Excerpt from Story of the Wild West and Camp-Fire Chats The task of writing the lives of the three greatest pioneers of western settlement has been assumed by me with no little diffidence, surrounded as the work has been with many hard disadvantages, and obstacles of no ordinary character. Chief of these is the disadvantage of poor literary qualification, as the opportunities for acquiring an education were denied me, except such as I could obtain by unaided endeavors and a favorable association with refined persons in latter years. The obstacles of which I complain are found in the confusion of information growing out of the fact that the several biographers of Boone, Crockett and Carson have generally made quite as much use of fiction as of actual, verified incident in making up their history of these three prominent characters. The idle stories thus incorporated in their work being left so long uncontradicted have become an almost inseparable part of frontier history, since few records are accessible, or were ever made, from which a truthful account of the valorous deeds and eventful lives of these heroes may be obtained. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.