Carver, Jonathan
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Jonathan (1732-1780), an American explorer. He was a native of Stillwater, New York , and died in London. In 1756 he commanded a company of colonial rangers in the invasion of Canada. On the conclusion of peace he obtained a halfway commission to explore the vast territory lying west of the Great Lakes . In 1766 he set out from Boston. He traveled by way of Mackinaw and struck westward to the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien. He visited the Falls of St. Anthony, bargained with the natives, it is said, for a grant of land where St. Paul now stands, and explored the northern border of Lake Superior. In 1768 he returned to Boston and soon set sail for England to lay his charts and reports before the authorities, by whom he hoped to be recompensed for his outlay. In this he was disappointed. The lords commissioners required his charts, but gave him no money. In 1778, while earning a living as a clerk, he managed to bring out an edition at Boston of his Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America . It is an interesting account of the country and the manners, customs, ceremonies, dress, languages, and mode of living of of the Indians he had seen. Grave doubt has been thrown on the truthfulness of the writer. Some of the most interesting parts of his account were taken evidently from the narrative of an earlier French traveler. Carver's Cave, as it is called, may be seen in a sandstone cliff at St. Paul. John C. Fremont and other distinguished frontiersmen carved their initials on its walls. It was here that Carver witnessed the burial ceremony of a Sioux chieftain. His account of the address given by a warrior was made the basis of a poem by the German Schiller.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 sketch already voiced the "grave doubt" of its day, and modern scholarship has settled much of it: Carver did make the 1766-68 journey, but the ethnographic set-pieces in the Travels were lifted from earlier French writers such as Lahontan and Charlevoix, and the book was padded and largely written up for him in London, where it appeared in 1778 rather than at Boston. His surviving journals were edited and published by John Parker for the Minnesota Historical Society in 1976, which also corrected the biography: Carver was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, and was considerably older than the 1732 birth date given here. The "Carver grant" of land where St. Paul stands, pressed on Congress by his heirs through the nineteenth century, was rejected and is now generally regarded as spurious. Carver's Cave itself survives, much reduced by nineteenth-century quarrying and railroad cutting, and is honoured today under its Dakota name Wakan Tipi within a St. Paul nature sanctuary.
Written for this edition, 2026.