A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians, From Its Commencement, in the Year 1740, to the Close of the Year 1808

Philadelphia: McCarty & Davis, 1820. First edition. Good. No dust jacket as issued. Rebacked in half buckram with original boards. Front end papers missing. Front vinette pated down. From the collection and signed by Paul A. W. Wallace. An important association copy. 429 p. First American Frontier. Audience: General/trade. First edition. Sabin 31205; Streeter 1331; Howes H392; American Imprints 1556; Field 678. A good copy with wide margins. According to Field, "The narrative of this mission is a history of the noblest labors of the human race, for the civilization of a savage people. There could be no better guarantee of the value of a treatise on the American Indians, than the names of Rev. John Heckewelder and Peter S. Duponceau. " "Standard authority on the Moravian missions in Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. " [Howes]. In 1999, Anthony F. C. Wallace completed transfer of his professional and personal papers to the Library of the American Philosophical Society, where they join a large body of materials for research into Native American history, cultural anthropology, and the history of Pennsylvania. Including a significant body of correspondence for both Wallace and his father, Paul A. W. Wallace, the Wallace Family Papers are an important resource for historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists. An historian, anthropologist, and folklorist, Paul A. W. Wallace was a long time student of the history and culture of the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada, and had an interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Spending most of his career at Lebanon Valley College where he was chair of the Department of English, Wallace was recognized for his pioneering work on Indian-white relations during the eighteenth century, and particularly for his biography, Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945) and his book about Iroquois traditions, The White Roots of Peace (Philadelphia, 1946). A colleague of Frank Speck, A. Irving Hallowell, and William Fenton, among others, Wallace was an active ethnologist of contemporary Native American communities, conducting fieldwork among the Iroquois and Huron tribes at the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford and in other communities in Ontario and Western New York state. He was editor of Pennsylvania History, 1951-1957; cons.