who, having commenced his career near
the Atlantic had been driven, by the increasing and unparalleled advance of
population, to seek a final refuge from society in the broad and tenantless
plains of the West, to induce him to hazard the experiment of publication. That
the changes, which might have driven a man so constituted to such an expedient,
have actually occurred within a single life, is a matter of undeniable history;
- that they did produce such an effect on the Scout of the Mohicans, the
Leather-stocking of the Pioneers and the Trapper of the Prairie, rests on an
authority no less imposing than these veritable pages, from which the reader
shall no longer be detained, if he be disposed to peruse them, after this frank
arrival of the poverty of their contents.
 

                                  Introduction

The geological formation of that portion of the American Union, which lies
between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains, has given rise to many
ingenious theories. Virtually, the whole of this immense region is a plain. For
a distance extending nearly 1500 miles east and west, and 600 north and south,
there is scarcely an elevation worthy to be called a mountain. Even hills are
not common; though a good deal of the face of the country has more or less of
the rolling character, which is described in the opening pages of this work.
    There is much reason to believe that the territory which now composes Ohio,
Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and a large portion of the country west of the
Mississippi, lay formerly under water. The soil of all the former states has the
appearance of an alluvial deposit; and isolated rocks have been found, of a
nature and in situations which render it difficult to refute the opinion that
they have been transferred to their present beds by floating ice. This theory
assumes that the Great Lakes were the deep pools of one immense body of fresh
water, which lay too low to be drained by the irruption that laid bare the land.
    It will be remembered that the French, when masters of the Canadas and
Louisiana, claimed the whole of the territory in question. Their hunters and
advanced troops held the first communications with the savage occupants, and the
earliest written accounts we possess of these vast regions, are from the pens of
their missionaries. Many French words have, consequently, become of local use in
this quarter of America, and not a few names given in that language have been
perpetuated. When the adventurers, who first penetrated these wilds, met, in the
centre of the forests, immense plains, covered with rich verdure or rank
grasses, they naturally