Research branch · dated evidence

Maps

A chronological stream of original historical maps. Dates are primary here. Do not redraw an old map to make it fit The Living Realm. Show the original, record what it depicts, then set it beside the next one.

Seven period originals. Two later schematics, labeled as such. Nothing is corrected silently — Disturnell’s El Paso error stays on Disturnell; island California stays an island until a later plate draws a peninsula. Photographs of later cities are a different shelf. Photographic Breadcrumbs.

Sequence

04 / 10

Indigenous nations

A period compilation of California nations — recorded as Powell’s 1877 survey, not as Native-authored cartography.

Distribution of Indian tribes in California, 1877. John Wesley Powell (U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region). — 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).

Open plate

All plates

Year order. Open a plate, read what it depicts, then compare it with the next original.