The Arizona sentinel., 1886-06-05
CURIOUS MSS.
Discovery of Frenchmans Memoirs of
 Our Colonial History.

| Discovery of a Frenchman's Memoirs oi Our Colonial History.
 The National Library of Paris has
 lately received curious acquisition in a manuscript work entitled Voyage au
 Canada dans le Nord de rAmerique,
 Septentrionale fait depuis Tan 1751 a
 1761, par T. c. 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 trOWpes de Ia mo- TTne, which composed th9 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. It was a time when the storekeeper of military outpost in Canada rarely failed to make modest competence at the expense of the King. ''T. c. 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 Canad an paper money.
 His book would be more valuable if it were less ambit ous. 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- fore me. It forms four hundred anG twenty-eight pages of manuscript, in- cluding preface, an index and long treatise on the Ind ans. In short. it is a book prepared for the press, though it was never printed. 1T. c. B." would have done well if he had contented him. self With relating his own experience, instead of undertaking to recount the whole course of the war. He did not WI te his book till thirty or forty years after his return to France, and his mem- ory, in spite of the notes which he says that he kept, often plays him strange tricks. Thus, he puts the defeat of Braddock in 1756 and the removal of the Acadians in 1754, though they both occurred in l755; and he makes the cap- ture of Fort William Henry and the de- t at of Abercrombie occur in the same summer. His account of the Indians and his long descriptions of the animals of the country revery inexact. Accord ing to him, the Canadian porcupine darts its quills at all corners, while the caTca Ou, or wolverine. has a tail sev- eral mes longer than its body
 DuIing the winter of 1758 and 1759 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 d 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 CTS 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 1760 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 l 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 l