Travels through the two Louisianas and among the savage nations of the Missouri; Also, in the United States, along the Ohio and the adjacent provinces in 1801, 1802, & 1803. With a sketch of the manners, customs, character, and the civil and religious ceremonies of the people of those countries […]. Translated from the French.

8vo., marbled paper boards with gilt-lettered leather label to spine, pp. 106, [2], with hand-coloured plate of ‘Man & Woman of Unalaschka’ misplaced opposite p. 8, the plate having been originally intended for another book, Sarytschew’s Voyage of Discovery to the North East of Siberia, also printed for Richard Phillips the following year, in which the plate also appears opposite p. 8. Light foxing to pages, faint waterstaining to margins; otherwise very good. Rare first edition of the English abridged translation of Voyage dans les deux Louisianes (1805). Volume of especial interest for what was presumably a binder’s error which led to the insertion of an illustration of people from Siberia in a book about those native to North America. Landing first in Newfoundland, Perrin du Lac visited New York, Washington and Philadelphia before proceeding to Kentucky, Missouri and Louisiana. He offers interesting discussion of a wide variety of subjects: the Anglo-French rivalry in the fur trade, particularly on the Upper Missouri, but with numerous references to Canada; the early history of Louisiana; the customs and habits of the various native tribes of the region. The last chapter relates the life of George Augustus Bowles, an Englishman who became chief of the Creek Nation. Perrin du Lac’s account of his trip up the Missouri River as far as central South Dakota with a fur trading expedition in 1802 was probably actually borrowed from the journal of St. Louis trader Jean Baptiste Trudeau.