A Century to Publish Clarence Burton's Legacy for America

The Detroit Public Library will shortly publish on its website an American treasure that has been largely overlooked for more than a century. These are the English translations from French archives documenting the French history of Early America and its exploration. Conceived by Detroit city historian Clarence Monroe Burton, created by a brigade of researchers and translators from 1906 to 1915, hammered out on manual typewriters at the time, and microfilmed for interlibrary loan in 1945, the translations will now be available to researchers all over the world through PDF pages online for the first time.

Burton was born in 1853 to a Battle Creek doctor and newspaper editor and his wife, a local poet of some note, in a California Gold Rush mining community with the picaresque name Whiskey Diggings. After the family returned home from the rough and tumble of California, Burton graduated from the University of Michigan and its law school. Burton spent much of his professional life working with historical records and creating abstracts, which led him early in life to an antiquarian hobby: the collection of books on history. He began making use of his collection by writing histories in the 1890s. These included A Sketch of the Life of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Founder of Detroit and A Chapter in the History of Cleveland (both 1895), and In the Footsteps of Cadillac (1899). He welcomed others to his collection, which he later preserved in a fireproof chamber. Burton became a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1907 and Detroit's city historiographer in 1908. But in 1906, the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, under Burton's direction, decided to publish English translations of archival documents related to New France, a huge region that stretched through the Great Lakes and down the Ohio-Mississippi river system.

The documents existed, in French, in six volumes published by Pierre Margry, archivist for France's Ministry of Marine, in the mid-1800s as Découvertes et Établissements, des Français dans l'Ouest et dans le sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale, 1614-1754. The Library of Congress had made the

Clarence Monroe Burton

Source: Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

publication possible by subscribing to 500 copies of an American edition, though in their original language. However, Margry had carelessly transcribed by hand his trove of French documents chronicling the early exploration of America's heartland. The result was a series of often unreliable documents. A few examples may suffice to indicate the problems this caused.

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, wrote on September 29, 1680, to his partner, Estienne Thouret, and again on August 22, 1681, to his Paris agent Claude Bernou that Le Griffon, a supply ship he had had built above Niagara Falls, was a barque of forty tons. Margry mistakenly transcribed the number in the 1680 letter as fifty tons, leading at least one later historian to question whether La Salle had any idea how big his own vessel was and, by implication, whether La Salle himself was reliable.¹

Pierre Margry

Source: Comptes-Rendus de L'Athénée Louisianais (Nouvelle-Orleans: January 1, 1897)

In another instance, La Salle reported to Thouret that navigation on Lake Michigan ended at a place called Checagoumeman.² La Salle used this name for the mouth of the present-day Chicago River, and this is prominently displayed on a 1684 map made under La Salle's supervision. However, Margry mistakenly wrote Checagou in place of Checagoumeman, which created confusion for scholars, who recognized "Checagou" as a name used for both the Chicago Portage and the Des Plaines River.

Such errors in detail existed in substantially greater sections, however. In 1998, William C. Foster translated part of Henri Joutel's journal of La Salle's 1684 expedition to Texas, taken directly from Découvertes et Établissements. When Foster compared Margry's version to that of the corrected Burton translation, however, he found so many...