Wovoka

The government's own record

Whose land was this?

Between 1784 and 1893 the United States recorded, piece by piece, how it came to hold the land of the lower 48 states: by treaty, by executive order, by act of Congress, and in places by no document at all. In 1899 Charles C. Royce mapped every piece for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Tap the map, or use your location, to read what the record says about the ground under you.

How to read it

Start with:
Map of the lower 48 states divided into the 718 areas Royce recorded as ceded or taken, 1784 to 1893, shaded by year
Royce areas as digitised by the US Forest Service (2018), simplified for the screen. State lines: US Census Bureau. Shaded by the year of Royce's first entry for each area; where areas overlap, the later one is drawn on top. Royce's schedule begins in 1784; ground left blank, mostly in the East, is not in it.

What this map is, and what it is not

  1. These are the United States' lines, not the tribes'. Royce drew them from the treaties, orders and acts, and from the government's own surveys. Peoples' homelands overlapped and moved, and no nation drew these boundaries for itself. The US Forest Service, which digitised them in 2018, says they are not legal documents and cannot be used to settle title or boundaries.
  2. The names are the names in the documents. They are often not what a people called themselves. Which nations today descend from the peoples named is for those nations to say, so this page does not say it.
  3. Not every entry is a cession. Royce's schedule also records reservations set apart, which were often cut down later, and land the United States simply took. For most of Paiute country in Nevada there was no treaty: his schedule says the land was “taken possession of by U. S. without formal relinquishment by the Indians.” Read his entry, linked under each result, before saying what happened to a place.
  4. The edges are simplified to about a kilometre so the map loads quickly. Royce's own plates, linked under each result, are the record.
  5. Royce's lines have critics. Of his map of the California cessions, the anthropologist Robert Heizer wrote that it had “no basis for their delineation other than the vague impression of the Senate,” and that “Royce's map is, therefore, his own artifact.”

There are at least three records of whose land this was: where the peoples lived and held it, which they can tell for themselves; what the United States recorded taking, which is this map; and what the Indian Claims Commission later found each people had held, which is on the vanishing map. None of them is the whole answer.

Sources: Charles C. Royce, Indian Land Cessions in the United States, Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2 (Washington, 1899) · US Forest Service, Indian Land Cessions in the United States (Royce areas digitised, 2018) · Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2 (1904), as transcribed by the Oklahoma State University Tribal Treaties Database · signed originals: National Archives, Ratified Indian Treaties · Indian Land Areas Judicially Established, Indian Claims Commission and US Geological Survey, 1978 · Robert F. Heizer, “Treaties,” Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California (1978), p. 703