The Frontier Years of Abe Lincoln

[Gene C]

by Richard Kigel. The full title is, "The Frontier Years of Abraham Lincoln: In the Words of His Friends and Family"
Since I purchased this book I found there is an expanded and updated version titled "My Childhood's Home:
Growing Up With Young Abe Lincoln. It appears to have 5 additional chapter including one about Ann Rutledge
http://younglincoln.com/lincoln.html

I can recommend either one. Mine was a hardback copy I got for $.04,
The updated version is a softbound or ebook and a little more $8.75.

The focus is on the early years up through New Salem (not much about Ann Rutledge in my older copy). Good footnotes. He does a good job of combining the different resources into an interesting account of Lincoln's early life.

Knowing what I know now, I would probably spend the extra $ to get the new version, even though it's softcover.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Childhoods-Home...8&qid=&sr=

or http://www.amazon.com/Frontier-Years-Abe...ars+of+abe

either way it is a good book about Lincoln's early years.

I did learn that Denton Offutt, Lincoln's outspoken, wheeler dealer employer on one of his flatboat trips to New Orleans and as a store clerk, kind of disappears after the store fails. He turns up in Baltimore several years later in the 1850's as a horse trainer, an early version of the Horse Whisperer, "advertising himself in the city papers as a veterinary surgeon and horse tamer, professing to have a secret to whisper in the horse's ear...by which the most... vicious horse could be quieted and controlled." He also published a book in 1860 titled, "The Educated Horse". I'd like to find a copy of that, but so far no luck.