[NetBehaviour] Canadian historic treasure may be a hoax.

[marc]

Canadian historic treasure may be a hoax.

Randy Boswell.

A treasured Canadian artifact, long hailed as the earliest map of the 
American Midwest and the best proof of the 1673 discovery of the 
Mississippi River by two French-Canadian explorers has been dismissed as 
a ``hoax'' by a U.S. researcher, who claims it couldn't have been drawn 
before the War of 1812.

The map was discovered in the 1840s at a Montreal religious college 
among historical documents related to the Jesuit missionaries of early 
Canada. It is still held today by the Jesuit Archives in St-Jerome, 
Que., but has been loaned to the U.S. Smithsonian Institution and the 
Canadian Museum of Civilization for recent exhibitions celebrating the 
400th anniversary of French settlement in North America.

Believed to have been drawn by Father Jacques Marquette, a celebrated 
17th-century Catholic priest who ventured into the western wilderness to 
convert natives, the hand-drawn map depicts Lake Superior, Lake Michigan 
and several rivers flowing into a great southern waterway christened, by 
Marquette, ``La Riviere de la Conception'' in honour of the Virgin Mary.

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