Delisle, Guillaume

Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississippi dressée sur un grand nombre de memoires ... Paris: chez l'auteur, 1718



Double-page engraved map (20 1/2 x 27 1/4 in.; 520 x 692 mm), contemporary outline color, inset map of the Mississippi Delta and coast of Alabama; guarded at fold, small light stain in lower right corner entering the Gulf in the inset map, slight edge browning and fraying.

Buisseret, Mapping the French Empire in America 12; Cohen, Mapping the West, pp. 48-51; Cumming, Southeast in early Maps 170a; Kohl, Collection of Maps Relating to America, 238

Foundation map for the French colony of Louisiana, "the mother and main source of all the later maps of the Mississippi and the whole West of the United States" (Kohl).

In this map, Delisle stakes French claims to all the territory fed by the Mississippi and its tributaries, including the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, as well as Canada and the Great Lakes, restricting the English to a narrow region along the eastern seaboard, a view at odds with existing English land grants and aspirations.

This is the second state, published after the news of the founding of the French settlement of New Orleans, established by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville for the French Mississippi Company, on 7 May 1718. With this news the plate was re-engraved to show New Orleans both in the main map and in the inset.

Of special interest to Texas collectors is the first appearance, on a printed map, of the name "Texas" in the inscription "Mission de los Teijas etablie en 1716."