Maps help us navigate our way through life. Here is one of those many maps that Hawkeyes have used over the last 300 years to navigate around this beautiful place called Iowa.
1718 – Guillaume (William) De L’Isle’s “Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi” is an example of French cartography at its height. It was widely circulated in Europe and remained in print for years, either copied exactly or used as a base map. As a result of its accurate representation of the lower Mississippi and the surrounding areas, De L’isle’s map became a source map for all succeeding maps of the Mississippi River. The map is centered on the Mississippi River and the interior of what would later become the continental United States. It spans the area from the bottom of Lake Superior in the north to the point at which the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico in the south; the map also extends from the Atlantic coast, where numerous European settlements had been made, and westward to the Rocky Mountains.
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