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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851,

BY HENRY HOWE,

In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of Ohio.

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PREFACE.

WRITTEN HISTORY is generally too scholastic to interest the multitude. Dignified and formal, it deals mainly in great events, and of those imper. fectly, because not pausing to present clear impressions by the associations of individual life. It is these that lend to written fiction its greatest charm, and attract the multitude by appearing more like truth. Although untrue in the particular combinations, scenes and plots delineated, yet well written fiction is drawn from Nature, from experience; and these facts in life, as with chessmen, are only arranged in new, but natural positions.

History includes everything in Nature, Character, Customs, and Incidents, both general and individual, that contributes to originate what is peculiar in a People, or what causes either their advancement or decline. So broad its scope that scarcely anything is too remote for its grasp; so searching, scarcely anything too minute. Were written History a clear transcript of all that properly comes within the province of History, it would be more enticing than the most fascinating fiction. But it being otherwise, the multitude prefer well written fiction, which touches the heart and arouses all the sympathies of man by its vivid pictures of actual life."

Herein are given, in the language of a great variety of writers, not only the great events in the History and condition of the West, but in illustration the minute matters of individual experience and observation, without which the other is, in a measure, untruthful, because it fails by its incompleteness to impart correct impressions. The materials are arranged in chronological order, and the sources from whence they are derived are presented on another leaf,

(vii)

PREFACE TO THE ENLARGED EDITION.

"THE GREAT WEST" was first published in the year 1851, and at once gained a wide-spread and unexpected popularity. It appears to have met a great public want, as has been shown by the extraordinary sale of more than eighty thousand copies a number which has been rarely reached by any American historical work. As in the interval many important changes have taken place in the West, the book has been remodeled and the current of events brought down to the present time, so that the reader now has it in an enlarged and improved form.

"The Great West" has become a standard work, and will probably in future editions instruct and interest multitudes long after the present generation shall have passed away.

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