audacity to name it, as we read on the title-page, "An Authentic and
Comprehensive History of Buffalo, with some account of its early
inhabitants, both savage and civilized." It was published in Buffalo in
1864, in two octavo volumes, containing respectively four hundred and
thirty-two and four hundred and forty-three pages. To comprehend the
utter absurdity of the thing, we shall have to glance at history a bit.

It will be remembered that during and for some time after the
Revolutionary War the country about the Niagara River remained in the
possession of the British. The Seneca Indians, who sided against the
Colonies in that war, and who were driven from their homes by the
expedition of General Sullivan in 1779, gathered around Fort Niagara and
became such a nuisance that the English had to set up anew in
housekeeping these faithful allies and disagreeable neighbors. One of
the villages they started was at Buffalo Creek. Our historian, Ketchum,
has twenty-five chapters in the first volume of his Authentic and
Comprehensive History of Buffalo. He gets the Senecas settled at Buffalo
Creek in the twenty-fourth!

During the rest of the century the inhabitants of this Indian village on
the ground where Buffalo was to stand, consisted of redskins and
semi-redskins, a few Indian traders who doled out the firewater, and a
settler or two. The present city of Buffalo, according to the
encyclopaedia (and for once that mass of condensed wisdom is correct
about the date of settlement of a Western city), was founded in 1801, by
the Holland Land Company, which opened a land office here in January of
that year. The notice of this event may be found in the region of page
146, in vol. ii, of Ketchum's book,--the uniform lack of concise
statement, the huge amount of irrevelant matter, and the absence of
lucid summaries and intelligent comment, making more exact reference
impossible.

The rest of this "comprehensive history" is occupied with the course of
events down to December 30, 1813, when the British burnt the town,
leaving but two houses standing--a dwelling-house and a blacksmith's
shop. Here, having brought his Phoenix to ashes, our comprehensive
historian brings his narrative to an abrupt end. This is at page 304.
Then follows the "appendix," an invariable feature of city histories,
which makes of every one of them a huge anti-climax. In this instance,
one hundred and thirty-nine pages of appendix contain, according to the
a