Map of the Indian Tribes of North America, about 1600 A.D. along the Atlantic, & about 1800 A.D. westwardly (Albert Gallatin, 1836)
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
| Map | Map of the Indian Tribes of North America |
|---|---|
| Author | Hon. Albert Gallatin; published by the American Antiquarian Society, Pendleton's Lithography, 1836 |
| Archive | Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division · 1:18,000,000 |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1836 — public domain by age. The Library of Congress scan is free to use and reuse. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 100 km (RMS 45 km at 21 control points). At 1:18,000,000 the fit is better than the map: Gallatin's geography west of the Mississippi predates the surveys and is schematic. Read the tints as which language family's country, at the scale of whole regions. The Atlantic states are shown as of about 1600, the west as of about 1800 — the map mixes two centuries by design. |
| Method | Single third-order polynomial fit to 21 coastal and lake features across the continent; the sheet is a small conic projection. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-09-17 |
| Covers | Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming |
Changelog
- 1.0.0 (2026-09-17): First release: 21 control points, tinted and scan layers, z3–z7.
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.