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stirring events in Tryon County during the Revolution. Stone wrote the biography of Brant as might one who loved Brant and honored his memory. Simms gathered into his several publications an extensive and curious array of material. Jay Gould, when still under age, revived much that Campbell and Simms had brought to light, and added other valuable information. Cooper, with accuracy and fulness, recorded the annals of the settlement developed by his father on Otsego Lake, all of which Cooper himself may be said to have seen and a large part of which he afterward was.

Some of these and other chronicles were printed sixty or more years ago. They all long since had passed out of print and out of the convenient reach of purchasers, some of them being now very scarce books. At the time of their publication, moreover, a large store of important material, printed and unprinted, which is now to be found in State archives and in libraries, was either inaccessible, or for other reasons was not drawn upon.[1]

  1. Noteworthy material of this kind includes: The Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols., 8vo; The New York Colonial Documents, 15 vols., quarto; The New York Colonial and Land Papers, 63 Ms. vols., fol.; The Public Papers of Governor George Clinton, edited by Hugh Hastings, State Historian, 4 vols., 8vo, the same being the part thus far published of the Clinton Manuscripts in the State Library, comprising 48 large folio volumes, these manuscripts having been largely used in the preparation of this work through permission from the State Library; The Journals of the Legislative Council and Provincial Congress, 4 vols., quarto; The New York Revolutionary Papers, 2 vols., quarto; The New York State Archives, 1 vol., quarto; The Journals of the Sullivan Expedition; The Draper Collection of Brant Manuscripts in the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society at Madison, 23 vols., large octavo; The Sir William Johnson Manuscripts, in the State Library, 25 vols., large folio, and all of Parkman’s writings. Most important of all this material, in so far as relates to the Border Wars, are the Clinton Papers and Manuripts. The intelligence shown by Mr. Hastings in initiating and carrying forward the publication of these papers deserves special recognition. Only in the light of this correspondence can the whole story of

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