Preface 1 1 



The Virginia State Papers have recently been 

 published, and are now accessible to all. 



Among the most valuable of the hitherto un- 

 touched manuscripts which I have obtained are the 

 Haldimand papers, preserved in the Canadian ar- 

 chives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, 

 the British and Indian side of all the Northwestern 

 fighting; including Clark's campaigns, the siege of 

 Boonesborough, the battle of the Blue Licks, Craw- 

 ford's defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist, Mr. 

 Douglass Brymner, furnished me copies of all I 

 needed with a prompt courtesy for which I am more 

 indebted than I can well express. 



I have been obliged to rely mainly on these collec- 

 tions of early documents as my authorities, espe- 

 cially for that portion of Western history prior to 

 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, and 

 often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson wrote 

 down as coming from Boone, there are no printed 

 histories of Kentucky earlier than Marshall's in 

 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Hay- 

 wood's, in 1822. Both Marshall and Hay wood did 

 excellent work; the former was an able writer, the 

 latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky his- 

 torian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, de- 

 voted to the Union, and prompt to stand up for the 

 right. But both of them, in dealing with the early 

 history of the country beyond the Alleghanies, 

 wrote about matters that had happened from thirty 

 to fifty years before, and were obliged to base most 

 of their statements on tradition or on what the 



