Memoir of the Author.

      By Lyman Copeland Draper.

      In 1831, an interesting volume appeared from the press of Joseph Israel, of Clarksburg, in North Western Virginia, prepared by Alexander Scott Withers, on the border wars of the West. It was well received at the time of its publication, when works on that subject were few, and read with avidity by the surviving remnant of the participators in the times and events so graphically described, and by their worthy descendants.

      Historians and antiquarians also received it cordially, universally according it high praise. Mann Butler, the faithful historian of Kentucky, declared that it was “a work to which the public was deeply indebted,” composed, as it was, with “so much care and interest.” The late Samuel G. Drake, the especial historian of the Red Man, pronounced it “a work written with candor and judgment.” The late Thomas W. Field, the discriminating writer on Indian Bibliography, says: “Of this scarce book, very few copies are complete or in good condition. Having been issued in a remote corner of North-Western Virginia, and designed principally for a local circulation, almost every copy was read by a country fireside until scarcely legible. Most of the copies lack the table of contents. The author took much pains to be authentic, and his chronicles are considered by Western antiquarians, to form the best collection of frontier life and Indian warfare, that has been printed.”

      Of such a work, now difficult to procure at any price, a new edition is presented to the public. In 1845, the writer of this notice visited the Virginia Valley, collecting materials on the same general subject, going over much the same field of investigation, and quite naturally, at that early period, identifying very large the sources of Mr. Withers’s information, thus making it possible to reproduce his work with new lights and explanations, such as generally give pleasure and interest to the intelligent reader of border history.1

      In 1829, a local antiquary, of Covington, a beautiful little village nestling in a high mountain valley near the head of James River, in Alleghany County, Virginia, gathered from the aged pioneers still lingering on the shores of time, the story of the primitive settlement and border wars of the Virginia Valley. Hugh Paul Taylor, for such was his name, was the precursor, in all that region, of the school of historic gleaners, and published in the nearest village paper, The Fincastle Mirror, some twenty miles away, a series of articles, over the signature of “Son of Cornstalk,” extending over a period of some forty stirring years, from about 1740 to the close of the Revolutionary War. These articles formed at least the chief authority for several of the earlier chapters of Mr. Withers’s work. Mr. Taylor had scarcely molded his materials into shape, and put them into print, when he was called hence at an early age, without having an opportunity to revise and publish the results of his labors under more favorable auspices.

      Soon after Mr. Taylor’s publication, Judge Edwin S. Duncan, of Peel Tree, in then Harrison, now Barbour County, West Virginia, a gentleman of education, and well fitted for such a work, residing in the heart of a region rife with the story of Indian wars and hair-breadth escapes, made a collection of materials, probably including Mr. Taylor’s sketches, with a view to a similar work; but his professional pursuits and judicial services interposed to preclude the faithful prosecution of the work, so he turned over to Mr. Withers his historic gatherings, with such suggestions, especially upon the Indian race, as by his studies and reflections he was enabled to offer.

      Other local gleaners in the field of Western history, particularly Noah Zane, of Wheeling, John Hacker, of the Hacker’s Creek settlement, and others, freely furnished their notes and statements for the work. Mr. Withers, under these favorable circumstances, became quite well equipped with materials regarding especially the first settlement and Indian wars of the region now comprising West Virginia; and, to a considerable extent, the region of Staunton and farther southwest, of the French and Indian War period, together with Dunmore’s War, and the several campaigns from the western borders of Virginia and Pennsylvania into the Ohio region, during the Revolutionary War.

      Alexander Scott Withers, for his good services in the field of Western history, well deserves to have his name and memory perpetuated as a public benefactor. Descending, on his father’s side, from English ancestry, he was the fourth child of nine, in the family of Enoch K. and Jennet Chinn Withers, who resided at a fine Virginia homestead, called Green Meadows, half a dozen miles from Warrenton, Fauquier county,