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.