Maps

The Adai Caddo appear on some of the earliest maps of colonial Louisiana and Texas. Throughout the French and Spanish colonial periods, Adai villages and territory were repeatedly depicted on official and published maps of the New World.

From the earliest Spanish and French cartography of colonial Louisiana through eighteenth-century British, Portuguese, German, and Russian maps, the Adai Caddo appear with remarkable consistency. Across the maps presented here, the Adai Caddo are the only Indigenous people consistently identified in this region—a cartographic record of their enduring presence on their ancestral homeland.

The Seven Years’ War—known in North America as the French and Indian War—was the first truly global conflict, drawing the great European powers into warfare across much of the world. The treaties ending the war dramatically redrew the imperial boundaries in North America. A 1777 map documenting these territorial changes again identifies the Adai Caddo. Like many other eighteenth-century maps of the region, it depicts the Adai as the only Indigenous nation named in this portion of Louisiana. These maps depict the Adai at Los Adaes and two additional Adai villages along the river bearing their name, the Rio de los Adais [River of the Adai], today known as the Sabine River.

The tribe’s presence on maps continued as empires gave way to nations. Following the American Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Adai Caddo continued to appear on maps of the recently acquired Louisiana Territory, some of the earliest maps of the new state of Louisiana, and later military maps produced during the Civil War.

As Louisiana passed through Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, the cartographic record evolved with it. The older designation of an Adai “Indian village” gradually gave way to the community names of Adaias, Adaies, Adair, Adayes, and Adois, while a U.S. Post Office also bearing the tribe’s name further marked the Adai community on the American landscape. 

Across this remarkable succession of maps of west-central Louisiana—from present-day Beauregard Parish northward through De Soto Parish—the Adai repeatedly stand as the only identified Indigenous people. Rather than disappearing from the cartographic record after the colonial era, the tribe persisted across French, Spanish, and American maps, surviving changes in empires, national boundaries, governments, and cartographic conventions.

The Adai Caddo are an Indigenous tribe of Louisiana who have never sold, been forcibly removed from, or abandoned their ancestral homeland. Taken together, these maps form a cartographic record spanning nearly four centuries, documenting the Adai Caddo on the same ancestral lands from the seventeenth century to the present day. 

Yet the evidence of this continuity extends far beyond the maps themselves. From the banks of the Sabine River, which once bore the Adai name, to the bayous, creeks, springs, islands, roads, Catholic missions, historical markers, presidio, state historic sites, ceremonial grounds, cemeteries, mounds, and headstones that continue to bear the names of the tribe and its people, the landscape itself preserves story of the Adai Caddo. Together, the cartographic and physical record bear witness to the tribe’s unbroken presence on its ancestral homeland since time immemorial.

The maps below were selected from the tribe’s archives and are organized into three categories:

Primary Cartographic Works — Maps produced as independent cartographic works by cartographers, explorers, surveyors, military engineers, government agencies, mapmakers, and publishers including official maps prepared to document treaties, boundaries, and territorial claims.

Illustrative Cartography — Maps created to accompany books and other historical works, including maps prepared by authors, editors, historians, ethnologists, professors, and illustrators to depict historical events, migrations, boundaries, settlements, expeditions, and routes.

Periodical and Ephemeral Cartography — Maps published in newspapers, magazines, journals, pamphlets, brochures, and other periodical or ephemeral publications.