Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the Northwest

Produced by Gene Smethers and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
If we but knew the exact meaning of the word 'WAU-BUN,' we should be happy. — Critic .
WAU-BUN—The dawn—the break of day. — Ojibeway Vocabulary .

1873
Every work partaking of the nature of an autobiography is supposed to demand an apology to the public. To refuse such a tribute, would be to recognize the justice of the charge, so often brought against our countrymen—of a too great willingness to be made acquainted with the domestic history and private affairs of their neighbors.
It is, doubtless, to refute this calumny that we find travellers, for the most part, modestly offering some such form of explanation as this, to the reader: That the matter laid before him was, in the first place, simply letters to friends, never designed to be submitted to other eyes, and only brought forward now at the solicitation of wiser judges than the author himself.
No such plea can, in the present instance, be offered. The record of events in which the writer had herself no share, was preserved in compliance with the suggestion of a revered relative, whose name often appears in the following pages. My child, she would say, write these things down, as I tell them to you. Hereafter our children, and even strangers, will feel interested in hearing the story of our early lives and sufferings. And it is a matter of no small regret and self-reproach, that much, very much, thus narrated was, through negligence, or a spirit of procrastination, suffered to pass unrecorded.
With regard to the pictures of domestic life and experience (preserved, as will be seen, in journals, letters, and otherwise), it is true their publication might have been deferred until the writer had passed away from the scene of action; and such, it was supposed, would have been their lot—that they would only have been dragged forth hereafter, to show to a succeeding generation what The Early Day of our Western homes had been. It never entered the anticipations of the most sanguine that the march of improvement and prosperity would, in less than a quarter of a century, have so obliterated the traces of the first beginning, that a vast and intelligent multitude would be crying out for information in regard to the early settlement of this portion of our country, which so few are left to furnish.