Map of Military Road from Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia to Fort Benton on the Missouri, made under the direction of Capt. John Mullan…
Captain John Mullan’s map of the military road across the northern Rockies and the country around it: the trails of the Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Pend d’Oreille, Blackfeet and other nations, the Hudson’s Bay and mission posts, and the 1858 battlefields.
Source
| Map | Map of military road from Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia to Fort Benton on the Missouri |
|---|---|
| Author | John Mullan, U.S. Army, 1863 |
| Archive | Leventhal Map & Education Center |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1863 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 9 km (RMS 1.5 km at 11 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 border ticks were fitted with a polyconic projection together with Fort Dalles and Fort Colville, the other coordinate of each tick taken from that fit, and the 11 points warped with a second-order polynomial. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-09-30 |
| Covers | Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (1.4 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 3070; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (5.7 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.1 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 11 places. From the Native Routes sources register; Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library.
Credits
- From the Native Routes sources register; Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Leventhal Map & Education Center
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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