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Details
LEZAY-MARNEZIA, Marquis Claude Francois. Lettres ecrites des rives de l'Ohio. Fort Pitt: Prault, [1801].
8° (188 x 122 mm). (Title trimmed along fore-edge and with a short marginal tear and whole, A1 with internal paper flaw affecting a few letters.) 19th-century calf-backed boards (spine dry and cracked, some rubbing).
FIRST EDITION OF THIS SUPPRESSED DESCRIPTION OF OHIO IN 1790-91. The most recent traceable copy of this work is from Eberstadt catalogue 163 of 1964: “One of the rarest and most important books on the Old Northwest Territory, of which it is thought fewer than a dozen copies escaped the rigid suppression imposed by the French police.
“The Marquis brought a considerable group of colonists from France in 1790, composed of the aristocracy, farmers and tradesmen. He had purchased a large tract in Ohio (near the present town of Gallipolis) from the Scioto Company, where the colony proposed to settle, but the Company did not fulfil its obligations, and the colonists, after a year in the western wilderness, abandoned the enterprise and returned to France. This volume is the Marquis’s account of his Colony, its adventures and difficulties, in the form of letters addressed to friends in France. The first two epistles, dated respectively at ‘Marieta, 15 Nov. 1790,’ and ‘Fort Pitt, 2 Nov. 1791,’ occupy the first 112 pp. of the work, and constitute a history of the colony, a description of the country and of the undertaking he had organized. The final letter was sent from Philadelphia after the abandonment of the enterprise.” Howes L-328; Jones Checklist 681; Querard (“Tres rares”); Sabin 40912 (“A very scarce pamphlet; we have seen only two copies”); Thomson 718 (it is evident Thomson had never seen a copy); Vail 1295.