Their

CHARLEVOIX.

sledges . . . are two small and very thin boards half a foot broad each, and six or seven long. The fore part is somewhat raised, and the sides bordered with small bands. . . . Let these carriages be ever so much loaded, an Indian draws it without difficulty, by means of a long thong or strap, which is pass'd round his breast, and is called a collar.1

CARVER.

Their sledges consist of two small thin boards about a foot wide when joined, and near six feet long. The fore part is turned up, and the sides are bordered with small bands. The Indians draw these carriages with great ease, be they ever so much loaded, by means of a string which passes round the breast.?

A veteran of the French and Indian war and a witness of the Fort William Henry massacre must have seen the operation of scalping many times, yet the author of Carver's Travels would seem to have been somewhat put to it to give an exact description of the process. He was no doubt relieved to find the following in James Adair's History of the American Indians:

This honourable service is thus performed-They seize the head of the disabled, or dead person, and placing one of their feet on the neck, they with one hand twisted in the hair, extend it as far as they canwith the other hand, the barbarous artists speedily draw their long sharp-pointed scalping knife out of a sheath from their breast, give a slash round the top of the skull, and with a few dexterous scoops, soon strip it off. They are so expeditious as to take off a scalp in two minutes. 3

The account in Carver's Travels reads:

At this business they are exceedingly expert. They seize the head of the disabled or dead enemy, and placing one of their feet on the neck, twist their left hand in the hair; by this means, having extended the skin that covers the top of the head, they draw out their scalping knives, which are always kept in good order for this cruel purpose, and with a few dextrous strokes take off the part that is termed the scalp. They are so expeditious in doing this, that the whole time required. scarcely exceeds a minute.

The real Carver must have seen the Indian game of lacrosse, and if capable of writing the Travels would have been able to describe the game; the case would seem to have been different with the author of the Travels, for his description of the game is copied from Adair.

1 Charlevoix, Journal, I. 336.

2 Carver's Travels, 330-331.

3 James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London, 1775), 387-388. 4 Carver's Travels, 328-329. Chateaubriand copied Carver's description of scalping, and lent an extra touch of realism by the added detail that the scalper deftly took off the top of the skull, leaving the brain bare, but untouched by the knife! See Bédier, Études Critiques, 248; Chateaubriand, Voyage en Amérique (edition Pourrat, Paris, 1836), 218.

If we turn from the manners and customs of the Indians to the animals and products of Jonathan Carver's native land, we find the same disposition to rely upon his French predecessors. The buffalo, of which he must have seen in his residence among the Sioux more than Charlevoix ever did, is described in Charlevoix's words:

Again, the long account of the beaver is condensed from the same source; and the same is true of Carver's accounts of the moose and the caribou, the bear, the porcupine, and other animals.

After these specimens of the manner in which the writer of Carver's Travels drew upon different sources, we need not be surprised to discover that Carver's "A short Vocabulary of the Chipéway Language" is almost entirely copied from La Hontan's "Dictionary of the Algonkin Language." The copying, however, would seem to have been done by one ignorant of the language. For example, the word "dart" immediately follows "dance" in both lists; but Carver gives, as the equivalent of "dart", Sheshikwee", which in La Hontan is the name of a particular kind of dance. In Carver's text, however (p. 385), “Chichicoué" is a medicine-man's rattle. Again La Hontan for "hart" gives "Micheoue", which Carver gives for "heart". In regard to the structure of the language Carver is equally beholden to La Hontan's account of the Algonkin:

LA HONTAN.

The Algonkin Language has neither Tone nor Accent, nor superfluous dead Letters; so that 'tis as easy to pronounce it as to write it. 'Tis not copious, no more than the other Languages of America.1

CARVER.

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The Chipéway tongue is not incumbered with any unnecessary tones or accents, neither are there any words in it that are superfluous; it is also easy to pronounce, and much more copious than any other Indian language.

The writer of Carver's Travels apparently thought it safe enough to give an Algonquin vocabulary for one of the "Chipéway" language; for he regards the two names as interchangeable, using the phrase, "the Chipéways or Algonkins" (p. 414).3

The examples that have been given, a few out of many that might be cited, are sufficient to show that the allegations of Greenhow and the conjectures of Wolcott and Schoolcraft were fully justified, and that the second part of Carver's Travels is essentially a compilation from La Hontan, Charlevoix, Adair, and other sources which I have not yet identified. That a traveller should borrow some descriptions from preceding travellers does not necessarily discredit his book, but in this case the borrowings are so extensive and

1 La Hontan, New Voyages, H. 290. 2 Carver's Travels, 416.

3 The Chippewa belongs to the Algonquin linguistic stock, but in Carver's time Algonquin and Chippewa were names of languages apparently as different as Dutch and German. See the parallel column vocabularies in Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, by J. Long (London, 1791), 196 et seqq.

of such a character that one cannot help suspecting that nearly everything was borrowed.

Turning now to the first part or the narrative proper of Carver's Travels, is it a genuine record of experience and did he write it, or was it written by another from his memoranda or oral recollections? So far as I can judge by literary evidence, I should reply that Carver was the source rather than the author of the narrative. The style of the first part is fluent literary English, and apparently is from the same hand as the descriptive matter in the second part. To pronounce upon the worth of this part of the book first-hand intimate knowledge of the field of observation is required. This qualification William H. Keating, the scholarly and painstaking geologist and historian of Long's expedition to the source of St. Peter's River in 1823, possessed in a high degree. The members of Long's expedition naturally gave Carver's account a more critical scrutiny under more favorable conditions than has been the case since or is likely to be in the future.1 Their general judgment is unfavorable. In general it is remarked: "No gentleman of the party would be willing to ascribe to Carver a scrupulous adherence to truth, (personal observation having convinced them all of the many misrepresentations contained in his work.) "2 Again, Hennepin estimated the height of the Falls of St. Anthony at fifty or sixty feet.

This height is, by Carver, reduced to about thirty feet; his strictures. upon Hennepin, whom he taxes with exaggeration, might with great propriety be retorted upon him, and we feel strongly inclined to say of him, as he said of his predecessor, the good father, I fear, too often had no other foundation for his accounts than report, or at least a slight inspection."

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In regard to the St. Peter's River and to the customs of the Sioux Indians, as to which Carver is still referred to as an important authority, the following comments are selected:

Carver is the only traveller who states that he visited this river, merely from motives of curiosity; but a close perusal of his book, has satisfied us that he professes too much. He asserts that he "proceeded upon the river about two hundred miles, to the country of the Naudowessies of the plains, which lies a little above the forks formed by the Verd and Red Marble rivers." He states that he resided five months

1 The late Dr. Elliott Coues in the notes to his The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike (New York, 1895) repeatedly quotes Carver and expresses a favorable opinion of his narrative. He does not refer, however, to part II.

2 Keating, Long's Expedition (Philadelphia, 1824), I. 277.

3 Ibid., 297-298. The actual height as measured by Pike and by Long was sixteen and one-half feet.

Cf. the bibliography to Livingston Farrand, Basis of American History (New York, 1904), 282-283.

among the Naudowessies, and that he acquired their language perfectly. We are inclined to doubt this; we believe that he ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony, that he saw the St. Peter, and that he may even perhaps have entered it; but had he resided five months in the country, and become acquainted with their language, it is not probable that he would have uniformly applied to them the term of Naudowessies, and omitted calling them the Dacota Indians, as they style themselves. . . . In his account of the river St. Peter, Carver attributes to it a breadth of nearly one hundred yards for two hundred miles, whereas at the distance of one hundred and thirty miles it was but seventy yards wide, and was found to be rapidly diminishing in size. He also ascribes to it "a great depth," which is not the case at any distance above its mouth.

. . . It is scarcely possible that if Carver had ascended the St.. Peter two hundred miles, he would have reported without contradicting them, the exaggerated accounts of the great extent of this river, or attributed to it a rise near the Shining, (Rocky,) Mountains; but besides these inaccuracies, some of which may perhaps be partly accounted for by his having seen the river at a time when it was unusually high, and when a mere brook may have been so much swollen as to be mistaken for a small branch of the river, yet we cannot place any confidence in him on account of the many misrepresentations contained in his work. Almost all that he relates as peculiar to the Naudowessies, is found to apply to the Sauks, or some other nation of Algonquin origin. Thus on reading to Renville, Dickson, (the son of the late Colonel Dickson,) and to several other of the half-Indian interpreters whom we saw on the St. Peter, that part of chapter 12th of his work, in which he relates that "the Naudowessies have a singular method of celebrating their marriages which seems to bear no resemblance to those made use of by any other nations that he passed through," these men all exclaimed that it was fabulous, that such a practice had never prevailed among any of the Dacotas, though they believed it to be in use with some of the Algonquin tribes. The practice of having a totem or family distinction, exists, as we have already stated, among the Sauks, etc. but it is quite unknown to the Sioux, to whom it is attributed by this writer. It is, we believe, clearly proved at present, that the land which he claimed by virtue of a grant from the Indians, was never conveyed to him by them. . . . When chapter 5th of Carver's work [on Indian government] was read to Renville and the other men, they denied the truth of its contents; but immediately recollected the designs of a snake and a tortoise, which were affixed to the treaty, no doubt to make it tally with the account of their family distinctions contained in that chapter of his travels. His vocabulary appears certainly to have been taken from the Dacota language; it may have been obtained from the Indians along the banks of the Mississippi, but was more probably copied from some former traveller, for a reference to old works will prove that Carver derived much of his information from them, though no credit is given to their authors for it.'

It is clear from the evidence here presented that the Travels of Jonathan Carver can no longer be ranked as an authentic record of the observations of the supposed author. Schoolcraft's con

1 Keating, Long's Expedition, I. 323-325.