On the expedition against the Mohawks, led by Mantet, Courtemanche, and La Noue, we have more various accounts. Parkman gives a graphic recital, and his notes show he has used all the sources. The French authorities, besides the letter of Callières to the home government, are the Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable en Canada, 1692-93; the Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada au sujet de la Guerre, 1682-1712; while citations of original journals, etc., are in Faillon’s Vie de Mdle. Le Ber, and of course we have La Potherie (iii. 169) and Belmont. The N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. ix., contain important material, including a “Narrative of Military Operations in Canada;” and Major Peter Schuyler’s report is in vol. iv. of the same collection. Colden, in his Five Nations, p. 142, wrote while the actors were still living. There was a tract on the expedition issued in London the same year, which is of such rarity that the copy in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,446, with fac-simile of title; also Harrisse, no. 171) is the only one known to me, and from it Sabin, in 1868, reprinted it. It is entitled, A Journal of the late actions of the French in Canada, with the manner of their being repulsed, by his Excellency Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of New York, etc. By Coll. Nicholas Reyard [should be Beyard] and Lieutenant-Coll. Charles Lodowick.
The reader must turn to the chapter on Acadia for the authorities for such other expeditions as come within the alleged limits of that province and the neighboring English settlements.
A CANADIAN SOLDIER.
This sketch of the costume of a grenadier de St. Louis, Compagnie canadienne, is taken from the Mass Archives: Documents Collected in France, iii. 3.
On Frontenac’s last raid,—the attack upon the Onondagas, in 1696,—we must naturally find our chief information from the French, for the English at Albany were not ready to advance till the French had done their work and had gone. Frontenac and Callières each despatched accounts to Paris; and besides the Relation, 1682-1712, already referred to, we have the Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada,—a manuscript preserved in the library of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (see Parliamentary Library Catalogue, 1858, p. 1613); the Relation, 1696, which Shea has printed, and of course the accounts in La Potherie, iii. 270, and Charlevoix (Shea adds references in his edition, vol. v.), and the papers in the Doc. Hist. of N. Y., i. 323, and the N. Y. Col. Docs. iv. 342. Parkman’s narrative (Frontenac, chap. xix.) is clearly put and exemplified.
B. General Documentary Sources Of Canadian History.—Harrisse prefaces his Notes pour servir à l’histoire, à la bibliographie et à la cartographie de la Nouvelle France et des pays adjacents, 1545-1700, Paris, 1872, with an account of the sources of early Canadian history, and of the repositories of documentary material in Paris, etc. He states that the French Government refused access to their archives to an agent of the Historical Society of Quebec in 1835, and that a similar refusal was made in 1838; but that in 1842 General Cass, then United States Minister, succeeded, in behalf of the State of Michigan, in securing about forty cartons for publication; and ten years later the Parliament at Quebec obtained copies of documents, which now (1872) form a series of thirty-six folios,—not embracing, however, the papers of the early discovery, which were withheld.