Errata & Editorial Policy

Policy

Every plotted claim traces to a source. Nothing is stated as fact on inference alone: where a location is approximate the marker shows it, where a date comes from a library label the caption says so, and where two copies of the same manuscript report disagree, both figures are shown rather than harmonized. Corrections are logged here permanently rather than silently fixed. To report an error, use the repository's issue tracker or the contact in the footer.

Corrections log

• 2026-07-14 — Military map #31, Armed Encounter on Sacramento (1817). The previous version characterized the result as an "indigenous strategic victory." The register and the source (Bancroft II) record a standoff from which the Spanish retreated. Corrected to "Standoff — Spanish retreated."
• 2026-07-14 — Gallery quality exclusions. Two image files acquired in July 2026 proved defective on review: the Duflot Quadra/Nutka plate was truncated and the 1799 atlas sheet 25 was a saved error page, not an image. Both were excluded, then re-acquired complete on 2026-07-15.
• 2026-07-15 — Ord & Hutton 1849 Los Angeles plan. The gallery shows the Los Angeles Public Library's scan of a period copy. A 1975 facsimile of the same plan (Historic Urban Plans, Ithaca NY) is held in the research collection but is not displayed, to avoid presenting a modern reprint as a period impression.
• 2026-07-15 — Coordinate verification pass, 8 sites. The Presidio of San Diego was plotted near Ballast Point instead of Presidio Hill, and the Presidio of Santa Barbara at the harbor instead of the presidio site; both fixed on three maps. On the missions map: Mission Soledad moved to its actual site, the San Bernardino estancia to the Redlands asistencia site, the San Gorgonio estancia to the Banning area, the Suisun outstation to the Rockville and Cordelia end of Suisun Valley, and two Santa Ysabel sites adjusted.
• 2026-07-15 — Reference-layer coordinate audit (pre-DOI gate G1). A systematic cross-map check against the verified mission and presidio table found 12 stale reference pins inherited from the site's first version, including Mission La Purísima 78 km out of place, Mission Santa Inés 31 km, Mission San Fernando 13 km, and Mission San Diego plotted at the presidio's location. All conformed to the verified sites. Subgroup labels on the Native California map were also tested point-in-polygon against their parent territories; two were nudged inside, and the redundant Ipai and Tipai labels were replaced by glossing the Handbook's own Tipai and Ipai territory polygons as Kumeyaay.
• 2026-07-22 — Coast Miwok subgroup labels (pre-DOI gate G4). A placement check of all 34 subgroup labels against the ethnographic literature (Handbook vol. 8, Kroeber, Merriam) confirmed 33 correct but found one name–place mismatch: the label "Lekahtewutko (Marin Miwok)" stood on the Marin peninsula, which in Merriam's scheme belongs to the Hookooeko; Lekahtewutko names the southern Sonoma (Petaluma-area) Coast Miwok. The Marin label now reads Hookooeko, and a separate Lekahtewutko label was added near Petaluma. The Karkin label's text was also clarified: standard references map Karkin villages on the south shore of Carquinez Strait, and the north-shore band shown on this map is the site's logged editorial extension (see the standing flag below).
• 2026-07-23 — Gallery attribution corrections (pre-DOI gate G2, Rumsey-held items). Verification against the David Rumsey catalog records found three misattributions. Two sheets shown as Wilkes-expedition charts of c. 1841 ("Entrance, San Francisco" and "Carquines Straits, Vallejo Bay, and other anchorages") are in fact from Ringgold's Series of charts, with sailing directions (surveyed 1850; the Rumsey copies are the 1852 third edition) — the pre-conquest framing of both captions was wrong and has been rewritten. The "Plan of the Harbour of San Francisco" shown as a second Beechey sheet is an engraved broadside after Beechey published by the New York Herald in January 1849 with its gold-discovery coverage. Also corrected: the Wilkes Oregon map's southern reach (Mount Shasta and the upper Sacramento, not San Francisco Bay), the three Ringgold sheets' edition (1852 third edition, not 1851), and the Frémont-Preuss 1848 caption's "first US government map of the conquest" superlative, which Emory's 1848 publication undercuts — recast to the map's documented firsts. Several "year unchecked" hedges were resolved from the catalog records (La Pérouse 1797 first edition, USCS San Francisco 1859, USCS Bodega Bay dated 1864/probably 1884, Bowen 1775 issue, Emory published 1848).
• 2026-07-23 — Full reference-coordinate audit (pre-DOI gate G1, completion). A systematic web-verified audit of all 219 fixed-site reference pins (missions, presidios, settlements, forts, labels) found 13 distinct errors, all corrected: the Santa Catalina (Baja) frontier-mission label was 132 km south of the Dominican mission site; Mission Santa Inés carried a longitude typo on the Zalvidea map (34 km); the modern reference labels Lancaster (24 km), Fort Tejon (20 km), Novato (13 km), Knights Ferry (7 km), San Rafael (6 km), Vernalis, Sanger, and San Fernando were off their towns; the Los Angeles label on the military map sat 12 km south of the plaza; and Mission San Diego de Alcalá was plotted 4.7 km south of its Mission Valley site on all three maps that carry it. Mission Soledad and the Mission Dolores reference were conformed to their exact sites. The Kostromitinov Ranch pin, which contradicted its own summary, was moved to the Russian River mouth area and downgraded to area precision (the exact site is debated); Port Rumiantsev was aligned across maps to the Bodega Harbor anchorage at place precision. Baja sites Loreto, San Borja, Velicatá, Santo Domingo, San Miguel, and San Vicente all verified correct; El Rosario gained a note distinguishing its 1774 and 1802 sites.
• 2026-07-23 — Gallery caption verification, completion pass (pre-DOI gate G2). The remaining gallery items were verified against the Library of Congress, Rumsey, Stanford, and JCB records, and the vault's Savage-transcript surveys. Corrections: the "Puerto Sidman" chart records the British merchant captain James Baker on the Oregon coast, not Vancouver's lieutenant; on the c. 1780 carta reducida, "Hezeta" was a commander, not a ship (the frigate was the Santiago); the 1823 carta esférica is by José María Narváez; the 1799-atlas sheet 14's "Carrasco" is an alternate name of the Nitinat archipelago, not a surveyor, and sheet 15 gains its surveyor (Lt. Francisco de Eliza, 1791) from the Library's own transcription; sheets 23–24 take their correct titles (Entrada de Bucarely; Ensenada de N. Sra. de la Regla); Duflot's "Romanzoff" named Bodega only, and his "Port de Quadra" is Discovery Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not a Vancouver Island port; Voznesensky was a naturalist of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, not a Company employee; the San José suertes plano is dated June 6, 1782, recording the distribution of April 23 (per the C-A 52 record); ten Library of Congress page links pointed at blank versos and were shifted to the charts; and the 2024-acquisition note now distinguishes the ten-chart purchase from four charts already held. Several captions were softened from unsupported superlatives ("first map" → "first engraved map" for Cañizares; "most detailed" → "among the most detailed" for Duflot's Ross plan), and the Ringgold sheets now carry their 1849–50 survey dates.
• 2026-07-23 — Population map: the 1817 and 1833 cumulative mission ledgers re-read from the manuscript at full resolution. A scale-1 re-reading of the two cumulative demographic ledgers in the Savage transcripts (C-A 50 Docs 387 and 427), with every column checked against its own written total, corrected two rows on the province-wide panel. The 1817 ledger's death total is 41,757, not 41,767 (the column now sums exactly), and the ledger also carries a fourth column the earlier reading omitted — "huidos que resultan," 3,205 fugitives. More substantively: Durán's December 1833 cuadro is not a ledger of all the Alta California missions — he signs as president of the San Fernando college's missions, and the sheet totals "las 13 Misiones," the southern missions left to the Fernandinos after the 1833 Zacatecan division. Its figures read 52,882 baptized, 14,533 married, 38,417 dead, and 10,482 living — not the 82,882/58,417 previously shown, which would in any case be inconsistent with the sum-verified 1817 totals. The corrected reading is internally consistent: a 13-mission subset of the 21-mission system.

Standing flags (not errors, but known limits)

• Two Savage transcript copies of Arrillaga's 16 July 1793 defense report disagree on San Francisco's gun count (2 vs 6) and San Diego's (2 vs 3 in the 1823 reports). The Presidial System map shows both figures.
• Gallery caption verification is complete (July 2026): every item's attribution, date, and substantive claims were checked against the holding institutions' records. The 1799-atlas sheets remain identified from the Library of Congress contents list rather than the sheets' own titles, and say so in place.
• Native California map, Carquinez Strait. The territory boundaries follow the Handbook of North American Indians vol. 8, with one drawn editorial deviation: the Karkin (Ohlone) are shown holding both shores of Carquinez Strait, taking in the Vallejo and Benicia shore, where the Handbook plate ends Costanoan territory at the south shore. The departure is flagged in the map's About panel and in both affected popups.
• The 1799 hydrographic atlas sheet identifications follow the Library of Congress contents list and sheet order; sheets 1 and 8 are confirmed from the sheets themselves, the rest are not yet.