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The Louisiana Territory in 1684. |
Trying to sort out where present-day Fayetteville might be in this cropped portion of an 1684 map showing the lower Mississippi River valley is a trick. The map, titled "Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr. De La Salle" and produced by Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, shows the Missourits Riviere and the Riviere des Acancea paralleling each other as they do roughly in present-day maps; however, the Mississippi River meanders across the southwest into present-day Texas and hits the Gulf of Mexico closer to where one would expect to see Houston rather than dropping straight south to Baye du Esprit, site of present-day New Orleans.
Why? Turns out there was a little skulduggery involved.
The original map was created in 1684 to show the exploration of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, the year after La Salle returned from his expedition down the Mississippi River.
The course of the Mississippi River was intentionally drawn incorrectly to gain more royal support for a fort near the mouth of the Mississippi. Depicting the Mississippi as being closer to Mexico would provide an advantage to the French if they wanted to send soldiers over to "borrow" some ore from the Spanish silver mines. To learn more, download the PDF publication Louisiana: European Exploration and the Louisiana Purchase, produced by the Geography Division of the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, the original map, held by the Archives de la Marine in Paris, was lost sometime during the last century, but this facsimile was produced sometime between 1896 and 1901 and is held by the Library of Harvard University, and a digital version is available from the Library of Congress.
Nevertheless, some of the names on this very early map of our region continue to today: the Zages (Osages), the Tchacta (Choctaw), les Ci-Ca-Ça (Chickasaw), the Tounica (Tunica) and, of course, the Acansea (Arkansas), both as a river and as a tribe of Indians.