Rhode Island: Native trails and villages

The Narragansett homeland on Gallatin's 1836 map of the tribes.

Historic maps for Rhode Island

Gallatin's tribes of North America, 1836

Hon. Albert Gallatin; published by the American Antiquarian Society, Pendleton's Lithography, 1836 · about 100 km accuracy

Albert Gallatin's founding map of American ethnology, published by the American Antiquarian Society with his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes: the homelands of the continent's nations tinted by language family — Algonkin-Lenape, Iroquois, Cherokee, Muskogee, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Sioux, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Athapasca, Eskimaux — as of about 1600 along the Atlantic and about 1800 westward. A continental baseline: every state shows its nations here.

Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division · Rights: public domain

Open in the map

What the 1836 map shows

Albert Gallatin’s map — the founding map of American ethnology — tints each language family’s homelands: the Atlantic states as of about 1600, the west as of about 1800. It is the continental baseline; a dedicated state map replaces it as each state’s overlay is built.

Reading the overlay

At 1:18,000,000 read the tints as regions, not lines. The scan layer carries the color key.