COLDEN, Cadwallader [1688-1776]. The History Of The Five Indian Nations Of Canada, Which are dependent On the Province of New-York in America, And Are the Barrier between the English and French in that Part of the World... 2 Volumes. 12mo. pp. xii, [4], 260; 2 p.l., 251, [9]ads. lacking the folding engraved map. contemporary sprinkled calf, rebacked, endpapers preserved (joints cracked, extremities worm & chipped). armorial bookplate of Henry Home, Lord Kames [1696-1782], Scottish jurist and philosopher. London: Printed for Lockyer Davis, J.Wren, and J. Ward, 1755.
Third London Edition of the first general history of the Iroquois First Nations, with discussion of their manners and customs, forms of government, wars and treaties, and the current state of their trade and alliance with the British nation. The Five Tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy lived south of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Erie, for the most part in the present-day state of New York, extending by 1700 north into present-day Canada, west along the Great Lakes and south on both sides of the Allegheny mountains, and into the Ohio Valley. The alliance comprised the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca peoples, and after 1722 the Tuscarora people as well. Cadwallader Colden was surveyor-general of New York and first colonial representative to the Iroquois Confederacy; he eventually served as lieutenant governor of New York after 1761.
The original edition of Colden's history, published in New York in 1727, the first historical work to be printed there, is basically unobtainable, being known in only ten copies according to Streeter. Large additions were incorporated into the first London edition of 1747, including a map, 'Papers relating to Fur Trade which Colden had edited and published in New York in 1727, and a section on Pennsylvanian Indian affairs which Colden had not written, together with the text of various charters relating to Pennsylvania, from that of William Penn up until 1701.
Dionne II 81. Gagnon I 928. Howes C-560. JCB I 1049. Sabin 14275. Vlach 166. cfBell C406. cfField 342. cfStreeter II 868. cfTPL 220. See Wroth, 'An American Bookshelf 1755', 1969, pp. 91-94 and 178-183.