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No French sheet ever surveyed Clay or Harris Township. What the imperial record gives this ground is a river, a fort at its mouth, and a portage — drawn at continental scale, from other men's journals. The chain, checked against this ground, runs as follows. In 1679 La Salle built Fort des Miamis at the mouth of the river he called the River of the Miamis, the stream the county histories say Marquette had named St. Joseph in 1673; the two namings stand unreconciled in the sources and both are printed in the land leg. The reports of Marquette, Jolliet, Hennepin, La Salle and Allouez were gathered in Quebec by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, the crown's clearing-house for cartographic information from New France, and reached print in the Coronelli–Nolin Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France (first state c.1687, second state dated 1688), the first printed map devoted to the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi. On it the river runs from the south-eastern shore of Lake Michigan — labelled from Thévenot's 1681 Lago Illinois, o Michigami — and Fort des Miamis sits at the lake's southern tip, later Fort Saint-Joseph. Coronelli's 1694–95 elaboration in the Atlante Veneto kept the same geography, and no map of comparable quality followed until the Charlevoix–Bellin sheets of 1744: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, hydrographer to the Marine, drew the Carte des lacs du Canada from the Dépôt des cartes manuscripts and Charlevoix's journal, longitudes reckoned west of Paris. By then the river, its mouth fort and the Kankakee portage behind this ground were settled features of the French lake system. The 1763 cession ends the French series; the ground itself — the future townships — appears on none of these sheets as anything but riverbank between the lake and the portage. That is the honest measure of the imperial record here: the corridor was mapped for a century before the place was.
Sources: Barry Lawrence Ruderman / Geographicus cataloguing of the Coronelli–Nolin Partie occidentale (1688 state) and Coronelli La Louisiana (1695), and of Bellin's Carte des lacs du Canada (1744), incl. the Dépôt des cartes cartouche; Library and Archives Canada fac-simile of the Marquette map (1673–74); county-history namings of the river as carried in the build's land and tribes legs. Library of Congress digital copies of the French lake sheets checked against the same sequence assembled in the South Bend maps leg.