Margry considers this paper to be the official report drawn up by the Abbé Bernou from La Salle’s letters. The account of the journey to Fort Crevecœur in 1679–80, given in this narrative, is nearly identical with the description of the same voyage in Hennepin’s “Description de la Louisiane.” For this reason Margry charges Hennepin with plagiary, which calls out a defence of the latter by Shea, in his edition of Hennepin’s “Louisiana,” where the two narratives are compared. Membré’s journal in Le Clercq’s “Premier Établissement de la Foy,” Paris, 1691, which is reproduced in English in Shea’s “Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi,” and Tonty’s Memoirs, which will be more fully described farther on, also report this stage of the explorations. Hennepin’s spurious “Nouvelle Découverte” also contains an account, which does not differ materially from that given in the “Description de la Louisiane.”
Mathieu Sâgean, who claimed to have been with La Salle in 1679–80, dictated from memory, in 1701, a report of his adventures in Canada. See Parkman’s La Salle, p. 658, concerning Sâgean’s pretensions. Shea published Sâgean’s narrative in 1863, with the title, “Extrait de la Relation des avantures et voyage de M. Sâgean.”
In February, 1680, Hennepin, by La Salle’s orders, set out from Fort Crevecœur for the upper Mississippi. He ascended that river to the Sioux country, and discovered St. Anthony’s Falls. Hennepin’s first work, “Description de la Louisiane,” Paris, 1683, relates the events of this expedition, and also gives an account of La Salle’s journey from Canada to the Illinois in 1679–80. Shea gives in his “Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi” the portion of this work relating the voyage to the upper Mississippi. Hennepin’s works are held in disrepute, owing to undoubted plagiarisms and falsifications which characterize some of them. Shea, however, shows in the preface to his edition of the “Description of Louisiana,” New York, 1880, that this charge applies only to the “Nouvelle Découverte” and “Nouveau Voyage,” and other works made up from these two last, and that they were probably published without Hennepin’s sanction. Parkman agrees with Shea in considering the “Description de la Louisiane” to be an authentic work.