Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 6).djvu/15



In this volume we present reprints both of Brackenridge's Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri (1811), and of Franchère's Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America (1811-14).

Henry Marie Brackenridge, traveller, author, statesman, jurist, had a long and varied career. Born at Pittsburg in 1786, one of his earliest memories was the Whiskey Rebellion, in which his father, an eminent lawyer of that town, was a prominent actor. In later years, the son's researches into his parent's part in this incident, bore fruit in his History of Western Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, commonly called the Whiskey Insurrection, 1794 (Pittsburg, 1859).

Henry Brackenridge has also given to the world an autobiography, in the work entitled Recollections of Persons and Places in the West (Philadelphia, 1834), from which we ascertain that at the age of seven years he was sent to learn French among the Creoles of Louisiana Territory. Having spent three years at the village of Ste. Genevieve—where his French was acquired at the expense of his English, which for a time was quite forgotten—he returned to Pittsburg, where his further education was conducted chiefly under his father's supervision.

At an early age he began to read law, and was admitted to the bar before he had attained his majority. Acting upon his father's advice, he attempted to begin practice in Baltimore; but finding his profession overcrowded in that city, retired for a year to Somerset, Pennsylvania, thence