Lyman Copeland Draper, creator of the Draper Manuscripts, was born in Lockport, New York,
on September 4, 1815. The eldest son of Luke Draper and Harriet Hoisington Draper, Lyman
attended the village school, worked on the family farm, and clerked in several shops. A
slight youth who attained a height of only five feet and one inch, he was ill-suited for
rough sports and heavy physical labor. Instead he vicariously sought adventure in books, in
tales of the American Revolution related by his grandfather, and in stories of British
captivity during the War of 1812 told by his father. Lyman's quest for learning attracted
the attention of Peter Remsen, husband of Draper's cousin Lydia. With Remsen's financial
support, Draper attended Granville College in Ohio from June 1834 until November 1836; but
it soon became apparent that the young scholar was more interested in American history than
in the prescribed classical curriculum. He began writing letters to seek reminiscences of
Kentucky pioneers; he delivered college orations and wrote articles on American historical
and archeological topics for the Gemof Rochester, New
York.
After leaving college, he spent several years earning his subsistence in varied
occupations—business associate of Remsen, editor of the Pontotoc (Mississippi) Spirit of the Times, Mississippi land agent and speculator, and
clerk in the Erie Canal office in Buffalo, New York. Concurrently he read American history,
gathered random notes, and gradually conceived plans for a book on western history and
biography which he would eventually entitle “Sketches of the Lives of the
Pioneers.”
Impressed by Draper's vision, in 1843 Remsen decided to fund Draper's historical research
and travel in return for occasional domestic and business assistance. Until Remsen's death
nine years later, Draper took full advantage of this remarkable opportunity. He made nine
trips through the southeastern and middle states, filled several thousand notebook pages
with interview notes and copies-of archival records and newspaper articles, and acquired
many of the most significant original manuscripts in his collection, including papers of
Daniel Boone, Daniel Brodhead, George Rogers Clark and his brothers, the Martin family of
Tennessee, and William Preston. In addition he wrote hundreds of letters appealing for
manuscripts, recollections, and other data. By 1841 the task Draper envisioned had expanded
from one volume to a series of some twenty titles including biographical dictionaries of
western pioneers and western Indians, a historical reader for schoolchildren, a history of
Dunmore's War, and biographies of such notable frontier figures as Daniel Boone, Samuel
Brady, Joseph Brant and other Indian chiefs, Richard Butler, George Rogers Clark, William
Crawford, Simon Kenton, James Robertson, John Sevier, Thomas Sumter, and William
Whitley.
After Remsen's sudden death resulted in an abrupt cessation of income, Draper on the advice
of other friends moved to Wisconsin, where in 1854 he was appointed corresponding secretary
of the small State Historical Society of Wisconsin. For the next few years most of his
personal interests were put aside while he devoted his time and energy to creating a firm
administrative organization for the Society, attracting a broad state and national
membership, and beginning the acquisition of books, manuscripts, and maps for its library
and artifacts for its museum. By 1857 Draper could again find time for personal research and
collecting in addition to performing his Historical Society functions. During the next
thirty-four years he made several major trips for interviews, carried on a voluminous
correspondence on Boone, Clark, and other contemporaries, and worked sporadically on several
proposed historical and biographical books. Only one, King's Mountain
and Its Heroes(1881), was ever published. Draper retired from his administrative
duties at the Historical Society at the close of 1886. Still busily engaged with his
manuscripts and his correspondence about Clark, he suffered a stroke and died in Madison on
August 26, 1891.
In politics Draper became a Democrat during his college days and remained an active member
of this party thereafter, which often proved an asset in his collecting efforts in the
South. In religion he was converted to the Baptist faith also while in Granville, and during
his early years in Madison was a lay leader in the First Baptist Church. His Baptist
connection was severed early in 1869 as the result of a conversion to spiritualism during a
research trip to Indiana and Kentucky in the preceding autumn; for the rest of his years he
remained a spiritualist. (Contrary to a widely publicized myth among genealogists, Draper
was never ordained or appointed a minister to any church and was never a circuit rider for
any denomination or religious movement.)
Draper was married twice, first in 1853 to his widowed cousin, Lydia Remsen, who died in
May 1888. Seventeen months later, in October 1889, he married Lydia's friend, Mrs. Catherine
T. Hoyt, who survived him.
A full-length, well-researched biography of Draper was written by William B. Hesseltine.
Entitled Pioneer's Mission: The Story of Lyman Copeland
Draper, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin during the Draper
Centennial commemoration in 1954. Out-of-print in its original format, it has been reissued
on microfiche.
Draper willed his personal collection of manuscripts to the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin. Soon after his death, the Society took possession of the papers and moved them
from Draper's library, a stone building near his home, to the Society's quarters (which were
then in the Capitol). There Reuben G. Thwaites, Draper's successor as Society executive,
supervised the preparation of the collection for public use.
In accordance with nineteenth-century library practice, Draper intended his personal
collection to be neatly arranged and bound into volumes. During his travels he made his
records in pocket memoranda or larger notebooks; these he frequently combined for binding.
He arranged unbound papers, including many original documents of the 1750-1830 period, into
groups as a source on a particular person, event or geographical area. Therefore, he did not
regard a collection of family papers as an inviolate unit; neither did he keep letters of
individual correspondents together. Instead numerous letters and documents, which had
originally been interrelated by provenance, were dispersed to various segments of his
collection. After grouping his loose papers, he often bound them together as well. Many
pages show his own handwork with paste and paper mounting strips. Some of his volumes he
indexed in varying degrees of detail. After 1854 the pressure of Historical Society duties
and other Wisconsin activities caused him to fall into arrears on the sorting, binding, and
indexing of his growing collection, and in his years of retirement he put his papers further
into disarray as he puttered among his unfinished projects. As received from the Draper
estate, the collection contained about 150 bound volumes and many bundles of loose sheets.
Although Draper's storage building had been relatively safe from danger of fire, it was not
free from rodents and insects or extremes of temperature and humidity. Many papers,
especially the unbound ones, were in need of cleaning and repair as well as of
arrangement.
