North American Buckskin Map

Neil MacGregor (0:03)

Thank you for downloading this episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects from BBC Radio 4 The First World War began in 1756

For the next seven years, Britain and France were to fight each other on land and sea, in Europe and Africa, India and America. It was the first truly global conflict, and it was particularly hard fought in America. A satirical account of the time explained why the two countries were fighting over the chill wilderness of North America.

SPEAKER_3 (0:43)

They are at present engaged in a very destructive war.

They have already spilled much blood, and all on account of each side desiring to want greater quantities of fur than the other.

The pretext of the war is about some land a thousand leagues off, a country cold, desolate, and hideous, a country of a people who were in possession from time immemorial.

Neil MacGregor (1:06)

The hideous land actually refers to Canada, and the author, the poet and novelist Oliver Goldsmith, goes on to argue that Britain and France are despoiling the legitimate inhabitants of the countries they explore and exploit. From Canada, the wall drifted south, and today's object is a map which shows part of the area that the British moved into, as they captured the long line of French forts that ran from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, as far south as St. Louis.

The map was made around 1774, probably by a Native American, one of the people who had, in Goldsmith's words, been in possession from time immemorial.

David Edmunds (1:52)

If you give up land and you move away from your homeland, you are moving away from God for practical purposes. So that's why the Indian removal or the removal of people off of land is very, very traumatic.

Martin Lewis (2:09)

It's a particularly rich map. With a lot of research, I could relate it with a high degree of certainty to when, exactly when, exactly why it was made.

SPEAKER_5 (2:21)

A history of the world in a hundred objects. North American Buckskin Map from Midwestern USA, made around 1775

Neil MacGregor (2:53)

This week, I'm looking at Europe's engagement with the rest of the world in the 18th century, the intellectual curiosity that led to the gathering of vital knowledge about oceans and continents. But dispassionate learning often came accompanied by commerce and conquest. The buckskin map and our story in this programme come from the years between the British defeat of the French in North America in 1763, and the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776

The war had left the British government in charge of a new stretch of territory to the west of the existing British colonies, from the Great Lakes down to the Mississippi. In charge, but not necessarily in control. If the French had gone, British colonial governors now had their own countrymen to contend with. British settlers were eager to move west, violating agreements already struck with Native American leaders, and they were negotiating illegal land deals with local tribes, a recipe for future conflict. This map was made for one of these problematic land deals. It shows us an encounter not just between two different worlds, but between two different ways of imagining the world, the frontiers between the lands represented, but also the frontiers between two cultures, cultures which had quite different conceptual, spiritual and social ways of being.

Mapping, for Europeans, was a central technique of control, partly intellectual control, the pursuit of accurate knowledge of the world, but also, of course, political and military control. For a Native American, mapping, as we shall find out, was about something quite else. The map is drawn on the height of a deer, and it's roughly three feet by four feet. Disturbingly, the deer itself still seems to be very present because you can see exactly how it died. In the hide, there are holes from a musket ball that passed through the animal's right shoulder through its heart and out through its rear left side. This deer was killed by a top-class shot, somebody who knew how to hunt. Looking at the buckskin map with a modern map in my hand, I can see exactly where we are. We're surveying the vast drainage basin formed by the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

We're just below Lake Michigan, and the area of the map is effectively four modern states, pretty well all of Illinois and Indiana, and large parts of Ohio and Missouri.

It's this area that, after 1763, British settler companies wanted to exploit. And the map is the record of one of many conversations between these intrusive settlers and Native Americans. Near the center of the map is the phrase, Pianquishua sold, indicating a land transaction that's already been agreed. The Pianquashaw, as they're usually known today, were a tribe of Native Americans living in an area that includes modern Indiana and Ohio. The map was probably made for the Wabash Land Company, which had been set up by British settlers to buy land along the river Wabash from the Pianquashaw Indians around 1775 Malcolm Lewis, expert on maps and North American Native cultures, explains.