Martin Jerrold was not the only Englishman travelling down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in this period. I owe a particular debt to two of his compatriots, Fortescue Cuming and Thomas Ashe, whose published descriptions of their own journeys provided me with a wealth of information and inspiration, as well as to all the other travellers and settlers whose accounts I read. Many are preserved in the Library of Congress’s exemplary online American Memory archive, particularly the Early Western Travels and the First American West collections. Also online, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (www.davidrumsey.com) was an invaluable resource for establishing the geography of America in the early 1800s.
I am grateful, as ever, to the British Library, and to Laura MacPherson and the staff of the National Library of Scotland. At various points further west I profited from visits to the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth, to the several sites run by the Friends of the Cabildo in New Orleans, the Mississippi River Museum in Memphis, the Ohio River Museum in Marietta, Ohio, the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, and especially the Blennerhassett Island Historical State Park in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
Other debts: to Emily Cullum for answering my questions about horses; to Natalia Nowak-Kerigan and Caroline Dodds for rummaging through old newspapers; to Andrew and Melanie Lerchen who gave me the chance to research sailing conditions on the Gulf of Mexico firsthand; to all the Americans whose hospitality made my research trips so much easier; to Werner and Nina Lutgering who provided much help in a lost cause; and to my wife Emma who stoically accompanied me on my adventure along the Mississippi and didn’t try to shoot me at the end of it. At Transworld, Simon Thorogood and Selina Walker were generous in accommodating my delays, and as incisive as ever in straightening the flow of the text whenever it meandered too far. My agent Jane Conway-Gordon watched from her eyrie and missed nothing.
Finally, in deference to the good residents of the Buckeye State, I should clarify a deliberate inaccuracy in Chapter 12. Ohio does not mean ‘bloody’, though this was a common misconception at the time; it in fact means ‘beautiful’.