A Note on Sources & Method

This is a narrative history, and it is written to be read straight through. But a narrative that cannot be checked is only a story with dates in it, so every factual claim in the book stands on a source that is named, held, and searchable. This page explains what that means in practice — what counts as verified, what is carried as tradition, where the record disagrees with itself, what is deliberately not reproduced, and how to get from any line in the book to the document under it.

How to follow a claim

There are three ways in, running from the particular to the general.

• The § marker. Where the book quotes a document directly, a small raised § follows the quotation. It links to that source in the research store. If you want to know who wrote “Nobody wants to stay here and have his throat cut,” the answer is one click from the sentence.
• Sources behind each movement. Every movement closes with a link to the documents filed behind it — the sources, and the distilled facts drawn from them, for that stretch of the story.
• The research store. The whole archive is searchable: sources, the facts taken from them, and the full text of those that have been transcribed. The Ground maps the places; The People profiles the cast.

What the status labels mean

Every fact in the store carries one of four labels. They are not decoration; they are the difference between what is known and what is merely repeated.

• verified — attested in a primary or reliable secondary source, cited and quotable.
• tradition — carried in the record as story rather than documentation. Local tradition, family memory, an account written down generations after the event. It is included where it has shaped how the valley remembers itself, and it is labelled so that it is never mistaken for the first kind.
• corrected — a claim that circulated widely and is wrong. The correction is kept together with the error, because a mistake that is quietly deleted tends to come back.
• conflict — the sources disagree and the disagreement has not been resolved. These are never silently settled. Where two good records give different numbers or different dates, both are recorded and the conflict is preserved. A history that tidies its own contradictions away is telling you less than it knows.

Places carry a parallel set: a site is located as exact, approximate, or disputed — or it is withheld, and no coordinates are published at all.

Where the record is thin

This book narrates. It sets scenes, it describes weather and ground and the look of men, and a reader is entitled to ask which of that is documented and which is reconstruction. The rule followed here is that detail is either attested or flagged. Where a description comes from a source, it comes from a source. Where the record is silent, the book says so plainly rather than filling the gap and hoping — and it says so in the text itself, not only in a footnote: a tradition that hangs by a single thread is introduced as hanging by a single thread.

The same rule governs the cast. Physical and material description of real people is drawn from attested accounts wherever any survive; reconstructions from period practice are marked as such and never presented as though a witness had written them down. And there are no invented likenesses. No authentic portrait of Tecumseh taken from life survives, and none is shown here; the familiar engraving is a later invention. Little Turtle sat for Gilbert Stuart and the canvas burned in 1814, so the ablest soldier of the frontier comes down to us with no certain face, and this account leaves it that way.

What is cited but never copied

Not everything that can be found should be reproduced.

• In-copyright work is cited by attribution and paraphrased. It is not quoted at length, not mirrored, and not loaded into the searchable text. Where a modern scholar's finding is load-bearing, the finding is credited and the reader is pointed at the original.
• Tribal and removal-era materials are cite-not-copy, as a matter of data sovereignty and not merely of law. They are named so that they can be found through their own communities and institutions, and their content is not republished here.
• Burial and ossuary material is recorded as existing and is not detailed, and its locations are withheld.
• Private material — including family genealogy gathered in the course of the research — is held out of the public work entirely.

Public-domain sources, by contrast, are quoted freely and, wherever possible, mirrored and transcribed in full so that a reader can check the book against the document rather than against a summary of it.

What this account is not

It is not neutral, and it does not pretend to be. It argues that the through-line of this valley is the conversion of a homeland into an entry in a ledger, and that the same instrument came, in the end, for the descendants of the people who wielded it. Readers should weigh that argument against the sources rather than take it on trust — which is the entire reason the sources are here and open.

It is also a living draft. Movements are still being deepened, sources are still being added, and the store grows faster than the prose does.

Corrections

The valley has been written about carelessly for two centuries. If something here is wrong — a date, a name, a claim that outruns its evidence, a source that should be read differently — that is worth knowing, and the correction will be made and recorded. Write to me.

Written and built by Scott Flack. The sources this work draws on are in the public domain or are cited by attribution; its prose, figures, design, and the curation of the research store are not — see Copyright & Rights.