Maps and Explorers of North American Heartland in Late 17th century...

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

Edward Husar, Quincy Herald Whig

“A treasured Canadian artifact, long hailed as the earliest map of the American Midwest and the best proof of the 1673 discovery of the Mississippi River by two French-Canadian explorers has been dismissed as a ``hoax'' by a U.S. researcher.”

Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service

Historians have since 1852 accepted this map as authentic. It was published that year in J.G. Shea. 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 the contrary claim of topping the list of fakes.

The map, "discovered" in the 1840s, is also called the St. Mary's Map, and the Montreal Map.

Delangley says it is incontrovertible evidence of a 1673 Marquette Mississippi expedition. As will be demonstrated, Delangley was wrong, the map is not authentic.

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.

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, when John Melish, in 1813, made a map for Illinois statehood.

The mapmakers cartogaphic tool kit made a great leap forward in the 18th century. In Marquette's time, instruments were crude, the ability to record latitude inconsistent, and confident ability to record longitude still waiting for 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. The shape of the Illinois River approximates three sides of an ocatagon.

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 said to have been in a cache of old missionary documents that had been entrusted to hospital nuns in 1800. Steck researched the cache of documents and claimed that the three Marquette documents, this map being one of them, were not in the original inventory listings.

When the missionaries returned to Canada in 1842, the nuns gave them the cache of documents, included amongst which, as the story goes, was 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. Steck points out that 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.

More on Marquette Map Hoax

"truth spreads by contagion, not veracity..." Nassim Nicholas Taleb