The New Way to the Forks of the Ohio: Reflection on John Potts's Map of 1758
In the course of his illuminating discussion of cartographic symbolism in The Power of Maps, Denis Wood laconically observes that the adage "Every map is out-of-date before it's printed" is not one over which "cartographers lose sleep." This must certainly have been true in the instance of Pennsylvania Surveyor-General Nicholas Scull, who in 1759 published his watershed map of the "Improved Part of the Province of Pennsylvania," dedicating it to the "true 8c absolute Proprietaries Thomas & Richard Penn. Already obsolete and inaccurate in its rendering of several important trans-Susquehanna features, the map intimates that Scull must indeed have slept soundly to have published it when and where he did. During the previous year, 1758, Brigadier General John Forbes and his able executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet, had reversed the tide of disaster released upon the Pennsylvania frontier by the defeat of Major General Edward Braddock in July of 1755. Forbes's combined British and Provincial six-thousand-man army had cut its way through the virgin forests and over the ridges of the Alleghenies, thereby capturing the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and eliminating the immediate French and Indian menace. To a populace interested in tracing the sinuous and daring route of Forbes's new road to the Forks of the Ohio, in locating the site of near-mythical Fort Duquesne (renamed Fort Pitt), and in obtaining a clearer understanding of the ongoing war as Bouquet tried to push the French and the Indians out of the Ohio altogether, Scull's map would have disappointed,