Tag: Contributor: John Wesley Powell

This is a map depicting the linguistic stocks of American Indians north of Mexico. It is based on the exploration and work of a famous explorer of the 19th Century, John Wesley Powell, who had many explorations, of course, particularly in the west, and this map is some record of where the several Indians were located in the North American continent before some, unfortunately, were probably already being pushed to one side by the arrival of the colonists and the expansion that was going on already in the early 19th Century. But you see the areas that were occupied by people speaking a language called Muskhogeon, then there is Iroquoian – the great Iroquois Nation, of course, both in the Mid-Atlantic area and also up in the Pennsylvania, New York, and Great Lakes vicinity. And off to the west are still more smaller areas reflecting what was spoken in those areas as well. This map, therefore, tells a story. It tells a story of who were the peoples, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the early-to-mid 1800s.