CARVER, JONATHAN (1710-1780), American traveller, was born in Weymouth (Mass.), a son of David and Hannah (Dyer) Carver. When he was eight years old his family moved to Canterbury (Conn.), where he gained what seems to have been a fair education, including something of surveying. Here in 1746 he married Abigail Robbins, and a few years later they moved to Montague (Mass.) . At the beginning of the French and Indian War Carver joined the Massachusetts provincial troops, serving efficiently until peace was declared and holding the rank of cap tain the last two years. Part of this period he served in Quebec as a surveyor, and here in the wilderness he may have first dreamed of exploring the great north-western territories, and of finding an overland route to the western sea. Carver's opportunity came through Major Robert Rogers, newly appointed commandant of the north-western fort and trading post of Mackinac, who enter tained similar designs. Rogers sent a number of agents among the more distant Indian tribes to win their allegiance and trade and to learn more of the country. Carver travelled, as one of these, by the Fox-Wisconsin route to the Mississippi and up that river to the Falls of St. Anthony to visit the Sioux tribes. He spent the winter of 1766-67 at one of their villages on the Minnesota river and gained an elementary knowledge of their language and customs. In the spring he started to return to Mackinac, but at the mouth of the Wisconsin river he met Captain James Tute, in command of a party sent out by Rogers to explore a route to the Pacific ocean. Tute brought orders for Carver to join the party as draughtsman and third in command. They proceeded up the Mississippi and crossed to and skirted the shores of Lake Superior to the Grand Portage. There they waited for supplies from Rogers, but his failure to send them caused Tute to abandon his expedition and return by the north shore of Lake Superior to the fort, where he arrived in Aug. 1768. Rogers had exceeded his powers in employing these agents, and Carver was never paid. After nine years of misfortune and poverty his book, Travels through the Interior Parts of North America in the years 1766, 1767, 1768, was printed in London (1778). Its success was imme diate, but this came too late to bring the author any material benefit. He died in London in 178o, a broken old man, 7o years of age, and was buried in the potter's field. No narrative of early adventure and travel in America has ever approached the popu larity of this work. At least 32 editions in English, French, Ger man and Dutch were printed. The second part, dealing with the life and customs of the Indians, is largely plagiarized from earlier French writers, but this does not warrant discrediting the whole as some historians have done. Carver's original journals, includ ing a day-by-day log of his journey, are in the British Museum and substantiate the main facts of the first part of his book. Care ful comparison leads to the conclusion that the book was written from memory, with these journals not at hand. Besides the minor inaccuracies, the book is guilty of deliberate falsification when it denies Rogers credit for initiating the expedition and conceals the fact that Tute commanded it. Just how far Carver is responsible for these deceptions and the plagiarism cannot be determined.
See J. T. Lee, A Bibliography of Carver's Travels (Wis. Hist. Soc., Proceedings, pp. and Captain Jonathan Carver: Additional Data (Ibid., 1912, pp. 87-123) ; W. Browning, "The Early History of Jonathan Carver" (Wisconsin Magazine of History, iii., 291--306) ; and T. C. Elliott, "Jonathan Carver's Source of the Name Oregon" (Oregon Hist. Soc., Quarterly, xxiii., 53-59).
(0. W. H.)