for me? All right, I'll hold the wire."
Offutt, though his downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that position as afterwards it did to his associates at the bar. Dr. Holland has preserved one or two incidents of this kind, which have their value.
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