Author Note

We have been unable to discover any biographical information about Hugh Bell, whose recollections are recorded in this manuscript.

Document Note

These interview notes were made during a trip Lyman Copeland Draper took to the south early in his career, sometime between 1841 and 1844. They are now housed in volume 30S of the Draper Manuscripts (Drapers Notes), pages  257-264.

Other Internet and Reference Resources

For more documents on early Kentucky, see AJ-125, AJ-150, AJ-155, AJ-157, AJ-158, and AJ-159.

The printed literature on the exploration and settlement of Kentucky is immense. A convenient online source to selected digitized images of this literature is the Kentuckiana Digital Library at http://www.kyvl.org/, a project of the Kentucky Virtual Library, Frankfort, Kentucky.

Another useful website is “The First American West: the Ohio River Valley 1750-1820” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/icuhtml/fawhome.html, a collection of fifteen thousand pages of original historical materials documenting the land, people, exploration and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West, selected from the collections of the University of Chicago Library and the Filson Historical Society of Louisville, Kentucky.