Carte particulière d’une partie de la Louisianne … les routtes par terre relevé & mesurées aux pas (Broutin, de Vergés and Saucier, 1743)

A French manuscript map signed at New Orleans on 10 November 1743 by Demarigny, drawn from the surveys of the engineers Ignace-François Broutin and de Vergés and the draughtsman Saucier: the Mississippi from the Balize to Fort de l’Assomption (Memphis), with the Red River, the Yazoo, the Pascagoula, the Mobile and the Tombigbee up to the Chickasaw country, and the overland routes they measured by pace in the years of the French Chickasaw campaigns of 1736–40, drawn as red dotted lines. A key, “Renvoye des routtes par terre”, names each route by its lettered points: from Fort St. Martin (A) on the Mississippi over the heights (B) to the Yazoo; from Fort de l’Assomption to the first branch of the Yazoo (E) and on to the Chickasaw; up the Margot (F–K); from the Petit portage on the Tombigbee (M) to the Chickasaw; and Saucier’s routes from the Chickasaw to the Choctaw, from the Yazoo (L) to the Choctaw towns and Fort Tombecbé, and from that post to the Chickasaw. A Nota describes the ground of each — open oak ridges and prairie, canebrakes, ravines and drowned bottoms. It draws the Villages Tchkachas (Chickasaw), the Choctaw towns inside a dotted “circuit des villages Tchactas au nombre de 44 villages”, the “passage des anglois” — the English traders’ way — from the Choctaw towns to Tombecbé, the Alabama towns at Fort Toulouse, and the villages and old village sites of the Arkansas, Tunica, Avoyel, Chakchiuma, Ibitoupa, Biloxi, Mobile and Tawasa. The title, key and Nota are not shown.

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