When this monumental work first appeared in 1884, it set out to capture nothing less than the entire arc of a region's rise — from primeval wilderness on the Niagara frontier to one of the great commercial cities of the American republic. More than a century later, Henry Perry Smith's two-volume History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County remains the indispensable account of how that transformation happened.

Volume I traces the long history of Erie County itself: the land of the Iroquois and the Seneca, the centuries of contested French and English dominion, the surveys of the Holland Land Company, and the first hardy settlers who carved farms from the forest. Here too is the fire and fury of the War of 1812 — the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, and the burning of Buffalo — followed by the county's emergence and the regiments it sent to the Union cause.

Volume II turns to the city: Buffalo before the war, its rebirth as village and then as a booming metropolis on the Erie Canal. Smith chronicles the lake commerce and the towering grain elevators that made Buffalo a hub of the nation, its German community, its churches, presses, hospitals and celebrated park system, and the merchants, jurists and pioneers whose lives are preserved in his richly detailed biographical sketches.