Military Map of Nebraska and Dakota, by Lieut. G. K. Warren, Top’l Eng’rs, from explorations made by him in 1855, 1856 and 1857 (1857)
Gouverneur K. Warren’s military map of the northern plains: the lands of each Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Pawnee and other nation as he understood them, the Indian trails and war roads, and the routes of the 1855–57 expeditions.
Source
| Map | Military map of Nebraska and Dakota |
|---|---|
| Author | G. K. Warren, Topographical Engineers, 1857 |
| Archive | Library of Congress |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1857 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 6 km (RMS 1.3 km at 29 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 on the sheet’s own graticule: its degree and half-degree ticks on the border (and the 40th parallel, the Kansas–Nebraska line) were fitted with a polyconic projection, the other coordinate of each tick taken from that fit, and the 29 ticks warped with a third-order polynomial. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-09-30 |
| Covers | Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (8.1 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (6000 × 5295; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (18.9 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.7 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 (2026-09-30): First release: placed by hand at 29 places. From the Native Routes sources register; Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
Credits
- From the Native Routes sources register; Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
- 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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