Excerpt from The New Purchase: Or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West

The Princeton University Press offers a worthy contribution to the centennial celebration of Indiana's admission to statehood by issuing a Centennial Edition of the "New Purchase" by Baynard R. Hall. This work has been pronounced "one of the best books ever written concerning life in the West." Its reproduction will be appreciated by all who are interested in western history. It makes available a handsome reprint of a volume long since out of print, the original edition being now very difficult to find and expensive to buy. This reprint contains the original copy without modification or expurgation. There is certainly no more valuable book on early Indiana. Judge D. D. Banta, himself very thoroughly informed on early Indiana life, has called it "the best and truest history of pioneer life and pioneer surroundings in Indiana that can anywhere be found. Hall evidently entered with zest into the life and scenes about him, and he writes graphically of all he sees and hears." It is my privilege in this Introduction to speak of the man and his work - the man who has realized his youthful ambition to be enrolled among the earliest literary pioneers of the romantic west and the book which has long since been recognized of such acknowledged excellence and historic value.

In 1818 the United States Government obtained by treaty with several tribes of Indians what is known in the history of the Middle West as the "New Purchase". In that year Governor Jennings, of Indiana, Benjamin Parke, then Federal Judge for the District of Indiana, and General Lewis Cass, Territorial Governor of Michigan, acting as a commission of the Federal Government, met the representatives of the Indian tribes at St. Marys, Ohio. The Weas, the Kickpoos, the Pottawattomies and the Miamis were there in the persons of their chieftains and their spokesmen.

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