Excerpt from The Life of Abraham Lincoln for Boys and Girls As the endless caravan of canvas-covered wagons crept up the long, uneven slope on the Virginia side of the mountain range, hundreds of these venturesome pioneers passed the moln farm, each company, no doubt, shouting to the less adventurous farmer, as they passed, a playful invitation to sell out and come along. The elder Abraham Lincoln soon caught the spirit and joined the procession of emigrants that for the next fifty years was to take its winding course over the Wilderness Trail to the new West. In 1780, Kentucky was a vast solitude, inhabited by wild beasts and a few scattered bands of Indians. Its trees and streams, its wild ravines and sweeping val leys, lay before the wondering eyes of the emigrants as they came down the western slope of the great moun tain barrier, a picture of indescribable beauty, a picture in which there were no signs of human life, no houses, or schools, or churches, or bridges, or roads, or fields of grain. It was a paradise just as God's hand had left it. And yet the struggle that was going on there between Daniel Boone and his comrades in adventure and the few thousand savages who claimed this paradise as their own, gave to Kentucky the romantic name of the dark and bloody ground, and ofiered promise of excitement and adventure, as well as a free home, to all who might leave civilization behind them and brave the hardships of the Wilderness Trail. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.