Map of the Route Pursued from Fort Laramie to Fort Leavenworth by Captain L. C. Easton in 1849
Captain L. C. Easton’s manuscript map, made for the Army’s Quartermaster’s Department, of the route he took with wagons in August and September 1849 from Fort Laramie to Fort Leavenworth: south-east from the fort past Scott’s Bluff, Chimney Rock and Pole Creek to the South Fork of the Platte, across to the forks of the Republican, and down the Republican Fork to the Kansas, Union Town and Fort Leavenworth, drawn in red with the road to Fort Kearny, the road to Santa Fe by Westport and Council Grove, and the routes proposed to shorten them. Everything else, the map’s note says, is taken from Colonel Frémont’s maps — the Platte and its forks from the Missouri to Fort Laramie and St. Vrain’s Fort, the Laramie Plains and the Medicine Bow Mountains, and the Kansas, Republican, Solomon’s and Smoky Hill forks. “Pawnee Village” stands on the south bank of the Platte below Fort Kearny, and three dotted trails of the Pawnee (Chaticks si Chaticks) run south from the Platte toward their hunting grounds on the Republican: the two lettered “Pawnee Trails” from the village, which Frémont’s 1845 map does not have, and a “Pawnee Trail” from the Platte about 95 km below Fort Kearny across the Little Blue and the Republican Fork toward Solomon’s Fork — Frémont’s single 1845 trail, redrawn some 50 km east of his line.
Source
| Map | Map of the Route Pursued from Fort Laramie to Fort Leavenworth by Captain L.C. Easton |
|---|---|
| Author | L. C. Easton, 1849 |
| Archive | Wikimedia Commons |
| Rights | Public domain. An unpublished manuscript drawn for the Army’s Quartermaster’s Department (National Archives, Record Group 92) — a U.S. federal government work, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 34 km. 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 through 20 places read from the scan and matched to their positions today — Fort Laramie, Scott’s Bluff, Chimney Rock, Ash Hollow, the forks of the Platte, Fort Kearny and St. Vrain’s Fort; the mouths of the Sweetwater, the Cache a la Poudre, the Platte, the Big Nemaha, the Kansas, the Blue and the Little Blue; the junction of the Republican and Smoky Hill forks and the Republican’s bend to the south below the Kansas–Nebraska line; St. Joseph, Fort Leavenworth, Westport and Council Grove. The map’s 1° graticule (Greenwich, on a conic projection) is ruled with care, but the drawing departs from it: Fort Kearny and the mouth of the Little Blue lie within 6 km of their graticule positions, while the Missouri and the lower Kansas are drawn 17–43 km east of theirs and the country from Chimney Rock west 11–33 km west of it, so the graticule is not used. Leave-one-out error is 7.9 km median and 13.6 km RMS; the worst are Ash Hollow (36 km — the map draws the North Fork from the forks to Ash Hollow some 35 km short), the mouth of the Platte and the forks of the Platte (23–24 km). The drawn Platte from Fort Kearny to the Missouri lands within 6 km of the river except along the reach by the Pawnee Village, which lands 8–12 km south of it — and the Pawnee trails begin a little south of the drawn bank, so their northern ends land about 20 km from the river; the drawn Republican lands within 3 km of the river where the “Pawnee Trail” and the western of the “Pawnee Trails” cross or reach it, and about 11 km from it where the eastern one does. West of Fort Laramie — the Laramie Plains and the Medicine Bow Mountains along Frémont’s route of 1843 — the only control point is the mouth of the Sweetwater, so that sketch is placed only roughly (the map puts the mouths of the Sweetwater and the Medicine Bow 9 km apart; they are about 44 km apart). The title, the note, the legend, the scale and the margins are masked; the archive’s pale blue pencil marks across the Pawnee Trails between the Platte and the Little Blue are left on the scan. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-10-16 |
| Covers | Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado, Missouri |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (1.2 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 2699; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (4.2 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (1.8 MB)
Project Homeland
This map is open for tracing into Project Homeland, one map of the trail network melded from every traced source. Members trace a trail by clicking along it: Trace a trail on the map.
Changelog
- 1.0.0 (2026-10-16): First release: placed by hand at 20 places. From the National Archives (NAID 100307396; RG 92, Post and Reservation Map 41 NE) via Wikimedia Commons; added for Project Homeland.
Credits
- From the National Archives (NAID 100307396; RG 92, Post and Reservation Map 41 NE) via Wikimedia Commons; added for Project Homeland
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Wikimedia Commons
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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