Map of the Country upon the Brazos and Big Witchita Rivers, explored in 1854 by Capt. R. B. Marcy, 5th U.S. Infantry, embracing the lands…
Captain Randolph B. Marcy’s map of his 1854 survey of the upper Brazos and the Big Wichita, made to choose the lands Texas set aside for the Brazos and Comanche reservations: the Indian trails and the Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita and Caddo country between the Red River and the Colorado.
Source
| Map | Map of the Country Upon the Brazos and Big Wichita River |
|---|---|
| Author | Capt. Randolph B. Marcy, 1854 |
| Archive | Texas State Library and Archives |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1854 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 17 km (RMS 5.3 km at 20 control points). Placed by hand in a map-queue session and approved by a person. If something sits in the wrong place, members can fix it with Fix placement on the map. |
| Method | Placed by hand: a smoothing thin-plate spline through the sheet’s half-degree graticule ticks (32°–34°30′ N, 98°–101° W; the other coordinate of each tick from a polyconic fit) and three forts — Belknap, Phantom Hill and Chadbourne — which Marcy drew up to 20 km from where his own graticule puts them; 20 points in all. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.2, updated 2026-10-08 |
| Covers | Texas, Oklahoma |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (3 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 5855; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (11.6 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (2.7 MB)
Project Homeland
This map’s trails are traced into Project Homeland, one map of the trail network melded from every traced source, where they are compared with the other maps’ lines. Members can trace more of them: Trace a trail on the map.
Changelog
- 1.0.2 (2026-10-08): Re-placed: Fort Phantom Hill and Fort Chadbourne re-read on their fort symbols (both had been placed in open country). Leave-one-out error 6.8 → 6.0 km. Place names moved with it (median 1.6 km).
- 1.0.1 (2026-10-06): Fix: place names re-placed where the map draws them (they had been set by an approximation of the warp: median 0.2 km, up to 0 km off).
- 1.0.0 (2026-10-06): First release: placed by hand at 20 places. From the Native Routes sources register; Texas State Library and Archives Commission (map 03910).
Credits
- From the Native Routes sources register; Texas State Library and Archives Commission (map 03910)
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Texas State Library and Archives
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.
Something on this map sits in the wrong place? Members can show where with Fix placement on the map — confirmed fixes are tested against the map’s other control points each night and credited here. For anything else, report a problem.
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