Not wholly satisfied with correspondence as a means of collecting papers and securing information, as early as 1841 Draper began to converse with western pioneers and their descendants and to record their oral statements and replies to his questions in notebooks, many of which compose this series. Draper was therefore a pioneer in oral history decades before mechanical and electronic recording devices were developed. In addition to interviews he transcribed into his notebooks selections from state and county archives, newspapers, and personal manuscripts—any significant records found during his travels which he could not acquire in the original. Geographically his research travel ranged from Washington, D.C., to Kansas and from Mississippi to Ontario. He sought information on the West from the early crossings of the Allegheny mountain ranges by white explorers in the mid-eighteenth century to the close of the War of 1812, a period from about 1750 to 1815.
During his months as newspaper editor and farmer in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1841 Draper recorded interviews with pioneers in that vicinity (27-29 S), but his serious research travels began two years later. From 1843 to 1846 he made several extended tours into Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, western Pennsylvania, and western Virginia. Interviews and other notes recorded for these trips are found in 1-3 S and 27–33 S. In 1850 he journeyed to Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania and to western New York, a tour which included several Iroquois Indian reservations (4 S). Two volumes (5-6 S) cover his wide ranging trip in 1851; starting in western Pennsylvania, he took a boat down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi River to the French villages of Illinois and Missouri, then returned east by land routes through Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. For his 1858 journey (7-8 S) he began in Cincinnati and concentrated on interviewing residents of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Two years later (1860) he again began his collecting of data in Ohio, then traveled to Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., to examine and copy state and federal public records, and returned to Ohio by way of western Virginia and western Pennsylvania (9-16 S). In 1863 (17-20 S) he rambled through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan, and also included a portion of western Ontario in order to interview descendants of British and Loyalist leaders in the American Revolution and War of 1812. During the next year (1864, 20 S) he spent some time in Cincinnati and made a special journey to visit Simon Girty's only surviving daughter in Illinois. Notes for his 1866 trip (21 S) began at Toledo, Ohio, but also include interviews with residents of central Ohio, northern Kentucky, central Indiana, and northern Illinois. His three journeys during 1868 (22-26 S) are the latest ones recorded in this series. On the first (May-July 1868) he made a few stops in Illinois, spent several days in St. Louis and vicinity, then interviewed descendants of Kentucky and Tennessee pioneers who had migrated to western Missouri and members of the Delaware and Shawnee tribes who had been removed to Kansas. In October he made a shorter excursion to Iowa to visit descendants of southern Ohio pioneers. And on his third trip (November-December) he roamed through southern Indiana, stopped at Louisville, and went as far east as Parkersburg, West Virginia.
When traveling, Draper sometimes took his interview notes in small pocket memoranda books and later at home would transcribe the interviews for a single trip or a year's journeys into larger notebooks; in doing so, he often placed the interviews in the order in which he wished to read them for research instead of in the chronological sequence in which he had recorded them. Volume 2 S (1844) contains examples of original pocket memoranda books. Volumes 22-25 S (1868) exemplify volumes composed of recopied and rearranged interviews.
