Book excerpt: First published in 1961, Early Midwestern Travel Narratives records and describes first-person records of journeys in the frontier and early settlement periods which survive in both manuscript and print. Geographically, it deals with the states once part of the Old Northwest Territory-Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota-and with Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Robert Hubach arranged the narratives in chronological order and makes the distinction among diaries (private records, with contemporaneously dated entries), journals (non-private records with contemporaneously dated entries), and "accounts," which are of more literary, descriptive nature. Early Midwestern Travel Narratives remains to this day a unique comprehensive work that fills a long existing need for a bibliography, summary, and interpretation of these early Midwestern travel narratives.