ia State Papers have recently been published, and are now
accessible to all.

Among the most valuable of the hitherto untouched manuscripts which I
have obtained are the Haldimand papers, preserved in the Canadian
archives 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 Boonsborough, the battle of the Blue Licks,
Crawford'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 collections of early
documents as my authorities, especially 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
Boon, there are no printed histories of Kentucky earlier than
Marshall's, in 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Haywood's,
in 1822. Both Marshall and Haywood did excellent work; the former was
an able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky
historian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, devoted 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 pioneers remembered in their old age. The later
historians, for the most part, merely follow these two. In
consequence, the mass of original material, in the shape of official
reports and contemporary letters, contained in the Haldimand MSS., the
Campbell MSS., the McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State
Department MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., not only cast a
flood of new light upon this early history, but necessitate its being
entirely re-written. For instance, they give an absolutely new aspect
to, and in many cases completely reverse, the current accounts of all
the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern
tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier
diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode
of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government.
It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many
different ways that it is difficult to know which