Map Information: History of Mapping the Southwest

Wheat, the well-known California historian, has undertaken in this work nothing less than to trace the opening of the American West by studying the succession of maps which, beginning in the 1540's, accurately trace the paths of the explorers and the record of the resulting growth of knowledge. Mr. Wheat has sought out every map, manuscript or printed, relating to the Transmississippi West, before 1861, and has selected the most interesting and important. These maps cover the story of Spanish, French and English exploration. These Five volumes bound into two carry the story of American cartography and exploration through the Civil War. He discusses each map, showing its origins and weighing its significance and accuracy. Mr. Wheat has long studied the topography of the West and has searched patiently through map collections in all parts of the country. Scholars, collectors and dealers of Western Americana should find this work an essential tool for Mr. Wheat has produced a work of scholarship that to this day remains without rival in its field. In all 1302 maps are fully described, with many illustrated in full page. A chronological calendar of maps, a full index, and a system of marginal reference make these volumes easier to use than any other comparable work.

This work is divided into 3 parts: the main index, an alphabetial list of titles, and an index by Wheat's entry numbers.

After the Civil War, four geological and geographical surveys, later called the Great Surveys, Undertook the massive task of finding out what lay west of the hundredth meridian in the vast American wilderness. Parties led by Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, medical doctor turned geologist, Clarence King, aristocrat and intellectual, John Wesley Powell, conqueror of the Colorado River, and Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, determined military man and scientist, roamed over the wild country during the years 1867-79, observing, analyzing, mapping, and at the end of each season, returning to Washington to publish their results. For the first time in book form, Richard A. Bartlett has recreated for the reader the hardships, both physical and financial, the discoveries, and the high adventures of the bold, headstrong, and often brilliant men of the Great Surveys as they climbed the Rockies, explored the Yellowstone, or battled the Colorado.

The field work of the four great surveys whose publications are catalogued and indexed herein was done between 1867 and 1879, when the United States Geological Survey was organized. The office work, such as the preparation of maps and reports, continued until several years later.

In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area for what they thought would be a calm summer's work completing a previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors' diary entries, field notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining, engaging narrative of the team's experiences, contextualized with a thoughtful introduction and conclusion. Accompanied by the great photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden's team quickly found their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water. Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery--Hispanic villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant dispossession from their homeland. Hayden saw his expedition as a scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description, cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways, solidifying the idea of "progress"--and government funding of its pursuit--while also revealing, via Jackson's photographs, a landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.

Holmes first came to national attention as a topographical illustrator for western survey by Ferdinand V. Hayden and Clarence E. Dutton. The insistent incorporation of geological knowledge distinguished Holmes's illustrations of western wonders such as Yellowstone, Estes Park, Mesa Verde, and Grand Canyon from earlier depictions, and advanced scientific theory and practice.

In 2009 the University of Utah Press and the Utah State Historical Society co-published three volumes of long out-of-print journals, letters, and other documents from John Wesley Powell's expeditions down the Colorado River. We are proud to announce the fourth and final volume. Cleaving an Unknown World collects Powell's journal (Smithsonian Journal of History, 1968); Jack Hillers's diary and photographs, previously published as Photographed All the Best Scenery, edited by Don D. Fowler (University of Utah Press, 1972); original maps from Francis Marion Bishop (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); Frederick S. Dellenbaugh's letters (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); and John C. Sumner's journal from the first Powell expedition (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969). Roy Webb's foreword provides the context for these disparate pieces. This beautifully illustrated book features Hillers's photographs--long regarded as a remarkable and unique record of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Cleaving an Unknown World belongs in the library of any reader interested in the exploration of the American West.  

Widely accepted as Jackson's most trusted autobiography of his early pioneering days and his first eight years as the official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey. This reconstruction of Jackson's classic work, long out of print, presents 160 photographs and early drawings, paintings, and lithographs by America's best-known landscape photographer, drawing on Jackson's diaries, other published accounts, and his annotations of The Pioneer Photographer to create a complete and multidimensional view of the unfolding nineteenth-century American West. Editor Bob Blair has significantly expanded Jackson's original autobiography, reprinted here in full with the author's annotations, with seventy additional photographs, drawings, and paintings, and extensive excerpts from Jackson's writings, much of the new material drawn from archives and historical collections and never before published.

From the forward -- "On the pages that follow, a story unfolds that provides us with a glimpse into the past when the American West was little known and almost totally unmapped. A continuous thread of cartographic history runs throughout these papers, resulting in an examination of the primary product of map librarianship, the map. The eight authors who have contributed to this work share with the reader the story of how the land was explored, measured and mapped, and how early maps and cartographers influenced one another, in the intriguing political climate that existed throughout this period of exploration."

From the preface -- "'The Mapping of the American Southwest', a symposium held at the University of Texas at Arlington in the winter of 1983, brought together cartographic experts from across the United States to focus their attention upon one of the most dramatic but often overlooked areas in the field of cartographic history -- the American Southwest. The symposium papers reproduced in this volume are varied in scope and subject, but all relate significantly to the cartographic history of the southwestern frontier.

Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713-1785) is remembered today not only as colonial New Mexico's preeminent religious artist, but also as the cartographer who drew some of the most important early maps of the American West. His "Plano Geographico" of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin, revised by his hand in 1778, influenced other mapmakers for almost a century. This book places the man and the map in historical context, reminding readers of the enduring significance of Miera y Pacheco. Later Spanish cartographers, as well as Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike, and Henry Schenck Tanner, projected or expanded upon the Santa Fe cartographer's imagery. By so doing, they perpetuated Miera y Pacheco's most notable hydrographic misinterpretations. Not until almost seventy years after Miera did John Charles Frémont take the field and see for himself whither the waters ran and whither they didn't.

From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California--today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers. With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, cost Mexico half its territory, while the United States gained land that became California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Because the new United States-Mexico border ran through territory that was still incompletely mapped, the treaty also called for government commissions from both nations to locate and mark the boundary on the ground. This book documents the accomplishments of both the U.S. and the Mexican Boundary Commissions that mapped the boundary between 1849 and 1857, as well as the fifty-four pairs of maps produced by their efforts and the ongoing importance of these historical maps in current boundary administration. Paula Rebert explores how, despite the efforts of both commissions to draw neutral, scientific maps, the actual maps that resulted from their efforts reflected the differing goals and outlooks of the two countries. She also traces how the differences between the U.S. and Mexican maps have had important consequences for the history of the boundary.

In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated volume edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, five leading scholars in history, geography, and cartography discuss the role Spanish explorers and mapmakers played in bringing knowledge of the New World to Europe. The entradas, of Pánfilo de Narváez and Alvar Núnez Cabeza de Vaca (1527-37), Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1539-42), and Hernando de Soto and Luis de Moscoso (1539-43), into the Greater Southwest of North America were crucial in the dissemination of information and images of the newly discovered lands.

The contributors investigate linkages between the early explorers’ experiences, their influence on indigenous peoples, and perceptions of the region as reflected in printed maps of the period. This body of images, which incorporated Indian information, made a powerful impression on the still largely preliterate people of Europe, reshaping their world.

How the West Was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples. Bernstein explores the cartographic creation of the Trans-Mississippi West through an interdisciplinary methodology in geography and history. He shows how the Pawnees and the Iowas--wedged between powerful Osages, Sioux, the horse- and captive-rich Comanche Empire, French fur traders, Spanish merchants, and American Indian agents and explorers--devised strategies of survivance and diplomacy to retain autonomy during this era. The Pawnees and the Iowas developed a strategy of cartographic resistance to predations by both Euro-American imperial powers and strong indigenous empires, navigating the volatile and rapidly changing world of the Great Plains by brokering their spatial and territorial knowledge either to stronger indigenous nations or to much weaker and conquerable American and European powers. How the West Was Drawn is a revisionist and interdisciplinary understanding of the global imperial contest for North America's Great Plains that illuminates in fine detail the strategies of survival of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas amid accommodation to predatory Euro-American and Native empires.        

Strange as it may seem from our modern American perspective, New Mexico was literally a foreign country until the middle of the nineteenth century and, as field archaeologist and history instructor Peter Eidenbach discovered, in the minds of some it still is. The New Mexico landscape is easy to get lost in and much of its terrain has not been fully explored in many years. Yet, the state holds a rich cartographic history not often recognized by the many people who daily interact with its topography. Approaching this gap as a teacher and enthusiast, Eidenbach set about compiling a collection of New Mexico's historic maps, navigating through a varied terrain of research and discovery, even securing permissions for colonial-era maps held in special collections with limited public access. This collection, featuring beautifully rendered diagrams of New Mexico's landscape, allows exploration of the past as seen by that past's inhabitants.

New Mexico’s long and dramatic history was in many ways predestined by its location, vast size, and abundant mineral resources. Treasure-hunting Spanish explorers tramped across its plains and scaled its mountains in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola in the sixteenth century. In clashing with descendants of the prehistoric Indian population, the Spanish began three centuries of struggles that lasted through the nineteenth century when the steamroller of United States expansion arrived. The history of New Mexico is the story of the blending of the three cultures—Hispanic, Indian, and Anglo.

In this volume, a historian and a cartographer collaborate to depict specific aspects of the state’s geography and events of its history, with the narrative illustrated through maps. Topics include geographical data (from topography to weather), sites of prehistoric civilizations, Spanish and United States expeditions, first towns, historic trails, the Civil War, stagecoach lines, railroads, county boundaries, principal cities and roads, state and national parks and monuments, and state judicial districts.