The Winning of the West, Volume One | Page 3

I could do
nothing save express my sincere appreciation and gratitude, which I
take this opportunity of publicly repeating.
The Gates MSS., from which I drew some important facts not hitherto
known concerning the King's Mountain campaign, are in the library of
the New York Historical Society.
The Virginia 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 to
choose. Even Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was
apparently indifferent as to whether his name should or should not
contain the final silent e. As for the original Indian titles, it is often
quite impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers
often wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear
no resemblance whatever to one another.
In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor of
love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not blind to
their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their many strong
and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of my time on
the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild
country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the
far west; and there were of course many features in which the life of a
cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that
led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before. Yet
the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We
guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear,
bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down
evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and
among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did
the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins
beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The men
who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a
peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the

past.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT. SAGAMORE HILL, _May_, 1889

FOREWORD.
In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a
century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright
from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests
of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was