The Draper Manuscripts, collected by Lyman C. Draper, contain first hand accounts from men and women involved in the emerging American frontier including Draper's own notes on his many interviews with Western pioneers and their descendants. Easily accessible through calendars and a printed guide, the biographies, oral histories and other documents provide important data on military figures, pioneers, Indian leaders and influential families as well as maps and genealogies useful to local and cultural historians.

Among the biographical manuscripts are Daniel Boone's 1774 military account books and his Kentucky land survey notebooks, papers by and about the noted Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, and the Campaign Leader, Thomas Sumter, together with accounts of frontier life from the diary of Thomas Spottswood Hinde. The regional manuscripts include the Frontier War Papers - original letters and journals kept by participants in the Indian wars in the West from 1754 to 1815 - the Kentucky Papers and the King's Mountain Papers assembled by Draper to mark the centenary of the victory of frontier troops over Loyalist soldiers at King's Mountain, South Carolina in 1780.