Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1886-05-20
CURIOUS MSS.
Discovery of a Frenchman's Memoirs of |
Our Colonial History.

Discovery of a Frenchman's Memoirs of
Our Colonial History.
The National Library of Paris has
lately received a curious acquisition in a
manuscript work entitled ''Voyage au
Canada dams lie Nord de rAmerique,
Septentrionale fait depuis Tan 1851: a
1861, par I. G. B." The author, when
very young and at his wits end for a
living, took an opportunity which was
offered him of going to Canada, and
there enlisted in the troa.pes de la ma
rsse, which composed the standing mil
itary force of the colony. As his educa-
ton was much above his new position,
he sometimes acted as secretary to his
commanding officer, and was at length
made storekeeper at Fort Duquesne,
where, as he ingeniously remarks there
were good opportunities of making
money without much risk. 1t was a
time when the storekeeper of military
outpost in Canada rarely failed to make
a modest competence at the expense of
the King. ct. G. B." found himself at
the end of the war in possession of
something more than eighty thousand
francs, nearly all of which melted into
nothing through the depreciation of
Canadian paper money.
His book would be more valuable if it
were less ambitious. He says that he
made notes of what he saw in Canada,
from which, many years afterward, he
wrote his story; but these notes must
have been of the most imperfect kind.
An exact copy of the whole work is be-
twenty-eight pages of manuscript, in
Guiding preface, an index and long
treatise on the Indians. In short, it is
a book prepared for the press, though it
was never printed. ct. C. B." would
self with relating his own experience,
instead of undertaking to recount the
whole course of the war. He did not
write his book till thirty or forty years
after his return to France, and his men,
DRY, in spite of the notes which he says
that he kept, often plays him strange
Braddock in 1856 and the removal of
the Acadians in 1854, though they both
occurred in 1855; and he makes the cap
ture of Fort William Henry and the de-
feat of Abercrombie occur in the same
and his long descriptions of the animals
of the country arevery inexact. Accord
ing to him, the Canadian porcupine
darts its quilts at all corners, while the
carcaiou, or wolverine. has tail sew
eral times longer than its body.
During the winter of 1853 and 1859 he
returned to Quebec with pockets full of
paper money from his lucrative service
at Fort Duquesne, and engaged himself
in marriage to young woman OF the
city, hired a house, furnished it at cost
of ten thousand francs, and somewhat
prematurely installed in it his intended
bride and mother-in-law. after which he
changed his mind and broke off the
match, assigning no reason to his read
ers or to his betrothed, whose disap-
pointed parent gave him great trouble
before he could dispossess her of the
house and furniture. Resuming his
military life, he was captured in the
summer of 176O and sent prisoner to
New York. His account of that place
and what befell him there is interesting
and curious. Being sent to France with
other prisoners, he rejoined his family,
and, at length, growing old, put his
story upon record, apparently about the
end of the last century. AS historical
evidence, the value of his work is small
Even in the events of which he was HIM
self part, his memory is often at fault,
and where he tells of what he did not