The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1679 – 1763 · Run B #182
The river enters print before the ground does: the St. Joseph River reached European paper with La Salle's expedition of December 1679 — the party raised Fort Miami at the river's mouth and on 3 December 1679 ascended the river to the south bend, crossing to the Kankakee portage above this ground. The first great printed sheet to carry the journey is Louis Hennepin's map in his Description de la Louisiane (Paris, 1683) — the first map to incorporate La Salle's reports, the first to print the name Louisiana — on which the river system of the lake's south end is drawn from the explorers' accounts, the St. Joseph as the river of the Miamis, whose name it carries through the French century. The definitive imperial sheet is Vincenzo Coronelli's and Jean-Baptiste Nolin's Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France (second state dated 1688, from Franquelin's collected missionary and explorer reports — Marquette, Jolliet, Hennepin, La Salle, Allouez): the first printed map devoted to the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi, which marks Fort des Miamis at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the post that became Fort Saint-Joseph, and which remained the region's standard for over fifty years. Through the imperial decades that follow — the Delisle and Bellin successions that redrew the lakes for the French and then, after 1763, for the British — the river is drawn at the same regional scale under its Miami name, a line from the lake to the portage, with the south bend as its one named feature of this valley. The range closes with the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended French imperial cartography east of the Mississippi and passed this valley to British, then American, surveyors.
This ground's share, stated plainly: no French or imperial sheet reached for this section depicts Baugo Creek, the creek mouth, or anything at township scale. The imperial record of this ground is the river alone, drawn at continental scale — a corridor Europeans mapped because they travelled it, past a creek mouth none of them charted. The townsite's cartographic life begins where the Land leg already opens it: Harris's 1817 boundary line, Kendrick's 1827 state line, and the 1829 subdivisions that ruled the valley into the sections the plat was drawn on.
Hennepin's 1683 map and its record (the Ruderman / Burden catalogue entries: first incorporation of La Salle's journey; the Miami (St. Joseph) River's mouth and Fort Miami; the ascent of 3 December 1679 to the South Bend area); Coronelli–Nolin, Partie occidentale du Canada (1688 state; Burden 630; Fort des Miamis at the lake's southern tip, later Fort Saint-Joseph; definitive for fifty years); this build's Before-the-City and Land legs for the 1679 passage and the survey succession that follows.