With numerous botanical illustrations and splendid maps by hydrographer, Jacques-Nicholas Bellin, Charlevoix represents a culmination in the middle of the eighteenth century of what the French knew, or thought they knew, about North America and its rivers and varied lands drained by them. He was sent to North America to find a route to the Pacific and through years of travel and study recommended doing this by the ascent of the Missouri River or through the establishment of posts along traditional native trading routes in Canada, through strategic stepping stones. Charlevoix and Bellin set out to prove that the Missouri and the Mississippi had basically the same headwaters, and the maps in these volumes reflect that thinking in the supposed nearness of the sources of both rivers. The Great Lakes through a vast system not only were connected to the Atlantic but to the Pacific as well. the works of the French explorers and cartographers heavily interested Thomas Jefferson. Charlevoix considered the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers the finest in the world., Statement of Responsibility: Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France : avec le Journal historique d'un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l'Amérique Septentrionnale / par le P. de Charlevoix.
Projected upon the best Authorities and Astronomical Observations. By Thos. Kitchin Geographer. Engraved for Cap Knox's History of the War in America. Map of the British colonies in North America in 1763, as well as French Louisiana, Canada, and some of New Mexico.
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.