Please understand that I am not trashing Folklore itself - only its mistaken use alone, as History. Doing that spoils both, because the difference between Folklore and History is not a simple difference between just gossip and real fact. Folklore is to History as Pepper is to Salt; the two are not interchangeable, but often go very well together, when each is recognized for its separate essence. For general example, when historiography (the writing of history) overly-depended on the documents about elite males (his-story), the mostly-unwritten accounts of common females' activities (HER-Story) survived largely through folklore. The same is true about other whole groups, who have been rightly called "Peoples Without History". In the specific example of the (in)famous Rogers' Rangers' Raid on the St Francis Abenaki, at Odanak, in October 1759, the whole story certainly was not told by Major Rogers' own self-serving account alone. Yet Angloamerican professional academic historians tended to accept Rogers' own account at face value, until ethnohistorian Gordon Day ferreted-out the Abenaki women's folklore to add a corrective perspective to it. "Oral Tradition as Complement" is Day's descriptive title of his 1972 paper telling a more-complete story: both parts together, history and folklore each completing the incompleteness of the other [Ethnohistory Vol.19 No.2 (Spring 1972) pp.99-108]. To find out just how alive-&-well folklore really is, visit the website of "the preeminent collection of its kind in New England" -The MAINE FOLKLIFE CENTER and NORTHEAST ARCHIVES OF FOLKLORE & ORAL-HISTORY*: www.umaine.edu/folklife *Oral-history is the interviewing & audio / video-taping of the life-history of an interesting person / family / group / community, to obtain an archival record for present & future public remembrance. Northeast Folklore (the periodical publication of the Northeast Folklore Society and the Northeast Archives) usually contains the published written format of one or more such interviews, with still photos.