Map showing the lands assigned to emigrant Indians west of Arkansas and Missouri
The Topographical Bureau’s 1836 map of the lands assigned to the nations removed west of Arkansas and Missouri — Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Delaware, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Peoria and Kaskaskia, Piankeshaw and Wea, Seneca and Quapaw — beside the country of the Osage, Kansa, Pawnee, Otoe, Omaha, Ioway and Sac and Fox, with tables of each nation’s numbers east and west of the Mississippi. It shows the Santa Fe Road and the Osage Road across the plains, and Forts Leavenworth, Gibson and Smith.
Source
| Map | Map showing the lands assigned to emigrant Indians west of Arkansas and Missouri |
|---|---|
| Author | United States Topographical Bureau, 1836 |
| Archive | Library of Congress |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1836 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 20 km (RMS 2.8 km at 53 control points). Placed by hand in a map-queue session and approved by a person. If something sits in the wrong place, members can fix it with Fix placement on the map. The graticule fits closely, but the map draws Forts Leavenworth, Gibson and Smith 14–18 km from where its own graticule puts them, and the plains west of the frontier rest on the graticule alone: read boundaries to within about 20 km. |
| Method | Placed by hand: a smoothing thin-plate spline through the sheet’s own one-degree graticule (crossings read off its lines; longitudes counted west of Washington, taken as 77.03° W) and four places on it — Fort Leavenworth, Fort Gibson, Fort Smith and the mouth of the Kansas River; 53 points in all. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-10-06 |
| Covers | Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (2.5 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (7862 × 8000; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (9.4 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.3 MB)
Changelog
- 1.0.0 (2026-10-06): First release: placed by hand at 53 places. From a Library of Congress search; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (99446197).
Credits
- From a Library of Congress search; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (99446197)
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Library of Congress
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.
Something on this map sits in the wrong place? Members can show where with Fix placement on the map — confirmed fixes are tested against the map’s other control points each night and credited here. For anything else, report a problem.
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