An Early Map of Minnesota

This is one of my favorite old maps of North America: Jean-Baptiste Franquelin's "Map of the Mississippi" from 1676-8:

 

 

It's one of a handful of maps that were made in the wake of the 1673 expedition to the Mississippi conducted by Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette.  This was the era when the French were beginning to really explore the continental interior beyond the cozy shores of the St Lawrence, and were establishing missions along the shores of the Great Lakes with an eye toward the Illinois country.  From the European perspective, at least, Jolliet and Marquette were the real discoverers of the Mississippi River.  The Spaniards had known of its existence through explorations of the Gulf of Mexico even before De Soto crossed it in 1541, but they never really grasped what it was.  It was Jolliet and Marquette who showed to the wider world that the Mississippi is the true central artery of North America.

 

Other such maps of the Marquette/Jolliet discoveries have been given names over the years: the "Colbertie Map", the "Manitoumi Map", the "Map of the Griffons", but this one doesn't have any special nickname like that.  "Map of the Mississippi" was what Lucien Campeau called it, but that just won't do.  Its proper name, as written on the map itself, is the "Carte Gen^lle de la France Sept.^le"—so I'll call it the "Carte Générale" for short.  The date of 1676-8 is likewise Campeau's estimate; I've seen others date it slightly later, but just barely.  Campeau's estimate would put the Carte Générale a few years later than the other Marquette/Jolliet maps, but still before the period when Duluth, Hennepin, and Le Sueur were visiting the Dakotas country in modern Minnesota.  That's significant because it's the upper Mississippi portion of the map which interests me.

 

 

There are eight names here along the upper course of the river as it slowly vanishes north beyond the mapmaker's knowledge: Ihanctoua, Pintoiia, Napapatou, Ouapikouti, Chaiena, Agatomitou, Oussiloua, and Alimouspigoiak.  Four of these can be easily identified:

 

Ihanctoua  :  Yankton (in Dakota: Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ)

Ouapikouti  :  Wahpekute (in Dakota: Waȟpékhute)

Chaiena  :  Cheyenne (in Dakota: Šahíyena)

Alimouspigoiak  :  Chipewyan (in Cree-Ojibwe: Alimospikwayak)

 

The other four (Pintoiia, Napapatou, Agatomitou, Oussiloua) are unknown to me.  These names don't seem to have ever been mentioned in any other document from the period, and modern researchers haven't much concerned themselves with them either.  I've asked a couple experts in Siouan and Algonquian linguistics what these names might mean and who they may refer to, but no one could hazard any solid guesses.  But there are plenty of odd names on these old maps, so that's not a thing too strange.  Let me tell you why I find these eight names interesting though.  If this map is from 1676-8, then I'm pretty sure that makes it the first document ever in which any of the above named groups (the Yankton, Wahpekute, Cheyenne, and Chipewyan) are mentioned.  You could say the same of some other Indian tribes first encountered—or heard about—by Jolliet and Marquette though.  But what makes these four different is that, I have no idea how Marquette or Jolliet could have known about them at all . . . and to be honest, I don't really think they did.

 

The expedition of 1673 didn't exactly travel the whole length of the Mississippi, only the middle section from the mouth of the Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas.  Marquette and Jolliet never saw the Gulf of Mexico, or the headwaters in Minnesota, and they never paddled up the Missouri and Arkansas rivers.  They did however meet members of other tribes, like the Illiniwek and Quapaw, who told the explorers about further indigenous groups living in these unexplored regions.  Thus Marquette's sketch map shows the names of several Arkansas and Missouri river tribes that he never met, as well as some along the southern Mississippi, and insofar as it can be checked his intelligence was pretty accurate.

 

Marquette's sketch map of the Mississippi (1673)

 

Knowledge of the upper Mississippi would have likewise had to have come by word of mouth.  But if the expedition ever learned about the Cheyenne or the Wahpekute, then for some reason they never imprinted this knowledge on any of the other documents they produced, and it's hard to imagine why their names would have been kept out of the other documents only to then suddenly show up again on the Carte Générale in 1676-8.  Marquette himself never made it back to Canada alive.  He tarried in Wisconsin during the expedition's return journey, and later died in 1675.  Two documents that he made while in the field survived their creator's death and were sent home to Quebec: Marquette's journal of the expedition, and his sketch map (above).  The map shows several native tribes on and near the Mississippi, but nothing about any 'Ihanctoua' or 'Alimouspigoiak'.  Nor are they mentioned in the journal.

 

It's well that Marquette's map and journal survived.  He had presumably sent copies of both home with Jolliet, but the latter's boat capsized in the St Lawrence near Montreal and all of his documents were lost: his own journal as well as duplicates of Marquette's.  Thus when Jolliet returned to New France, the first map that he made (in cooperation with Franquelin) that depicted their discoveries was done entirely from memory.  As Campeau points out, this first attempt shows that Jolliet didn't remember much about the Native American tribes they had encountered.  It hardly has any tribal names at all.

 

Jolliet & Franquelin (1674): the "Colbertie" or "Map of the Griffons"

 

When Marquette's documents were brought to Canada in 1675, Jolliet made another map incorporating the information his parter had recorded.

 

Jolliet & Franquelin (1675): the "Frontenacie"

 

This map also says nothing of the Ihanctoua or the Pintoiia et cetera.  If Marquette had ever heard of such groups, he never wrote down their names, nor was he alive anymore to tell Franquelin or anyone else.  Jolliet meanwhile had a very poor memory for these things.  So where did the information for the Carte Générale come from—who told Franquelin about the Yanktons and the Wahpekutes?

 

Marquette and Jolliet were not the only men of the 1673 expedition.  It's possible one of the other members might have told Franquelin something.  Jacques Largillier was such a person, and like Marquette (and unlike Jolliet!) he could speak Miami-Illinois—he might have picked something up from the locals which Marquette missed.  But the problem is that the names on the Carte Générale—or at least the four that can be identified—don't really look like names that would have been relayed via Algonquian sources in the Wisconsin or Illinois region.  Three of the names are in Dakota, and the fourth is... well I'll get to that.

 

There are other suspects.  Michel Accault had allegedly been west of the Mississippi before 1678 at least, but I don't know specifically what he learned or from whom.  So had Pierre-Esprit Radisson, who did leave a record of his adventures, but they never mention any such groups as those on the Carte Générale.  Claude-Jean Allouez had learned something about the Sioux during his Lake Superior missionary work in 1665-7, but his writings likewise never mention any Pintoiias etc.  They do however mention another tribe called the Karezi, said to live somewhere beyond the Sioux.  Who these Karezi were is likewise unknown, but the Carte Générale at least doesn't mention them.

 

Could anyone else have told Franquelin?  Hard to say.  A century ago the historian Louise Phelps Kellog wrote, "between the discovery of Jolliet and Marquette and the expeditions of La Salle and Duluth, a period of five years intervenes, in which we have no record of exploration; yet the maps of the period show an increasing knowledge of the Great lakes and the paths to the Mississippi.  The question arises whether there were not some unrecorded reconnaissances within that epoch, and whether we may not be justified in inferring that some such unnoticed voyages took place" (French Regime, p 205).  Without knowing which maps in particular Kellog meant, it seems likely that Franquelin consulted such anonymous coureurs de bois.

 

There's a lot about this era that I don't know about, but the curiosity of these names goes beyond my own personal ignorance of French exploration.  Look at the orthography.  The name 'Chaiena' uses an identical spelling as that later used by Le Sueur: 'Chaienaton' (with the archaic Dakota word thuŋwaŋ meaning village), but that is more or less how you'd naturally spell Šahíyena in colonial French orthography anyway.  The names 'Ihanctoua' and 'Ouapikouti' are different.  Both these names (from Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ and Waȟpékhute) are spelled very differently than how they're written elsewhere, by the English or the French.  'Ihanctoua' in particular stands out in correctly representing the word thuŋwaŋ with two syllables.  Everyone else from the 1600s onward has almost universally spelled this ending as 'ton' with one syllable, a convention which survives in names like Yankton, Sisseton, Wahpeton.  I'm not entirely positive, but I think you might not see this word correctly spelled with two syllables again until the 1800s, with linguists like Stephen Riggs and the Pond brothers.  So in this the Carte Générale was way ahead of the curve.

 

And this is conjectural, but the two-syllable spelling might be hiding in the names of 'Agatomitou' and 'Napapatou' as well.  On the map these are written <Agatomitȣ> and <Napapatȣ> with the letter ȣ, an old ligature which usually stands for "ou".  However, an idiosyncracy of the 17th century Jesuits is that ȣ was sometimes also used to write "oua"—something that's confusing now, and was even confusing then.  For instance, our first attestation of the name of the Assiniboine is from the Jesuit Relation of 1640, where they are referred to as 'Assinipour'.  I assume that this was copied from a document in which the name was written <Assinipȣr> and intended to be read as 'Assinipouar', reflecting the Old Algonquin Ahsini:pwa:r.  Usually the French didn't otherwise miss the /wa:/ in this name.  So if we imagine that something similar happened with the Carte Générale, then <Agatomitȣ> and <Napapatȣ> were supposed to end in "toua".  But of course these names are still unidentified (they might not have ended in thuŋwaŋ anyway) and all this is still technically an argument from absent evidence.

 

The strangest thing about the map, though, is the last name.  The Alimouspigoiak.  This name means literally the "Dog Rib People" in Algonquian, which survives in the name of the modern Dogrib tribe (also called the Tlicho), however in olden days the Algonquians tended to apply this name more generally to the Athabaskan tribes as a whole.  In this instance it probably refers to the Chipewyan (a.k.a. Dene Suline).  These people lived in the boreal forests of Canada, far from the sources of the Mississippi, so the map's geography here is obviously very vague and speculative.

 

What's really interesting about 'Alimouspigoiak' is that this specific variant is a linguistic hybrid.  In David Pentland's analysis, it derives from the Old Odawa [Ojibwe] word alim meaning "dog" and the Cree word ospikway meaning "his rib" (plus the plural suffix ak).  This would presumably not have been the ordinary way of referring to the Chipewyans in 17th century Cree or Ojibwe: that would have said something like atimospikwayak or alimohpikayak, respectively.  Crees and Ojibwes didn't tend to arbitrarily mix and match their languages like this.  So why does the map?

 

 

There is, I believe, only one other place where this hybrid name appears: a letter by the Jesuit missionary Gabriel Marest where he refers to the Chipewyan Indians by the name 'Alimouspigui'.  Apart from minor spelling differences, this is the exact same name minus the plural ak suffix.  Marest's letter was written around 1706, but he had known about the Alimouspigui since late 1694 or early-to-mid 1695, when he took part in the military campaign in which France captured Fort York from the English.  During his stay at Fort York (briefly renamed Fort Bourbon), Marest endeavored to learn the Cree language from a pair of local Indians, from whom he learned about other tribes like the Assiniboine, Sioux, Eskimo, other groups of Cree, the Alimouspigui, and another possibly Athabaskan tribe called the 'Ikovirinioucks'.  Marest likely never acquired true fluency in Cree (though he later did in Miami-Illinois), and some of his information may have come from the English trader Henry Kelsey.  But the reason 'Alimouspigui' has such a strange shape more likely is because Marest's principal Native informant was "a slave from another Tribe, who knew only imperfectly their Tongue [Cree]".  This man surely must have been an Ojibwe whose Cree was laced with his own native language.

 

Thus the peculiar form of the name 'Alimouspigui' comes from the very specific circumstances in which Gabriel Marest heard it: circumstances firmly anchored to a well-documented and securely dated historical event.  In other words, there's little to no way anyone would have heard of such a name prior to late 1694, and anyone using it afterward would surely have had Marest as their source.  Also, while Gabriel Marest did not speak Dakota (the language of the other 3 names), his brother Joseph Marest did.  If the two brothers ever exchanged notes, then either one could have been Franquelin's source for the Carte Générale.  But that would mean the map wasn't made until after 1695 at the earliest, nearly two decades after Campeau's estimate.  Could Campeau have been wrong?

 

Lucien Campeau was a Jesuit studying the history of the Jesuits in America.  He knew a great deal about who was who, where, when, what they knew and when they knew it, et cetera, et cetera, and people always seem to speak highly of him.  But in his study of the Marquette/Jolliet maps, at least, he seems to have taken the Native American names more or less just as a given.  His focus was more toward the details of geography and hydrography.  This led him to overlook some potentially interesting details, such as that the 'Papikaha' on the Marquette sketch are most likely the same group as the 'Pacaha' from the De Soto accounts.  This tribe has occasionally been claimed as Quapaw, but much more likely they were Tunican.

 

The Arkansas River on Marquette's sketch map (1673).

 

He (and everyone else) has also overlooked the possibility that the 'Aganatchi' on the Frontenacie Map are the same as the Occaneechi, a Siouan tribe from the Virginia-Carolina piedmont.  Their being here on this map in the 1670's would mean, then, that they were yet another eastern Siouan tribe who fled west during the ultraviolent 17th century and settled in the Mississippi country.  On the Frontenacie Map, the Aganatchi are located near the Quapaw, Mosopelea, and Michigamea—other Siouan tribes who (to differing degrees) were relative newcomers to the area.

 

The Arkansas and lower Mississippi on the Frontenacie (1675).

 

But there are problems with thinking that Franquelin got his information from Gabriel Marest.  According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Marest stayed in the vicinity of Fort Bourbon until September 1696 when he was captured by the English, and he didn't return to Canada until early 1697.  By this time, Franquelin was in Paris and had already met with Pierre-Charles Le Sueur the previous winter.  The result of this collaboration was a new and up-to-date map of the upper Mississippi River based upon Le Sueur's first-hand knowledge of the area.

 

Franquelin, "Cours du grand fleuve Missisipi" (1697, with additions made from 1699 to 1702). This is a copy, the original map is lost.

 

This map gave the names of over twenty bands and villages of the Sioux (including the Assiniboine and Cheyenne, listed as Sioux villages), information provided by Le Sueur.  It's hard to say exactly how many Sioux villages Le Sueur was familiar with: there are three versions of his "list" which, when you put them together, total 26 different village names (or 28 if you include the Cheyenne and Assiniboine), but the short versions of each list name only 20/20/21 each.  In 1695 Le Sueur had conducted the Sioux chief Tiyoskate to Montreal, and in a meeting with governor Frontenac the chief said that his nation comprised 22 different villages—supposedly he named each one, but I don't think anyone made a record of it.  But I digress.  The point is that after 1697, Franquelin would not have gone backwards.

 

Even if you ignore the Alimouspigoiak issue, there are still problems with the idea that the Carte is much later than 1676-8.  By 1679 the French were again venturing to the Mississippi, and soon were acquiring more, newer, and better information about its streams and of the Native people living there.  These reports used an entirely different arsenal of names for the subdivisions of the Sioux—nowhere do they mention any Napapatou or Pintoiia.  Instead they refer to more familiar groups like the Santee, Teton, and again the Yankton, and to less familiar groups like the Oudebaton and Songaskiton.  The identity of these last two is something of a mystery.  Folks will on occasion claim they were proto-Cheyenne, and while that may incidentally be true, the actual arguments given for the theory are just, just awful.  But regardless, by the 1680s it was a convention among the French that the Songaskiton and Oudebaton (whoever they were) were among the most important of the Sioux subtribes, and they are listed as such by La Salle, Tonti, Duluth, Hennepin, and Le Sueur.

 

These names started appearing on maps as early as 1681, as on the Bernou map:

 

Detail from Bernou (1681), "Carte de l"Amerique Septentrionale et Partie de la Meridionale". Note that the "Nation des Forts" are the same as the "Chongasketon".

 

And the 1683 Hennepin map:

 

Detail from Hennepin (1683), "Carte de la Nouuelle France et de la Louisiane"

 

And the 1688 Coronelli map:

 

Detail from Coronelli (1688), "America Settentrionale"

 

Franquelin meanwhile was no stranger to the La Salle clique: his 1684 map incorporates data from La Salle's operations in the Illinois country:

 

Detail from Franquelin (1684), "Carte de la Louisiane"

 

Granted, the 1684 Franquelin map doesn't have any of the Dakota names I referred to.  However, the 1688 Franquelin map does:

 

Detail from Franquelin (1688), "Carte de l'Amerique Septentrionnale"

 

So . . . the Carte Générale can't have been made before 1695.  It also can't have been made after 1680.  Therefore it doesn't exist.  Well okay, not quite.  But you can see why I find the map so interesting, because I can't figure it out.  Maybe someone out there could tell me the answer.  Until then, my best guess is that the label 'Alimouspigoiak' at least might have been an accident.  In other words, it was supposed to say 'Atimouspigoiak' (i.e. the normal Cree atimospikwayak), but Franquelin miscopied the name and replaced the "t" with an "l".  And his mistake just happened—by a gigantic coincidence—to produce the exact same, hybrid form which Gabriel Marest recorded two decades later in entirely different circumstances and for entirely different reasons.  That seems highly unlikely, but we know what Mr Holmes said about the improbable.  Otherwise, maybe this variant of the Dogrib name somehow predates Marest, and doesn't come from him using an Ojibwe informant who spoke contaminated Cree?  I don't know if that's any better.  It wouldn't have come from Miami-Illinois, in case you were wondering: the MI form is alemō̆hpikaya, with l and h like Ojibwe.

 

All that granted, it still wouldn't put much of a dent in what makes the Carte Générale interesting.  It's still the first document to attest to these tribal names (including the extremely significant "Cheyenne"), and I still have no idea where Franquelin's information came from.  As for the four identified names: it's probably not worth speculating too much, but if you look at the arrangement of the eight names, there does appear to be a logic to it.

 

 

The two recognizable Dakota names are both within the bottom (i.e. southern) bloc of four.  The next name above that bloc is that of the Cheyenne, who some oral traditions say once lived along the Red River, north-northwest of the Sioux home at Mille Lacs.  And the Chipewyan, far away to the north, are at the top of the list.  So far so good.  That would imply that the Pintoiia and Napapatou were other Sioux groups, maybe?  It's harder to guess who the Agatomitou and Oussiloua were, but if Franquelin miscopying "t" as "l" is on the table, then the latter name may also end in thuŋwaŋ.  I suspect this is the case, but it doesn't really help with identifying them.  Their position suggests maybe groups of Cree or Assiniboine, and if those names are not known in subsequent history then these groups may have disbanded, as the Oudebaton and Songaskiton did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

The Lucien Campeau study is "Les Cartes relatives à la découverte du Mississipi par le P. Jacques Marquette et Louis Jolliet" in Les Cahiers des dix, 47 (1992).  There's also an English translation by Michael McCafferty, which you might find floating around.  Campeau technically shows a different version of the Carte Générale than this one—I think this is more of a handwritten draft and he shows a finished version, with a border and legend etc.—but all the relevant details are the same.

 

The Handbook of North American Indians usually is pretty diligent about giving the first attestation of tribal names, but here it cites the Carte Générale for the Dogrib and Cheyenne but not the Yankton or Wahpekute.  The first reference it gives to the Yankton is Hennepin 1698, and the first to the Wahpekute is Franquelin and Le Sueur's map of 1697.  The relevant parts of the Handbook are volume 6 (Subarctic): "Dogrib" by June Helm and "Chipewyan" by James G. E. Smith, and volume 13 (Plains): "Sioux Until 1850" by Raymond J. DeMallie and "Cheyenne" by John H. Moore, Margot P. Liberty, and Terry Straus.  The report of Gabriel Marest is in volume 66 of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites.  Note that the Thwaites edition miscopies 'Alimouspigui' as 'Alimouspigut'.  The suggestion that Marest got some information from Henry Kelsey is in Marest's biography in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol 2.  David Pentland analyzes 'Alimouspigui' in his doctoral dissertation, Algonquian Historical Phonology (1979, U of Toronto).  On the Pacaha/Papikaha: see Ives Goddard, "The Indigenous Languages of the Southeast" (2005), and Robert Rankin's chapter in The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, ed. Young & Hoffman (1993).  Some other 17/18th century Algonquian forms provided by Mii Dash Geget, but disclaimer that it's difficult to work out the details for historical stages of these languages.

 

Information on Le Sueur's work among the Dakota is from Mildred Mott Wedel's article in Aspects of Upper Great Lakes Anthropology (1974).  The three "versions" of Le Sueur's list are 1: the list from his "Memoires", 2: the names of the villages as they appear on Franquelin's 1697 map, and 3: the list of villages that accompanies said map.  'Tiyoskate' is Pekka Hämäläinen's spelling of the name, the historical the French spelling was 'Tiouscaté'.  Raymond DeMallie in the Handbook transcribes Le Sueur and Franquelin's Dakota village names with <tʰų> rather than <tʰųwą>.  Jan Ullrich (probably the foremost expert on Lakota/Dakota dialects past and present) assured me that there is no such word as *thuŋ, but that the final syllables in these long names can be faint.  Thuŋwaŋ itself is an archaic word no longer used by modern speakers, except in frozen forms like the name of the Mdewakanton: Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ, otherwise the word has been replaced by derivatives like otȟúŋwahe (Lak) or othúŋwe (Dak).  DeMallie and Le Sueur's mistake can be forgiven: Robert C. Hollow also once recorded the Wahpekute word for Mdewakanton as <bdewákątų>.

 

I won't get into the Oudebaton-Songaskiton issue here, but older works (and some modern works) often assumed that they were the Wahpeton and Sisseton, respectively.  This is false.  But it's just as sloppy when more recent authors essentially argue that, because they weren't Wahpeton/Sisseton, therefore they were Cheyenne.