Topographical Map of Central Nevada (“Map of country around Carson Co., Utah Ty.”), Office of the Chief of Engineers, about 1864

An undated manuscript map from the War Department’s Office of the Chief of Engineers, catalogued long ago as “Map of country around Carson Co., Utah Ty.” but drawn about 1864: it shows Ione and La Plata, county seats from 1864, and the trails of Breyfogle and Buel, who went out from Austin in 1864, but not Belmont, founded late in 1865; the sheet itself names no territory or state. On an unlabelled one-degree graticule it covers Nevada from Lake Tahoe (“Lake Bigler or Tahoe”) and the Sierra east to the 114th meridian and from the Oregon line south to the Amargosa: the Comstock and Carson Valley towns, Austin and the Reese River, Humboldt and Esmeralda mining camps, the Overland Mail stations, the emigrant and Hastings roads, and the prospectors’ trails of De Groot, Breyfogle and Buel. A fine dotted line marked “Old Indian Trail” runs north-east from a road at the edge of an alkali flat and drifting sand east of Walker Lake, past an “Indian Camp”, to the road into Ione — across the borderland between Northern Paiute (Numu) country around Walker Lake and Western Shoshone (Newe) country in Ione Valley; the map does not say whose trail it was. The sheet also names Shoshone Well, Shoshone Cañon, Indian Valley and Indian Spring, and keeps Western Shoshone and Goshute names that Simpson’s 1859 survey recorded in the east — the Un-go-we-ah Mountains, Ui-ya-bi Pass and Mo-ko-ga-ri Butte. One label in the south, marking graves, is masked and not shown.

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