...Durango haste San Antonio y desde Chihuaha por el paso de Sto. Domingo...

Josep de la Barcanda. Manuscript map: sepia ink and watercolor wash on vellum.
10.25” x 13.5”, Durango, 1778

When the new, independent "Internal Province" was established in New Spain in 1776 , the newly appointed governor was Spaniard Teodoro de Croix.

This sparsely settled territory, now Texas and northern Mexico, had only been sparsely surveyed and de Croix had no geographic concept of his new responsibilities. He began a massive survey in 1776, lasting until the end of 1778. His surveyor was Josep de la Barcanda, Captain of Engineers at the new provincial capital of Durango. The finished map was beautifully drawn from Barcanda's surveys in sepia ink and watercolor wash on velum by a skilled Jesuit priest named Pedro de Ormedo, with decorative Baroque motifs, locations of presidios (forts) and towns.

A solitary road runs southwest from San Antonio and crosses the Rio Grande at San Juan Bautista, the site visited in 1714 by the French explorer St. Denis. It continues southwest to the presidio of Santa Rosa in Coahuila, dividing north and south of the vast arid waste described in 1767 by the explorer Lafora as "unpopulated land where enemy Indians and apostates from the missions take shelter and from which they set out to raid Neuva Vizcaya and Coahuila."