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Before there was a county to map, there was a river system to get wrong on paper, and the French century got it progressively less wrong. The ground in question is specific: the upper St. That route, not the townsite, is what French cartography drew; no French sheet names or marks anything on the future Lincoln Township's sections, and this article's subject is the valley and portage as a mapped feature, at the strength the sheet record carries it.
The sheets, as a dated range. The manuscript generation comes first: Claude Bernou's Carte des Grands Lacs of 1680, compiled in Paris from the Jesuit and explorer reports of the 1670s, is among the first maps to draw the lakes-and-rivers system of which the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage is the southern hinge. The first great printed synthesis is Vincenzo Coronelli's Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, published with Jean-Baptiste Nolin in Paris and dated in its finished state 1688 — described by its modern catalogue record as the first map devoted to the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi region and the definitive portrayal of the region for over fifty years, its information conduit the royal hydrographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, who collected the cartographic intelligence flowing out of New France; it marks La Salle's forts, including Fort des Miamis at Lake Michigan's southern end, the post that became Fort St. Joseph. Guillaume Delisle's Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France (1703) then reset the region's geometry — the first map of Canada to present the whole of the Great Lakes correctly, on its catalogue record — and carried the St. Joseph, its fort and the portage country into the eighteenth century's standard image. The closing generation is Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's: his Partie occidentale de la Nouvelle France in its 1745 form and its 1755 revision (published at Nürnberg in the Homann heirs' edition, in the last years of French control), a sheet whose record states its contents plainly — towns, missions, forts, Indian villages and tribal territory, rivers and lakes, and portages — the portage between the St. Joseph and the Kankakee drawn as a working feature of empire to the end of the French regime in 1763.
Where these sheets live, and how this build treats them: the records read for this section are the sheets' catalogue records — the Newberry Library's French cartographic holdings tradition and the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collection stand behind the class as its named seats, with the Toronto, Boise State and rare-map catalogue records read here as carriers — and the sister South Bend build's treatment of the same valley, where the posts and the portage are that city's ground, stands at pointer: the cartography is shared, the ground is not, and nothing in this article promotes a valley sheet into a Walkerton map.
Closure: MIXED — the range DUG as a class with makers and dates (Bernou 1680; Coronelli–Nolin 1688; Delisle 1703; Bellin 1745/1755; regime end 1763); a sheet-by-sheet reading of what each draws at the portage itself a NAMED GAP. Settler: the Newberry Library and BnF sheet records read at image strength for the St. Joseph–Kankakee reach, sheet by sheet.
Sources: catalogue records read for this section — Bernou, Carte des Grands Lacs, 1680 (University of Toronto Map & Data Library, NMC 6409); Coronelli and Nolin, Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, 1688 (Burden catalogue record: first map devoted to the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi; Franquelin as conduit; Fort des Miamis identified); Delisle, Carte du Canada, 1703 (catalogue record: first correct whole-Great-Lakes presentation); Bellin, Partie occidentale de la Nouvelle France, 1755, Nürnberg, Homann heirs (Archives West record MSS 105: an updated version of Bellin's 1745 map; contents including portages); Before the City leg of this build (La Salle, December 1679; the portage; the French-century negative for this ground).