Old Territory and Military Department of New Mexico, compiled in the Bureau of Topographical Engineers of the War Department chiefly for…
The War Department’s map of the old Territory of New Mexico (today’s New Mexico and Arizona): the Indian trails, springs and water holes, the pueblos, the Navajo, Apache and Ute country, and the routes of the survey and military expeditions of the 1840s and 1850s.
Source
| Map | Old Territory and Military Department of New Mexico |
|---|---|
| Author | U.S. Topographical Engineers, 1867 |
| Archive | Library of Congress |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1867 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 23 km (RMS 5.7 km at 22 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 smoothing thin-plate spline through 22 places read from the scan and matched to their positions today. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.1, updated 2026-10-06 |
| Covers | New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (4.9 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 4878; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (18.7 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.9 MB)
Project Homeland
This map’s trails are traced into Project Homeland, one map of the trail network melded from every traced source, where they are compared with the other maps’ lines. Members can trace more of them: Trace a trail on the map.
Changelog
- 1.0.1 (2026-10-06): Fix: place names re-placed where the map draws them (they had been set by an approximation of the warp: median 5.7 km, up to 13 km off).
- 1.0.0 (2026-09-30): First release: placed by hand at 22 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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