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 Genlle
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment