Warrior-Pioneers: Extracts from the Boone Papers, Volumes 4C-13C of the Draper Manuscripts

Lyman Copeland Draper’s collection focuses on what he called the “Trans-Allegheny West” during the Revolutionary War years. This area included the western Carolinas and Virginia, the entire Ohio River Valley, and parts of the Mississippi River Valley. Letters and interviews in his collection date from the 1840s to 1891, with an emphasis on the western frontier (Kentucky).
In this work, letters, interviews, military correspondence and other documents are selected from volumes 4 through 13 of the Boone Papers. Extracts from these ten volumes include more than eighty first-hand accounts. Draper’s correspondents relate their stories of Indian captives, raids on isolated cabins, and prolonged sieges on the Kentucky forts. The mythology of Boone is somewhat balanced by Draper’s correspondents, many of whom knew Boone personally.
The purpose of this work is not to make a complete transcription. Selected letters and interviews have been extracted/transcribed to make available some of the most valuable accounts of a vital era in our history and to make more widely available Lyman Draper’s tribute to Daniel Boone and those he called the “warrior-pioneers.” These same pioneers, hearing of Boone’s adventures, became adventurers and defenders of the frontier as well — some as far west as California.
Facsimile reprints of original documents and an appendix that provides a list of other items discovered in the reading of the microfilm add to the value of this work. An index to Draper’s original volumes presents full-names, places and subjects with the original volume and page number.