Scarce book: Chronicles of Border Warfare, or a History of the Settlement by the Whites, of North-Western Virginia: And of the Indian Wars and Massacres, in That Section of the State; With Reflections, Anecdotes &c., by Alexander S. Withers. Clarksburg, VA: Joseph Israel, 1831. Hardcover bound in full brown calf, 4.5 x 7.25, 319 pages. Book condition: G+/None, with heavy foxing and staining throughout, corner losses to the first few pages, edgewear and rubbing to boards, ownership inscription to first free end page and initials inked to textblock edge, and the bookplate of Joel Davis Madden, Jr., affixed to front pastedown.
Reviewing this work in 1895, future president Theodore Roosevelt described it as 'one of the number of books which have a great value because they preserve the traditions of the border about the Indian fighting of the second half of the eighteenth century in the West.' In his 'Essay Towards an Indian Bibliography' of 1873, Thomas Warren Field observed: 'Of this scarce book, very few copies are complete or in good condition. Having been issued in a remote corner of Northwestern Virginia, and designed principally for a local circulation, almost every copy was read by a country fire-side until scarcely legible…The author took much pains to be authentic, and his chronicles are considered by Western antiquarians, to form the best collection of frontier life and Indian warfare, that has been printed.'
Joel Davis Madden, Jr., left Princeton University in 1905 and moved west to make his fortune in the railroad industry. He went on to become an executive with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and died suddenly in 1928 at the age of 41. His book collection, offered by his granddaughter, has not been publicly offered or privately sold in a century.
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