Michigan: cartographic perspectives on the "Great Lakes State"

Michigan Historical Review, Spring, 2005 by Gerald A. Danzer

There are two major elements in this new chapter of Great Lakes cartography. The first is the division of the region into American states and their subdivisions, counties and townships. The second, on which statehood and local governments often depended, was the system of land division which turned the region into parcels that were numbered, located, and measured so they could be bought and sold as commodities. Both of these fundamental components of later Michigan maps started under the Articles of Confederation, the Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

The earliest maps to label the United States as such were simply revised versions of readily available maps. These appeared first in Paris, then in London, but there was a widespread feeling in America that the new states and the new nation needed to produce their own maps. (41) Two individuals, one in Philadelphia and the other in New Haven, met this need for an American map of the new nation in 1784.

The first to appear was Abel Buell's wall map in four sheets: A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America ... Humbly Inscribed to His Excellency the Governor and Company of the State of Connecticut. (42) The title, the elaborate cartouche topped by the new American flag, and the extension of the seaboard states west to the Mississippi River all followed traditional map design. In his depiction of Michigan, Buell retained the usual elevated plain in the center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Signs of hope, such as "around here is plenty of virgin copper" were qualified by an "extensive sandy desert" that reached from Grand Traverse Bay to Kalamazoo. Buell prominently labeled Detroit and included Fort St. Joseph next to the "Poutowatomi Town" to suggest a toehold for future settlement. The map designated the rest of Michigan's future territories as lands of the "Chipeways" and the "Ottowas."

William McMurray's wall map of the United States reflected the work of the cartographers serving in the Continental Army. (43) Their efforts did not reach the Great Lakes region, so the high plain remained on the map. McMurray added political subdivisions for the region northwest of the Ohio River according to the division of that area into ten new states set by a resolve of Congress. Thus, straight lines of latitude and longitude cut the Northwest Territory into unnamed blocks, suggesting a future union in which statehood would emerge from the work of surveyors rather than out of geographic circumstances or the processes of historical development. A year later, this region on McMurray's sheet would be featured on a separate Map of the North West Parts of the United States of America produced by John Fitch. (44)

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 changed the number and alignment of states in the region and the next wall map of the nation, issued in 1791 by Osgood Carleton, a Boston teacher and map publisher, simply omitted all suggestions about future states. (45) The early maps of the United States included in books and atlases produced in America also omitted political subdivisions for the Northwest Territory. Jedidiah Morse, "the father of American geography," folded two maps showing the northern and southern states into his 1789 volume, The American Geography. (46) John Stockdale prepared an additional "Map of the Back Settlements" for the 1794 edition of Morse's popular fide. The 1796 edition carried a new "Map of the Western Territory" by Thomas C. Andrews of Boston. Neither map projected boundaries for the future states, but the second effort was pathbreaking in an important way. It was one of the earliest maps to show the lines of the congressional land survey. (47)