La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

APPENDIX. 488his victim La Salle, he would have been more sparing ofhis praises. " He " (Franquelin), writes the governor, « isas skilful as any in France, but extremely poor and inneed of a little aid from his Majesty as an Engineeris at work on a very correct map of the country, whicli 1shall send you next year in his name; meanwhile, I shallsupport him with some little assistance." — Colonial 1>ments of New York, IX. 205.The map is very elaborately executed, and is six feet longand four and a half wide.It exhibits the political divisionsof the continent, as the French then understood them ; thatis to say,all the regions drained by streams flowing into theSt. Lawrence and the Mississippi are claimed as belongingto France, and this vast domain is separated into two granddivisions, La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. Theboundary line of the former, New France, is drawn fromthe Penobscot to the southern extremity of Lake Champlain,and thence to the Mohawk, which it crosses a little aboveSchenectady, in order to make French subjects of theMohawk Indians. Thence it passes by the sources of theSusquehanna and the Alleghany, along the southern shoreof Lake Erie, across Southern Michigan, and by the headof Lake Michigan, whence it sweeps northwestward tosources of the Mississippi. Louisiana includes the entirevalley ofth*»the Mississippi and the Ohio, besides the whole ofTexas. The Spanish province of Florida comprises thepeninsula and the country east of the Bay of Mobile, drainedby streams flowing into the Gulf; while Carolina,Virginia,and the other English provinces, form a narrow stripbetween the Alleghanies and the Atlantic.The Mississippi is called " Missisipi, ou Riviere Colbert;" the Missouri, " Grande Riviere des Emissourittes, ouMissourits; " the Illinois, "Riviere des Ilinois, ou Macopins; " the Ohio, which La Salle had before called by iU