The manner in which the writer of this book came into possession of most of its materials, is mentioned in the work itself. Any well bred reader will readily conceive that there may exist a thousand reasons, why he should not reveal any more of his private sources of information. He will only say, on his own responsibility, that the portions of the tale for which no authorities are given, are quite as true as those which are not destitute of this peculiar advantage, and that all may be believed alike.
There is, however, to be found in the following pages an occasional departure from strict historical veracity, which it may be well to mention. In the endless confusion of names, customs, opinions, and languages, which exists among the tribes of the west, the Author has paid much more attention to sound and convenience than to literal truth. He has uniformly called the Great Spirit, for instance, the Wahcondah, though he was not ignorant that there were different names for that Being among the nations he has introduced. So, in other matters he has rather adhered to simplicity, than sought to make his narrative strictly correct at the expense of all order and clearness. It was enough for his purpose that the picture should possess the general features of the original: in the shading, attitude, and disposition of thefigures, a little liberty has been taken. Even this brief explanation would have been spared, did not the Author know that there is a certain class of learned Thebans who are just as fit to read a work of the imagination, as they are qualified to write one.
It may be necessary to meet much graver and less easily explained objections, in the minds of a far higher class of readers. The introduction of one and the same character, as a principal actor in no less than three books, and the selection of a comparative desert, which is aided by no historical recollections, and embellished by few or no poetical associations, for the scene of a legend, in these times of perilous adventure in works of this description, may need more vindication. If the first objection can be removed, the latter must fallof course, as it would become the duty of a faithful chronicler to follow his hero wherever he might choose to go.
It is quite probable that the narrator of these simple events has deceived himself as to the importance they may have in the eyes of other people. But he has seen, or thought he has seen, something sufficiently instructive and touching in the life of a veteran of the forest, who, having commenced his career near the Atlantic, had been driven by the increasing and unparalleled advance of population, to seek a final refuge against 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 theydid produce such an effect on the Scout of the Mohicans, the Leatherstocking of the Pioneers, and the Trapper of the Prairie, rests on an authority no less imposing than those veritable pages, from which the reader shall no longer be detained, if he still be disposed to peruse them, after this frank avowal of the poverty of their contents.
