About Native Routes

A free atlas that puts historic maps of Native trails, villages and place names on top of the roads and towns you know, one state at a time.

What it is

Most of the roads across the Northeast follow paths that were walked for centuries before them. The historic maps that record those paths sit in archives as scanned sheets you cannot line up with anything. Native Routes georeferences them, publishes the method and the error, and lets you fade between then and now.

What it is not

It is not a treasure map. Village symbols are shown at the historic map's own accuracy, typically several kilometres, and the site never publishes precise locations of burial grounds, archaeological sites or artifact finds. Requests to add them are declined.

Names and nations

The historic maps use the terms of their day, including "Indian trails"; those appear here as source titles. In the site's own words we use the nations' names: for New York, the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora and Mohawk Nations, whose homelands these maps depict. Members of these nations and their historic preservation offices are invited to review and correct anything here, and corrections are logged publicly. Write to [email protected].

Credits

Base map: © OpenStreetMap contributors, served as a self-hosted Protomaps extract. Historic maps: credited on each overlay. Site built with Astro, MapLibre GL JS and PMTiles.