Thanks for the replies so far to my inquiry.
 The reason behind my inquiry is that I have been looking for any
information on interaction between the Chickasaws and the colony/state of
North Carolina on treaties, trade, land etc during the time period from the
end of the Revolution to the beginning of the Federal government.  I found
mentions that the Chickasaws had some interaction with Virginia hence
sparking the inquiry.  The Bibliographic and database information are much
appreciated.
    The use of modern databases such as Google and WorldCat have helped
speed up the process of finding things but there is still a need for good
old fashioned bibliographic searches of printed material especially for the
early 20th century and earlier.  The later databases are good but the trick
is finding the proper search terms to look for items. If you look for
Chickasaw in conjunction with a combination of search terms you can get
different results every time. The void in a search can result when no
scholarship has been done on a particular topic and the information still
resides in the primary source form of original documents that have not been
analyzed by scholars yet.  But still with the new information technology you
can find those problem spots a lot faster and develop search strategies to
fill them in with a combination of both old and new methods.
Thanks again 
Kent Moran
Research Associate
Center for Earthquake Research and Information
University of Memphis


> From: Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 10:23:54 -0500
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Virginia agents and the Indians
> 
> Thank you. Very interesting and I can see how it could be a useful
> starting point - and I'm sure many of us will experiment further with
> Google's beta version search engine.  Indeed this week's New Yorker has a
> fascinating article about the copyright/intellectual property issues
> inherent in Google's much larger digital library project that is well
> worth reading.  But I digress.
>     Traditional on-line library catalogues continue to have their merits,
> too, however - and resources for full-text searching such as JSTOR or
> Project Muse are well worth a trip to a major library.
>     In this instance, for example, the Google beta version search engine
> turns up many titles that are not very useful for the initial query
> about Indian agents and that are of limited use even for the 1768 Fort
> Stanwix Conference. (This is not surprising: my research in JSTOR and
> other places suggests that sustained scholarship about the Fort
> Stanwiz conference is pretty limited, which may be why my short list
> had things published almost back to 1900.)
>    In this regard, the Google search on "Fort Stanwix Conference 1768" for
> which Dr. McDonald provided the link resulted in 189 titles, most of
> which had perhaps ONE mention of the conference, and many of which are
> passing references......  Conveniently, of course, Google let's you
> look at each of these 189 pages - a great boon when away from a good
> library - at say a minute or two each, that's about 3 to 6 hours.
>   Back when I was gathering information about the conference (among other
> things I needed to know exactly when it began and ended because
> Jefferson was accused of making advances toward Elizabeth Moore Walker
> while her husband was attending it) I found half a dozen useful things
> in the net in a regular Google search, but frankly it was traditional
> library on-line catalogues and JSTOR that got me most quickly to the
> really useful titles that I cited. (BTW I've already done what I needed
> on the Stanwix conference, I mentioned it just in recommending titles to
> someone else interested in Indian agents as an indication of the period
> - 1760s - for which these titles were most useful.)
>    At some fundamental level all findings aids, printed or on-line, are a
> bit like indexes in one respect: a good index entry is based on
> informed judgment and will get you to the select information you're
> looking for. A less well edited index may provide dozens or scores of
> page numbers for every mention of some term or another (like a
> concordance), but those sought-after kernels of information are in
> effect buried in so much "chaff" that the result is very cumbersome....
> Sometimes, even outside of modern architecture, less is more.
> 
> Jon Kukla
> 
> 
> 
>> I have found Google's beta version search engine for limited-view and
>> full-view books, with their on-line digitized data, to be helpful,
>> especially when a large library is not readily accessible.  An example for
>> your topic:
>> http://books.google.com/books?q=Fort+Stanwix+conference+1768+&as%5fbrr=0
>> 
>> Go to the basic '.com' URL for general info.
>> 
>> Hope this helps.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Neil McDonald
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jon Kukla" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:48 PM
>> Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Virginia agents and the Indians
>> 
>> 
>>> In the context of writing about Thomas Jefferson and Elizabeth Moore
>>> Walker, I did some reading about the Fort Stanwix conference of 1768
>>> that
>>> John Walker attended as secretary for the Virginia delegation headed by
>>> his father, Dr. Thomas Walker.
>>>  Among the works I found helpful (some old some new and in no particular
>>> order) were: <snip>
> 
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