Sources & Method

Every map on this site is driven by an open dataset, and the great majority of the features in those datasets carry their own citation. This page gathers what the whole site is built on and says which map uses which. Across 14 published maps there are 1,337 features, 1,192 of them carrying at least one citation of their own, and 185 carrying a quoted passage from a source. This page is generated from the datasets, not maintained by hand, so it follows the data.

How to read a citation on these maps

A pin’s popup carries its own sources. Several conventions run across the site:

• Coordinate precision is stated, not implied. A solid marker sits at a known place; a translucent or dashed marker is approximate within its district; a hollow marker is conjectural. Dashed route lines mean the party passed roughly this way.
• Manuscript citations give both page systems. A document in the Savage transcripts is cited to the original folio or page and to Savage’s own pagination and the scan leaf, because the three do not agree.
• Quoted matter is in quotation marks with a citation. Where a map paraphrases, it does not use the source’s wording. The site was audited for unquoted borrowing in September 2026 and the corrections applied.
• A missing source is shown, not hidden. Where no source was found for something, the popup says so rather than leaving a confident blank.
• Dates carry their grain. Some are exact to the day from a document; others are a year from the standard accounts, and say so.

Which map uses what

Principal sources per map. Ordered by kind first — manuscript, then printed primary, then data, then scholarship — and within a kind by how much of the map rests on it, so the list leads with the strongest evidence rather than the most frequently repeated. Every map’s full citation set lives in its own dataset, linked in the last column.

The sources

Archival and manuscript sources

What the maps ultimately rest on. Where a feature has a manuscript behind it, the popup cites it.

• Archives of California (BANC MSS C–A), The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley — the Thomas Savage transcript copies, 63 volumes. The originals burned in 1906; Savage's copies are the record. Most features on this site that rest on a manuscript rest on these. Pins with a catalog record deep-link to the documentary calendar and from there to the manuscript leaf. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, Missions & Establishments, Gabriel Moraga's Expeditions, Native California, Population of the Californias, The Presidial System, The Secularization of the Missions
• United States District Court land case files for California, The Bancroft Library (Northern and Southern District series, cited as ND / SD by case number). Digitised at digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu. The evidentiary basis for the rancho maps: each confirmed grant generated a case file with the claimant's title papers. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Ranchos of Mexican California, Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California, Ranchos, Pueblos & Presidios; Version B (NAHC base)
• Online Archive of California and Calisphere — finding aids and digitised images from California repositories. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Ranchos of Mexican California, Ranchos, Pueblos & Presidios; Version B (NAHC base)
• Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Documentos para la Historia de California (BANC MSS C–B), The Bancroft Library — cited by volume and document. The companion collection to C–A, and the source for much of the presidio artillery and garrison detail. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California
• Land Case Maps (diseños), The Bancroft Library — the hand-drawn grant sketches filed as evidence in the land cases. 1,397 catalogued for this project; the gallery reproduces them. Used by: Ranchos of Mexican California, Ranchos, Pueblos & Presidios; Version B (NAHC base)
• Local historical societies and house museums — Kelley House Museum (Mendocino), Fort Ross Conservancy, Sonoma County Library heritage collections, Mill Valley Historical Society, Marin History Museum, Del Norte, Aptos, Cambria, Tomales and Salt Point local collections. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Presidio garrison and artillery register — an unpublished working register compiled for this project from the Archives of California transcripts and the printed accounts. Not yet published. Where a feature rests on it alone, the underlying documents are cited in the register and can be supplied on request. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Presidial System
• San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, J. Porter Shaw Library — Carl Christensen and Carlos A. Call photograph collections; Tooker and Lewis research files; Canright, “Coastwise Lumber Transportation.” Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Cal Poly Humboldt Special Collections — A. W. Ericson, Palmquist, Swanlund–Baker, Boyle and Schoenrock photograph collections. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast

Printed primary sources

Published contemporaneously with the events, or printing documents whose originals are gone.

• Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California, 7 vols. San Francisco: The History Company, 1884–1890 — including the Pioneer Register. Used as a printed primary compilation as much as a secondary work: Bancroft quotes and calendars documents whose originals are gone. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, Missions & Establishments, Gabriel Moraga's Expeditions
• Gibson, James R., and Alexei A. Istomin, eds. Russian California, 1806–1860: A History in Documents — cited by document number. Cited in the data as “Gibson & Istomin, Doc n”. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier, Missions & Establishments
• Russian-American Company material — documents from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI), and Golovnin and Khlebnikov as cited in the data in short form, often at second hand through Farris and through Gibson & Istomin. Where a Russian document is reached through a translation or a secondary work rather than the archive, the citation says so. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier, Missions & Establishments
• Period newspapers — Daily Alta California, Mendocino Beacon, Fort Bragg Advocate, Ukiah Republican Press, the San Francisco Call and Chronicle, the California Star. Via the California Digital Newspaper Collection and as quoted in the doghole-ports MPDF. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California
• Davidson, George. Pacific Coast. Coast Pilot of California, Oregon, and Washington. Washington: GPO, 1869; 4th ed., 1889. The single most useful printed source for nineteenth-century coastal positions, landings and station descriptions. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey topographic sheets (T-sheets) and harbour charts, 1852–1930s. NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Diary of Fr. Pedro Muñoz (Moraga expedition, 1806) and Diary of Fr. José María de Zalvidea (1806), as edited and translated in Cook. Used by: Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, The 1806 Interior Expeditions; Zalvidea & Moraga
• Wagner, Henry R. — the 1931 edition of the Spanish northwest-coast voyage accounts, cited in the data as “Wagner 1931” with page numbers. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier
• Hoffman, Ogden. Reports of Land Cases Determined in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. San Francisco, 1862. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California
• Duflot de Mofras, Eugène. The 1844 account of the Pacific coast, cited in the data by year for the post-sale condition of the Russian establishments. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California
• Menzies, Archibald. The journal of the Vancouver expedition’s naturalist, cited in the data in short form as “Menzies 1924” with page numbers. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier
• Annual Report of the Light-House Board, fiscal years 1852–1910 (printed within the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury through the 1870s, thereafter separately and within the Department of Commerce and Labor reports); Annual Report of the Commissioner of Lighthouses, 1911 onward; U.S. Coast Guard Light List, Volume VI. 163 passages are quoted verbatim on the lighthouses map, cited per passage to report year and printed page. Used by: Lighthouses of California
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers (harbour and bar works, principally Humboldt). Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Hittell, John S. The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1882. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Jepson, Willis L. California Tanbark Oak. USDA Forest Service Bulletin 75. Washington: GPO, 1911. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, 1877–1924 (vessel tonnages), with Lyman's compilation from the registers. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Historic American Engineering Record / Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress — HAER No. CA-61 (schooner C. A. Thayer, 1988), No. CA-67 (steam schooner Wapama, 2001), and light-station documentation. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Spanish hydrographic charts — the Plano del Puerto series and the Cartas esféricas, including the 1793 re-survey, from the Library of Congress and reproduced in this site’s gallery. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor

Datasets, boundaries and geographic data

Where the lines and the coordinates come from. These carry their own uncertainties, stated below.

• NAHC / California Natural Resources Agency, California Land Grants — grant boundaries reconstructed against the Public Land Survey System. One of two independent boundary sets on the site; the rancho maps exist in two versions precisely because the two disagree. Used by: Ranchos of Mexican California, Ranchos, Pueblos & Presidios; Version B (NAHC base)
• ECAI / UCSD, Spanish & Mexican Land Grants of California (via the California Land Grants ArcGIS project) — boundary and land-case data. The base for the published rancho map. Used by: Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California, Ranchos, Pueblos & Presidios; Version B (NAHC base)
• USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) — used to fix coordinates for named coastal features, cited by feature ID. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• USGS National Hydrography Dataset and The National Map — stream flowlines, used to place inland railheads and creek-mouth landings. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8: California (Smithsonian Institution, 1978) — tribal territory boundaries, as digitised by the Salton Sea Database Program, University of Redlands. Territory lines on a map imply a hard edge that the ethnography does not support. They are drawn as generalisations, and subgroup labels are positioned without boundaries implied. Used by: Native California
• OpenStreetMap — surviving rail alignments, traced for the lumber railroads where a historic grade is still on the ground. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• David Rumsey Map Collection — georeferenced historical maps. Used by: Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California

Secondary scholarship and reference works

Used for context, for dating at year grain, and for the interpretive claims the maps make.

• Cook, Sherburne F. Colonial Expeditions to the Interior of California: Central Valley, 1800–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. The route studies behind the expedition maps, and the source of the village identifications, which Cook himself gave as approximate. Used by: The Bay Area Imperial Frontier, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, Gabriel Moraga's Expeditions, The 1806 Interior Expeditions; Zalvidea & Moraga
• The redwood-coast literature — McNairn & MacMullen, Ships of the Redwood Coast (1945); Jackson, The Doghole Schooners (1977); Carranco, Redwood Lumber Industry (1982) and Carranco & Labbe, Logging the Redwoods (1975); Stanger, Sawmills in the Redwoods (1967); Kortum & Olmsted in California Historical Quarterly 50:1 (1971); Tooker in Sea Letter 6:1 (1968); Wurm, Crump and Kneiss on the logging railroads; Layton, The Voyage of the Frolic (1997); Henson & Usner on Big Sur; and the county histories of Munro-Fraser, Palmer, Elliott and Bledsoe (1880–81). Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Missions & Establishments
• Thompson, Erwin N. National Park Service historic resource studies on the Golden Gate forts — cited in the data as “Thompson HRS 1979” with page numbers. The standard documentation for the Bay's coastal batteries. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Langelier, John P., and Daniel B. Rosen. El Presidio de San Francisco: A History under Spain and Mexico, 1776–1846. 1992. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, Gabriel Moraga's Expeditions
• Kroeber, A. L. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 78. Washington: GPO, 1925. Used by: Native California, The 1806 Interior Expeditions; Zalvidea & Moraga
• Gifford, E. W., and W. E. Schenck. Archaeology of the Southern San Joaquin Valley. Berkeley, 1926. Used by: Gabriel Moraga's Expeditions, The 1806 Interior Expeditions; Zalvidea & Moraga
• Milliken, Randall — cited in the data in short form as “Milliken 2009” with page numbers, for Bay Area tribal geography and mission demography. Used by: The Bodega–Ross Corridor, The Bay Area Imperial Frontier
• Shanks, Ralph, and Lisa Woo Shanks. Guardians of the Golden Gate and Lighthouses and Lifeboats of the Redwood Coast; U.S. Lighthouse Society, Lighthouse Research Catalog. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• The Golden Gate fortification literature — Martini, Fortress Alcatraz (1991) and Fort Point (2016); Chin, Artillery at the Golden Gate (1994); Haller and Martini, The Last Missile Site (2010). Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay
• Engelhardt, Zephyrin. The mission histories — used for mission foundation dates and estate outstations, at year grain. Used by: Missions & Establishments
• Krell, Dorothy, ed. The California Missions: A Pictorial History — used with Bancroft and Engelhardt for secularization years. Used by: The Secularization of the Missions
• Marx, Deborah, and Denise Jaffke. Northern California Doghole Ports Maritime Cultural Landscape. NRHP Multiple Property Documentation Form, draft. California Department of Parks and Recreation / Office of Historic Preservation, 2021. A DRAFT nomination. The backbone inventory for the lumber-ports map, and flagged as draft wherever it carries a claim alone. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Delgado, Green, Jaffke, Lawrence and Marx. Maritime Cultural Landscape of Sonoma's Doghole Ports. Publications in Cultural Heritage 37. Sacramento: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 2021. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast

Government agencies, registers and digital repositories

Agency documentation, the National Register, and the platforms that deliver the scans.

• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — the delivery mechanism for most of the printed primary sources above, and for the scanned Savage volumes. A finding aid, not an authority: what is cited is the work, not the scan. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, The Bodega–Ross Corridor, Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, Native California, The Presidial System
• California State Parks, the Office of Historic Preservation, the California Historical Landmarks register, and the Historical Marker Database. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Military Engagements in Spanish, Mexican & Conquest-Era California, Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California, The Secularization of the Missions
• National Park Service — Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Presidio of San Francisco site documentation. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, The Secularization of the Missions
• Library of Congress — photographs, survey documentation and digitised maps. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast, Ranchos of Spanish & Mexican California
• National Register of Historic Places nominations, via NPGallery — cited by reference number, including Bookwalter’s Light Stations of California multiple-property submission (1989) and the Bear Harbor Landing district, with the NRIS listed-properties dataset for listing dates. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• U.S. Coast Guard Historian's Office — historic light-station information and photography, California. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine — used where an agency page that carried a fact has since been taken down. Cited with its capture date. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• NOAA Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary — the doghole-ports survey pages, with per-port histories and credited historic photographs. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast

Tertiary web sources

Compendia and enthusiast sites. These are useful for leads and for orientation, and they are not treated as authorities. Where one of these is the only support for a claim, the popup says so.

• Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and general-interest local-history web pages. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay, Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• LighthouseFriends.com — station histories. Used by: Lighthouses of California, Lumber Ports of the California Coast
• FortWiki and NorthAmericanForts.com — fortification compendia. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay
• California State Military Museum (militarymuseum.org) and The Military Standard. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay
• Ed Thelen's Nike missile site database — the standard hobbyist register of Nike installations. Used by: Coastal Defense of San Francisco Bay
• Railroad-history sites — MendoRailHistory, PacificNG, Santa Cruz Trains, the Skunk Train's own history pages. Used by: Lumber Ports of the California Coast

Basemaps

The maps are drawn with Leaflet over Esri’s World Topographic and Ocean basemaps (© Esri, HERE, Garmin, USGS, NGA, EPA, USDA, NPS, GEBCO, NOAA) and OpenStreetMap contributors. The basemap is a modern one in every case: no historical basemap underlies these pins, and modern coastlines, jetties and channels are not the ones the historical actors saw. Where that matters — a harbour entrance that has moved, a bar that has been dredged — the popup says so.

Companion projects

These maps are one of four related projects built on the same archive. Each is separately citable, and each is a source the others draw on.

• Archives of California: A Documentary Calendar of the Savage Transcripts — the item-level catalogue of BANC MSS C–A 1–63. The manuscript layer under most of what is on these maps; pins with a catalog record deep-link into it. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21912644
• Ranchos of Alta California — 672 land grants and claims with their adjudication, the families that held them, and the manuscript diseños filed as evidence. The rancho maps here use a different boundary dataset from the portal, which is why the two disagree; both are published rather than reconciled.
• California Ship Registry — every recorded vessel visit to the California coast, 2,072 visits carrying 2,900 citations, from the documentary calendar, Bancroft's narrative and marine lists, and Ogden's otter-trade appendix. The maritime counterpart to the landward record on these maps, and the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursor to the coastwise traffic on the lumber-ports and lighthouse maps.

What this page does not claim

• It is a list of what the site draws on, not a bibliography of the field. Works read and not used are not here.
• Grouped entries stand for families of citation. The exact citation for any single feature is in that feature’s popup and in the dataset, which is the authority.
• Full bibliographic form is given where it is established in this site’s own audited apparatus or complete in the data. Where the data cites a work in short form, the short form is what appears here rather than an expansion that was never checked.
• Coverage is uneven by design and by accident. Some maps rest on a long documented record; others rest on a thin one, and the thin ones say so on the map.

Corrections are welcome and are logged on the errata page.