Excerpt from The Winning of the Far West: A History of the Regaining of Texas, of the Mexican War, and the Oregon Question; And of the Successive Additions to the Territory of the United States, Within the Continent of America: 1829 1867 My first acknowledgment of indebtedness is to the men who left us the documents: explorers and soldiers, writing their journals after laborious days, by the flickering camp -fire; statesmen and orators welding them into form; clerks of frontier conven tions; journalists and adventurers who followed the armies, or pressed into the land of promise in search of gold. Documents produced under such conditions breathe the very atmosphere of the free plain and mountain, and without them the winning of the Far West would remain an untold tale. 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.