To Thomas Jefferson from John A. Chevallié, 21 May 1805
From John A. Chevallié
Union tavern George town 21t. may 1805.
J. A. Chevallié Present his respectful compliments to his Excellency the President & take the liberty of Enclosing an abstract of James McKay’s travels up the Missoury which he received last Evening from St. Louis des Illinois. if the President has not seen it before, he will be Very Wellcome to Direct a Copy to be taken, previous to its being returned to J.A.C.
RC (DLC); endorsed by TJ as received 21 May and so recorded in SJL. Enclosure not found, but see below.
received last Evening: Chevallié was in communication with Antoine Soulard, surveyor general for upper Louisiana. Chevallié shared Soulard’s account of the Missouri River, dated March 1805, with Samuel Latham Mitchill, who published a translation in his journal, The Medical Repository. It is likely that Chevallié sent Mitchill the document he enclosed to TJ at the same time he sent Soulard’s account. Immediately following the Soulard narrative, Mitchill published an excerpt from the journal of another Missouri explorer, Jean Baptiste Truteau, which he compared to “Mr. M’Kay’s narrative.” The Repository had yet to publish that narrative, so Mitchill was possibly confusing it with Soulard’s, but in the following number of the periodical he published “Extract from the Manuscript Journal” of James Mackay. Mackay’s account was not so much a journal as an overview of his trading and exploring experiences on behalf of the Spanish, with attention to the major Native American nations he had encountered. It also included an extract from the journal of his associate John Evans (Medical Repository, 2d hexade, 3 [1806], 308-15; 2d hexade, 4 [1807], 27-36; A. P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1804, 2 vols. [St. Louis, 1952], 2:490-9; Vol. 42:194n).