The second supporting question, “who were the first western explorers and traders to visit the Northern Great Plains?” helps students use sources to unwrap the context of the time and topic being examined. By the early 1700s, land on the northern Great Plains was being claimed by European countries even though they did not really know much about the territory and several Native American tribes already lived there. Some explorers came overland, but many used waterways and following trade routes already established by Native American tribes.
If you look at a current highway map of North Dakota, you will see roads of different qualities, towns, county lines, reservations, rivers, hills, lakes, and parks. The scale of inches to miles gives reliable, visual information on distance between points of interest. The modern map is very scientific, and except for the distortion created by applying the curve of the earth to a flat piece of paper, very accurate. Maps have not always been so reliable. The maps in this document collection, dated from 1752 to the 1830s, begin with a great blank space where we live today, which was gradually filled in and corrected over time as mapmakers learned more verifiable information. The earliest European mapmakers, using the best information available at the time, could not accurately place the two most important rivers in this region, the Missouri and the Red, nor identify major lakes, hills, or the continental divide. Even after European mapmakers did begin to fill in this information, it was still not complete. There were people living on the northern Great Plains in 1772 who knew how to find rivers, hills, neighboring towns and villages, and traveled along well-known trails to get from here to there. They had met Europeans and Native Americans of other cultures and exchanged much information with them about the lay of the land. This demonstrates that mapmaking is not only a scientific endeavor, but a cultural one as well.
Native Americans did not rely on maps drawn on paper or hide the same way Europeans and Americans did. They often only kept their knowledge of landforms, river courses, and villages in their minds and transmitted the information orally from one generation to the next. At the prodding of Europeans and European Americans they sketched the landscape features in dirt or snow or on paper or hide. Most of their knowledge was personal acquired from their own travels, although some was acquired from conversations with visitors from distant villages and cities. Europeans and Americans created maps with specific features such as political (nation or state) boundaries, mountain ranges, rivers, valleys. Maps were drawn to scale as accurately as possible with the knowledge available at the time. They used latitude and longitude to measure distance. They also developed common standards and practices for depicting cardinal directions. North is generally “up,” giving a common reference point in viewing maps, while also suggesting the way Western Europeans viewed themselves in relation to the rest of the world.
Interest in the Northwest, as the northern plains were known throughout the 19th century, grew and more details filled in the map. Details included villages such as those of the Mandan, or Mantannes as the French spelled it, where men engaged in the fur trade business sought profits in furs and other trade items. The maps not only indicated the conquest of the northern plains and the people who lived there, but also indicated which Western nations assumed control through exploration and claim. The conquest was not only of the land and the people, but of competing nations in the process of “discovery.” The series of maps presented here have been selected to provide insight into the process of changes wrought by human interaction with the land as well as changes in human occupation of the region over a period of several hundred years. They represent only a small portion of the map collection of the SHSND. Complete the following task using the sources provided to build a context of the time period and topic being examined.
Formative Performance Task 2
Either working individually or in groups, have students study the featured sources A-G and discuss the following questions. If working in groups, have students designate someone to take notes of the discussion and have each group report back to the class about what they found.
Featured Sources 2
The sources featured below are examples of primary sources. Primary sources are the raw materials of history—original documents, personal records, photographs, maps, and other materials. Primary sources the first evidence of what happened, what was thought, and what was said by people living through a moment in time. These sources are the evidence by which historians and other researchers build and defend their historical arguments, or thesis statements. When using primary sources in your lessons, invite students to use all their senses to observe, describe, and analyze the materials. What can they see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste? Draw on students’ knowledge to classify the sources into groups, to make connections between what they observe and what they already know, and to help them make logical claims about the materials that can be supported by evidence. Further research of materials and sources can either prove or disprove the students’ argument.
Who created each of these maps? What do these sources tell us about early exploration of the northern Great Plains? What can you learn from these maps about the people who lived west of the Mississippi River? What features suggest commerce or trade between the people of the west and the people of the United States? Do any of the maps indicate the territories of the British and Spanish in North America? What kind of inaccuracies can you identify on these maps? Bowen claimed in the label on his map that he had referred to “several Accurate particular Maps and Charts.” Do you think his research was thorough? Where would he have found map data on North America? What sources do you think he might have used? Compare these historic maps to modern maps available to you (either physically or online). Can you find where modern features, such as cities and roads, would be located on the historic maps? How has the naming of different locations changed over time? Imagine that you are a fur trader in St. Louis in 1814 and you purchase a copy of one of these maps. Which map would be most helpful? What would you consider to be the most important information that you can retrieve from these maps? Who were Maximilian zu Wied and Karl Bodmer? Why did they travel to the northern plains? What did they contribute to our knowledge of the early history of North Dakota? What else can you find? What did Europeans and Americans know about the northern Great Plains when they first began exploring the region? How accurate were the maps they were using? Who were the first western explorers and traders to come to the area and what countries did they represent? Who were the Native American tribes living in the area? How did the explorers and traders travel? How do map makers decide how and what to communicate through maps? How do they decide what is the important data and how to represent it in symbols and text on a map?
| Source A |
Source: SHSND 970.03 B786n 1752. Emanuel Bowen, an 18th century English mapmaker and printer, made this map in London in 1752. It measures 20 ¾ inches by 17 inches.. Bowen’s map of North and South America is the earliest in this document set. The British North American colonies had not yet rebelled against King George III to form the United States, and the French and Indian War (1754–1763) had not yet determined the western boundary of the English colonies along the Appalachian divide. Though Bowen’s details of the east coast are pretty accurate, the northern Great Plains is blank from Lake Superior to the western coast. French trader and explorer La Verendrye had visited the Mandan Villages on the Missouri River nearly fifteen years earlier, but his maps were apparently not known to Emanuel Bowen. Bowen placed Native American tribes in the central and southern plains (Osages, Panis, Apaches, Paducahs), but appeared to have no information concerning the peoples of the northern plains. |
| Source B |
Sayer's Map of North & South America (1772)
Source: SHSND 970.03 G3263 1772. This map was printed for Robert Sayer of London in 1772. It measures 20 1/2 inches by 24 inches. The 1772 map offers more detail for the northern plains than Bowen’s map. The Red River of the North is identified, but it appears to flow from the east and the mapmaker notes “its course is little known.” The Red River appears to be among the “sources of the Mississippi” which today we know to be incorrect. The “Nation of the Snake” is the name given to the “Sioux” or Oceti Sakowin (Lakota and Dakota peoples). The Mandan are mentioned in relation to a river, “which is supposed to be the same as the Missouri.” Lake Ouinnipique offers us one of many different spellings of Winnipeg. The mapmaker did not refrain from drawing the River of the West, which was supposed to carry travelers from the plains to the Pacific Ocean, but it was only the dream of explorers. Though this map indicates international interest in North and South America and suggests the potential for commercial exploitation, it is inaccurate by hundreds of miles. Mapmakers of this time were still struggling to find the tools for locating longitude and latitude properly on a flat map. |
| Source C |
Reid's Map of North America (1795)
Source: SHSND 970.03R353g 1795. John Reid was a New York mapmaker active in the late 18th century. This map measures 16 ½ inches by 20 ¾ inches. Reid’s map begins to fill in some detail for the northern plains, though the proportions are still distorted, and many features are misplaced. In this map the Red River runs from west to east to Lake Winnipeg. The headwaters of the Missouri are properly located near the Rocky (Stony) Mountains, but the major tributaries are missing. The Louisiana Purchase is still eight years in the future, so the map lacks definition of the territories claimed by the British, French, Spanish, or the United States. The Rocky Mountains are labeled the Stony Mountains on this map. Some geographers and mountain men also called the Rockies the Shining Mountains well into the 19th century. Reid made no attempt to identify any western peoples or villages, but he did note the fledgling United States and its capital, Washington. |
| Source D |
Lewis and Clark Map (1804–1806), by Samuel Lewis
Source: SHSND 917.8 L585 v4 map 1. Samuel Lewis drew this map of the trail followed by the Corps of Discovery in 1804, 1805, and 1806. Lewis (no relation to Meriweather Lewis) was a cartographer active in the late 18th and early 19th century. This map, published in 1814, made the Lewis and Clark trail available to a wide audience for the first time. It was one of his most significant endeavors. Clark’s measurements on the course of the expedition were somewhat inaccurate, but he brought back a great deal more knowledge about the geography of the northern plains than had been previously available in the United States. Note the multiple chains of mountains that form the Rocky Mountains, the longer and more complex course of the Missouri River and the location of the Red River. |
| Source E |
Source: SHSND 978.41 M297 1814. This map was drawn around 1814 by an unknown cartographer or mapmaker. It measures 19 7/8 inches by 14 ½ inches. The Map of the Territory of Ossiniboia shows the Canadian perspective on the northern Great Plains. While its central focus is the area which is today known as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, geographic features of modern-day North Dakota are clearly visible including the Red River, the Pembina River, and Devils Lake (Gods Lake). The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was defined by the Missouri River drainage, or watershed, which did not include the north flowing Red River and its tributaries. Canada claimed the Red River watershed and all territory not drained by the Missouri River. The two nations agreed on a boundary line at the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains in 1818. The remaining distance was completed by treaty in 1846. The future state of North Dakota is entirely present in this map, though the course of the Red River is mistakenly drawn as flowing from Ottertail Lake and some other important features are not accurate. Some features, such as Warreconne River (Beaver Creek) indicate that the mapmaker was familiar with the maps of Lewis and Clark. Of great importance are the faint lines that indicate commonly used trails for commerce between the Mandan Villages and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at Brandon House. |
| Source F |
Melish's Map of the U.S. (1820)
Source: SHSND 973.5 M523u 1821. John Melish hired Benjamin Tanner to engrave this map which he then published in 1820. The map measures 17 1/2 by 21 ¼ inches. Melish immigrated to the US in 1811 from Scotland. Although he had been in the textile business in Scotland, in the US he became a publisher of maps and was very influential in that field. His maps were hand colored which allowed the reader to immediately see the shapes of states and territories. The nomenclature (naming of locations) is not modern. What we usually identify as the Louisiana Purchase is called Missouri Territory on this map. The state of Missouri had been removed from the Louisiana Purchase by the Missouri Compromise (1820). The map reverts to the earlier, inaccurate, representation of the Red River of the North, showing it flowing from the east with the Swan River as a major tributary. The Moose River is today called the Mouse, or Souris, River. Note the road from Mandan villages to the Hudson Bay factories (or trading posts) near Brandon, Manitoba. |
| Source G |
Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-America (1831)
Source: SHSND 973.5 W4224 1831. This map printed in Weimar Germany in 1831 was drawn by C. F. Weiland. It measures 21 1/8 by 27 inches. Weiland’s map was published in both German and English. It depends heavily on data gathered from the Corps of Discovery led by Lewis and Clark. This map was used by Prince Maximilian zu Wied and his artist Karl Bodmer on their journey to Fort Clark and Fort Union in 1833. This map appears to present more accurately the locations of rivers, lakes, and other features of the region that is today North Dakota which was Maximilian’s destination. The Red, the Missouri, and the James (Jacques) rivers appear in the proper locations. The Sheyenne (Shienne) and several other tributaries of the Red River appear for the first time among the maps in this collection. Teufels See, or Devils See, is modern Devils Lake. See is the German word for lake. |
