Amsterdam, chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1769.
8vo [200 x 120 mm] of xvi pp., 147 pp., (9), 3 plates out of text including 1 folding, 3 folding maps. Full marbled calf, blind-stamped fillet around the covers, spine ribbed and decorated, red lettering piece, red edges. Contemporary binding.
First edition in French, translated by the philologist Charles-Guillaume Dumas from the edition given in London three years earlier.
2 fine figures engraved after Benjamin West, representing the conference between the Indians and Colonel Bouquet in October 1764, and the surrender of the English captives in November of the same year, and 4 folding maps and plans, including a plan of the battle of Bushy Run and a map of the Ohio & Muskingum river.
Colonel Henry Bouquet (1719-1765) became famous during the Pontiac War (named after an Indian chief allied with the French), a conflict between the English and the Indian tribes of the Great Lakes region, Illinois and Ohio from 1763 to 1766. Written by Reverend William Smith from the papers of this officer and published for the first time in Philadelphia in 1765, the account tells Bouquet’s successful expedition at the Battle of Bushy Run (1763) which ended the siege of Fort Pitt.
According to Field, it is the first British victory over Indians armed with rifles.
The edition contains a short biography of Bouquet by Dumas. Interesting Réflexions sur la Guerre avec les Sauvages de l’Amérique Septentrionale occupy pp. 89-147: one finds there among other things the name of the different Indian nations which lived in North America, with the approximate number of their combatants.
(Field, An Essay towards an Indian bibliography, n°1443).
A translation of Smith’s “Historical Account,” taken from the London, 1766 edition. For another issue of the same sheets, see below “Voyage Historique.” The maps and plates are re-engraved from the London edition of 1766, the two parts of the map appearing separately. West’s two plates are re-engraved by “P. V. S.” An adaptation of the “Marche du Colonel Bouquet,” or “topographical plan,” is in Avery, vol. 4/1908, p. 374. The preface includes a biographical sketch of Bouquet by Dumas. It is translated, into English in “The Olden Time,” vol. I, pp. 203-207, May, 1846, and pp x—xvi of it are translated in the Cincinnati 1868 edition of the “Historical Account.” Sabin, n°84647.
Very beautiful copy of this Americana illustrated with 2 engravings by the famous painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), the father of the American school.
From the library of Louis-François de Monteynard (1713-1791), Secretary of State for War from 1771 to 1774, with his engraved ex-libris with arms.
