White Pine news weekly mining review. [volume] (East Ely, Nev.) 1910-1920, 1911-02-12
MEMORIAL TO LINCOLN BY
.bELFORD IS A MASTERPIECE
Brilliant Attorney From White Pine Delivers Ad.
dress Before Distinguished Gathering In Reno
atAnnversary Celebration Of Great EmancipatOr

IL it took life, it gave it in return,
and this element, working on man,
fashioned a race, which ii has lead
to the uttermoSt parts of the earth.
Proud and imperious, dominating
and exultant, its blood touched with
the wanderlust of ever-moving tides
and currents. scornful of obstacles,
needless of danger, the seed of Nor
man and Saxon has overrun the
world, TO conquer its barren places.
Nature with them had ever been
a jealous mistress. Her favors were
only for the strong and hardy de-
manding vigor of mind and body,
prodigious labor, clean living and
right thinking. The rude buffeting
of ocean storms was but the prelude
to the ruder conquest of an unknown
continent. The men who could sur
vive the one could overcome the
hardships of the other. Contact
with her made us a pioneer people,
a civilizing, liberty-loving race, fit
to cope with forest and mountain,
with plain and river.
So it was, when Greeland beckoned
to the Norseman, when the Cavalier
stepped upon the shores of Virginia.
when the Mayfiower turned her prov
to the West and the Pilgrims knelt
upon the soil of a new land, and, so
it was, in 1909, when Abraham Lin
coin looked out upon the lights and
shadows of the Kentucky wilderness.
Had the ina gination of man in
that year sought to light upon
child of promise. in whose destiny
the future was likely to become in
terested, Abraham Lincoln would
/ have been among the least of these
No pride of ancestry was his; no
hereditary place of distinction was
awaiting him, no fortune gathered
! by the labors OF others, was at his
call. Poor whites. in community
as wretehed as themselves, untu-
tored except in the ways of poverty,
far from civilization, on a desolate
frontier-these We're the companions
of his early childhood and were the
stock from which he sprang And
such a od-half-clothed and
| ill-fed, finding comfort only in the
dreams that haunt the infant mind.
A eheerless window by day. a lighted
tallow dip by night, We're the looms
upon which were woven the sombre
colors of his fate. His heritage was
merely the common heritage of his
race. rich in promise, If strength of
character could grow in soil of
hopeless misery
The crosses of childhood are as real
to those who bear them as were the
ones on Calvary. Abraham had
more than his share of those that
were real and of those hardest TO
bear. Between him and his father
there was no mystic bond of sympa-
thy. Thomas Lincoln was scarcely
fitted to enjoy the good will of those
among whom he lived; and he could
not understand, or encourage,
quest for things that lay beyond his
own horizon. The axe and plow, the
rifle and log cabin, determined the
limits of his world, while the hardest
kind of hard labor, shifted to the
boy, was its daily exaton. But in
the mother love of gentle Nancy
Hanks was the good fairy of those
early years. She understood him
and became his refuge and inspira-
ton. leading his spirit past danger
and pitfall to the heights where the
sun was shining. If the burden was
too heavy she lightened it; if the
cross was too hard she took it upon
herself; If the way was too long for
his lonely heart she travelled it with
him. As a potter with his clay. so
she moulded the soul and character
of her boy, marking deep, by sorrow
and patience. the lines of strength,
and piUipU him a tot haf
endure responsibility.
What wonder that their cabin.
standing midway between clearing
and forest. became in his eyes
strangely vested with the solemn
beauty of a temple, for it was illum-
ined from within by the quenchless
light of measureless love. And,
when she had gone to watch over
him from another shore, the despair
ing lad trudged for miles through
sleet and snow to find some minister
of God to say Memoriam" by the
lonely grave where his heart lay
buried.
From Kentucky TO Indiana, and
from Indiana to Illinois, was the pill
grimage of the Lincolns: moving
from one scene of shiftless living TO
another, until time had marked the
end of Abraham $ youth. If it was
a dreary stretch of twenty-one years,
! 1t was all behind him, and he dared
to lift his eyes in confidence to the
/ future. He had discharged his dut-
les TO the utmost limit. There were
no obligations to father or family
which remained unfulfilled. The
coarsest and most CALLING labor he
had given freely and without stint,
submitting to take place beside the
Continued on Page Three)