In 1816, when Abraham was seven, the family trekked north into the Indiana wilderness, settling on a claim at Little Pigeon Creek. This was the "back-country" in every sense—an untamed, heavily forested land where the trees had to be cleared by hand before a single crop could be sown. It was here, in the autumn of 1818, that the young boy faced his first great crucible: the "milk sickness," a mysterious and terrifying ailment that claimed his mother, Nancy.
The death of his mother left a void in the cabin that was both physical and spiritual. Thomas Lincoln’s eventual remarriage to Sarah Bush Johnston brought a new, nurturing influence into Abraham’s life; she was a woman who recognized the boy's towering intellect and encouraged the very thing that Thomas viewed with suspicion: reading. In the dim, flickering light of the cabin, with a copy of Aesop’s Fables or a borrowed Bible, Abraham began to drift away from the axe and toward the word. It was in these Indiana years that the "rail-splitter" identity was born—a man who could swing an axe with the best of them, but who, when the work was done, would retreat into the depths of a book, forever seeking a wider horizon than the trees allowed.