The writer of this book is well aware that it will not stand the test of criticism as a literary production. A frontiersman himself, his opportunities for acquiring information, and for supplying the deficiencies of a rather limited education, have of course been "few and far between;" and therefore it cannot be reasonably expected that he could make a book under such circumstances which would not be sadly defective as to style and composition. However, it can justly lay claim to at least one merit, not often found in similar publications—it is not a compilation of imaginary scenes and incidents, concocted in the brain of one who never was beyond the sound of a dinner-bell in his life, but a plain, unvarnished story of the "'scapes and scrapes" of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter, written out from notes furnished by himself, and told, as well as my memory serves me, in his own language.

John Crittenden Duval (1816–1897) was an American writer of Texas literature. He has been noted as being the first Texas man of letters and was dubbed the "Father of Texas Literature".