BWANTON] INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 5 



plo iiiisimdcrstaiulin«;s, ami. leaving aside the irlatioii of Hennepin, 

 which after all contains few (>xa<:i;'e rat ions re«;ai'(lin;j: the peop](! 

 themselves, thus far the writer has found but one jilainly exair^erated 

 n!iri'ati\e, that so often refei'red to as '' the spurious Tonti." It is 

 entitled " Dernieres Decouvertes dans L'Anierique Septentrionale 

 de M. De la Sale; ^lise an jour par ^I. le Chevalier Tonti, Gou- 

 verneur du Fort Saint Louis, anx Islinois,'' and bears the date Paris, 

 1()1»7. This certainly does contain many (>rroi's, yet if one compares 

 it with the Memoir of the Sieur de la Tonti, ])ublished by French in 

 the Historical Collections of Louisiana, 184(), he will find that it fol- 

 lows this nari'ative pretty closely, only overstating in particulars. 

 It would seem that some French publisher, having had an opportunity 

 to hear or read the Memoir of Tonti two or three times, had com- 

 mitted what he could remember to i)aper, along with amplifications 

 of his own, and })ut it out as the original work." An amusing mis- 

 take has been made by him in regard to the delta of the Mississippi, 

 the three channels by which the river reaches the sea being described 

 as three channels reuniting into one lower down. It is curious, how- 

 ever, that the two points for which the author of this work was 

 criticised most severely can not be charged against him. One of 

 these is a supposed statement that the Mississippi river divided into 

 two long branches before entering the ocean, while, as has just been 

 noted, he makes it separate into three which reunited farther on, 

 nothing being said of a division into two channels. Another writer 

 accused by Iberville of this same misstatement is Father Zenobius 

 Membre, who had accompanied La Salle and Tonti. But, as Shea 

 remarks, Membre does not claim to have seen the other branch of the 

 river, which in fact he supposes his party to have passed during a 

 fog, but appears to have assumed its existence on the authority of 

 existing maps.'' His additional statement that the Indians told them 

 of ten nations living on this branch ' might be explained on the sup- 

 position that the Indians imagined the branch that these travelers 

 talked about must be the INIanchac, or Iberville, and referred to the 

 Choctaw villages toward which it conducted. The second point for 

 Avhich " the spnrious Tonti " has been attacked is its description of thv^ 

 Natchez temple, while, as a matter of fact, it nowhere describes 

 the Natchez temple, but only that of the Taensa, and in this descrip- 

 tion does not diifer from that made by Tonti himself in any essential 

 l)articular. The critics of this book appear to have been very hasty 

 readers or to have derived their knowledge of it from hearsay — unless 

 there is another narrative unknown to the writer — or they would 



" It should be added, however, that the memoir published by French is itself incon- 

 sistent and difficult to understand in places. 

 ' Shea, Disc, and Expl., 173. 

 <^ Ibid.. 174. 



