Colorado: Native trails and villages

The Ute mountains and the Cheyenne and Arapaho plains, from Warren's 1857 War Department map of the West.

Historic maps for Colorado

Gallatin's tribes of North America, 1836

Hon. Albert Gallatin; published by the American Antiquarian Society, Pendleton's Lithography, 1836 · about 100 km accuracy

Albert Gallatin's founding map of American ethnology, published by the American Antiquarian Society with his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes: the homelands of the continent's nations tinted by language family — Algonkin-Lenape, Iroquois, Cherokee, Muskogee, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Sioux, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Athapasca, Eskimaux — as of about 1600 along the Atlantic and about 1800 westward. A continental baseline: every state shows its nations here.

Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division · Rights: public domain

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Warren's map of the West, 1857

Lieut. G. K. Warren, Topographical Engineers, U.S. War Department, 1857 · about 50 km accuracy

Lieutenant G. K. Warren's master map of the West, compiled in the Office of Pacific Railroad Surveys from every reliable exploration to date: the named country of each nation — Dacotas, Sheyennes, Comanches, Shoshonees, Utahs, Navajoes, Apaches, Blackfeet, Crows, Nez Perces, Pawnees and many more — with villages, forts, and the explorers' and emigrant routes that followed Native trails.

Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division · Rights: public domain

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What the 1857 map shows

Lieutenant G. K. Warren compiled the War Department’s master map of the West from every exploration to date. Each nation’s country is named and tinted, with villages, forts, and the exploration and emigrant routes — most of them following trails travelled for centuries. Use the scan layer: the color tints carry the meaning.

Reading the overlay

At 1:3,000,000 the territory boundaries are Warren’s synthesis, not surveyed lines — read them as whose country, accurate to a few tens of kilometres.