Wherever life has flourished across the vast territory of Texas, someone early on blazed a trail to get there. A new exhibit at The Witte Museum in San Antonio—Connecting Texas: 300 Years of Rails, Trails, and Roads—illustrates through a collection of more than 40 historic maps how people journeyed across Texas over the ages and laid the groundwork for the state as we know it today.

The exhibit, which opened Feb. 15 and runs through Sept. 17, features artifacts ranging from an original 1701 map of Frenchmen Sieur de La Salle’s ill-fated 1685 expedition along the Texas coast to a 1968 Rand McNally & Co. map showing routes to San Antonio for the HemisFair World’s Fair. In between are dozens of vintage maps depicting such historical chapters as early 19th century Native American trails; frontier military trails and forts; German immigrant Hill Country maps of the 1840s; new railroads stretching westward into Texas in the 1850s; and cattle drive trails of the 1880s.

“The goal is to show how different generations and different groups have collaborated to put the together the transportation network that we know today,” says James Harkins, a curator of the exhibit and director of public services for the Texas General Land Office Archives. “We wanted to show how people moved around Texas through time, and hence connected Texas.”

The exhibit draws primarily from the General Land Office’s archive of 45,000 maps, with a few private holdings also in the mix.