PIONEERS OR, THE SOURCES OF THE SUSQUEHANNA. A DESCRIPTIVE TALE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE DEERSLAYER," "THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS," Extremes of habits, manners, time, and space, PAULDING. COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. REVISED AND CORRECTED, WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION, NOTES, &c., NEW YORK: GEORGE P. PUTNAM, 155 BROADWAY. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by STRINGER & TOWNSEND, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. INTRODUCTION. As this work professes, in its titlepage, to be a descriptive tale, they who will take the trouble to read it may be glad to know how much of its contents is literal fact, and how much is intended to represent a general picture. The Author is very sensible that, had he confined himself to the latter, always the most effective, as it is the most valuable, mode of conveying knowledge of this nature, he would have made a far better book. But in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were SO familiar to his own youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined. This rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction; for all that is necessary to be conveyed to the mind by the latter had better be done by delineations of principles, and of characters in their classes, than by a too fastidious attention to originals. New York having but one county of Otsego, and the Susquehanna but one proper source, there can be no mistake as to the site of the tale. The history of this district of country, so far as it is connected with civilized man, is soon told. Otsego, in common with most of the interior of the province of New York, was included in the county of |