Meantime it is understood that the present memoirs is the first volume of a revised series of his complete works, including his travels, reviews, papers on natural history, Indian tales, and miscellanies.
To this rapid sketch of a man rising to distinction without the adventitious aids of hereditary patrimony, wealth, or early friends, it requires little to be added to show the value of self-dependence.

Such examples must encourage all whose ambitions are sustained by assiduity, temperance, self-reliance, and a consistent perseverance in well weighed ends.
PERSONAL MEMOIRS.
CHAPTER I.
Brief reminiscences of scenes from 1809 to 1817--Events preliminary to a knowledge of western life--Embarkation on the source of the Alleghany River--Descent to Pittsburgh--Valley of the Monongahela; its coal and iron--Descent of the Ohio in an ark--Scenes and incidents by the way-- Cincinnati--Some personal incidents which happened there.
Late in the autumn of 1809, being then in my seventeenth year, I quitted the village of Hamilton, Albany County (a county in which my family had lived from an early part of the reign of George II.), and, after a pleasant drive of half a day through the PINE PLAINS, accompanied by some friends, reached the city of Schenectady, and from thence took the western stage line, up the Valley of the Mohawk, to the village of Utica, where we arrived, I think, on the third day, the roads being heavy.

The next day I proceeded to Vernon, the site of a busy and thriving village, where my father had recently engaged in the superintendency of extensive manufacturing operations.

I was here within a few miles of Oneida Castle, then the residence of the ancient Oneida tribe of Iroquois.

There was, also, in this town, a remnant of the old Mohigans, who, under the name of Stockbridges, had, soon after the Revolutionary War, removed from the Valley of the Housatonic, in Massachusetts, to Oneida.