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In 1703 the Baron Lahontan (Louis-Armand, le Baron de Lahontan et Heslèche, a French aristocrat, writer, and explorer who served in the French military in Canada) published New Voyages to North America, which contained an account of his search for an inland passage between New France and the Pacific Ocean in 1688-1689, during which he canoed up the "Long River" (Missouri River) seeking its source. Scholars have almost universally discounted his work as largely fictitious and branded the baron a liar. In this book, a distinguished group of scholars familiar with the central Great Plains and the Platte River exposes the many major flaws in Lahontan's critics' judgements and demonstrates the truthfulness of the baron's journal, including descriptions of Native peoples who had never encountered a European prior to Lahontan. The authors applied anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, and physical geography, all supported by French and Spanish documents, to carry out this extensive reexamination of Lahontan's narrative. They believe that the baron should rank among the great explorers of North America.
About the author
Steven G. Baker earned his BA in anthropology from the University of Kansas and his MA in American History from the University of South Carolina. Baker was an independent locally focused Colorado scholar who has worked as an archaeologist and ethnohistorian for nearly 60 years. He worked in Canada for Parks Canada in the 1960s and gained experience in French Canadian colonial history and archaeology. He was the founder and president of Centuries Research, Inc. of Montrose, Colorado, one of the first cultural resource management firms established in the United States. His most recent significant contributions within a long bibliography extending back to 1967 are Juan Rivera's Colorado, 1765: The First Spaniards Among the Ute and Paiute Indians on the Trails to Teguayo and My Name Is Pacomio: The Life and Works of Colorado's Sheepherder and Master Artist of Nature's Canvases, both in new editions from Sunstone Press.
