Scanned from:  An Atlas of Early Maps of the American Midwest. Ed.; W. Raymond Wood. Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, Vol. XVIII. Illinois State Museum: Springfield, Illinois. 1983.
 

Plate 20

Joseph N. Nicollet September 28-November 14, 1839

[Untitled pen-and-ink manuscript map, in French, of the Mississippi River from Fort Snelling
(Minneapolis-St. Paul, in southeastern Minnesota) to the mouth of the Des Moines River (near
present Keokuk, southeastern Iowa).]

Original: Joseph N. Nicollet Papers, Vol. 2, Part 2, pp. 441-458. Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The map consists of twenty-two sheets (one of them
unnumbered), several of which can be juxtaposed to form single sheets, for a total of eighteen
charts. Size: each sheet measure about 39 by 25 cm.

Scale Ratio: Plate 20F is reproduced at 95 percent of original size; Plates 20P and 20Q at
98 percent; the remaining plates are full-scale.

Reproduced here from Photostats of the originals in the Library of Congress.

Joseph N. Nicollet’s western expedition of 1839 carried him on the steamboat Antelope from
St. Louis to Fort Pierre, in present South Dakota. He was accompanied by John Charles Fremont,
his assistant, and by Charles A. Geyer. From For Pierre the group traveled overland, following
an erratic course, finally arriving at the home of Henry Sibley, in Mendota, Minnesota.
On September 28, he began his return to St. Louis down the Mississippi River. Fremont
remained behind; he was to have rejoined Nicollet at Praire Du Chien, but events prevented
him from doing so, and Nicollet completed the journey without him.

Traveling by canoe, Nicollet mapped the river from his point of departure near
Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to Warsaw, Illinois, at the mouth of the Des Moines River---
part of the modern boundary between Iowa and Missouri. At Warsaw, Nicollet boarded a
steamboat for the rest of the trip to St. Louis. There is no suggestion that he mapped
this second part of his Mississippi River excursion. Unfortunately, his field diary for
the Mississippi River expedition has been lost; so details of the journey must largely be
reconstructed from notes on the map, which are very informative (Bray and Bray 1976:
135-136, 210-211).

The map shows great detail of the river channel, as well as the course of Nicollet’s
canoe (shown by a dashed line), and a multitude of natural and cultural features along both
banks, including early townsites and Sioux and Fox Indian village locations. There is
unfortunately a major gap in the set of sheets between the mouths of the La Crosse and
Wisconsin rivers in southwestern Wisconsin and covering the period between October 9 and 31, 1839.
One of the sheets (Plate 20 H) is not of the Mississippi River; it charts the lower reaches
of the La Crosse River east of the town of La Crosse. None of these maps has been previously
published.