HISTORICAL SOURCES AND ATTENDANT CARTOGRAPHY.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE principal sources for the cartographical part of this study are as follows: The collection of manuscript copies[544] of maps in the French Archives which was formed by Mr. Parkman, and which he has described in his La Salle (p. 449), and which is now in Harvard College Library; a collection of manuscript and printed maps called Cartographie du Canada, formed by Henry Harrisse in Paris, and which in 1872 passed into the hands of Samuel L. M. Barlow, Esq., of New York, by whose favor the Editor has had it in his possession for study; the collection of copies made by Dr. J. G. Kohl which is now in the Library of the State Department at Washington, and which through the kind offices of Theodore F. Dwight, Esq., of that department, and by permission of the Secretary of State, have been intrusted to the Editor’s temporary care; and the collection of printed maps now in Harvard College Library, formed mainly by Professor Ebeling nearly a hundred years ago, and which came to that library, with all of Ebeling’s books, as a gift from the late Colonel Israel Thorndike, in 1818.[545]
The completest printed enumeration of maps is in the section on “Cartographie” in Harrisse’s Notes pour servir à l’histoire ... de la Nouvelle France, 1545-1700, Paris, 1872, and this has served the Editor as a convenient check-list. A special paper on “Early Maps of Ohio and the West” constitutes no. 25 of the Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society. It was issued in 1875, and has been published separately, and is the work of Mr. C. C. Baldwin, secretary of that Society, whose own collection of maps is described by S. D. Peet in the American Antiquarian, i. 21. See also the Transactions (1879) of the Minnesota Historical Society.
The main guide for the historical portion of this essay has been the La Salle of Parkman.[546]
There are in the Dépôt de la Marine in Paris two copies of a rough sketch on parchment, showing the Great Lakes, which were apparently made between 1640 and 1650. They have neither maker’s name nor date, but clearly indicate a state of knowledge derived from the early discovery of the Upper Lakes by way of the Ottawa, and before the southern part of Lake Huron had been explored, and found to connect with Lake Erie. The maker must have been ignorant of the knowledge, or discredited it, which Champlain possessed in 1632 when he connected Ontario and Huron. Indications of settlements at Montreal would place the date of this map after 1642; and it may have embodied the current traditions of the explorations of Brulé and Nicolet, though it omits all indications of Lake Michigan, which Nicolet had discovered. Though rude in many ways, it gives one of the earliest sketches of the Bras d’Or in Cape Breton. The channel connecting the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence, if standing for anything, must represent the Connecticut and the Chaudière. Dr. Kohl, in a marginal note on a copy of this map in his Washington Collection, while referring to the uninterrupted water-way by the Ottawa, remarks on a custom, not uncommon on the early maps, of leaving out the portages; and the same suspicion may attach to the New England water-way here given. A note on the map gives the distance as three hundred leagues from Gaspé to the extremity of Lake Ontario; two hundred more to the land of the buffaloes; two hundred additional to the region of apes and parrots; then four hundred to the Sea of New Spain; and thence fifteen or sixteen hundred more to the Indies. A legend in the neighborhood of Lake Superior confirms other mention of the early discovery of copper in that region: “In the little lake near the mountains are found pieces of copper of five and six hundred pounds’ weight.”
THE OTTAWA ROUTE, 1640-1650.
At a later day La Salle had learned, from some Senecas who visited his post at Lachine, of a great river, rising in their country and flowing to the sea; and, with many geographers of his day, captivated with a promised passage to India, he preferred to believe that it emptied into the Gulf of California.[547]