The Jesuit Lafitau published at Paris in 1724 his Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains in two volumes, with various plates, which in the main is confined to the natives of Canada, where he had lived long with the Iroquois. Charlevoix said of his book, twenty years later, “We have nothing so exact upon the subject;” and Lafitau continues to hold high rank as an original authority, though his book is overlaid with a theory of the Tartaric origin of the red race. Mr. Parkman calls him the most satisfactory of the elder writers. (Field, no. 850; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 344, 345, 472; Sabin, vol. x. p. 22.) There was a Dutch version, with the same plates, in 1731.
Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale, in four volumes, with a distinctive title to each (1722 and 1753), is mainly a history of the Indians with which the French came in contact. He wrote early in the last century, and his book saw several editions, evincing the interest it created. His information is at second hand for the early portions of the period covered (since Cartier); but of the later times he becomes a contemporary authority. (Field, no. 66,)
Of less interest in relation to the seventeenth century is Le Beau’s Voyage Curieux et Nouveau parmi les Sauvages de l’Amérique Septentrionale, published at Amsterdam in 1738,—a work, however, of a semi-historical character, (Field, no. 901.)
Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations was printed by Bradford in New York in 1727, and is now very rare. Dr. Shea reprinted it in 1866, and in his introduction and notes its somewhat curious bibliographical history is learnedly traced. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 393, 394; Field, Indian Bibliography, 341; Menzies, 429, $210; Sabin, vol. v. p. 222.) The three later London editions (1747, 1750, 1755) were altered somewhat by the English publishers, without indicating the variations they introduced. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 847, 922, 1,049.) A portrait of Colden is given in the Historical Magazine, ix. 1. Sulte, in his Mélanges, p. 184, has an essay on the respective positions of the Iroquois and Algonquins previous to the coming of the Europeans.
D. G. Brinton, at the end of chap. i. of his Myths of the New World, characterizes the different writers on the mythologies of the Indians; and Mr. Parkman, Jesuits, etc., p. lxxxviii, notes some of the repositories of Iroquois legends.
A valuable paper on the origin of the Iroquois confederacy, by Horatio Hale, is printed in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 241; and Mr. C. C. Baldwin has a paper on the Iroquois in Ohio in the Western Reserve Historical Society, no. 40, and another paper on the early Indian migrations, in no. 47. Mr. Hale has further extended our knowledge by the curious learning of his Iroquois Book of Rites, Cincinnati, 1883; and he also printed in the American Antiquarian, January and April, 1883 (also separately Chicago, 1883), a scholarly paper on Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language.
So far as relates to the more easterly tribes coming within the range of the Jesuits’ influence, Parkman’s description can be compared with the plain matter-of-fact enumerations which make up the picture in Palfrey’s New England, which are derived from authorities enumerated in his notes. See various papers in the Canadian Journal.
The general historians of New France necessarily give more or less attention to the study of the Indians as the Jesuits found them; and such a study is an integral part of Dr. George E. Ellis’s learned monograph, The Red Man and the White Man in North America, whose account of the different methods of converting the natives, pursued by the French and the English, may be compared with that in Archbishop Spalding’s Miscellanea, i. 333.