Note I-71 — Chapter I · ITINERARY: UP THE MISSOURI AND OSAGE RIVERS, AND THROUGH KANSAS TO THE PAWNEE VILLAGE ON THE REPUBLICAN RIVER, JULY 15TH-SEPT. 30TH, 1806.

Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, commonly called Abbé Raynal, b. Aveyron, France, Apr. 12th, 1713, d. Paris, Mar. 6th, 1796—a philosophical free-thinker and historian, who wrote too much sense and truth to suit his official superiors, and was consequently unfrocked. It is a curious fact in the history of the most Tammany-like machine for the propagation of painful superstitions ever known in the Western world—excepting perhaps Brigham Young's similarly organized scheme—that whenever one of its members begins to think for himself they make him take off his gown and wear trousers openly. The irony in the case seems to escape the professional nurserymen in that hot-house. The abbé wrote various works; his most celebrated one, to which Pike refers, is: Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, 1770, repub. 1780-85—a book whose strength and other merits may be inferred from the fact that it had the honor of being burned by Parliamentary order; though its author was simply exiled, the times being already a little out of joint for roasting heretics along with their heresies.