Old Factory, The (William Westall), 548.-Old Maid's Paradise, An (Miss Phelps), 327.—Our Parson o' Dumford. The, 547.-Patroclus and Penelope (Theodore Ayrault Dodge), 111.-Pep- Reading Club, The, 560.-Readings from Macaulay, 560.-Readings from Ruskin, 560.-Recent Samuel Adams (James K. Hosmer), 221.-Satinwood Box, The (J. T. Trowbridge), 663.—Saxe Vagrant Wife, A (Florence Warden), 548.-Vain Forebodings, 328.-Venetian Life (W. D. Waters of Hercules, The, 328.-Whittier's Poems of Nature, 661.-Willis, N. P., Prose Writ- Desirable Data as to High School Graduates.-The Case of One Class.-Statistics of Univer- .104 The Eminence of General Grant in Public Esteem.-Military Glory.-The Relation of Gen- 219 The Endowment of Newspapers.-The College of the American People."-The Difficulty of 329 .442 The Appointment of a President to the State University.-The Presbyterian Plan for a De- .555 Recent Events of Interest.-First Thoughts on the Stanford Gift.-Expulsion of Chinese in 659 Contributed: Last Days of Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson.. Legend of the Two Roses, The... 197 .199 ..383 Edward P. Baker .602 Flora Haines Apponyi. ..310 M. W. Shinn.. .315 William S. Hutchinson. .512 THE OVERLAND MONTHLY. DEVOTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY. VOL. VI. (SECOND SERIES.)-JULY, 1885.-No. 31. WAS IT A FORGERY? To reproduce in fiction, in such vivid form as to deceive the reading public, scenes purporting to be from actual life, requires a faculty for accurate description accompanied by an acute memory for details. When we consider the enormous volume to which the literature of fiction has grown, the great talents which have been devoted to writing novels and stories, and the careful study which many writers have applied to their work, we must regard it to their credit, that so few have been tempted to test the credulity of their readers by passing off the coinage of their brains as truth. There are, however, occasional instances where men have written stories whose object was to deceive. This has been done by them for the amusement of hoaxing the public or for the purpose of gain. One notable case there is of a writer, who, to his astonishment, found that what he had intended to pass for a story with a moral, had been so well told that it was accepted by many as the truth. De Foe's "Apparition of Mrs. Veal at Canterbury," is said to have been written with intent to aid the flagging sale of the work on "Death," then recently published by his friend Drelincourt. It is a conspicuous instance of success on the part of a writer celebrated for the verisimilitude of his style. VOL. VI.-I. (Copyright, 1885, by OVERLAND MONTHLY CO. All Rights Reserved.) It with the idea that they had met the hero of "Mrs. Veal" and Locke's "Moon Hoax," the story. These examples furnish types of remarkable successes in this line of literature, which include the wilful, the humorous, and the unintentional hoax. What follows is a digest of a paper read before the American Antiquarian Society. If its conclusions are accepted, it will consign to the same general classification the remarkable story told by Le Page du Pratz, in his "Histoire de la Louisiane," on the authority of a Yazoo Indian, who claimed to have made a journey across our continent about 1700 A. D., and to have met on the Pacific Coast bearded white men, whose clothing and general appearance would readily enable us to identify them with the Orientals. The simple narrative of the Indian rivals the best work of De Foe in its quaint air of truthfulness. It was republished in the "Revue d'Anthropologie," in 1881, by M. de Quatrefages, who there demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the journey was actually accomplished, and that the bearded white men must have come from Lieou-Tchou, or the eastern isles of Japan. Whether true or false, the story is interesting. On the one hand, ethnologists the world over are concerned in its details, which would go far towards settling the origin of the tribes of North America. On the other, there is added to the curious literature of hoaxes a characteristic story, amplified and enlarged for purposes of deception, whose details fail to reveal their origin in the imagination of the writer, except under the closest inspection and with the resources of a large library at hand for purposes of comparison and analysis. The story is so little known that M. de Quatrefages congratulates himself on being the first, as he supposes, to call attention to its ethnological value, and it is of sufficient intrinsic merit to rivet the attention of the reader, if he be endowed with but a moderate amount of interest in historical subjects. To determine whether we shall exalt this tale to the position assigned it by the French anthropologist, or classify it with De Foe's we must first know something of the historian and his surroundings, and then subject the story itself to a critical examination. In the autumn of 1718, the "Company of the West" forwarded to America a party of eight hundred emigrants, among whom was M. Le Page du Pratz. The future author of the "Histoire de la Louisiane" settled first at New Orleans, but very soon joined a party which was about to start a new village at Natchez. He remained on the farm which he then acquired eight out of the sixteen years that he was in this country. We gather from his book that he had previously served in the army in Germany, and that he had received a fair education. He tells us that he picked up the language of the natives, and he records a variety of speculations concerning their origin, the mysteries of their religion, and the laws regulating the hereditary succession of their chiefs, which indicate a close observer and an active mind. The origin of the Indian tribes was to him a mystery of special interest. Thinking that some clue to their migrations might be discovered in the oral traditions of the tribes, he lost no opportunity to talk with their old men, whose minds were stored with stories handed down to them from their ancestors. The zeal with which he pursued his investigations is impressed upon us as we read his work, and we are irresistibly led to compare the fervor of the secluded ethnologist upon his farm in the wilderness with the self-sacrificing spirit of Lieutenant Cushing in our time, who is following precisely the same slender thread of research in the Pueblo of the Zuñis. In 1758 he published his history, and, in addition to the personal experiences and observations there recorded, he has treasured up for posterity in this work much that he garnered from these conversations. He tells us that he was particularly perplexed about the origin of certain of the red-men who were found by the Natchez living on both sides of the Mississippi River, "for they had not, like the Natchez, preserved their traditions, nor had they arts and sciences like the Mexicans, from which one can draw |
