Part of the Purcell Map, compiled not later than 1770 in the interest of British Indian trade by John Stuart (redrawn for Swanton, Early…
The trading paths linking the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw towns, from John Stuart’s Southern Indian District map (Joseph Purcell, c. 1770) as redrawn for John R. Swanton in 1922, with the numbered towns of each nation.
Source
| Map | Part of the Purcell map compiled not later than 1770 in the interest of British Indian Trade by John Stewart, H. M. Sup't of Indian Affairs. |
|---|---|
| Author | Joseph Purcell and J. R. Swanton, 1922 |
| Archive | a CONTENTdm library collection |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1922 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 63 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 smoothing thin-plate spline through 11 places read from the scan and matched to their positions today. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.1, updated 2026-10-06 |
| Covers | Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (1.6 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 5819; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (5.9 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.8 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
- 1.0.1 (2026-10-06): Fix: the sheet’s edges, cut off before, restored (bounds from the warp itself); place names re-placed where the map draws them (they had been set by an approximation of the warp: median 36.4 km, up to 51 km off).
- 1.0.0 (2026-09-30): First release: placed by hand at 11 places. From the Native Routes sources register; Swanton’s 1922 redrawing (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 73, plate 7), Tennessee Virtual Archive.
Credits
- From the Native Routes sources register; Swanton’s 1922 redrawing (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 73, plate 7), Tennessee Virtual Archive
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: a CONTENTdm library collection
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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