get away, and had no great relish to make the attempt. Should they fall into the hands of the mob there was no telling what might be done with them.

This was the situation until three o'clock in the afternoon, when an old cannon and a couple of anvils were brought close up to the church and fired again and again until the very walls rattled. Mr. Seward saw that a time had come when something had to be done, and he accordingly arose and by dint of much exertion gave the crowd to understand that the effort at speechmaking would be abandoned and the meeting would come to an end. Themselves tired with the long farce, the majority of the crowd passed out, and taking Mr. Bigelow by the arm the minister, with the aid of his wife, managed to get him into the open air in safety. They made a hurried start for Mr. Seward's house, a crowd of boys and half-drunken men hooting about them. Had Bigelow been alone he would have been roughly handled, but respect for Mr. Seward kept them back, and nothing worse than a shower of rotten eggs overtook the abolition orator on his way to the parsonage, where he was unmolested thereafter.

The mob had got started now, and, Bigelow or no Bigelow, the rough fellows were determined to have their fun out. An old suit of homespun was presented by one of them—a blacksmith, I believe-while another brought a bundle of straw. An imitation Bigelow was soon created, a rough gallows erected and the straw man hung upon it. After a time man and scaffold were

set on fire and burned-to the great delight of the now drunken gang. After they had dispersed for the night, a number of men just as set against any interference with slavery as they, but more quiet in the making of their points, erected a huge pile of stones on the town "green," and out of the middle of the heap there projected a slab on which was inscribed in roughly painted letters something like this:

Sacred to the Memory of the Apostle of Abolitionism,

the Friend

of the Prostitute

and the Benefactor of the Wench. Cruelly Burned

at this Stake as a Just Punishment for Flagrant Utterances Against Established

Law and Order!

This thing stood there all the next day, and no one attempted to tear it down. But that night it disappeared, and in the morning, after a long search, the pro-slavery men found the plank, and, with many threats against any man who dared touch it, again put it in place. The other men gave it up for the time, and for many days was the rough plank upraised in front of the church-a monument to the intolerance and narrowness of a then almost frontier settlement. One evening when the sun went down it still stood there, but in the morning it was gone, and not a splinter of it was ever seen again. A crowd of determined men had got together at night, torn the stone heap to pieces and scattered it over a hundred acres of land, and cut the plank

into pieces and burned it. Nothing was done after that by either side, but the discussion that these events caused set many to thinking, and I have no doubt

that the result was largely in favor of the abolition movement.

J. H. KENNEDY.

It is the chief purpose of a historical society to gather and preserve the materials of history. And the office of history, as we all know, is to keep true records of the past for the instruction of the future. It is unluckily true that all history is not reliable. It is not true that it is not generally safe to receive it, if properly scanned and compared. The great errors we all learn to look out for. We all know that it is sometimes written by zealots, who see nothing that is not on their side, and color or omit all inconvenient facts. It is sometimes written by narrow and bat-eyed men, who do not see or appreciate many things for want of mental force and discrimination. It is sometimes written by pompous men, who think small affairs beneath its dignity. But it is hardly necessary to count up all the causes which make history a somewhat inexact science. There is no great need of speaking of the great dangers. There are many that are generally reckoned minor perils which are more likely to arise from the methods of societies for historical purposes, and which are more serious now and then than they are always supposed to be. They cannot all be put in classes, although some may be. To refer to any considerable number will be like compiling a table of errata, which is generally more useful than entertaining.

But the work is at least of some use, and seems to be worth attempting. The present sketch is by no means exhaustive. It will leave room for many more such essays.

It may be well to say something in the first place of what has been noticed in particular associations. The volumes already printed in one or two states represent a great many papers and contain a great many historical facts or assumed facts, and such inferences as are drawn from them. The collections have already assumed public importance, and it is their business to recognize an obligation both to preserve the truth and to guard against They are not responsible for the original accuracy of their papers, but they are at least bound to publish them accurately.

errors.

A most serious and it is to be hoped unusual error has been several times com. mitted, and has been too often repeated, by not, where possible, submitting to every writer the proofs of his articles. No one, however plainly he may write, does not leave in his manuscript some occasional obscurity. One word may often be mistaken for another where either makes sense, but not the same sense. Proper names are especially subject to such errors, and a change of a single letter in spelling may change the personality. Abbrevia

tions are especially open to mistake, and the more so when the copyist or printer has not a complete familiarity with the subject and has not gone over the same ground with the writer-and this seldom happens. It may also sometimes happen. that the writer himself makes a slip of the pen that he would recognize and correct at once when the matter appears before him in print. In some volumes most of the articles are published from copies made by copyists of probably usual care, but with no accurate knowledge of old affairs, and necessarily liable to error. One not familiar with the names of persons and families referred to, especially if of another nationality, can very seldom avoid mistakes in spelling. An i may be left without a dot, or a c without the cedilla. There is frequent confusion between u and n; a, e, i and o are interchanged; and as our predecessors were not much more careful with the gray goose quill than we are with metal pens in their signatures, their paraphe, which was usually accurate, is more reliable to one not familiar with their names than the written signature. Accents and other literal peculiarities are not attended to. Family names are mistaken for titles, e. g., Cavelier de LaSalle is often translated the Cavalier de la Salle. In the cases of public men, and of Frenchmen generally, there is usually no difficulty in getting the true name from church, public or family records, and no reason for adopting supposed orthography against them. It would be hard to find an article not reproduced from print and containing several names, in which there are not instances of such mistakes as those mentioned. This class of errors does not

always arise from culpable carelessness. The work may have been done conscientiously. It is due to a failure to consult the authors quite as much as to hasty inferences.

It is

In some volumes it appears that the editors or copyists undertook, in part if not throughout, to adopt a uniform spelling of names according to their own theories, without reference to the spelling of the writers, whose work was copied. This ought not to be done. It leads to some danger of confounding different persons, and it sometimes gives just offense. no uncommon thing for members of the same family to adopt different spellings of the family name, purposely and for reasons which they deem adequate. It is not unfrequently done to restore the relation with some past generation. It is sometimes done to accommodate pronunciation. The forms, however different, have usually had some significance, and a peculiar spelling sometimes enables us to identify a historical period as well as a source of information, and find an additional test of accuracy. Corrections, if attempted, should be in notes. Passing to more general sources of mistakes, which are not peculiar to any society or period, reference may be made to some things where we are liable to be misled by reason of our northwestern historical antecedents in two other nations, the French and the English. As we are an Englishspeaking people, we generally expect to resort to translations for our knowledge of the French period and of the records. of the French people here as well as elsewhere. The same would be true of the Indians, if they had any literature. The

fact that they had none rendered their names and their dealings subject to the carelessness or knavery or ignorance of interpreters. It is the common testimony of public men that an Indian interpreter never acknowledges ignorance of the meaning of anything, and the version he gives to each side of the meaning of the other is sometimes ludicrously and sometimes wickedly false. Aside from such misconceptions, a difficulty has often arisen from the difference in vocal organs of interpreters of different nations. The French writers have always preserved the sounds of Indian names more uniformly and correctly than any others. In their reproduction of words and sounds of all but possibly Iroquois, there is no difficulty, even where is some difference in spelling by different authors, in tracing identity. But the Dutch and English, as well as American interpreters, do not seem to have been able to catch or repeat sounds so accurately. We have not in English anything to represent either the guttural or the nasal sounds common in Indian languages. One of the most striking illustrations of this is found in the attempts to spell the Iroquois and Huron name of the place where Detroit was lo cated. In the 'New York Documents' the index contains nineteen different forms of orthography of this name, most if not all being impossible to pronounce accurately. This list includes none of the French forms. The form adopted by Mr. Bishop from Governor Colden's spelling, Teuchsa Grondie, is simpler than most of them. Even the French give some slightly different forms, owing to the fact that the Huron language has similar variations

from that of the Five Nations, to those of the English from Scotch, or Yorkshire from Devon; and the Iroquois themselves had apparently some changes of dialect. Bishop Baraga, in his admirable Chippewa dictionary, shows in his own pronunciation his national peculiarity, which confounds p with b and t with d. Some tribes make no use of consonants common in others. These difficulties have made it almost impossible to be sure of the identity of many places and of some persons. Any one who reads the names of the same chiefs signed to our different Indian treaties will often be puzzled to trace their identity, and this is partly true as to the tribes. The variation from Pondiak to Pontiac, or Tecumseh to Tecumthe, creates no confusion. A thick tongue or a lisp will account for either. But a person not having some knowledge of both local French and English will not at once recognize the identity of Sonnontouans and Senecas, Goyoguins and Cayugas, Ouiatanons and Weas, Oumamis and Miamis, Ouendâts and Wyandots, to say nothing of scores of personal names of all kinds. One source of confusion in regard to Indian locations has been a failure to identify the same tribes or bands under different names. The Huron names of Algonquin tribes seldom resemble the Algonquin names.

One would suppose the very general study of French would have prevented most such difficulties in translation from that tongue. But it has not done so, and very good French scholars trip up now and then. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. get at.

Some it is not so easy to

When the English and Americans got into business relations with the French, it became very common to attempt to spell French names by the sound. Both vowels and consonants were exchanged for others. As the votaries of the phonetic system have discovered that all English and Americans do not pronounce the same letters and words alike, it is easy to see how the variation would increase in the attempt to reproduce a foreign word. Our geography is full of these wrecks. Boisblanc island is generally known to sailors as Bobalo. Isle aux galets is called Skilligalee. L'Anse Creuse has more than once got into print as Long-Screws. The Chenal Écarté of Lake Saint Clair figures as Snycarty, and the neighboring channels fare no better. The Rivière à Saint Jean (St. John's river), on Lake Superior, first received a French twist into Chien Jaune, and this translated by the geographers became Yellow Dog, and so continues to this day. La Rivière aux Becs Scies became very naturally River Betsy. These are all cases of crazy phonetics. They can all be matched by attempts by French writers to give English names by sound. The old Pontiac manuscript, the spelling of which is phonetic but abominable, gives faithfully by sound the names of some British officers, as, for instance, Hay and Campbell, by their equivalents. But some names puzzled the writer more.

Gladwin is fairly represented by Gladouine. Hopkins figures as Hobquince. Amherst as Amers. Macdougall becomes Magdou. But many persons of temporary prominence are left unnamed or described in some other way, evidently because the writer was puzzled and could not master them. Schlosser, the com

mander of Fort St. Joseph, was in this case, and while referred to is not named at all. So was the unfortunate leader in the battle of Bloody Run, who is only described as an aid of General Amers. His name, however, has been discussed more or less among our own writers. Written Dalzell or Dalziel in Scotland, it is given by the sound in some papers as Dalyell, and the name is subject to similar variations with many other Gaelic family names with which we are all acquainted. Some French names have been changed to English versions. Thus Lapierre becomes Flint or Stone; Deschamps is Fields or Defield, Such changes are quite common.

A more general source of trouble is the fact that according to the French custom members of the same family often had different names in daily use, so that one not acquainted with the genealogy would never imagine the relationship. They were sometimes called by the names of their estates, as lairds are in Scotland, and the same person did not always use the same signature. Thus the founder of Detroit, whose family name was neither Lamothe nor Cadillac, is called by either name indiscriminately and seldom by any other. Lamothe is a very common name, but formerly seldom used alone, but almost always as a prefix to some place or estate, as Lamothe Fenelon, Lamothe Fouqué, Lamothe Cadillac, and the like It is spelled indiscriminately Lamotte and Lamothe. It is supposed to refer to the mound of judgment belonging to old feudal jurisdictions having plenary powers. There were several Lamothes in Canada and in Detroit, but probably none were related. There was a Captain Lamothe