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The confluence enters printed cartography as a carrying place. Guillaume de L'Isle's Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi, published at Paris in 1718 and compiled, its title says, from a great number of memoirs including those of M. Le Maire, is the first great printed map of the continent's interior — and on it, as the Allen County Genealogical Society's map index points out, the portage of the Miamis is marked, joining the Wabash — spelled "Huakiki" — to the river running down to Lake Erie. There is no town to draw yet. What the map records is the route: the short overland carry that made this ground matter to empires. The Library of Congress holds the map (call number G3701.S2 1718 .D4) and serves a digital copy.
The maps stayed in use because the campaigns were fought over them. The footnotes to Henry Hamilton's journal of his 1778 expedition from Detroit to Vincennes, as the Indiana Historical Bureau edits it, cite the working cartography of the day — Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's Le Petit Atlas Maritime (Paris, 1764) and Jean-Baptiste d'Anville's map of Canada, Louisiana, and the English lands. When Hamilton's force came down the Maumee past the Miami villages in the autumn of 1778, one of his officers, Second Lieutenant Henry DuVernet, drew a map of the Maumee River route; the manuscript survives in the Public Archives of Canada at Ottawa, as the linguist Michael McCafferty documented in a 2023 presentation on the expedition's route.
The best British-era sheet for this ground is Thomas Hutchins's A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina (1778). Hutchins, a former British ensign who became geographer to the United States, drew the whole Ohio country from surveys and journals: the Miami villages at the head of the Maumee are placed, and the carrying place west to the Little Wabash — the portage itself — is drawn as the route it was. The Library of Congress serves a high-resolution zoomable copy. When the Treaty of Paris was negotiated in 1782–83, the maps on the diplomats' table were John Mitchell's 1755 map of North America and Hutchins's work, as the History Center's own blog recounts: the boundary that made the confluence American was drawn on paper that showed the Miami towns at the head of the Maumee.
Sources: Library of Congress catalog record for de L'Isle, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi (1718), LCCN 98685731; Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Maps of Allen County, Indiana (acgsi.org), items on the 1718 and 1778 maps; Indiana Historical Bureau edition of Henry Hamilton's journal, footnote citations to Bellin (1764) and d'Anville; Michael McCafferty, 2023 presentation on the Hamilton expedition route (DuVernet map, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa); History Center blog, Fort Wayne History Center (fortwaynehistory.com), on the Mitchell and Hutchins maps at the Treaty of Paris negotiations.