Still I take the first opportunity of fulfilling the promise given, when starting on the wide excursion I meditate, of writing to my friends from the different stages of the route, and describing its features with sufficient minuteness for those who take an interest in my letters to accompany their writer in his wanderings. My journey has not as yet furnished an incident worthy of being entered into the diary of the most unambitious tourist. Schoolcraft, Professor Keating, and the lamented Say, have already made the regions described in these pages well known to the public but there is an ever-salient freshness in the theme of "The Far West," which prevents its becoming trite or tiresome and as the author believes himself to be the first tourist who has taken a winter view of scenes upon the Indian frontier, he trusts that this circumstance will impart some degree of novelty to his descriptions in that quarter, while the romantic beauty of the region described nearer home will bear its own recommendation with it. Flint, the graphic sketches of Judge Hall, and the valuable scientific researches of Mr.
These additions the author has preferred to place in an appendix, rather than imbody them with the original matter, as he feared that whatever attraction his sketches of scenery and manners might possess would evaporate upon throwing them into a different form, and their chief merit as first and faithful impressions would be lost.
In preparing them for publication, he has thought proper to illustrate some of the facts contained in them, by observations derived from other sources or made subsequent to their date.
The sufferer and the witness torrent series#
SEVERAL of these letters have already appeared in the New-York American - the favourable reception they have met with has induced the writer to complete the series and publish them in the present form.