At long last, all the known journals and the description of Jean-Baptiste Truteau (1748–1827) have been published in one scholarly edition. For those unfamiliar with these documents, they include journals of Truteau’s 1794–96 fur-trading expedition up the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Arikara nation and a “Description of the Upper Missouri,” which hold significant historical and ethnographic interest. Excerpts of these documents have been published previously, but this new translation of the Quebec manuscripts (the fullest extant collection), with angled brackets showing differences in the “Seville” and “Nicollet” versions, should now be considered the authoritative published version of the journals and description.
The seventy-five-page introduction by Douglas Parks ably summarizes the history of the French and Spanish in Louisiana to the 1790s, before examining Truteau and his expedition in some detail. Then Parks carefully unravels the complex and tangled history of the various versions (some now lost) of...
