A map of West Florida, part of East Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, with the Chactaw, Chickasaw & Creek Nations (Romans, c. 1773)
Bernard Romans’s manuscript map of about 1773, compiled for John Stuart, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District, for General Gage: West Florida from the Mississippi to the Apalachicola, with Georgia, part of East Florida and the edge of South Carolina, and the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Muscogee (Creek) nations. The Choctaw towns are numbered by party — the Eastern Party, Oypatoocoola, the West Party (Oocolofalaya) and the Six Villages — and keyed in a list beside the Chickasaw villages; the Upper Creek towns are named along the Coosa and the Tallapoosa and the Lower Creek towns along the Chattahoochee. Dotted paths join the Choctaw towns to Fort Tombecbe on the Tombigbee, lead from the Koasati (Coosada) town there toward the Creek Nation, run from Natchez to the Choctaws and link the Upper Creek towns. The road from Pensacola to the Upper Creek Nation and on through the Lower Creek towns to Augusta — the traders’ path, laid down from David Taitt’s courses — is the map’s subject, and its table gives the computed miles along it: Tuckabatchee 243½ from Pensacola, Augusta 541½, Charlestown 715. The coast from the mouths of the Mississippi to Apalache is George Gauld’s. Red lines mark the boundaries laid out between the nations and the provinces. Built from the Hargrett Library’s linen photocopy, with faint lettering read on the Clements Library’s colour original; the table of distances, the remarks, the title cartouche and the lists of villages are not shown.
Source
| Map | A map of West Florida and part of Et: Florida, Georgia part of So: Carolina including Chactaw, Chickasaw & Creek nations with the road from Pensacola through ye Creek nation to Augusta & Charlestown |
|---|---|
| Author | Bernard Romans (Taitt, Gauld), 1773 |
| Archive | Hargrett Library, University of Georgia, via the Digital Library of Georgia |
| Rights | Public domain. A manuscript map of about 1773, over 200 years old; the Hargrett Library copy is a photocopy the Digital Library of Georgia marks No Copyright – United States (NoC-US). Public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 62 km (RMS 2.3 km at 43 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. |
| Method | Placed by hand: a thin-plate spline, held loosely (smoothing 0.1), through 43 places read from the scan — George Gauld’s Gulf coast from the passes of the Mississippi to the Aucilla, the Mississippi from the Wolf River to New Orleans, the Atlantic inlets from the Savannah to Cape Canaveral, Augusta and Savannah, Jones Bluff on the Tombigbee, the Alabama–Tombigbee, Coosa–Tallapoosa and Flint–Chattahoochee confluences, the falls of the Tallapoosa and the road’s crossings of the Chattahoochee and the Ocmulgee — and matched to their positions today. The coasts and the Mississippi are drawn closely (half their places within 5 km when each is left out of the fit); the Indian country between them is sketched, and its places fall a median 17 km from where the rest of the map would put them. The map draws the Chickasaw towns about a degree too far north and the Flint–Chattahoochee confluence some 60 km north-east of its place; both are pulled into place, which stretches the country above the Tombigbee and below the Lower Creek towns. The east sheet, laid down from Taitt’s courses and coast draughts that Romans notes run too far north, carries its own parallels and is placed by its own places. The empty country west of the Mississippi above the Arkansas is masked with the title, remarks, table of distances and lists of villages. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-10-16 |
| Covers | Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (4.3 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 5178; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (14.8 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (3.7 MB)
Project Homeland
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Changelog
- 1.0.0 (2026-10-16): First release: placed by hand at 43 places. From the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia (a linen photocopy), via the Digital Library of Georgia; added for Project Homeland.
Credits
- From the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia (a linen photocopy), via the Digital Library of Georgia; added for Project Homeland
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Digital Library of Georgia
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.
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