Mitchell Map

Mitchell did so, on his own initiative, by making a first map of North America in 1750, which he then showed to the politicians he knew through his botanical and gardening activities.

Mitchell compiled a first map in 1750 from the materials that he could find in London, in official archives and private hands.

The published map bore the complete title A map of the British and French dominions in North America, with the roads, distances, limits, and extent of the settlements, humbly inscribed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Halifax, and the other Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade & Plantations,.

A copy of the map owned by King George III of Great Britain is in the British Library's collection.

[2] The geographer John Green (né Braddock Mead) criticized Mitchell and his map soon after it appeared, emphasizing two failings with respect to Nova Scotia (an area of particular dispute with the French).

Mitchell, Green noted, had used neither the astronomical observations for latitude and longitude made by Marquis Joseph Bernard de Chabert in the 1740s nor a 1715 chart of the Nova Scotia coast.

Mitchell extended the southern colonies across the entire continent, even over established Spanish territory west of the Mississippi.

The map is liberally sprinkled with text describing and explaining various features, especially in regions that were relatively unknown or which were subject to political dispute.

Since Mitchell's main objective was to show the French threat to the British colonies, there is a very strong pro-British bias in the map, especially with regard to the Iroquois.

In cases where the imperial claims of Britain and France were questionable, Mitchell always takes the British side.

Various impressions (and also French copies) were used to establish the boundaries of the new United States of America by diplomats at the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.

[clarification needed] Its supposition that the Mississippi River extended north to the 50th parallel (into British territory) resulted in the treaty using it as a landmark for a geographically impossible definition of the border in that region.

It was not until 1842, when the Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolved these inconsistencies with fixes such as the one that created Minnesota's Northwest Angle, that the border between British North America and the United States was clearly drawn from the Atlantic Ocean to the Oregon Country.