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French-era cartography of the St. Joseph and the Kankakee, at range strength
Before there was a survey there was a river on French paper, and the maps leg begins there: this valley entered cartography as a route, not as a place. The St. Joseph River and its portage to the Kankakee were working geography in the French era — Marquette passed by the Kankakee and the portage in 1673 in the atlas history this build already quotes, and La Salle's expeditions of 1679 onward made the St. Joseph a named corridor of New France. The French and imperial sheets of the range the floor sets, 1679 to 1763, draw that corridor: the river, the lake, the portage, the mission and trading geography of the valley's north end. What none of them draws is this township — an unsurveyed interior south of the river, on a divide the route maps had no reason to enter; Union Township ground has no French-era cartographic existence as ground, only as blank country beside a drawn river. That is the honest imperial-maps article for a place of this size: the region enters the map record in the French range, at river-and-portage strength, and the townsite enters it only with the federal survey two generations later. The residue is named: a sheet-by-sheet reading of the Library of Congress and David Rumsey French-era holdings for any interior detail south of the river is the settler the audit named, current, and this item closes mixed on it — the range and the corridor proved, the sheet-level census unmade.