Take another lake city—­Buffalo.  The growth of this city has been rapid.  Its sudden rise to the dignity of a metropolis was largely due to that most interesting of the many important internal improvements of the first half of the century,—­the Erie Canal.  With the development of Buffalo was identified the rise of lake navigation and the grain elevator.  Its population has been increased by the addition of a large foreign element, which has had its due influence on manners, morals, and public life.  It appears from the report of the board of health for 1879, that, in 1878, of the children born in Buffalo, nineteen hundred and seventy-five were of German descent; of all other descents, two thousand and fifty-six,—­a difference of only eighty-one.  The city has indeed been thoroughly Germanized, if we may coin the word.

Here are things of which we would know more.  Yet what do we find about them?  Save in meagre or verbose pamphlets, nothing.  To be sure, there was a book written which claimed to be about Buffalo, but a microscopic examination would fail to find in it anything worth knowing about the history of this community.  The author of that book, William Ketchum, had the audacity to name it, as we read on the title-page, “An Authentic and Comprehensive History of Buffalo, with some account of its early inhabitants, both savage and civilized.”  It was published in Buffalo in 1864, in two octavo volumes, containing respectively four hundred and thirty-two and four hundred and forty-three pages.  To comprehend the utter absurdity of the thing, we shall have to glance at history a bit.

It will be remembered that during and for some time after the Revolutionary War the country about the Niagara River remained in the possession of the British.  The Seneca Indians, who sided against the Colonies in that war, and who were driven from their homes by the expedition of General Sullivan in 1779, gathered around Fort Niagara and became such a nuisance that the English had to set up anew in housekeeping these faithful allies and disagreeable neighbors.  One of the villages they started was at Buffalo Creek.  Our historian, Ketchum, has twenty-five chapters in the first volume of his Authentic and Comprehensive History of Buffalo.  He gets the Senecas settled at Buffalo Creek in the twenty-fourth!

During the rest of the century the inhabitants of this Indian village on the ground where Buffalo was to stand, consisted of redskins and semi-redskins, a few Indian traders who doled out the firewater, and a settler or two.  The present city of Buffalo, according to the encyclopaedia (and for once that mass of condensed wisdom is correct about the date of settlement of a Western city), was founded in 1801, by the Holland Land Company, which opened a land office here in January of that year.  The notice of this event may be found in the region of page 146, in vol. ii, of Ketchum’s book,—­the uniform lack of concise statement, the huge amount of irrevelant matter, and the absence of lucid summaries and intelligent comment, making more exact reference impossible.