Ethan Allen

Up to some twenty years ago, all the many books and pamphlets and essays about Ethan Allen were pretty much confined to the same few high lights of his career and a number of generalities, things that had been more or less of public knowledge. Then, and all within a decade or so, a considerable amount of new material came to light. The important Canadian Archives were made available, and American historians mined them to good effect; the British account of the capture of Ticonderoga was found; Vermonters and others like Henry Steele Wardner, Allen French, J. B. Wilbur, John Clement, John Spargo, and Hall Park McCullough delved into long dusty letters and documents and made known their contents; Matt B. Jones spent years in gathering the material for his book on Vermont; and John Pell, with a staff of able researchers, combed collections of materials in many states and found doubtless about all that ever will be known of Ethan Allen's early and obscure years, which appeared in Mr. Pell's exhaustive biography.

To all of these the present author is indebted, just as both they and he are indebted to earlier writers--Zadock Thompson, Benjamin Hall, Hiland Hall, Jared Sparks, and Benson Loring among many others.

In addition to those named, I have to thank others for aiding and abetting me: the men and women of the Boston Public Library, Harvard College Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Connecticut Historical Society, Vermont State Library, Vermont Historical Society, Bennington Historical Museum, the libraries of the University of Vermont, and S. H. P. Pell and the Fort Ticonderoga Museum.

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