A soldier who traveled extensively through the early military defenses of New France, Lahontan related a very early picture of the western lands, one of the most comprehensive to his time and his maps of the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi are some of the first to show the Missouri-Mississippi river confluence. Lahontan was an especially valuable correspondent on the state of the native peoples of the French colonial lands.
Hutchins accompanied expeditions to the Mississippi at the time of Pittman’s own travels into the Illinois Country as a young officer and produced his own accounts of these journeys with excellent maps which are among the earliest—if not the earliest—printed maps with St. Louis clearly identified in a location long known to some explorers, obscured or overlooked by others for one hundred years of mapping New France. Many of these descriptive narratives borrow heavily from Pittman, but his maps are crucial for the period he describes. Much later, Hutchins was an important surveyor for the territories of the young United States, rising to the post of Geographer to the United States, the first and only citizen ever to hold such a position., From: A topographical description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina / reprinted from the original ed. of 1778; ed. by Frederick Charles Hicks.
Popple was an associate of astronomer and mathematician, Edmund Halley, and the advertisement in the inset cartouche for this map stresses that friendship in an endorsement for the map’s accuracy, depicting fields, forts, towns, rivers, bogs, forests, all from St. Louis’s future area, well mapped, showing the Missouri River in detailed positioning, also the Meramec River, Cahokia and Kaskaskia