[121] [For example, The Present State of the Country ... of Louisiana. By an Officer at New Orleans to his Friend at Paris. To which are added Letters from the Governor [Vaudreuil] on the Trade of the French and English with the Natives, London, 1744 (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 773; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 955; Sabin, no. 42,283).—Ed.
[122] Gayarré, in his preface, says: “Mr. Magne (one of the editors of the New Orleans Bee) inspected with minute care, and with a discretion which did him honor, the portfolios of the Minister of the Marine in France, and extracted from them all the documents relating to Louisiana, of which he made a judicious choice and an exact copy. Governor Mouton, having learned of this collection, hastened, in his position as a clear-headed magistrate whose duty it was to gather together what might cast light upon the history of the country, to acquire it for account of the State.” It is understood that this Magne Collection was purchased for a thousand dollars at the instance of Mr. Gayarré. It was then deposited in the State Library; but is no longer to be found. A similar disappearance has happened in the case of some other copies which were made for Mr. Edmund Forstall, and were likewise in the State Library; and the same fate has befallen two bound volumes of copies which were made for the Hon. John Perkins while in Europe, and which were by him likewise given to the State Library. Many of these documents were included by Gayarré in his Histoire.
It was also by the influence of Gayarré that the Louisiana Legislature appropriated $2,000 to secure copies of papers from the Spanish Archives. It was committed to the Hon. Romulus Saunders of North Carolina, then the American minister in Madrid, to propitiate the Spanish Government in an application for permission to make copies. He failed, though zealous to accomplish it. Through the medium of Prescott recourse was then had to Don Pascual de Gayangos, who, after difficulties had been overcome, succeeded in getting copies of a mass of papers, which greatly aided Gayarré in his Spanish Domination. These papers, like the rest, found their way to the State Library at Baton Rouge, but disappeared in turn during the Civil War. A small part of them was discovered by Mr. Lyman Draper, of Wisconsin, in the keeping of the widow of a Federal officer, and through Mr. Draper’s instrumentality was restored to the Library. The correspondence of Messrs. Saunders, Gayangos, and Gayarré makes one of the State documents of Louisiana.
A few years since, another movement was made by Mr. Gayarré to get other papers from Spain, impelled to it by information of large diaries (said to be four hundred and fifty-two large bundles) still unexamined in the Spanish Archives, pertaining to Louisiana. The State of Louisiana was not in a condition to incur any outlay; and by motion of General Gibson a Bill was introduced into the National House of Representatives, appropriating $5,000 to procure from England, France, and Spain copies of documents relating to Florida and Louisiana. Nothing seems to have come of the effort beyond the printing of a letter of Mr. Gayarré, with his correspondence with Saunders and Gayangos, which was done by order of a committee to whom the subject was referred. The facts of this note are derived from a statement kindly furnished by Mr. Gayarré.
[There is among the Sparks manuscripts in Harvard College Library a volume marked Papers relating to the Early Settlement of Louisiana, copied from the Originals in the Public Offices of Paris (1697-1753).—Ed.]
[123] Xavier Eyma adopts another form in “La légende du Meschacébé,”—a paper in the Revue Contemporaine (vol. xxxi. pp. 277, 486, 746), in which he traces the history of the explorations from Marquette to the death of Bienville.
[124] Norman McF. Walker on the “Geographical Nomenclature of Louisiana,” in the Mag. of Amer. History, Sept., 1883, p. 211.
[125] See Vol. IV. p. 375.
[126] There is an account of him in the Allg. Geog. Ephemeriden, vol. x. p. 385. See Vol. IV. p. 375.
[127] There are issues of later dates, 1722, etc.