MARK BENNETT: Flatboat journey tracing young Abe Lincoln’s steps attracting attention

By Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE September 18, 2008 11:26 am

— Aboard his frontier-style flatboat, Ron Drake is retracing the path of a young Abraham Lincoln.
In a way, though, the legacy of an older, wiser Lincoln is following Drake.
It doesn’t just emerge each time Drake’s 60-foot craft reaches a new port along a 27-day voyage along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, from Rockport, Ind., to New Orleans. Sure, the arrival of “Lincoln’s Journey of Remembrance” has drawn crowds at each stop so far. Curious onlookers and history buffs check out the boat and an informational display set up by the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Then Drake and the crew shove off for the next town on a 23-city course through eight states.
But Drake had the 16th president on his mind long before this adventure began Sept. 9.
“I’ve done a lot of reflecting on Lincoln over the years,” Drake said Tuesday by cell phone, as he and his companions reached shore in Metropolis, Ill. “And that’s how a lot of this evolved.”
The trip is part of a two-year, nationwide observance of Lincoln’s 200th birthday on Feb. 12, 2009. The flatboat’s mission is to retrace an excursion Lincoln took in 1828. He hauled produce down the Ohio and Mississippi for a local merchant. At his destination, New Orleans, the 19-year-old Lincoln saw slaves auctioned. The scene jarred the man who, three decades later, ended slavery in America.
The crew expects to reach New Orleans on Oct. 5.
That experience in New Orleans was a pivotal moment for Lincoln. And, obviously, it’s important to Indiana’s Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, an organization designed to remind the public that the Great Emancipator spent his formative years (from age 7 to 21) as a Hoosier resident. “We feel like Lincoln’s Indiana years are the untold or forgotten story,” said Melissa Miller of the visitors bureau in Spencer County, site of his boyhood home.
Drake values Lincoln’s Hoosier era, too. The 70-year-old Fairbanks native, now a Washington, D.C., attorney, took over care of his ancestors’ farm in Sullivan County and studied his own family’s migration to Indiana. Their trek mirrored that of Lincoln’s family, even their church, Little Pigeon Primitive Baptist Church. The research led Drake to have three craftsmen — John Cooper of Tennessee, and Hugh Oxendine and Keith Altvater of Vigo County — to build him a flatboat, so Drake could retrace a voyage his ancestors took from Cincinnati to Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 1810. After that trip, the Lincoln Bicentennial organizers commissioned Drake to re-create Abe’s 1828 journey.
Still, it’s the final year of Lincoln’s life that most inspires Drake.
Up to that point, in Drake’s view, Lincoln was largely an opportunist, driven by political forces. Then, as the Civil War reached its end, with the Union preserved and slavery abolished, Lincoln embraced the spirit and persona that would become his legacy, according to Drake. A month before his assassination, Lincoln — who had won re-election by a landslide — called on the country to “let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
“At the very end, in my view, he had really reached sainthood,” Drake said.
In Drake’s own lifetime, he saw another political icon evolve into the leader America hoped he would become. For most of the 1960s, Drake hadn’t been a backer of Robert Kennedy, a harsh politician. Then Kennedy entered the 1968 presidential campaign. Amid its tumultuous issues, a growing number of Americans saw Kennedy as a thoughtful prospect who might end the Vietnam war, advance civil rights and lessen poverty.
A friend got Drake involved in Kennedy’s campaign, and they traveled to California for its primary. At one stop, Drake watched crowds of people stretching their arms to shake Kennedy’s hand, or just touch him, and he responded. The lofty expectations of those people clearly had changed Kennedy. “As he moved from corner to corner on stage,” Drake recalled, “I became a believer that he believed.
Drake was there when Kennedy’s California victory and all those hopes unraveled in a tragic assassination in Los Angeles.
At the end, like Lincoln, “the cause had consumed” Kennedy, Drake said.
So a deep sense of history is accompanying Drake as he follows Lincoln’s eye-opening odyssey. He also has an appreciation for the toughness of 19th-century pioneers. This expedition already has tested Drake and the five-person traveling party.
On the second day, his wife, Carolyn, tripped and broke her ankle as they docked at Evansville. She was holding one of their 15-month-old twin daughters, Dawn, and was able to protect the child as she fell. They were treated at a hospital, and Carolyn and both girls have flown safely back home to Washington, Drake said.
Then on Sunday, the remnants of Hurricane Ike tossed and twisted the 60-foot, 50,000-pound boat on its way to Paducah, Ky. Waves swept over the bow. “I thought the boat would break up,” Drake said. “But we had a good builder, and the strength weathered the storm.”
Perilous moments, indeed. Still, Drake insisted, “I wouldn’t compare what we’ve gone through to what [Lincoln] went through. They were hardy pioneers who endured harsh frontier difficulties. Ours was dangerous, but dangerous in 21st-century way. Theirs was dangerous in a very primalistic way.”
Lincoln’s boat didn’t have a pair of 150-horsepower motors. And, unlike Abe, Drake’s team has been greeted at each stop by welcoming parties and community activities, such as a Lincoln-Douglas debate re-enactment in Jonesboro, Ill.
Yet, as the early incidents proved, the two trips, 180 years apart, share an unpredictability.
“I don’t know what to expect now. It’s gone so unaccording to script so far,” Drake said. “I hope it’s peaceful.”
Lincoln would appreciate that sentiment.
Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.
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To follow Lincoln's Journey of Remembrance, read Ron Drake's daily blog.

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