The Earliest American Map of the Northwest Coast: John Hoskins's A Chart of the Northwest Coast of America Sketched on Board the Ship Columbia Rediviva … 1791 & 1792

Between 1790 and 1793, John Hoskins created a map of the Northwest Coast of North America that included ninety-one place names documenting Native communities. The map is the earliest example of such detailed documentation by an American and was rediscovered in 1852 at the Cartographic Archives Division of the National Archives and Records Administration. In this research article, James Walker and William Lang provide a historical context for the map, including comparative charts that break down the Native names that Hoskins documented into seven cultural groups. According to Walker and Lang, the map “opens a window to what American traders knew, what they perceived about the region, and what they may have understood about the Native landscape.”