Object Status:
Extant
Accession Date:
February 1782
Primary Source Reference:
Du Simitière Memorandum Books, Library of Congress, fol. 65r
Notes:
This 48-page manuscript booklet is in Du Simitière Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia, Scraps, nos. 133, 134. The cover and an interior page are pictured here.
Richard Butler (1743-1791), an Irishman, was an officer in the Continental Army. He later was an Indian agent and in 1786 was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern department. He was second-in-command of Arthur St. Clair’s disastrous expedition of 1791 and was killed in the surprise attack of the Western Indians on 4 Nov. of that year. He later supplied Indian vocabularies to George Washington, who was collecting them for Lafayette at the request of Catherine the Great of Russia. See the Washington-Butler correspondence of 1786-1788 in Founders Online, National Archives.
