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This fold-out copper engraving—one of the four plates that illustrate Volney’s Tableau du Climat et du Sol des États-Unis d’Amérique (Paris, Courcier & Dentu, An XII = 1803)—combines two complementary views of the Niagara frontier on a single sheet.
Upper panel – “Coupe de la Chûte prise sur le milieu de la Rivière.”
Running the full width of the sheet, the upper vignette presents a transverse section of the gorge viewed square-on from mid-stream. To the left, densely wooded limestone bluffs step down toward the river; to the right, the water plunges over a crescent lip into the misty chasm below—an early European attempt to render both the Horseshoe and American Falls in a single scientific profile. A finely ruled sky and cross-hatching in the river foreground give tonal depth, while a graduated baseline, annotated in pieds (feet) at 100-foot intervals out to 300 ft, supplies a graphic scale for estimating the height and recession of the escarpment.
Lower panel – “Local de Niagara.”
Beneath the section lies a narrow, plan-view strip charting the strategic corridor between Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario (left margin) and the cascade (right margin). The course of the “Fleuve St Laurent” (a contemporary French mis-naming of the Niagara River) is flanked by stippled woodland and scattered clearings; tiny rectangles mark settlements such as Koumistou (Queenston) and Foungwement (Chippewa), while a dotted line traces the portage route skirting the impassable rapids. A second scale, this time in toises (approximately two metres), runs beneath the map, extending to 2 000 toises, about 3 miles, underscoring the military and commercial importance of the short, turbulent river link between the Great Lakes.
