French map doesn’t prove Lake Ontario was once called ‘Lac America.’ It’s altered

In August 2026, during a trade war with Canada, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for the federal government.

Among the social media responses were people who purported to justify the decision. For example, one X post (archived) posted an image of what appeared to be an old French map that labeled the body of water “Lac America.” Text on the image read, “Wont you take a look at that.. apparently Trump is just correcting what was once called lake America a very long time ago. from an OLD canadia map thats in french.”

The same image was shared on other social media sites such as Facebook (archived), LinkedIn (archived) and Threads (archived). Snopes readers sent us emails to ask if the image was of a real map.

However, the “Lac America” map was an AI-generated edit of a real vintage map that actually labeled the lake “Lac Ontario.” Therefore we’ve rated the edited image as a fake.

While some versions of the “Lac America” image crop out parts of the map, full versions of that map have a box in the top left that reads, “Le Lac America avec les lieux circonuoifins & particulierement les cinq nations Iroquoifes. Lannée 1688.”

The text within the box, plus the map itself, match a real map made by the French Jesuit cartographer Pierre Raffeix in 1688.

The difference between the AI-generated edit and the real map, however, is that the real map, as found in the University of Toronto’s scan, reads “Lac Ontario” wherever the AI-generated map has “Lac America.”

BnF, the national library in France, has in its collection what appears to be Raffeix’s handwritten version of the University of Toronto map, before he finalized it. Again, on this map the lake is labeled “Lac Ontario” and makes no mention of a “Lac America.”

Raffeix’s “Lac Ontario ou de Saint Lovis” (translated “Lake Ontario or Saint Louis”) matches the name given the lake by other French cartographers from the 1600s, as covered by Snopes previously. Even as early as 1641, French Jesuits referred to the lake as “the Ontario or lake of St. Louys.”

As for the “Lac America” map being AI-generated, there are several clues on that version of the map itself.

There is a seal of an anchor flanked by the letters “V” and “C” on the Lac America map that appears directly above the “E” in “America.” This appears to be based on a seal above the “T” in “Ontario” in the real map, although that seal appears to have fleurs-de-lis, a symbol associated with French royalty that some Americans might more easily recognize as the logo of the New Orleans Saints football team, on either side of the anchor instead.

Additionally, there are certain place names on the fake map that go beyond bad handwriting and into the sort of gibberish commonly associated with AI-generated images, particularly older ones. For example, the label on land immediately above the “Lac” label in “Lac America” does not appear to use real letters, except for an “l” and a “g.” While Raffeix’s handwriting certainly makes that label hard to read in the real map, zooming in on it reveals the first several letters are “theyag” before the rest becomes illegible.

For further reading, Snopes has previously covered claims referencing Trump’s federal renaming of Lake Ontario, including a satirical claim about Canadian officials refusing passage to ships bound for “Lake America.”