VI
PREFACE.
been omitted, therefore, except purely formal matter, such as notes of hand, drafts drawn against Austin by various colonists, copies of State and Federal laws already available, inventories of local archives, field notes and deeds, and fragments which seem to have no value whatever. The Austin Papers, it should be said, came into possession of the University of Texas in 1901 by gift of the literary executors of Colonel Guy M. Bryan, himself the nephew of Stephen F. Austin, who had had the custody of the papers during his life. Considering his many ha_rassing duties, Stephen F. Austin was a voluminous and remarkably painstaking letter writer. Of most of his official papers he apparently preserved copies, and we fre- quently find several drafts of a document, interlined and deleted almost beyond decipherment before it reached the copy-book stage. It has seemed desirable to include as complete a collection of his letters as possible, and various sources have contributed here to sup- plement those which he himself preserved. The most important of these are the Bexar Archives at the University of Texas, and tran- scripts which the University has obtained from Mexican archives, particularly from the Department of Fomento; the Records of the General Land Office of Texas; and the Lamar Papers, Nacogdoches Archives, and other collections of the Texas State Library; the Mis- souri Historical Society; and the Wagner Collection of Yale Uni- versity. One letter was obtained from the Poinsett Papers in the Pennsylvania Historical Society's library; and scattering copies have been found in various newspapers, mostly in the files of the Wis- consin Historical Society and of the Durrett Collection of the Uni- versity of Chicago. Of the Texas collections used for this volume only the Bexar Archives and the Lamar Papers are calendared, so that it is hardly possible but that some Austin letters have escaped the search.· Others will come to light in contemporary newspapers and through further exploration of Mexican archives. Those included in the .present volume, however, represent, for the period covered, the result of notes which the editor has made: incident to other studies, for a good 1any years. All the copies have been collated by the editor with the originals, .xcept the Mexican transcripts, the letter from the Poinsett Manu- scripts, two or three copies from newspapers, and those from the Missouri Historical Society. These last were verified by Miss Stella M. Drumm, the Librarian of that Society. • From time to time, for one purpose or another, Spanish letters in the State collections have been translated into English. In every case the translation has been used in this volume. It is sometimes awkward, but whenever possi- ble--and it has been possible with very few exceptions-it has been
Powered by FlippingBook