Map of the surveyed part of the Territory of Michigan (Risdon, 1825)

Orange Risdon’s map of the surveyed part of Michigan Territory, engraved by Rawdon, Clark & Co. at Albany in 1825: the country of the first land sales, from the Detroit and St. Clair rivers west to the Principal Meridian and north to Saginaw, laid out in its counties, townships and sections, with the strip south to the line it marks as the northern boundary of Ohio (Port Lawrence, now Toledo, north of it) and the Upper Canada shore from Sandwich to Amherstburg. It shows the young towns — Detroit, Monroe, Pontiac, Mt. Clemens, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dexter, Tecumseh, Palmer (St. Clair) and Saginaw — with their mills, inns and roads, among them the new “United States Road” toward Chicago, and the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi) and Wyandot country they were laid over: Indian villages on the Saginaw, the Cass, the Flint and the Raisin, at Brownstown and on Lake St. Clair, and the reserves kept in the treaties of 1807–1819 with their acreages — the Wyandot reserve at Brownstown, the Macon reserve on the Raisin, Tonquish’s and the “Sequinsackin Res.” on the Rouge, Maconce’s on Lake St. Clair, and the Saginaw reserves on the Saginaw, Tittabawassee, Cass, Flint and Shiawassee. In fine dots, keyed “Indian Trails”, it draws a web of trails, none of them named: from Saginaw up the Flint and the Shiawassee, across Livingston and Oakland to the lakes and on to Detroit, west from Ann Arbor toward the St. Joseph country, and from Saline by Tecumseh west — the Detroit–Chicago trail. The unsurveyed Thumb and Saginaw Bay, sketched too freely to place, are not shown; nor are the title, the key, and Lake Erie with its islands.

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