Historical maps of North America all suck. This might sound like a harsh statement, but it is my opinion and I believe I can back it up. Consider, for example, this popular Youtube video which purports to depict all of human history of the entire world from the 4th millennium B.C. to the present:
It’s a very entertaining and informative video. I’m sure there are many inaccuracies in it, but I wouldn’t hold that against the author, since any project with that much information is going to include some inaccuracies—especially considering how difficult it can be to research this sort of thing. But in its coverage of North America it, well, it sucks. Why? Well, most historical maps of North America look like this:
This map shows the states, colonies, and territories of America and other powers in the territory now encompassing the continguous United States. Maps like this are very common, and seem innocuous enough. But they are all (almost without exception) strangely deficient for those of us who have read Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, in which we’re shown the following map of the sovereign territory of the Comanche Indians in the early 1800s:
Or perhaps the more recent The Heart of Everything That Is, in which we see the following map of the territory controlled by the various divisions of the Sioux in the 1860s:
As you can see, both of these powerful nomadic empires controlled significant swathes of territory in what is now the United States. But they never show up in conventional maps—historical or otherwise—of North America or of the United States. The above Youtube video falls prey to the same problem. De jure (someone’s “jure”, anyway) these areas were claimed by mapmakers for the various imperial powers of the Atlantic seaboard (plus Russia), but de facto much of the continent remained the demesne of this or that Native American tribe up until the late 19th century.
Of course I’m hardly the first person to raise the “But what about the Indians?” objection to these kinds of maps. But, see, the problem is that many maps which seem to make an effort of mapping the territory of Indian tribes over time... are also terrible. Some of them are like this travesty, a.k.a. “The Most Inaccurate Map Ever Made”:
In due fairness, the caption on the right suggests that this map was originally made as part of an alternate-history scenario, and was not intended as a historical map of pre-Columbian North America. Unfortunately, however, it seems that at least 124,047 people on Facebook interpreted it otherwise. If this were an attempt at a pre-1492 map of North America, then almost every single aspect of it would be completely wrong. Just a few examples:
- The “Olmec Kingdom” did not coexist with the Aztec Empire—the Olmecs were gone as a civilization nearly two thousand years before the emergence of the Aztecs.
- The “Creek” are shown in Florida. The Creeks were a confederacy or “symmachy” of disparate tribes, and probably didn’t even exist as such in 1492—some scholars place their origin as late as the 18th century (Forgotten Centuries, p. 374).
- California was a dense babel of a hundred-odd tribes and languages up until the 20th century. It was not simply controlled by the “Pomo” and the “Chumash”.
- And so on.
So whatever... it’s not surprising that a speculative alt-history map of an alternate 2015 A.D. which was interpreted by idiots on the Internet as a map of “America before colonization” would be unreliable as a historical depiction of indigenous North America. You would think, though, that the professional cartographers responsible for The Routledge Atlas of American History would do better, yes? Well, you’d be wrong. Here is their map of “The Indian Tribes of North America Before 1492”:
And it's hardly any better:
- The Comanche are shown as occupying Texas, when they would still have been part of the Shoshone nation and living in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains (Comanche Empire, p. 22-3).
- The “Teton Dakota” are shown in the South Dakota-Wyoming area, when in reality they didn’t occupy lands west of the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers until the decades around 1700 (Siouan Languages, p. 11).
- The Cheyenne are shown in separate northern and southern bands when they didn’t split thusly until the early 1800s or so—and are placed in the Wyoming-Colorado area when as late as the 1700s they were still living in North Dakota (Archaeology, p. 459-60).
Florida isn’t simply given to the Creek this time, but instead is shown to be inhabited primarily by the Seminole, which is just as inaccurate. In reality, the Florida of 1492 was dominated by four groups: the Calusa in the south, the Timucua and Aïs in the north, and the Apalachee in the panhandle… the Seminole probably didn’t even exist at that time, and at any rate their ancestors would have lived farther north. And neither this map nor the previous one seems to show the Cofitachequi or the Coosa, the two most powerful paramount chiefdoms of the Southeast in the early 1500s (Forgotten Centuries, p. 197-256). Of lesser import, but still wrong, is the population estimate given of "approximately one million"—more likely it was around four times that number (Native Population, p. xxviii).
Oftentimes (on Wikipedia, for instance) you see maps based on the one created by Ives Goddard for the Handbook of North American Indians:
Ives Goddard knows his shit, but this map also has problems. For one, it’s an attempt to compress several centuries of history into one map, and wasn't intended to be a snapshot of any one moment in history. Therefore it by necessity has anachronisms: groups such as the Assiniboine and the Comanche, for instance, are shown along with the Calusa and the Timucua… even though the former did not occupy the areas shown (and were not even entities distinct from the Nakota and Shoshone respectively) until the latter were already practically destroyed. Also, since it is a map not of peoples but of languages, there are omissions, such as the aforementioned Coosa and Cofitachequi whose languages we know nothing of, and which may in any rate have been confederacies comprising tribes speaking several distinct languages—I would guess they spoke something Muskogean, but that’s just a guess.
Therefore, since there do not seem to be (to my knowledge) any decent historical maps which show the locations and movements of the indigenous tribes of North America, I have decided to try to create one of my own. I’ve already begun research on this, but it will likely end up being a rather large project which I don’t expect to be done for at least a couple years. Already, however, I’ve identified a few methodological difficulties that necessarily come with such a project:
Firstly, how far back do I begin? Do I start before the historical era and include peoples known only via archaeology, such as Cahokia, the Oneota, and the Olmecs? Archaeology bores me to tears, so I don’t relish the thought of doing research in this area, but it would be remiss of me not to.
Secondly, how do I handle political bodies which comprise numerous ethno-linguistic entities? The “Creek Confederacy” included people from Shawnee and Yuchi stock. The Siouan-speaking Michigamea were a member of the Illinois Confederacy. The Arapahoan-speaking Gros Ventres were politically part of the Blackfoot Confederacy in the early 1800s. Similarly, how fine-grained do I define divisions? The Assiniboine are not usually included as part of the “Očhéthi Šakówiŋ”—the "Seven Council Fires" of the Sioux Nation, but were they distinct enough to be considered separate (i.e. did they make war on each other?), and if so how early did this relationship exist?
Thirdly, how to define a tribe’s “boundaries”. Conside the map of “Red Cloud’s Territory” above, for instance. The territory shown is not only that of the Sioux, but also smaller tribes like the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Mandan, and the Crow. These tribes were subjugated and dominated by the Sioux as the map would imply (I believe the book calls them “client states”?), but they still existed. Raiding areas sometimes extended beyond a tribe's core territory and leap-frogged over a neighboring tribe. Multiple allied tribes might share a single hunting area (e.g. the Cree and Assiniboine). How best to show this on a map?
I may post more on this at a later date.
Works referenced:
Advances in the Study of Siouan Languages and Linguistics. Catherine Rudin, Bryan J. Gordon eds. 2016.
Archaeology of the Great Plains. W. Raymond Wood, ed. 1998.
Handbook of North American Indians. William C. Sturtevant, series ed. 1978-2008.
The Comanche Empire. Pekka Hämäläinen. 2008.
The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South 1521-1704. Charles Hudson, Carmen Chaves Tesser eds. 1994.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend. Bob Drury, Tom Clavin. 2013.
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. William M. Denevan ed. 1992.
The Routledge Atlas of American History. Martin Gilbert. 2006.
