“Carl J. Weber is taking on one of the Mississippi's most esteemed legends and poking it right in the eye...”

Edward Husar, Quincy Herald Whig

Historians have since 1852 accepted this map as authentic. It was published that year. And it is no minute trivia of historical oh-hum and who-cares. It has some grand claims of marking milestones:

1. The first map of the American heartland ,
2. The first map documenting Europeans at Chicago,
3. The first map of the "Discovery" of the Mississippi River from a northern approach,
4. The only primary source document of a 1673 Marquette-Jolliet expedition

On the other hand, it has a contrary claim to being one of the
more noteworthy frauds and forgeries in the history of cartography.

The map, "discovered" in the 1840s has been considered as incontrovertible evidence of a 1673 expedition of Mississippi River discovery participated in by Marquette. And what of the various maps specifically said by historians to be dependent on this map? It looks like the forgery is dependent on them.

Ten years ago, by way of detective work on Chicago's name, I started studying 1650-1700 maps and explorers.

Six years ago I made presentations about this map to historian groups, published it, got some radio, print and internet coverage, and have always had it on my web site.

Tony Campbell has had it on his list of maps of dubious authenticity as a possible "forgery/fake?" for a few years now.

What do historians have to say to say about this?

It might be good to get that question mark removed after "forgery/fake?" on the Campbell list, or in the other direction, redeem Marquette and get the map off the list.

The singular discovery and argument here:

The most formidable challenge to the map's authenticity is the Illinois River is shaped too accurately.

It's too accurate by 140 years.

It's reputed creator, missionary Jacques Marquette (died 1675 at 38), had no training in map drafting nor was he known to have made any other maps. In addition, the tools in Marquette's time were relatively crude, the ability to record latitude inconsistent, and confident ability to record longitude still waiting in the 18th century to be discovered.

Fast forwarding 138 years to the Melish Map of Illinois, 1813. This was the cartographic document for Illinois statehood. The Illinois River would have been charted with tools and techniques far in advance of Marquette's.

Whoever forged the Marquette Autograph Map in the name of Marquette used a post-1813 template for the shape of the Illinois River.

See pre-Melish Maps

Marquette, with no map training and not known to have made any other maps, was able to create a map 140 years ahead of its time?

 

When, in the mid-1800s this map entered history, it was allegedly in a cache of old missionary documents that had been entrusted to hospital nuns in 1800. When the missionaries returned to Canada in 1842, the nuns gave them the cached documents, including, as the story goes, the Marquette Map. With the exception of Francis Borgia Steck in 1959, Marquette Legends, no one appears to have questioned the authenticity of the map after it was published in 1852. What Steck had to say: Marquette's own mission, St. Xavier is not on the map, the Mississippi called "River of the Conception" is totally ahistorical, and the location of certain Indian tribes on the map suggested a slightly post-1700s state.

In the middle 1800s, as the American heartland was opening to English speaking settlers, the growing population wanted to know more about their regional colonial history. A battle erupted in scholarly publications over claims and counter claims: who were the first Europeans to discover and explore the Mississippi during the French colonial historical sequence? This puts us back in the 1670s and 1680s. This forged map was a deceit pulled off in the mid-1800s by missionaries who wanted to inflate their early role.