The river on French maps: the imperial sheets, 1679–1763

Manuscript reports, the first printed map of the region, and the map its source walked

The ground enters paper as a route, not a place. When La Salle's party crossed the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage in December 1679, the valley's first European geography was a written relation — the river of the Miamis, the head of the Kankakee he named the Seignelay, "only a league and a half" between them, as the Before the City file carries the account. No map from La Salle's own hand survives. His geography reached paper through Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, the hydrographer at Quebec charged with collecting and compiling the cartographic intelligence flowing out of New France: the reports of Marquette, Jolliet, Hennepin, La Salle and Allouez passed through Franquelin's office, and it is his compilations, not the explorers' own sheets, that the printed record descends from. The loss is the first gap in this section and it is permanent: the portage's first cartographer is known, and his originals are not.

The first printed map devoted to this region is the Venetian geographer Vincenzo Coronelli's and Jean-Baptiste Nolin's Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, published at Paris — the privilege for it was granted 4 January 1687 and transferred at once to Nolin; the first state survives in a single copy at the British Library, and the second state is dated 1688. The map scholarship — Burden's Mapping of North America, no. 630, with Karpinski's bibliography of the printed maps of Michigan behind it — calls it the first printed map focused on the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi region, and the first to put the French exploration of the interior into print together: it is drawn, through Franquelin, from the reports named above, Hennepin's 1683 published account of his travels with La Salle among them, exaggerations included. On it the post La Salle built at this river's mouth in 1679 appears as Fort des Miamis at the lake's southeastern shore — the post that became Fort Saint-Joseph — and the Illinois River runs under the name Seignelay, La Salle's name for the Kankakee system the portage fed. The river that would carry South Bend is present on the sheet as the stream running down to that fort; the bend itself is far below the resolution of a continental map.

The map whose source walked the portage came two generations later. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's Carte des lacs du Canada, published at Paris in 1744 in Charlevoix's Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (scale about 1:4,000,000; the University of Illinois copy is digitized in its Historical Maps Online), was drawn, its title says, from the manuscripts of the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine and from Charlevoix's journal — and compiled in large part, the catalog record notes, from the manuscripts of the engineer Chaussegros de Léry. Charlevoix himself had come down Lake Michigan's eastern shore in 1721 to Fort St. Joseph, "on the river of the same name, near the present site of Niles," had been weathered back from an attempt on the Chicago portage, and had reached the Illinois country by crossing the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage — this ground's carrying place is inside the journal the map was drawn to illustrate. By Bellin's sheet the river carries its saint's name, the name the French post had given it, and the fort stands at its mouth. The map is equally famous for what it invented: the four fictitious islands in Lake Superior — Philippeaux, Pontchartrain, Maurepas and Ste. Anne, planted to honor Charlevoix's patron the Count of Maurepas — which later complicated the drawing of the international boundary. The imperial sheets mixed survey, report and flattery in one plate, and the record is read that way here.

The English succession. At the peace of 1763 the valley passed to Britain, and at the peace of 1783 to the United States, and the standard map at the Paris negotiations was John Mitchell's great 1755 map of North America — the sheet on which the boundary through the lakes was drawn, as the Fort Wayne file's map chapter records for the sister valley. The St. Joseph County Public Library's map case still shelves the era under a French heading — a sheet cataloged "1600–1800 French Canada: 17th and 18th Century" — which is where the local collection's own order puts the beginning of this record.

Sources:

1. Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America, no. 630, as given in the catalog records of the Coronelli/Nolin Partie occidentale du Canada (privilege 4 January 1687; second state dated 1688; single-copy first state at the British Library; derivation through Franquelin from Marquette, Jolliet, Hennepin, La Salle and Allouez; Fort des Miamis and the Seignelay naming); Louis C. Karpinski, Bibliography of the Printed Maps of Michigan, 1804–1880 antecedents as cited there.
2. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte des lacs du Canada (Paris, 1744), in Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France — catalog record of the University of Illinois Map Library copy (scale ca. 1:4,000,000; Karpinski no. LV); the map's compilation from the Dépôt manuscripts and de Léry's manuscripts, and the four fictitious Superior islands, per K. A. Kershaw, Early Printed Maps of Canada, no. 947, and John Goss, The Mapping of North America, no. 56.
3. Charlevoix's 1721 journey — Fort St. Joseph "on the river of the same name, near the present site of Niles," the weathered-back Chicago attempt, and the Illinois reached via the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage — as the Charlevoix literature summarizes his journal.
4. St. Joseph County Public Library, Local & Family History map case finding aid (as of 20 December 2021) — the "French Canada" historical sheet and the case's arrangement.
5. Before the City file of this history — La Salle's December 1679 relation, the Seignelay naming and the league-and-a-half measure.