Two plates, as printed
1877 beside 1857
Nothing is redrawn. Each column is what that sheet actually shows. Read both records before deciding they rhyme.
1877
Distribution of Indian tribes in California
John Wesley Powell (U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region)
Period original
What this plate depicts
Powell’s colored patches of tribal names across California, with a language-family key (Yuman, Shoshonean, Mariposan, Moquelumnan, Kulanapan, and others as he grouped them). Coast, valley, mountain, and desert are all assigned. This is a U.S. ethnologist’s 1877 compilation — a period document of how a federal survey mapped nations after conquest. It is not a Native-authored map, not a map of 1600, and not a map of reservation law. Record Powell’s lines; do not promote them into the nations’ own cartography.
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons scan of Powell’s 1877 distribution map of California tribes.
- License
- Public domain (U.S. government work, 1877).
1857
U.S. Coast Survey — San Francisco Bay and the California coast
U.S. Coast Survey, under A. D. Bache
Period original
What this plate depicts
A surveyed California coast: triangulation, shoreline, San Francisco Bay, depth of survey notes. The peninsula is attached to the mainland. The bay is a measured harbor, not a gulf that makes California an island. Issued about eight years after the gold-rush population jump; related city sheets of this survey generation show San Francisco still hugging the waterfront, with Yerba Buena Cove already in the process of being filled. The name on the American survey is San Francisco, not Yerba Buena (the pueblo was renamed in 1847).
- Source
- Geographicus / Wikimedia; Coast Survey sketch of Section X, Point Sal to Tomales Bay, 1857.
- License
- Public domain (U.S. government work).