I had hoped when I planned the series to bring down this novel through the stirring period which ended, by a chance, when a steamboat brought supplies to Jackson’s army in New Orleans—­the beginning of the era of steam commerce on our Western waters.  This work will have to be reserved for a future time.

I have tried to give a true history of Clark’s campaign as seen by an eyewitness, trammelled as little as possible by romance.  Elsewhere, as I look back through these pages, I feel as though the soil had only been scraped.  What principality in the world has the story to rival that of John Sevier and the State of Franklin?  I have tried to tell the truth as I went along.  General Jackson was a boy at the Waxhaws and dug his toes in the red mud.  He was a man at Jonesboro, and tradition says that he fought with a fence-rail.  Sevier was captured as narrated.  Monsieur Gratiot, Monsieur Vigo, and Father Gibault lost the money which they gave to Clark and their country.  Monsieur Vigo actually travelled in the state which Davy describes when he went down the river with him.  Monsieur Gratiot and Colonel Auguste Chouteau and Madame Chouteau are names so well known in St. Louis that it is superfluous to say that such persons existed and were the foremost citizens of the community.

Among the many to whom my apologies and thanks are due is Mr. Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, whose unremitting labors have preserved and perpetuated the history and traditions of the country of his ancestors.  I would that I had been better able to picture the character, the courage, the ability, and patriotism of the French who settled Louisiana.  The Republic owes them much, and their descendants are to-day among the stanchest preservers of her ideals.

WINSTON CHURCHILL.