Mapping Nature across the Americas 9780226696577

Citation preview

mapping nature across the americas

the university of chicago press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978- ­0 -­226- ­69643- ­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978- ­0 -­226- ­69657- ­7 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208 /chicago/9780226696577.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brosnan, Kathleen A., 1960– editor. | Akerman, James R., editor. Title: Mapping nature across the Americas / edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, James R. Akerman. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056574 | ISBN 9780226696430 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226696577 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cartography—America—History. | Physical geography—America—Maps—History. | America—Maps—History. Classification: LCC GA401 .M36 2021 | DDC 526.097—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056574 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

List of Illustrations / vii Introduction / 1 Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman part one: people ’ s nature

part two: reinventors ’ nature

Chapter 1  ·  Staking Claims on Native Lands: The Symbolic Power of Indigenous Cartographic Conventions in the Ayer Map of Teotihuacan Mexico (1560) and Its Copies / 19 Jennifer Saracino

Chapter 5  ·  Transcending the Alps in the Andes: Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the Graphic Invention of the Mountain Range / 115 Ernesto Capello

Chapter 2  ·  Into the Interior: Reading the Native Landscape of the Great Lakes in European Maps, 1612–1755 / 41 Kelly Hopkins Chapter 3  ·  Currents of Influence: Indigenous River Names in the American South / 65 Craig E. Colten Chapter 4  ·  Oysters and Emancipation: The Antebellum Shellfish Industry as a Pathway to Freedom / 88 Michelle Zacks

Chapter 6  ·  On the Trail with Humboldt: Mapping the Orinoco as Transnational Space / 135 Adriana Méndez Rodenas Chapter 7  ·  Palms and Other Trees on Maps: Exoticism, Error, and Environment, from Old World to New / 157 Brian Bockelman Chapter 8  ·  Beyond the Map: Landscape, History, and the Routes of Cortés / 180 Raymond B. Craib

part three: the state ’ s nature

Chapter 9  ·  Nature Knows No Bounds: Mapping Challenges at the US-­Mexico Border / 209 Mary E. Mendoza

Epilogue  ·  The View from across the Pond / 291 Catherine T. Dunlop Acknowledgments / 299

Chapter 10  ·  Visualizing the Enlarged Homestead Act: Mapping Power and Place in Early Twentieth-­Century US Land Policy / 223 Sara M. Gregg Chapter 11  ·  Mapping Canadian Nature and the Nature of Canadian Mapping / 239 Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn Chapter 12  ·  Seeing Forests as Systems: Maps of North American Forest Conditions and the Emergence of Visual-­Ecological Thinking / 270 Peter Nekola

Appendix  ·  Critical Map Reading for the Environment / 303 List of Contributors / 307 Notes / 313 Index / 373

illustr ations

0.1

Mapa Siguenza (Nahuatl glyph map of Aztec migration from Aztlan to Tenochtitlán), sixteenth century; c. 1830 ms copy / 8

0.2

Cross section of the volcano Chimborazo, Ecuador, published by Alexander von Humboldt in the “Geographie des plantes equinoxiales,” in his volume Essai sur la geographie / 10

0.3

John Gardiner, Map of the Bounty Lands, Illinois (Washington: General Land Office, 1818) / 14

1.1

Reproduction of lost Mazapan map of unknown provenience, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century, from José María Arreola, “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacan (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922) / 21

1.2

Legend of glosses in the reproduction of the lost Mazapan map of unknown provenance, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century, from José María Arreola, “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacan (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922) / 22

1.3

Tenochtitlán in the Codex Mendoza, c. 1541 / 26

2.1

Samuel de Champlain, Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1612) / 50 vii

2.2

Samuel de Champlain, Carte de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1632) / 53

2.3

A Mappe of Colonel Römer’s Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations, 1700 / 57

2.4

Detail of the Great Lakes region, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755) / 61

2.5

Title cartouche, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755) / 62

3.1

Detail, John Smith, Virginia (London, 1624) / 70

3.2

Detail of Carolina and Florida coast, Pieter van der Aa, Zee en Land Togten der Franszen Gedaan na, en in’t Americaans Gewest van Florida, allereerst door Ioh, Pontius Ontdekt (Leiden, 1706) / 71

3.3

Detail, Joseph Francisco Badaraco and Juan Linares, Plano. I descripcion de la costa, desde el Cavo Cañaveral, hasta cerca de la boca de la Vir[ g]inia, contando, costa de Florida, Georgia y Carolinas del S, y N (1756) / 73

3.4

Jean Baptiste Liébaux after Jacques Marquette, “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 dans l’Amerique Septentrionale,” in Melchisédec Thévenot, Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot (1681?) / 74

3.5

Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Carte de la Louisiane (1752) / 76

3.6

Detail, John Mackay and J. E. Blake (US topographic engineers), Map of the Seat of War in Florida (Washington, 1839) / 81

4.1

Survey of the coast of the United States, New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs (Washington, 1845) / 92

4.2

F. H. Gerdes’s sketch of Wade’s Point Signal / 96

4.3

New Haven Harbor, NOAA National Ocean Service (Washington, 1846) / 98

4.4

1862: Coast Chart 33: Chesapeake Bay: From Choptank River to Potomac River / 104

5.1

Detail, Guillaume Sanson, Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (Paris: Alexis Hubert Jaillot, 1693) / 122

viii · i l l u s t r a t i o n s

5.2

“Carte de la Baye de la Table au Nord du Cap de Bonne Esperance,” Cartes marines, early eighteenth century / 124

5.3

Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Vue de la Base mesurée dans la plaine de Yarouqui,” in Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du Roi, a l’equateur, servant . . . la mesure de trois premiers degres du méridien (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751) / 128

5.4

“Profile de la cordeliere de Pérou,” in Pierre Bouguer, La Figure de la terre: Messieurs Bouguer, & de La Condamine, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, envoyés par ordre du roy au Pérou, poit observer aux environs de l’Equateur. Avec une relation abregée de ce voyage, qui contient la description du pays dans lequel les operations ont été faites (Paris: Jombert, 1749) / 132

5.5

“Carte de la meridienne de Quito,” and “Coupe du Terrain de la Meridienne de Quito,” in Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du mériden dans l’hémisphere austral (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751) / 134

6.1

Chute du Tequendama, based on a sketch by Alexander von Humboldt and engraved by Wilhelm Friedrich Gmelin. Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: Chez F. Schoell, 1810–13) / 143

6.2

Samuel Fritz, “Plan de la riviere de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones,” in Cartes marines (early-­eighteenth-­ century copy of the 1707 original) / 149

6.3

Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, “Carte du Cours de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones,” in Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique mériodionale (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1745) / 150

6.4

Alexander von Humboldt, “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, du Casiaquiare, et du Rio Negro,” in Atlas géographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle-­Espagne (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811) / 153

7.1

Detail of Abraham Ortelius, “Typus orbis terrarum,” in Theatrum orbis terrarium (Antwerp, 1570) / 158

i l l u s t r a t i o n s  · ix

7.2

“Tijpus Freti Magellanici,” in Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum (Leiden: Nicolaum à Geelkercken, 1619) / 001740

7.3

John Ogilby, “Tabula Magellanica, qua Tierrae del Fuego,” in America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London, 1671) / 176

7.4

“Terra” allegory detail on bottom-­right border of Hendrik Hondius, Nova totius orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula (Amsterdam, 1630) / 177

7.5

Detail of South America plant distribution map, from Heinrich Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas, vol. 1 (Gotha, Germany: Justus Perthes, 1845–48) / 178

8.1

The central corridor between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City, from Vicente Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos (Barcelona: Espasa y Compañía, editores, 1887) / 182

8.2

Map included in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico / 188

8.3

Detail of John Disturnell’s 1847 map showing the road from Veracruz to Mexico City / 192

8.4

Purported route taken by the ancestors of the Aztecs, from Aztlán to the central valley of Mexico, highlighted by García Cubas in Carta Histórica y Arqueológica / 196

8.5

Title page from the first edition of Benítez’s La Ruta de Hernán Cortés / 197

8.6

Landscape from Benítez, La ruta de Hernán Cortés / 200

8.7

Currency issued by the revolutionary government of Venustiana Carranza in 1915 / 202

9.1

“Extract from the Treaty Map of Disturnell, 1847, Referred to in Col. Graham’s Report,” in Report of the Secretary of War, showing disputed territory between the Gray and Bartlett-­Condé lines near El Paso / 220

10.1

Department of the Interior, “State of Arizona: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” 1916 / 225

x · i l l u s t r a t i o n s

10.2

Department of the Interior, “State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” 1910 / 234

10.3

Department of the Interior, “State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” 1916 / 235

11.1

The receding frontier of terra incognita in northern North America, 1670–1870 / 244

11.2

Phototopographic mapping in Canada, 1931 / 248

11.3

Photographic surveying of irregular terrain using a transit and camera, 1916 / 250

11.4

Before and after aerial mapping. From F. H. Peters, “Surveying and Mapping in Canada,” Empire Survey Review 1, no. 2 (October 1931) / 252

11.5

Canada Land Inventory classification for soils and agriculture, 1965 / 258

11.6a–c

Canada Land Inventory of potential for tourism, 1969 / 260–62

11.7

Canada Department of Energy, Mines, and Technical Surveys, 1978 / 268

12.1

Section 36, township 40-­17, March 7, 1878 / 282

Plate 1

Ayer Map of Teotihuacan, 1560

Plate 2

Detail, Nicolas de Fer, L’Amerique (Paris, 1704).

Plate 3

“Radeau de la Rivière de Guayaquil,” in Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland

Plate 4

Detail showing “palm” tree on Vercelli mappamundi, c. 1200

Plate 5

Spain and North Africa detail from Roselli 1456 chart, showing green Sierra Nevada and other characteristic portolan illustrations

Plate 6

Lopes portolan atlas, c. 1565: details of North Africa and Brazil

Plate 7

View from the Gulf of Mexico, approaching the port of Veracruz

i l l u s t r a t i o n s  · xi

Plate 8

Wayne Healy and David Botello, Columbus Lands on Las Indias

Plate 9

John Disturnell, Map of the Republic of Mexico, 1847

Plate 10

Department of the Interior map series, areas in red designated by the Secretary of the Interior as “nonirrigable,” 1916

Plate 11

General Land Office map, United States Including Territories and Insular Possessions, Showing Extent of Public Surveys, Indian, Military, and Forest Reservations, Railroads, Canals, National Parks and Other Details, 1913

Plate 12

Filibert Roth and Bernhard E. Fernow, Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin (Washington: US Department of Agriculture, 1897)

Plate 13

“White River Plateau Timber Reserve, Showing Distribution of Commercial Timber, Burned Areas, etc.,” 1898

Plate 14a “Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Wooded, Burned, and Restocked Areas, and the Density of Merchantable Timber,” 1897 Plate 14b “Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Distribution of Timber Species,” 1897 Plate 15a John G. Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Density of Forests,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report Plate 15b John G. Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Range of Principal Timber Trees, Irrespective of Burned Areas,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report Plate 15c John G. Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Burned Areas,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report Plate 16

Bernhard E. Fernow, “Forest Distribution in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Sheet,” in Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation Canada, 1912)

xii · i l l u s t r a t i o n s

introduc tion

Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman

Maps are inherently unnatural. This statement may seem an odd proposition to begin a book that argues for the greater analysis of historical maps in fostering our understanding of the environment. Projecting three-­ dimensional realities onto two-­dimensional surfaces, maps are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place. They can never provide a complete inventory of natural elements, but it is in their selections and silences that maps reveal what their makers perceive as important in any given environment. Seemingly static representations of a specific space at a given time, maps also reflect power dynamics and cultural values at the point of their creation and perhaps over time through shifting interpretations. They embody cultural constructions of nature and, in turn, become such constructions. These very characteristics impel us to give historical maps preeminence in examining how humans have interacted with the natural world. Interpreting maps in their historical context, we discover that these cartographic abstractions encapsulated stories about human relations with nature, and about relations between humans vis-­à-­vis competition for land, water, and other resources—and even for the right to name those resources. Maps also were contingent and aspirational documents, telling us not only what people perceived, but what they hoped to find or create in their experiences with dynamic environments. Thus, mapping constituted a culturally laden depiction of nature and a primary form of engagement with it. Maps were critical to the ways in which transatlantic cultures imagined 1

the Americas from the first Euro-­American contacts. Maps and views mediated the contest for empire and the emergence of new national identities. Geographical imagery shaped evolving ideas about the geography, natural resources, landscapes, and peoples of the Western Hemisphere.1 These images registered encounters between radically different forms of topographic and historical representation and ways of understanding space and nature. And indigenous peoples, as some of the essays in this book reveal, not only provided European mapmakers with vital information on physical features and natural amenities; many adapted the medium to their own cultural forms to assert land claims. Later modern landscape art, topographical drawing, tourist mapping, and commercial and government cartography shaped imaginations of the landscapes of the Americas and promoted the greater settlement, development, and consumption of resources. In time these representations became more concrete than their makers intended and, for some people, more concrete than the actual environments they proposed to depict. As Robert Karrow, the former curator of maps at the Newberry Library, observes: “A map . . . [generally] tends to carry an invisible nonfiction label, an implied certification that it is factual and trustworthy. This is especially true when the map meets high standards of design and production.”2 Nonetheless, mapmakers always have been selective in the “facts” they present. They have no choice but to make choices. No abstraction, regardless of the level of scientific accuracy, can fully represent all details of a particular space, no matter how large or how small. Mapmakers select which elements to include and which to conceal, and what is hidden—the cartographic silences—is equally important. Empty spaces on maps do not reflect gaps in knowledge. They are “positive statements” that often involve the deliberate withholding of information.3 Employing maps as forms of rhetoric, their creators targeted specific audiences and invoked authority for their selections, often through science or government.4 And with this authority, these abstractions also possess “the demonstrable power to organize social energies so as to bring into being the visions of the world they posit.”5 Thus, it is the mapmakers’ choices that we must interrogate more fully to unearth the constructions of nature contained therein. This collection of essays is perhaps the first book to fully contemplate historical maps as the primary evidentiary sources in examining the evolution of environmental knowledge in the Americas. Mapping Nature across the Americas emerges in part from a National Endowment for the Humanities–­ sponsored summer institute, of the same name, for college and university professors at the Newberry Library. The institute brought together the 2 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

fields of environmental history and history of cartography to illuminate their essential connections and to broaden participants’ appreciation of how maps and depictions of nature shaped and were shaped by diverse cultural and historical contexts. Except for the author of one essay, all contributors were participants or faculty members in the institute. The breadth of the Newberry Library’s collections, well represented in the images herein, allowed us to take a long view of the interplay between mapping and the human-­nature relationship over a span of five hundred years, exploring how they coexisted in specific works and contexts to mold ideas about space, landscape, natural history, ethnography, economic exploitation, and politics. At the same time, the interdisciplinary approach of the both the institute and this book stretches comfortable academic boundaries. One of the most explosive fields of history over the past four decades, environmental history has drawn practitioners from disciplines across the humanities and the social and physical sciences to study the role of nature in the human past. In a series of groundbreaking works, it explains how nature has influenced human life and, in turn, how humans have crafted the environments in which they lived. Environmental history, as Donald Worster argues, “rejects the conventional assumption that human experience has been exempt from natural constraints, that people are a separate and ‘supernatural’ species, that the ecological consequences of their past deeds can be ignored.”6 The field opened the door to a deep, multifaceted examination of the historical relationship between human societies and their environments—in much the same way that the historical study of mapping offers insights into the ways that humans perceive, interact with, and construct the world around them. Environmental historians also consider how “nature” itself is a construction or, as environmental historian William Cronon styles it, “a human idea, with a long and complicated cultural history which has led different human beings to conceive of the natural world in very different ways.”7 An interdisciplinary field by definition and in practice, environmental history uses a wide array of resources, including those from literature, religious texts, natural history, data on climatic and geological changes, and studies of plant and animal life.8 With some notable exceptions, however, when its practitioners have employed maps, they have done so only to provide illustrations or geographic context for other source materials.9 “Maps are well known but less well understood. . . . Historians have tended to relegate maps—along with paintings, photographs, and other nonverbal sources—to a lower division of evidence than the written word.”10 Historians need greater geographic imagination. All stories take place within i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 3

spaces, but when historians limit their interpretations of maps, those spaces become static. Environmental historians have played a crucial role in treating dynamic environments as much more than simply the background for human activity. The field must take a similarly strong approach to spatial analysis, making maps foundational texts for studying the role of nature in the human past. Over the last four decades, historical cartographic scholarship also saw dramatic changes, benefiting significantly as art historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have appreciated maps as cultural artifacts. Historians of cartography challenged the traditional narrative of their field—the story of the unfolding of the world map, revealed by Western explorers and geographers and enabled by the steady improvement in the accuracy and scientific sophistication of cartographic methods and technologies. The emergence of mathematical surveys for military, hydrographic, and national mapping revolutionized cartography and promoted the notion that mapping was a dispassionate science. Advances in production, especially color prints, allowed mapmakers to include more natural details in more sophisticated ways.11 Yet we now realize that even these new, seemingly objective methods were imbued with cultural values as well as economic and political motivations.12 Historians of cartography have “tried to peel back the layers of anonymity and objectivity with which many maps have been clothed.”13 Expressing points of view, they recognized, map are cultural constructions as much as they are products of science. These attempts to model the world were profoundly shaped by prevailing worldviews and the contexts in which they were created. Historical maps, as cartographic historian J. B. Harley observes, “illuminate cultural history or the social values of a particular period or place.”14 These shifts in emphasis have pushed map scholars to explore unstudied or understudied aspects of mapping, such as social geography, propaganda, and the relationship between mapping and art. However, cartographic studies have not yet fully delved into the essential, influential, and transformative constructions of nature embodied in these historical artifacts. Living in the Anthropocene, where human activity has been the most dominant influence on climate and the environment, this lack of attention is striking. Mapping Nature across the Americas, therefore, compels cartographic historians and environmental historians alike to expand their analytical framework and evidentiary foundations, and to contemplate the many faces of “spatialized nature” that maps pre­sent.15 However static cartographic representations remain on the paper, they retain a dynamism in their creation, 4 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

interpretation, and influence that mirrors the vitality of human society and the natural world. In provocative essays, our contributors investigate maps as complex sources—as carriers of ideas about nature and as participants in the human history of the environment. The authors discern the tentativeness of the data on which they depend and elucidate the contexts in which they emerged.16 As Harley notes, “Maps do not simply reproduce a topographical reality; they also interpret it.” Physical maps mold “the more elusive cognitive maps” drawn by generations across the Americas, shaping their actual interactions with the natural world.17And it is these interpretations and the interactions they spawn that offer fertile ground for the merger of environmental history and the history of cartography. Maps are a means to expand our understanding of the human-­nature bond. We seek to understand the “undeniable, if sometimes elusive, way of expressing knowledge of, mastery of, and control over the environments they depict.”18 This book reveals that this mastery was often fictive, as the objects, creatures, and landscapes that humans labeled as “natural” were intertwined with cultural concepts and embedded in the maps used to describe them. We have adopted a hemispheric approach as we establish the primacy of cartographic evidence in environmental analysis. Concentrating on the Americas sharpens the geographic focus of this volume, providing greater comprehension of how peoples with diverse traditions developed distinctive customs in their encounters with and mapping of nature. As Worster observes, “If modern history has a single, fabled point of beginning, it is here with Columbus’s finding of the Americas. They had not been lost, they had simply not existed heretofore in the European mind. Now suddenly there they loomed, all shining with hope and invitation for the new people of power: an array of islands, continents, tropical jungles, a promise of gold and spices and who knew what else . . .” 19 Maps played crucial roles in the ways peoples of the distant hemispheres interacted. Maps facilitated and drove European interventions in the Americas. “The advent of the printing press made maps readily multipliable,” and stimulated consumption of these geographic representations.20 And while cartography has been seen predominantly through Eurocentric lenses, particularly with respect to the centuries following contact, new cartographic analyses of the last four decades have allowed us to reexamine maps of “conquest” for the ways in which they appropriated indigenous knowledge or used silences to try to erase an indigenous presence. Moreover, indigenous and enslaved peoples provided environmental knowledge essential to cartographic creation and, over time, adapted and used cartographic forms to their own cultural ends on several occasions. i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 5

Our chronological scope emphasizes the historical contingencies of environmental and cartographic knowledge, and their places of merger. Many of the essays contained herein investigate maps from this era of early modern globalization, which the historians J. R. McNeill and William McNeill describe as “a painful, sometimes brutal process.”21 There were major provocations within established religions, through reformations, revivals, and schism. Empiricism challenged traditional science. In politics, revolutions were afoot as monarchies failed or fell. And protocapitalist efforts reshuffled fortunes in favor of merchant classes.22 Maps that underwrote these shifts appeared to be “part of an episteme of rationalization,” as the historian Elizabeth Sutton observes.23 In studying historical maps of this era, however, we are reminded of the many possible outcomes that might have followed contact between the earth’s Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Other developments from the scientific revolution—such as the concept of a universe governed by natural laws, or the emergence of natural history grounded in observation and focused on categorization— increasingly influenced mapmakers. Similarly, with the Enlightenment, the notion that societies existed within defined national interests also increasingly took hold. Various factors such as geography, natural features, language, and culture often defined nations.24 Maps and the nature they portrayed played profound roles in these processes, even as those maps or viewers’ assumptions about them camouflaged expressions of political power. As Denis Wood contends, “Defining the map as a representation of part of the earth’s surface naturalizes the map. Naturalizing the map has the effect of universalizing it, and this helps obscure the modern map’s origins in the rise of the state.”25

We have sorted our essays into three sections focused on both those who created the maps and those whose knowledge informed the maps, or whose labor shaped the environments depicted. These categories—the people’s nature, the reinventor’s nature, and the state’s nature—are to some extent arbitrary and nebulous. In reality, a number of themes run through and connect the chapters, such as the economic, cultural, and environmental exchanges embodied within historical maps; the emergence of new scientific cartographic methods to represent space and categorize nature; and the use of maps to establish or reinforce hegemony over people and nature. Via these categories, we do not intend to suggest any chronological progression that elevates the old narrative of an unfolding world map accom6 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

plished through cartographic improvements. Our contributors vigilantly reveal the sociopolitical and economic imperatives that have informed and pervaded the maps they study. To facilitate teaching with this volume, we also identify and define some of the types of maps found in Mapping Nature across the Americas in the following paragraphs. Readers also will find in an appendix a useful guide, “Critical Map Reading for the Environment,” suitable for their own research needs and appropriate for the introduction of cartographic sources in secondary schools and colleges. the people ’ s nature

In various ways, the essays in this section illustrate how otherwise marginalized peoples, particularly indigenous societies and enslaved populations, remained a vital presence in the Americas and within maps intended to convey their subjugation or removal. Vibrant peoples working within dynamic environments, these communities shaped and named much of the nature depicted within cartographic spaces. And at times they used the environmental knowledge garnered through their traditions and labor to subvert or escape domination or to claim their place within a new political order. Mapa Sigüenza, for example, appears to constitute an attempt by its makers, most likely the Aztecs, to reassert their history and connection to the land. Fig. 0.1 is a nineteenth-­century copy of this late-­sixteenth- or early-­seventeenth-­century map depicting the Aztec conquest of the Valley of Mexico. The migratory story begins in their traditional island home of Aztlän (the green hill in the square), and proceeds to Tenochtitlán (the nopal cactus at the crossed canals). A footprinted path indicates movement across time and space. Entering the valley near Chapultepec (the Hill of the Grasshopper), the map addresses relations between Aztecs and other groups, especially violent conflicts, as well as the retreat into the marshy lake. The history ends with the Aztecs founding Tenochtitlán, the city at the center of their empire.26 There also are hints here of the empire’s environmental foundations. The Aztecs initially adapted to the valley’s swampy marshes with a form of island farming. As they conquered the remainder of the valley, they irrigated drier areas.27 In a similar vein, the art historian Jennifer Saracino begins our discussion with an analysis of a 1560 map of colonial Teotihuacan, Mexico, from the Newberry Library, and subsequent copies of it. In an era when European maps acted as imperialist tools, indigenous actors offered a distinctive challenge. Recognizing the power of the visual text, they adapted their own i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 7

Fig. 0.1 Mapa Sigüenza (Nahuatl glyph map of Aztec migration from Aztlan to Tenochtitlán). MS, sixteenth century; 1830 ms. copy. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

cultural cartographic elements within pictorial maps to assert land claims. A pictorial map like Mapa Sigüenza operates on multiple scales, depicting space artistically to tell a story rather than model reality. Indeed, indigenous mapmakers consciously chose to highlight their lineal connections to past elites to justify their land claims. The historian Kelly Hopkins alternatively examines four maps from the 1600s and 1700s, offered by Europeans to support their colonial claims to lands surrounding the eastern Great Lakes. Yet, given their dependence on Native American knowledge of the region, the invaders produced representations revealing that “the Haudenosaunee exploited an expansive geographic territory for hunting, fishing and trade, and worked to protect those ecosystems.” And when the Haudenosaunee could no longer prevent European encroachment into Iroquois territory, they transformed their relations with the environment to participate in the Atlantic world market economy. Hopkins elevates her essay by analyzing the cartouches, or 8 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

decorative frames, that offer allegorical summaries of the contents of imperial maps. These cartouches often highlighted abundant resources and the promise of greater profits with investment and settlement. As the environmental historian Mart Stewart observes, they offered a “conditional statement about landscape and landscape change . . . meant to express dynamic environmental relationships rather than promote static ones.”28 Engaging a rich historiography that explores cultural appropriation as an intrinsic part of imperial mapping, the geographer Craig Colten examines the abundance and persistence of indigenous names for the waterways of Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana. Like Hopkins, Colten primarily uses planimetric maps, which represent horizontal positions of geographic features, to demonstrate that the different European powers initially claiming authority over these areas allowed for a comparative analysis. In the end, Colten concludes that their mapmakers did not simply appropriate names, and that their efforts at empire building depended intrinsically upon local knowledge of nature. The historian Michelle Zacks employs maps from the US Coast Survey (now the Office of Coast Survey), formed in 1807—one of the US government’s first scientific organizations. The agency’s task was to facilitate commerce and national defense by producing nautical charts that identified the shoreline, water depths, and navigation hazards. In the process, as Zacks demonstrates, its mapmakers offered detailed studies of specific maritime spaces, some shaped by captive labor and others intimately understood by African Americans, both freed and enslaved, who navigated the Chesapeake in the oystering trade and in their path to emancipation. the reinventor ’ s nature

As transatlantic cultures vied for dominion in the Americas, maps remained vital to the enterprise. They used geographic features to define political boundaries, regardless of the level of control on the ground, and identified resources for economic exploitation. With the scientific revolution in Europe, however, encounters with the distant and seemingly foreign environments of the Western Hemisphere allowed others to reimagine nature and its cartographic interpretations. Scientists and other explorers used maps to express spatial relations, but also to convey knowledge of the material world. Maps increasingly represented the human-­nature relationship on multiple scales and through many modes of expression. For example, the Prussian geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt generated abstract and schematic maps during his trip to the Americas between 1799 i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 9

Fig. 0.2 Cross-­section of the volcano Chimborazo, Ecuador, published by Alexander von Humboldt in the “Geographie des plantes equinoxiales,” in his volume Essai sur la geographie. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

and 1804. Through his cross-­section image of Chimborazo, the dormant volcano and highest mountain in Ecuador, for example (fig. 0.2), he hoped that the “spatial distribution (of biota) might reveal the complex interdependence in the natural world.”29 Ernesto Capello, a professor of history and Latin American studies, contemplates the reinvention of a specific landscape through the development of a scientific understanding of a mountain range. Traveling to 10 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

South America as part of an expedition to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the equator, the eighteenth-­century French explorers Charles Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer spent some ten years in what is now Ecuador. Among other achievements, they broke through certain European anxieties about “the mountain” with an innovative schematic map that deemphasized the altitude of an individual peak. Instead, they offered a less intimidating horizontal view that depicted the Andes as a range. The work of La Condamine greatly influenced Humboldt, as is clear in the image of Chimborazo. In chapter 6, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, a profesi n t r o d u c t i o n  · 11

sor of Caribbean and Latin American literature, offers a close, thoughtful reading of Humboldt’s writings during his journey on the Orinoco with Aimé Bonpland in 1800, to reveal how geographic and natural knowledge were constructed in Humboldt’s mind and expressed in cartographic imagery. Breaking free of Enlightenment traditions, she contends, Humboldt merged science and art, or observation and imagination, to see “Nature” as an interconnected whole. Humboldt’s maps and ideas of a holistic universe, in turn, had sweeping impacts on future generations.30 While Humboldt, La Condamine, and Bouguer reimagined nature through observation and experimentation, other mapmakers reinvented nature by presenting aspirational images. The historian Brian Bockelman, for example, analyzes the presence of nonnative flora—the palm tree—in colonial maps, and later on the streets of Buenos Aires. These trees did not simply constitute a misrepresentation of nature. Rather, Bockelman contends, mapmakers consciously borrowed the long-­established cartographic trope of the palm tree to convey South America’s exoticism and commercial possibilities. This trope proved so persuasive over time that Argentines were compelled to incorporate the palm tree into their physical landscape. Raymond Craib, a historian of cartography, portrays another imagined environment. The “route of Cortéz” was not a concrete place at all. Rather, in the late nineteenth century, through writings, artwork, and cartographic representations, it became a place of the imagination, promulgated to tell a foundational saga in Mexico’s history and, in turn, to recreate a landscape in which it supposedly occurred. Historical authenticity, Craib suggests, was found less in the actual events of conquest than in cartographic and artistic metaphors that elided the violence of imperialism. the state ’ s nature

By the late nineteenth and twentieth century, state bureaucracies in nations across the Americas became more entrenched at the same time that more mathematical mapping methods emerged, creating the appearance of geography as an objective science. Bureaucratic structures enhanced state capacity by maintaining control and order, or, as the political scientist James C. Scott argues, by making a complex society or a complex natural world more legible. State-­produced maps served these goals by seemingly offering images of rationality, efficiency, and knowledge.31 And through its widespread distribution of these maps, the state imbued the geographic profession with its authority.

12 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

Moreover, the nations that emerged across the Americas are settler colonial states. Such projects sought land and the construction of permanent, racially homogenous communities that aimed for “the elimination of the native.” Settler colonial societies across the Americas utilized similar political structures and cultural narratives to justify their actions. They argued that indigenous peoples failed to use the land adequately or appropriately. Colonial actors divided the land into private property, justifying their efforts as economic improvements and claiming sovereignty and legal authority.32 Bureaucratic mapmaking constituted an essential part of settler colonialism. Lorenzo Veracini reminds us that settler colonialism is an ongoing process. State-­sponsored cartography, observes geographer Cole Harris, is one of the “disciplinary strategies associated with the management of people, nature and space” which “have tended to simplify complex realities.”33 Such maps provided the government imprimatur for land seizures, cultural erasures, and persistent control within settler colonial regimes. Perhaps nothing demonstrates these points as clearly as the Land Ordinance of 1785 and subsequent laws that authorized government surveyors to divide much of what became the continental United States into six-­by-­ six-­mile townships. The cadastral maps that emerged from surveys show the boundaries of these administrative units. Expressing the Cartesian logic of Western science, they rationalized nature and facilitated the sale of land by dividing those units, such as the townships of the Bounty Lands of the Illinois Territory (originally intended for veterans of the War of 1812), into smaller parcels of 160 acres each (fig. 0.3) The ideology embedded in the cadastral map supposedly insured the yeoman farmer’s participation in democratic government, but also justified white settlement of and Native American displacement from the continent by effectively obliterating indigenous patterns of land use. These maps, and subsequent ones from the US Biological Survey and the US Geological Survey, also suggested that nature consisted of nothing more than commodities to be identified, distributed, and developed, with no sense of the larger ecological whole.34 In exploring efforts to map the riverine border between Mexico and the United States, environmental historian Mary Mendoza’s chapter offers a bridge between the preceding section on reimaging nature and the following essays on the state’s cartographic authority. She extrapolates a different type of nature, neither fully concrete nor fully imagined, but instead always shifting. Between the two nations, she argues, the political border was neither as visible nor as fixed as maps suggested. Nature in this story

i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 13

Fig. 0.3 John Gardiner, Map of the Bounty Lands, Illinois (Washington: General Land Office, 1818). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

is dynamic, chaotic, and perhaps elusive. The Rio Grande moved, complicating territoriality and sovereignty and undermining efforts to define it cartographically. Sara Gregg, another environmental historian, explains how the US Department of the Interior attempted to demonstrate its mastery of the arid and semiarid regions of the American West and induce their settlement by inventorying the region’s topographic and hydraulic features. This effort was part of a larger, ongoing, and aspirational state project to rationalize public land policy under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. As Gregg highlights, the department’s thematic maps simplified a complex space by depicting the spatial distribution of these geographic and natural phenomena in a quantitative graphic form. In the end, she concludes, control of the environment on the ground proved more illusory. In the twentieth century, the role of the nation-­state in the process of defining and mapping nature became more firmly entrenched, and in doing so, it increasingly reflected sovereign authority over science as well as political boundaries. For example, since their nation’s founding and led by their government, Canadians sought to better understand their country’s political, social, and ecological landscape—a task made more difficult by its sheer size. The geographers Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn analyze the evolving scientific methods in mapping and data management employed in such ventures, from aerial photography to geographic information systems (GIS). These new technologies have advanced the production of information but, as Dyce and Wynn explain, the resultant maps have raised new questions about “accuracy, omission, and truth.” The philosopher Peter Nekola suggests that echoes of the Humboldtian imagination can be found in government maps of US and Canadian forests in the late nineteen and twentieth century. While both national governments intended to aid the lumber interests through cartographic resource inventories, the maps they produced increasingly seemed to incorporate more holistic theories from the emerging sciences of forestry and ecology. Cartographers focused less on timber strands and more on interconnected forest systems; equally important, they recognized value in correlating patterns across different maps to protect their long-­term sustainability. epilogue

The final essay in this book is “A View from across the Pond,” an epilogue by Catherine Dunlop, an American scholar of mapmaking and environ-

i n t r o d u c t i o n  · 15

mental history in Europe, where many of the cartographic traditions explored herein originated. Dunlop observes that the archive of the Americas is “uniquely positioned” for a synthesis of the history of cartography and environmental history, though the methods used herein are broadly applicable in “a range of global geographic contexts.” In addition to elucidating the themes that connect these chapters, Dunlop shows how maps of nature—and, by extension, this book—can be used in the classroom to teach core historical methods, as well as the complexity and contingencies of mapmaking and ideas of nature.

In the end, our attention to maps as foundational texts stretches across academic boundaries, bringing together contributors from the history of cartography, environmental history, geography, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields. These maps are both abstract and material. They are ephemeral and enduring. They offer seemingly fixed representations of particular spaces but, upon analysis, also reveal the dynamism of nature and society. Tools that have helped humans understand the spaces in which they live and interact, maps have instrumentalized the nature that humans encountered and shaped within those spaces. As the novelist Reif Larsen writes, “A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”35 Maps enhance our comprehension of the always complicated, ever shifting connections between humans and nature, while negotiating the exercise of power over resources. Historically contingent documents, products of the many contextual factors that shaped their creation and use, these maps have revealed how people have perceived the Americas and engaged with their myriad environments, and, in the end, how they have found themselves changed by their nature as well.

16 · i n t r o d u c t i o n

chap ter one

staking cl aims on native l ands The Symbolic Power of Indigenous Cartographic Convention in the Ayer Map of Teotihuacan, Mexico (1560), and Its Copies

Jennifer Saracino

In the Newberry Library’s Ayer Collection, a map of Teotihuacan, an archaeological site about thirty miles northeast of present-­day Mexico City, depicts the boundaries between the properties of three indigenous proprietors (plate 1). The map shows the men standing in different areas of the site, separated by bold black lines that differentiate property boundaries. Scholars have long been drawn to the map’s inclusion of the ruins of the pre-­Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, abandoned about five hundred years before the Mexica people established the Aztec empire in the central Valley of Mexico.1 The Mexica venerated the ruins of Teotihuacan as the origin site of their ancestors. They believed that life on earth occurred in five successive ages, each heralded by the creation of a separate sun. The fifth and present age, in which we currently live, began at Teotihuacan, where the gods Tecuciztecatl and Nanauatzin threw themselves into a great fire to become the sun and the moon.2 The two great pyramids of Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, were both named for these deities, and the mapmakers included both pyramids in their depiction of the site.

19

The map is oriented with east at the top, and the ruins of Teotihuacan border its western edge toward the bottom, where two parallel lines mark the Avenue of the Dead, the three-­mile-­long axial road that extended the length of the city. At the map’s southern end, on the map viewer’s right, the road terminates in a large red circle emanating black wavy lines. This shape marks the Ciudadela, a sunken plaza that housed the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the city’s pre-­Hispanic rulers may have once lived.3 At the far north of the avenue, on the map viewer’s left, a stepped hill form denotes the Pyramid of the Moon. A similar upside-­ down mound closer to the map’s center symbolizes the Pyramid of the Sun. Scattered across the map are brief explanations of the map’s features written in Nahuatl, a language that continued to be widely spoken by the native population after Spanish conquest. At one point there were at least three known copies of this map. The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the Saville copy, the Newberry Library in Chicago possesses the Ayer copy, and a third iteration, now lost, is referred to as the Mazapan map (fig. 1.1), which contained the most detail and might have been an eighteenth- or nineteenth-­ century copy of the missing original source.4 The visually distinctive maps combine European and indigenous cartographic conventions. The planimetrically rendered boundaries and river would have been legible to Spanish authorities; but certain elements, such as the footprints to symbolize roads or the indigenous pictographic symbols for place names, may have been less familiar. The added Nahuatl glosses (fig. 1.2) help clarify the map’s more nebulous features, including its date of production (written as 1560), though several scholars believe that they were likely added to the map much later.5 Why was the first version of this map made? Why was it then copied at least twice over the course of more than a hundred years? What do these maps collectively tell us about changing concepts of land throughout the colonial period and into the twentieth century, as well as the negotiation of these contested ideas among Teotihuacan’s diverse population? This chapter demonstrates how the careful analysis of the Teotihuacan maps’ content and formal characteristics reveals how its indigenous creator(s) conceptualized their rightful claim to the land during a period when the very definitions of land, land tenure, and land rights were continually challenged and reconstituted by Spanish colonial authorities. As part of this analysis, this chapter provides an overview of indigenous mapping practices in central Mexico, and the potency of indigenous-­made maps as tools for negotiation with Spanish authorities in land disputes. Through-

20 · c h a p t e r

one

Fig. 1.1 Reproduction of lost Mazapan map of unknown provenance, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century. From José María Arreola, “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacán, vol. 1, part 2, plate 148 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

out the colonial period, the Spanish Crown’s increasing encroachment upon native lands fostered the continued production and subsequent preservation of maps created by indigenous individuals to assert their rights; similar circumstances likely led to the Teotihuacan map’s initial creation and subsequent copying. A recognizable “indigenous” quality in these maps hints at their potency and efficacy as tools of negotiation with Spanish authorities. Their existence attests to the ways that indigenous mapmakers attempted to subvert or resist oppressive colonial policies by harnessing the symbolic authority of indigenous maps, made visible by pre-­Hispanic and early colonial indigenous cartographic conventions. These maps embody a particular paradox of colonization in which participatory mapping was used in service of the Spanish authorities but ensured the continuity of indigenous cartographic conventions and pre-­ Hispanic cosmological associations of Teotihuacan. As will be explained in this chapter, the mapmakers visualized their claims to the land not only through clearly demarcated boundary lines and markers, but also through

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 21

Fig. 1.2 Legend of glosses in the reproduction of the lost Mazapan map of unknown provenance, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century. From José María Arreola, “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacán, vol. 1, part 2 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922), 549–94. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

the careful selection of visual symbols and iconography that denoted enduring and potent indigenous cultural associations with the landscape. Thus, the indigenous mapmakers’ rights to the land were not just proprietary in nature, but inherent due to their cultural and cosmological associations with the landscape, attained through long-­standing occupation of the site dating back to their ancestors. The mapmakers made these associations visible on the map in a number of ways, as will be demonstrated throughout this chapter. However, the maps did not stay in their original context, to be used as evidence by indigenous actors in land disputes amid continually shifting colonial policies. Instead, they became collectors’ items, acquired by various institutions in the United States, and acquired new significations and meanings. Thus, this chapter also describes how an analysis of these maps amid these shifting contexts tells us much about indigenous conceptions of the land throughout the colonial period, and how the maps’ ultimate removal from the pueblos that made them parallels the expropriation of indigenous lands at Teotihuacan.

22 · c h a p t e r

one

indigenous mapmaking traditions in early colonial mexico

Although few known pre-­Hispanic maps exist today, many early colonial examples of indigenous maps have survived. These examples display common pictorial conventions and structural similarities unlike those of European maps of the time. Thus, scholars generally agree that these maps exemplify characteristics stemming from a long-­established pre-­Hispanic mapping tradition.6 Indigenous maps generally fall into four main categories: cosmographical maps; cartographic histories; celestial maps of the night sky; and property plans and city plans, or cadastral maps.7 Cadastral maps and property plans pictorially described properties, plots of lands, boundaries, and land claims. As Barbara Mundy aptly observed, “. . . Such property maps quickly gained prominence as native peoples, especially the Aztecs, adapted to the demands of Spanish colonial law and government by using maps as proof of possession.”8 Indigenous maps, particularly property plans and pictorial land claims, continued to be made after the Conquest for use in legal and judicial contexts, specifically in disputes over property possession and land rights. The viceregal government requested many of these maps as part of a new colonial land grant (merced ) system intended to regulate land distribution and property possession. After the Conquest, the government initially rewarded Spanish conquistadors with tracts of land, as well as entitlements of indigenous labor, for their service to the Crown. Throughout the First Audiencia (the court and governing body of the Spanish Crown) in New Spain, the conquistadors exploited the system, overworking and overtaxing the indigenous population and greedily usurping territories beyond their legal rights. After his arrival in 1535, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza instituted a new land grant system with strict regulations in an effort to mitigate the sociopolitical disorder wreaked by the activities of the First Audiencia. In the new merced system, Mendoza granted plots of land through a standardized process.9 In this system, indigenous people were also eligible to seek land grants as a means to confirm their existing rights to lands or receive permission to raise livestock.10 The viceroy implemented strict regulations for the process of requesting mercedes. First, the audiencia issued an acordado—that is, a written record of the grant. Then, the local corregidor or alcalde mayor (types of government officials) in charge of the area under request sent the acordado to its designated recipients. It was the responsibility of the local official to ensure that

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 23

the grant did not encroach on lands already owned by either natives or Spaniards. As part of this act, the official announced the site and size of the grant to the local population, and collected testimony about the status of the lands to be granted. Finally, local inhabitants produced a map, or pintura, as a final testament to the requested land’s availability for a merced. The land grant acordados clearly stipulated features that the pintura should depict. The pintura should show settlements and fields and demonstrate that the lands were the legally mandated distance away from other fields and ranches.11 The majority of extant colonial maps in the Tierras branch of the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City come from these mercedes proceedings.12 Pinturas, or maps, made for the mercedes proceedings, comprised just a part of the florescence of pictographic documents made during Mendoza’s tenure as viceroy of New Spain. After his arrival, the viceroy implemented special jurisdictional authority to handle legal matters specifically for the indigenous population.13 Mendoza often personally investigated these legal matters, and indigenous litigants submitted information regarding property and land tenure via pictographic codices or maps, providing evidence for these lawsuits. The act of copying maps was a salient characteristic of indigenous mapping in colonial Mexico, particularly in legal proceedings. Maps, codices, or painted manuscripts submitted as legal evidence often had to undergo additional processing in order to be certified as legal documents.14 As discussed by Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, in a particular case that occurred in the pueblo of Tlacotepec, two members of indigenous nobility fielded a complaint regarding a property dispute. Both individuals brought forth codices, or painted manuscripts, as evidence of their claims. Two tlacuiloque (native artists) then copied the maps for their incorporation into the judicial record.15 As Medrano points out: This activity . . . suggests that a wide circle of tlacuiloque existed in the colony, functioning as notaries and executing copies of codices for inclusion in judicial proceedings. It is also apparent that a particular juridical ceremony existed to govern the production of these copies; the Spanish authorities had thus worked out a uniform process in which they employed artists who specialized in making copies of codices for those involved in court cases and litigation.16

In addition, Spanish authorities often asked native witnesses to read and interpret these indigenous-­made documents during a trial. Medrano cites 24 · c h a p t e r

one

a 1575 trial in which Spanish authorities asked the natives of Texcoco for pictorial evidence that the residents of Tenango served as tenant farmers to the Texcoco tlatoque (indigenous nobility). Immediately, the native Texcocans submitted a codex made in 1544 and noted that they possessed two additional copies made in 1560 and 1561, safeguarded by the principales (indigenous leaders) of the pueblo.17 By highlighting these various cases, Medrano and others have pointed out that the legal system in New Spain, particularly under the leadership of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, provided an avenue for the participation of the indigenous population in the colonial legal system. The fact that Spanish authorities actively demanded indigenous-­made maps and pictorial documents as evidence in court not only helped preserve indigenous cartographic traditions but also reinforced and made visible indigenous cultural associations with the landscape. As such, members of the indigenous population actively participated in and contributed to cartographic culture, preserving aspects of indigenous cartographic tradition and cultural associations with the landscape while adapting it to meet the demands of their local realities. The maps of Teotihuacan seem to stem from this larger tradition of indigenous-­made maps used in colonial legal proceedings. The mapmakers’ emphasis on boundaries and the location of fields, site names, and explanatory glosses indicate that the map’s primary function was most likely in a legal context. indigenous cartographic conventions

Although the Teotihuacan maps were made after the Conquest, they exhibit many indigenous cartographic conventions. In pre-­Hispanic pictorial tradition, indigenous scribes employed a mixture of symbols, logographs (symbols that possess the phonetic value of the Nahuatl word they signify), and pictorial representation to communicate information and ideas graphically.18 Scribes used these elements in varying degrees, and their meaning was largely determined by their context and spatial arrangement to one another.19 These same principles applied to the creation of indigenous maps after the Conquest. The Depiction of Space: Multiple Perspectives · Indigenous map‑ makers often combined a variety of perspectives within the same map in order to best represent salient aspects of the representation. For example, in an image from the Codex Mendoza (fig. 1.3), a pictorial codex created by indigenous artists circa 1541, the artists rendered topographic features s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 25

Fig. 1.3 Tenochtitlán in the Codex Mendoza, c. 1541. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Photo Bodleian Libraries, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1, fol. 2r.

planimetrically, as if the viewer were directly above the city.20 A blue square symbolizing Lake Texcoco frames the island, and two canals cross the space diagonally to create the settlement’s quadripartite division. In this representation, however, the artists represented architectural features and vegetation from the front. In the top quadrant of the conceptual city, a roofed building on a platform faces the viewer directly. In the right quadrant, a rack with a pierced skull represents the tzompantli where the Mexica leaders hung the severed heads of captive warriors or sacrificial victims. Green and blue water reeds describe the lacustrine environment in which the island is situated. Ten seated figures represent the foundational leaders of Tenochtitlan. Represented in profile view, the leaders sit on mats, their knees tucked to their chests with their lordly cloaks draped around them. Two figures in the bottom margin stand in three-­quarter profile, their left hands clutching the hair of their defeated captives. The Ayer map of Teotihuacan also displays a combination of perspectives (plate 1). Bold black lines delineate divisions among the properties. The San Juan River, two parallel black lines shaded with blue pigment, divides the entire composition diagonally from left to right (northeast to southwest). Toward the western edge, two parallel black lines running from north to south denote the Avenue of the Dead. Another road runs parallel to the Avenue of the Dead, painted with red, black, and yellow ink. The mapmaker rendered these features—the river, roads, and property boundaries—planimetrically. The mapmaker changed perspectives, however, in the depiction of the natural and built environments. At the northern end of the Avenue of the Dead, the Pyramid of the Moon is depicted two-­ dimensionally, its base situated on a property line. Similarly, the Pyramid of the Sun is depicted facing the western edge of the map. In the upper right corner, a square edifice with an arched doorway on a stepped platform marks the location of Coatlan, and a large palm tree is situated on a boundary line. The three individuals whose properties and their respective boundaries are the subject of the map are depicted in three-­quarter profile. Their accompanying glosses identify them as Don Diego Mazateuctli, in the upper left within a red square; Don Juan Cuitlamizteuctli, almost directly across from him on a hill by the river; and Don Hipólito Mizquiteuctli, in the lower right-­hand corner. glyphs, symbols, and signs

Indigenous mapmakers often employed glyphic signs to indicate either the personal names of individuals or place names. In the Codex Mendoza s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 27

image, a personal name glyph is affixed to each leader via a thin black line. These glyphic spellings comprise logographic symbols.21 For example, in the left quadrant, the stone (tetl ) and cactus (nochtli ) comprise the logographic spelling of te-­NOCH, the community leader. In all of the Teotihuacan maps, two of the indigenous proprietor’s personal name glyphs are depicted. Don Diego Mazateuctli is attached to an image of a deer (mazatl in the indigenous language, Nahuatl). Don Juan Cuitlamizteuctli’s personal name glyph is a cuitlamiztli, or leopard. Curiously, Don Hipólito Mizquiteuctli lacks a personal name glyph, which one might assume would be the logographic symbol for a mesquite tree ­(mizquic). In native pictorial tradition, scribes also employed place signs to identify locations. Place name glyphs were also often made up of logographic symbols. These signs usually comprised a topographic element such as a hill sign (tepetl ) or rock (tetl ), and an additional qualifier, often a phonetic referent that indicated the pronunciation.22 In the Codex Mendoza, the eagle landing on the cactus, in the center of the composition, recalls the sign of the Mexica patron deity Huiztilopochtli, which revealed where they should establish their permanent settlement. The cactus on the rock, upon which the eagle lands, functions as a logographic place sign for the city of Tenochtitlan. The place sign is made up of two elements: the phonetic complement tetl for stone and the prickly pear cactus, the logographic symbol for nochtli (the glyph for Tenoch and Tenochtitlan were thus the same). By combining the values of these two glyphs, the viewer could recognize the place sign for Tenochtitlan. The artists of the Teotihuacan maps also employed pre-­Hispanic style glyphs to denote place names and locations. In the Ayer map, a blue sphere nested into a mound marks the place sign for Nopaltenco, whose name means “at the edge of the prickly pear patch.” Almost directly across from Nopaltenco, in the southern region of the Mazapan and Saville map, the artist painted a circle inscribed with a four-­lobed cross, the indigenous logographic symbol for shield, or chimalli. This sign names a barrio of San Francisco Mazapan called San Sebastián Chimalpan, glossed in Nahuatl as Chimalpa Caltenco (glossed as numbers 12 and 14 in José Arreola’s analysis of the maps).23 Place name glyphs were not simply name signifiers, however; they carried a wealth of cultural and topographical information. Place names could refer to the names of polities (known as altepetl ), ceremonial centers, or specific geological or topographic features.24 Others carried cosmologi-

28 · c h a p t e r

one

cal meanings, referencing sacred locations or sites of recurring religious ritual. Thus, a reader conversant in native pictography could learn much about the surrounding community’s relationship with a location, as well as its topographical or cultural connotations, by identifying place signs and their etymological roots. The artist painted a circle over the Pyramid of the Moon on all three Teotihuacan maps, no doubt recalling the pre-­Hispanic cosmological association with the pyramid. Beside the Pyramid of the Moon is a gloss that reads, “Meztli ytzácual,” or “Pyramid crypt in honor of the Moon,” most likely referencing a cave or chamber beneath the pyramid. Although there is curiously no sun symbol above the Pyramid of the Sun, a sun with an anthropomorphized face radiates over the peak of another mound toward the right of the map. This area of the site is the eastern courtyard of the Ciudadela. Its accompanying gloss notes that this site is the “place of burials in honor of the sun,” perhaps referring to pre-­Hispanic human sacrifices.25 A serpentine creature diagonally east from the Pyramid of the Sun is glossed as Tecohuac, “place of the stone serpent.” Gloss 11, where a bold black line adjacent to Tomatlan (gloss 10) terminates in a pyramidal mound, indicates “a crypt that displays pictures,” known as Tzacualcuicuilco. These references to salient pre-­Hispanic cosmological features are notable inclusions in what is primarily a property dispute. In a survey of maps drawn of Teotihuacan from the early colonial period through the twentieth century, Daniel Schávelson argued that, in indigenous representations of Teotihuacan throughout the colonial period, the site is noted in pictorial convention for both its physical and its mythical aspects. In his discussion of indigenous depictions of Teotihuacan in maps and documents such as the Codex Xolotl, Codex Huamantla, and Mapa Uppsala (all dating roughly to the sixteenth century), among others, Schávelson noted, “The city was shown, in cartography of its time, for what it signified, not only for its physical form, but what it meant [to the indigenous population] before the arrival of the Spanish and what it continued to be in traditional indigenous cartography.”26 Thus, throughout these representations, the site was most often marked by some of the following pictorial features: its two most salient stepped pyramids, the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon; a sun glyph alluding to the creation of the Fifth Age; the site’s lesser surrounding pyramids; or the subterranean ritual caves that lay beneath the earth’s surface.27 Although the archaeological features may have been included to help the viewer ascertain exact boundaries, the additional glosses and pictographic symbols underscore the continuity of

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 29

pre-­Hispanic cosmological and ritual significance.28 The mapmakers deliberately incorporated personal name glyphs, place name glyphs, and other pre-­Hispanic iconographic conventions alongside Nahuatl glosses. In this way, the mapmakers’ rightful claim to the land is not just a matter of tenure and boundaries, but is also reinforced by their profound cultural connection to the land, as depicted through iconographic conventions, glyphs, and symbols. Indigenous pictorial conventions serve to anchor the mapmakers and their lands to long-­held cultural understandings of the land and its significance, further emphasizing the artists’ ancestral and cultural ties to the landscape. In addition, they highlight the artist’s resistance to divorce the representation of landscape from these long-­held cultural associations. The Representation of People on Indigenous-­M ade Maps · In the pre-­Hispanic pictorial tradition of central Mexico, artists paid close attention to the depiction of attire and accoutrements of individuals, and this tradition carried over into the depiction of indigenous proprietors in colonial cartography. In colonial land documents, indigenous proprietors were often depicted within or beside the territories in question. Oftentimes, mapmakers anachronistically depicted these indigenous proprietors in the pre-­Hispanic attire of illustrious noble warriors or Chichimec ancestors. To the native population, clothing and accessories had long served as important cultural markers of identity. Much of what we know about indigenous dress comes from conquistadors’ and missionaries’ accounts, as well as administrative and pictorial documents.29 For quotidian daily activities, every male wore a maxtlatl, or loincloth. The most important aspect of indigenous male attire however was the tilmatl, or cloak. The tilmatl, depending on its materiality, color, decoration, and length, clearly communicated the social status of its wearer. In the Teotihuacan maps, the indigenous proprietors all wear a tilmatl over a basic tunic. The tunic does not seem to be a standard garment from pre-­Hispanic tradition, but Spaniards in sixteenth-­century pictorial codices often wear such a garment.30 The tunic and tilmatl are typical representations of indigenous dress for the period, but the proprietors’ depictions are notable for the accoutrements that the men carry. Don Diego Mazateuctli carries a long bow, Don Juan Cuitlamizteuctli holds a staff with serrated obsidian blades (known as a macana), and Don Hipólito Mizquiteuctli grips a circular shield. These accessories are all typical weapons of pre-­Hispanic indigenous warriors, often associated with the Mexica’s ancestral Chichimec lineage.

30 · c h a p t e r

one

The Mexica believed that they had descended from the intermarriage between Chichimecs, a nomadic group, and the Toltecs, a culturally sophisticated sedentary group. In early colonial pictorial documents like the Mapa Quinatzin and Codex Xolotl, the Chichimecs are depicted with unkempt hair, wearing animal skins and holding bows and arrows. In the map of Tenochtitlan from the Codex Mendoza, the warrior standing beside Culhuacan in the bottom left corner holds a macana in his right hand and a shield decorated with tufts of eagle down in his left. All the men wear the signature hairstyle of noble Mexica warriors. The indigenous proprietors of the Teotihuacan maps also wear their hair half up and fastened with a red tie in a manner similar to that of the men depicted on the first page of the Codex Mendoza. The indigenous proprietors depicted in the Teotihuacan maps are not­ ably depicted in the attire and hairstyle of noble pre-­Hispanic warriors. These portrayals seem out of place on a map of property divisions among local farmers, particularly because those farmers would not have regularly donned the regalia of elite Mexica warriors. However, these depictions, coupled with other pre-­Hispanic conventions of the map, were likely conscious choices made by the artists to reinforce the indigenous quality of the maps in order to bolster their authenticity and validity as land titles in the eyes of their intended colonial audience.31 In her discussion of Techialoyan codices, Stephanie Wood has also highlighted how indigenous artist-­mapmakers added portraits of specific archetypal indigenous figures—­Chichimec and Mexica warriors and dons and doñas cloaked in the signature white cotton tunics of the social elite—to highlight the ancestral relation to pre-­Hispanic elites in the Techialoyan manuscripts.32 These representational choices reveal that the mapmakers were aware that their self-­ representation could help their case with the Crown; that is, their decision to portray themselves as descendants of elites subtly communicated that they also merited the land based on their illustrious lineage.33 In addition, I suggest that the mapmakers’ insistence on portraying the native proprietors with these notable pre-­Hispanic accoutrements is part of a conscious effort to continue an indigenous cartographic tradition in which the proprietors are depicted as part of the landscape to which they lay claim. Their claims, as I have mentioned at the outset of this chapter, are not merely in their contemporary ownership rights or tenure, but also in their long-­ established cultural connections to the land, made visible through their direct imaging onto the landscape in the traditional attire of their venerated ancestors.

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 31

archaizing and copying indigenous maps in colonial mexico

We would not know the Teotihuacan map’s alleged date of production if it were not for a gloss by a building in the upper left quadrant that reads 1560. George Kubler has argued that the three versions of the map are most likely copies of the lost original. In addition, he noted that the glosses on the Mazapan map were probably added “as much as a half-­century after 1560.”34 Although Kubler does not state why he believes this, his attribution dates the copies to at least the early seventeenth century. A more recent analysis by Michel Oudijk and Leonardo López Luján dates the Ayer map roughly to sometime between 1700 and 1767, when it was last documented as evidence in a legal case.35 Kubler’s attribution also places the Teotihuacan maps within the same time frame as another set of “archaizing” indigenous maps known as the Techialoyan manuscripts.36 Several scholars have pointed out that the Teotihuacan mapmaker’s choice of style and composition is very similar to that of the Techialoyan codices.37 The Techialoyans share commonalities with the Teotihuacan maps in materiality, content, handwriting, artistic style, function, and provenience (pueblos in and around the State and Valley of Mexico).38 The Techialoyan maps textually and pictorially describe the local community and its lands. The features are generally accompanied by alphabetic text written in simple Nahuatl expressions (loose, sprawling handwriting) which describes the land and its proprietors (as opposed to more sophisticated and polished Nahuatl prose, typical of sixteenth-­ century documents like the Florentine Codex).39 The glosses often claim that the maps were created in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although the Teotihuacan maps are not generally categorized with Techialoyan manuscripts, a comparison of the maps to the Techialoyans is useful for illuminating why the maps were created, how they might have functioned in their original context, and how their stylistic characteristics provide important clues as to how “indigeneity” was visualized and interpreted in colonial maps.40 Materiality · The Techialoyan manuscripts are often painted on coarse amate paper. Amate is a type of paper derived from the bark of a species of fig tree native to Mexico. The bark was soaked, beaten thin, and then pressed into sheets. The sheets could be glued together to form larger sheets, and were often sized with a white gesso to prepare the surface for painting.41 The Techialoyan manuscripts, however, were typically painted on a much 32 · c h a p t e r

one

coarser and fibrous paper than what was used for manuscripts of the sixteenth century. Earlier amate tended to be smoother and lighter in color. In fact, the paper of the Techialoyans tended to be so thick that many of the manuscripts have split and unraveled in certain areas due to their softness.42 The materiality of the Ayer map of Teotihuacan closely adheres to Robertson’s description of the amate used in the Techialoyan manuscripts. Its surface is so fibrous and coarse that the backing appears much thicker than it actually is, and the mapmakers’ insistence on using amate paper is notable given the attributed date of 1700–67 for the map. As noted by Stephanie Wood, the Techialoyan authors took “unusual pains” to use amate paper, especially when many Nahuatl writers at the time made use of European paper. They did this “apparently hoping to convey a sense of antiquity and native tradition.”43 In this sense, the symbolism of the document’s materiality also serves to reinforce the mapmakers’ implicit ancestral and cultural connections to the lands, made evident not just through iconographic convention but also through the map’s substrate. Content · The Teotihuacan maps are similar to the Techialoyans in their description of the pueblos and their lands. Many of the textual labels on the Ayer map describe the fields, which parcels of land pertain to whom, and even the quality of the lands or the crops they field.44 A short written description to the right of Nopaltenco states that San Francisco Mazapan shares boundaries with the community of San Pedro. Across the boundary line from Noplatenco, next to a tear in the map’s center, is text specifying the site of Tomatlan, which José Arreola interpreted as a site where tomatoes were cultivated.45 To the far right, the southeast corner of the map, enclosed within a small box, a gloss specifies that Coloztitlan, Xomolco, and Ixquitlan share this property. Arreola interpreted the symbols inscribed in the box as glyphic symbols for those place names. Gloss 20 (following Arreola’s numbering of the text), west of the Avenue of the Dead between the footpath and river, indicates that the boundaries of Calpotitlan and Ictzotitlán end at this location. Arreola noted that written land titles document a dispute between San Francisco Mazapan and Purificación, a dependency of San Juan Teotihuacan, over this boundary.46 Just adjacent to the Pyramid of the Sun, gloss 24 states that the shared boundaries end at this location. Toward the far north, east of the Pyramid of the Moon, gloss 30 specifies that these are also lands belonging to the proprietors. Certain glosses describe the quality of the soils. Gloss 22, west of the Pyramid of the Sun and right below a sketch of what appears to be a palm s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 33

tree, states: “The lands of Ixtlilco (black, muddy lands) are ours.” Across the Avenue of the Dead from gloss 20, gloss 21 states that here lie the best and most fertile lands of the properties. Again, the depth of information communicated on a document pertaining principally to a boundary dispute reveals much about the makers’ perception of what constituted rightful claims to property. Some of these formal elements suggest that the mapmakers’ proprietary claims were reinforced by their in-­depth knowledge of the land’s soil quality and its potential yields and use, as is conveyed by the numerous glyphs and glosses detailing this information. analysis

The question that emerges, then, with this comparison between the Techialoyan manuscripts and Teotihuacan maps is: Why would native mapmakers attempt to make the documents look more than a century older than they were, and thus copy this archaizing style? As Robertson has explained, the increased production of Techialoyan maps coincided with the aggressive expansion of European-­owned haciendas from the beginning of the seventeenth century through the middle of the eighteenth. Indigenous tenants and landowners needed documents to demonstrate their rights to land. Robertson argued that these manuscripts are not forgeries per se, but that their content was most likely gathered from an array of sources, including written, pictorial, and even oral testimony.47 The older a claim, however, the more legitimate it would appear in colonial court. Thus, indigenous mapmakers creatively archaized the Techialoyans to make them seem older than they actually were. López Luján and Oudijk’s research has revealed a similar crisis of land tenure permeating the social context of Teotihuacan maps. Although the threat of an expanding hacienda did not prompt the creation or recopying of these maps, it seems that the shifting political status of neighboring barrios and pueblos might have been the cause. After the Conquest, Spanish authorities restructured the political and economic organization of New Spain in order to effectively control the indigenous population. An essential aspect of this process was the implementation of the Spanish cabecera. A cabeza or cabecera was the secular ecclesiastical capital of a district in Castile Spain.48 In New Spain, the jurisdiction of the cabeceras constituted smaller pueblos, or sujetos, that were further subdivided into barrios.49 López Luján and Oudijk have hypothesized that the dispute arose be-

34 · c h a p t e r

one

tween the communities of San Francisco Mazapan (a sujeto of the larger community of San Martín Obispo) and San Juan Teotihuacan over the boundaries of two of San Juan Teotihuacan’s barrios, Purificación and Santa María Coatlan, when the political status of these neighboring communities changed in the eighteenth century. Before 1740, according to documents in the Archivo General de la Nación, San Martín was formerly a dependent of San Juan Teotihuacan; but four years later, San Martín’s status elevated to that of a pueblo.50 Thus, San Martín suddenly became equal in status to San Juan Teotihuacan, and these adjacent communities entered into a dispute over the boundaries between them. From the outset of corregimiento—that is, the Spanish reorganization of indigenous communities in the sixteenth century—neighboring sujetos commonly disputed boundaries. Rarely ever were all the names of barrios, estancias, or fields pertaining to each sujeto documented, and thus disputes frequently arose.51 Adding to the confusion was the fact that the cabecera-­ sujeto system became largely obsolete due to death from disease, and indigenous communities were repeatedly restructured throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as appears to have happened at San Juan Teotihuacan.52 Thus, old maps, and copies of old maps, were of increasing importance in new land disputes as evidence in court. To conceptualize the multiple copies of Teotihuacan maps as merely archaizing older forms, however, is to discount their potency as cartographic tools in their contemporary context. As argued by Stephanie Wood about similarly archaizing documents, “Techialoyan manuscripts are authentic in that they grew out of, and reflect, a power struggle of the time. Their authors intended them to help restore balance to a situation in which the pueblos were perceived to be losing ground.”53 Although harking back to older pictorial forms of expression, the Techialoyans and the Teotihuacan maps alike responded to contemporary struggles over land, natural resources, and control. The Teotihuacan maps and their copies thus stand as exemplars of colonial New Spain’s cartographic culture and climate. At the outset of their creation, and in their lifetime as viable forms of evidence in court cases, the Teotihuacan maps provided a powerful counterpoint to the Spanish Crown’s hegemonic control of the colonial landscape. These maps, made by indigenous mapmakers who recall pre-­Hispanic or indigenous symbolic conventions, place names, and cosmological associations, reveal how the native population actively contributed to New Spain’s cartographic “discrete constellations”—that is, the modes of community and practice that informed the diverse array of cartographic sensibili-

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 35

ties that permeated a particular geographic region and temporal period.54 The conscious revival or adherence to indigenous pictorial traits and pre-­ Hispanic cosmological associations underscores the tenuous ideological control the Spanish held over native lands and community members, as well as the slippages inherent in the colonial apparatus within which indigenous actors could express agency or subtly subvert colonial authority. It also exemplifies what Edney has stressed as “the crucially important implications of a processual analysis from individuals functioning within small communities to the mapping activities of broader impersonal activities.”55 The orality and performative nature of these indigenous-­made maps and pictorial codices were another characteristic of indigenous tradition that would have contributed considerably to the dynamism of cartographic culture in colonial New Spain. Although these aspects are less understood due to their ephemeral nature, archival evidence attests to the fact that communities’ oral histories continued to be passed on to subsequent generations after the Conquest. Aspects of the accounts of ancestors’ migrations and origin stories can be observed in some primordial titles and the iconography of colonial maps and painted manuscripts.56 As Elizabeth Boone has stated, “The Aztec pictorial histories were read aloud to an audience, they were interpreted, and their images were expanded and embellished in the oration of the full story. The pictorial histories were painted specifically to be the rough text of a performance.”57 An integral aspect of pre-­Hispanic pictorial tradition was the fact that images functioned as graphic carriers of information that provided references to the knowledgeable reader who interpreted the documents for a larger audience. Although the Teotihuacan maps are divergent from pre-­Hispanic or early colonial migration histories in purpose (that is, they serve an evidentiary purpose for land disputes, rather than expressly recount a migration history), archival records indicate that orality and performance were still integral to their display, interpretation, and comprehension. Medrano maintains that indigenous-­produced manuscripts, maps, and titles made in the seventeenth century addressed the indigenous community’s history, and that litigants provided oral history and submitted written briefs (often in Nahuatl) that described their ancestors’ migration journey and the rites performed when they took possession of their lands.58 Thus, native colonial mapmakers and artists often transcribed community history on maps within the framework of an oral history, further preserving an often overlooked aspect of pre-­Hispanic pictorial and, by extension, cartographic culture. 36 · c h a p t e r

one

charting changing concepts of land at teotihuacan

As noted previously, the last documented use of one of the indigenous-­ made maps was in a land lawsuit in 1767. Indigenous people continued to farm and live on the site of Teotihuacan until the expropriation of the lands by the Porfirian government, led by Leopoldo Batres at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1885, Batres had been appointed the head of the General Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments of the Republic, the first agency created by the national government with the exclusive task of protecting pre-­Hispanic sites and monuments. This organization would go on to become the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).59 As Christina Bueno has discussed, the nationalization of archaeology in Mexico comprised part of the country’s own larger process of nation building in the aftermath of its independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For decades, countries such as France, the United States, and Germany undertook extensive archaeological excavations in Mexico, collecting and exporting many of Mexico’s antiquities for their own museums. Mexico sought to take control of the ruins both for its own nation-­ building and for the good of the burgeoning discipline of archaeology.60 As expertly discussed by Christina Bueno, to add further complexity to this task, Mexican elites had to face a similar problem as other postcolonial countries who embarked on such nation-­building projects: . . . that of forging an “authentic” national past in a Western-­dominated world, a world whose racial hierarchies and cultural standards Mexican leaders had not only imbibed but would reinforce. Porfirian elites were deeply influenced by the Eurocentric racist thinking of the times.61

These circumstances led Mexican elites to act in contradictory ways in their treatment of indigenous populations and cultures of the past and present. While taking exclusive control of pre-­Hispanic sites and objects as an “authentic” past upon which Mexico was built, the Mexican government simultaneously marginalized and mistreated its present indigenous population. The nationalization of archaeology under the Porfirian regime, for example, involved a systematic expropriation of lands from indigenous populations who had lived on them for generations. As the Porfirian government sought to elevate Mexico’s illustrious pre-­Hispanic past as a means of distinction from the foreign intervention that defined their colonial period, its actions were simultaneously exclusionary toward cons t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 37

temporary indigenous populations. Bueno wrote about the contradictory nature of the project: The Indian past was thought to be everything the Indian present was not. It was a space where the Indians could be imagined in ways that gave the nation prestige; it provided a refuge from the loathsome natives, a way out of the dominant racist thinking that held indigenous people to be inherently inferior. . . . It was the monuments, the objects made of clay and stone, that were thought to be the embodiments of these magnificent ancient civilizations. The government took steps to place the antiquities under state control because they had become inseparable from the nation’s image. This was a task that involved plucking them out of their context, out of the landscape and out of the grasp of a variety of people who claimed them as their own and used them day by day.62

Expropriation did not pass without protestation, however. In mid-­1906, residents of Santa María Cuatlán and San Francisco Mazapa, both sites depicted on the Ayer map of Teotihuacan, protested expropriation to the Secretariat of Education. Not without insulting the residents, Batres provided nominal compensation to those who complained, and by mid-­1907 most of the residents had sold their land.63 The shifting occupation and use of the lands surrounding Teotihuacan over the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth parallels shifting cartographic representations of the site over time. The Ayer map of Teotihuacan (1700–67) is one of the last indigenous-­made representations of the area that we know of before the site was officially expropriated by the Porfirian government. Around the same time, however, we know of the existence of one of the first maps of the area, now lost, rendered in a Western European scientific mapping tradition. It is documented in the collection of Lorenzo Boturini, who lived in New Spain, and it was likely created between 1736 and 1743.64 Boturini’s map seems to have ushered in a new era of cartographic representations of the site, rendered by foreign explorers, historians, antiquarians, and archaeologists. A little more than a century later, in 1864, Emperor Maximilian of Austria formed the Scientific Commission of Mexico. As part of its initial activities, the commission created an archaeological map of Teotihuacan with the aid of a theodolite, a precision optical instrument that measures angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. According to Daniel Schávelson, the plan executed by the Scientific Commis-

38 · c h a p t e r

one

sion became hugely influential, providing the dominant template for maps of the archaeological site up until 1922.65 In the meantime, the indigenous-­made Teotihuacan maps documented in the land disputes of the eighteenth century ended up in the hands of collectors and, ultimately, major collecting institutions in the United States. The Ayer map in the Newberry Library, for example, was rolled and separated into fragments when it reached W. W. Blake, a bookseller in Mexico City. Blake added some pencil-­marked annotations to the document, circa July 10, 1891, claiming that the document had been sold to Leopoldo Batres by an “Indian.” Later, Stansbury Hagar, who wrote about these maps, stated that the Ayer and Saville maps were both discovered by Batres at Teoti­ huacan.66 As the lands surrounding and pertaining to the immediate archaeological zone of Teotihuacan were expropriated by the General Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments of the Republic, the indigenous-­made maps themselves underwent a similar transformation. As Teotihuacan’s indigenous inhabitants lost their own proprietary rights to the monolithic force of the inspectorate, the community maps of the colonial period lost their potency as viable tools of negotiation. Instead, the inherently “indigenous” nature of the maps, made visible through materiality and iconographic convention, took on a new cultural symbolism as the Porfirian government speedily nationalized its archaeological program. Having lost their legal power, the maps were appropriated by collectors as cultural artifacts, their iconographic conventions no longer conveying contemporary conceptions and cultural associations held by an indigenous population that actively lived there. Instead, with the indigenous population finally removed, they harked back to a distant and illustrious pre-­Hispanic past that Mexico claimed for itself as the foundation of its modern postcolonial state. conclusion

Many scholars have addressed how the juxtaposition of indigenous and European cartographic conventions reflects not only changes in indigenous artistic tradition, but also the transformation of indigenous conceptions of space more broadly.67 This shift manifested visually in maps produced in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The artist’s careful imitation of these traits in the later Mazapan map demonstrates the authoritative power of this visual quality even later in the colonial period. Like the Techialoyans, the Teotihuacan maps reveal how the blending of indigenous and European

s t a k i n g c l a i m s o n n a t i v e l a n d s  · 39

conventions on a map recalled an earlier era in which indigenous artists were just learning how to make their maps legible to a European audience. This visual style dated the map, making it seem older to an eighteenth-­ century audience, and thus lending greater authenticity and validity to the artist’s claim. The Teotihuacan maps differ markedly from the Techialoyans in purpose. The Techialoyans were created to demonstrate the land rights of a given community, but the Teotihuacan map was created specifically to mediate a dispute among three different proprietors. However, the maps are strikingly similar in the way the artists consciously manipulated stylistic convention to bolster the authenticity of the claims they made. The copying demonstrates that older maps, or even maps “archaized” to look older, maintained a symbolic validity despite shifting land policies. Although the maps were made in response to the unavoidable pressures of colonial authority, they demonstrate that indigenous mapmakers were able to express at least some kind of opposition and autonomy against disenfranchising colonial policies. Despite the outcome of the litigation, the fact that the maps were made, copied, and preserved demonstrates the inherent symbolic power of the map, as well as its capacity to preserve indigenous cultural memory and cartographic conventions. However, approximately a century after the last documented use of the maps as legal evidence, the General Inspectorate, formed by the Porfirian government, deemed lands pertaining to the archaeological site of Teotihuacan as the sole property of the Mexican government. The plots were expropriated from indigenous landowners, and the maps lost their potency as viable tools of negotiation. Gone with them was the validity of the claims held by the indigenous mapmakers that their ties to the land were ancestral, cultural, and proprietary. Instead, the maps, like the indigenous concepts of land contained within them—debated and negotiated over more than three hundred years of colonial policymaking—became artifacts of the indigenous tenants’ former occupation.

40 · c h a p t e r

one

chap ter t wo

into the interior Reading the Native Landscape of the Great Lakes in European Maps, 1612–1755

Kelly Hopkins

They [American Indians] are as ignorant of Geography as of other Sciences, and yet they draw the most exact Maps imaginable of the Countries they’re acquainted with, for there’s nothing wanting in them but the Longitude and Latitude of Places: They set down the True North according to the Pole Star; The Ports, Harbours, Rivers Creeks and Coasts, of the Lakes; the Roads, Mountains, Woods, Marshes, Meadows, &c. counting the Distances by Journeys and Half-­Journeys of the Warriors and allowing to every Journey Five Leagues. These Chorographical Maps are drawn upon the Rind of your Birch Tree; and when the old Men hold a Council about War or Hunting, they’re always sure to consult them.1

In September 1753, William Johnson—formerly a colonel and Indian agent (1746–51) for the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and soon to be the British superintendent for Indian affairs for the Northern Department (1755–74)—traveled deep into Iroquoia to hold a conference with the Six Nations. As the imperial contest for control of the interior of North America intensified between France and Great Britain, Johnson upbraided the Six Nations for allowing community members to relocate north near 41

French settlements along the St. Lawrence River, and for permitting French advancement into the contested Ohio Country south of the Great Lakes. The Six Nations, or Haudenosaunee, engaged in a collective discussion of Johnson’s speech and then appointed Red Head, an Onondaga headman, to deliver their response. Red Head reassured Johnson that Haudenosaunee leaders would do all in their power to convince their relations to return to their former communities. But, Red Head explained, “we did not conceive we had done so much Amiss in going thither [New France], when we Observed that you White People pray, and we have no nearer Place to learn to Pray, and have our Children Baptized, then [sic] that.” After denying any Haudenosaunee collusion in the French incursions into the Ohio Country, Red Head remarked, “We don’t know what you Christians French and English together intend we are so hemm’d in by both, that we have hardly a Hunting place left.” The Haudenosaunee worried that “in a little while, if we find a Bear in a Tree, there will immediately Appear an Owner for the Land to Challenge the Property, and hinder us from killing it which is our livelihood, we are so Perplexed, between both, that we hardly know what to say or to think.”2 In his response, Red Head emphasized indigenous mobility as individuals, families, or other specific groups traveled widely for subsistence, religious, economic, military, or personal reasons. This mobility required intimate knowledge of a vast expanse of the surrounding natural world that included living and nonliving entities, such as watersheds and river systems, and hunting territories and communities of friend and foe, as well as ecosystems attractive to animals or productive for farming. In the late 1690s, for example, Robert Livingston, a fur trader and secretary for the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs (1696–1710), obtained an Iroquois-­ produced map of the eastern Great Lakes. The Onondagas who had drawn the map detailed Haudenosaunee spatial relations to the natural environment and its human inhabitants in an area of approximately 150,000 square miles, from the Connecticut Valley and Quebec in the east to Lake Erie in the west and the Susquehanna River in the south. While the map lacked place names, the native cartographers highlighted culturally significant features of nature. Lakes, rivers, and the portages connecting different water routes dominated the indigenous map because each played a critical role in subsistence, communication, transportation, trade, sovereignty, and survival. In addition, as Livingston recorded the Onondagas’ explanation of the spaces represented, he revealed the breadth and depth of indigenous environmental and geographic knowledge depicted on the paper.3 Most importantly, Red Head’s statements demonstrated an acute aware42 · c h a p t e r

two

ness of the challenges that westward-­expanding colonial settlements and European intrusions posed to Haudenosaunee mixed subsistence practices and native autonomy. Native men and women exploited multiple aspects of their local and distant environments for hunting, fishing, gathering, and agricultural production. When choosing a village site, residents carefully examined the natural defenses of a particular topography. Prior to 1700, the Haudenosaunee repeatedly located their villages atop high hills or peninsulas surrounded by steep ravines. Residents favored impenetrable sites near productive soils with easy access to water routes for communication, travel, trade, and subsistence. Each nation also claimed a much larger geographic domain for subsistence. Consequently, Confederacy leaders worked to retain their autonomy and the freedom to hunt, fish, travel, and trade throughout their homeland and beyond, and they thwarted European attempts to restrict or control that movement.4 While the documentary record of diplomatic conferences with Native Americans logged some of the speeches, complaints, concerns, and promises of native leaders, the multitude of languages spoken and necessary translations led to errors and omissions. In addition, these European-­ produced transcripts rarely captured the body language and fluctuations in tone of the orators, thereby ignoring critical features of indigenous diplomacy and communication. As a result, the documentary record provides an incomplete picture of the ways in which natives understood and responded to a period of rapid imperial and colonial expansion into their homelands.5 Cartographic representations of the contested space, both native- and European-­produced, provide a more complete view of the native perspective. In recent decades, historians of the early contact and colonial period have examined geographic depictions of North America to distinguish between areas of European settlement, the terra cognita; areas of European exploration but not yet of settlement, the terra semicognita; and territory known only to Native Americans, the terra incognita. The history of cartography has increasingly deconstructed maps to see beyond their scientific understanding of a geographic area and to focus on the narrative context and the political act of making a map. In the early contact period of North America, maps reflected power relations between natives and newcomers; Europeans produced the maps to lay claim to a particular space, and often “erased” natives from the scene. Recent scholarship, however, has emphasized the role natives played in safely guiding Europeans into the interior of the continent and providing intimate geographic knowledge about landscapes and peoples the “explorers” never explored. The European colonizers’ portrayal and understanding of the land, including its resources i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 43

and inhabitants, depended heavily upon the details indigenous peoples provided, and how Europeans interpreted those details.6 A closer examination of four key European-­produced maps, and the native intelligence assimilated into them, provides vital information on changing indigenous community location and arrangement, space usage, subsistence practices, and the natural environment that the documentary record of missionaries, militaries, colonial traders, and government officials fails to capture. Two of Samuel de Champlain’s maps (1612 and 1632) offer some of the earliest European interpretations of native cartographic intelligence, native spatial relations with neighbors and the environment, and important attributes of nature. In 1700, New York’s military engineer, Colonel Wolfgang Romer, traveled throughout eastern Iroquoia to document Haudenosaunee village locations and the topography. Romer’s map captured the English desire to reap the economic, diplomatic, and military benefits of their complex alliance with the Haudenosaunee by constructing a fort at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario, to intercept western natives along their trade route to New France. Finally, as the imperial contest for control of North America intensified in the 1750s, John Mitchell produced a detailed map that reflected British perceptions of the contested continent. Mitchell highlighted the French threat to British colonial expansion, and exaggerated Haudenosaunee control of the Great Lakes region. As military, diplomatic, and economic partners with the Haudenosaunee, the British hoped to use Haudenosaunee territorial control to lay claim to the terra semicognita. Taken together, these European-­produced maps illuminate how French, colonial New York, and British perceptions of early North America, the indigenous inhabitants, and the natural environment changed over time, from the early contact through the late colonial period. More importantly, these maps are indispensable in mapping nature because they capture native land-­use practices, the ways in which indigenous peoples altered their subsistence strategies after contact, and native spatial relations with the natural environment and human inhabitants in the Great Lakes region. Champlain’s seventeenth-­century maps illustrated mixed subsistence strategies with explicit images of hunting and agriculture, while the predominance of lakes and rivers underscored the significance of fishing to the indigenous diet. As colonial settlements expanded westward into Iroquois territory, however, eighteenth-­century maps reflected Haudenosaunee attempts to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands and protect ecosystems critical to those mixed-­subsistence economies. By the 1750s, for example, new villages dotted southern Iroquoia, especially 44 · c h a p t e r

two

along the Susquehanna and Allegheny Rivers. In those fertile valleys, Haudenosaunee migrants had turned seasonal fishing and hunting camps into permanent villages. The Haudenosaunee practiced mixed subsistence strategies that emphasized seasonal exploitation of multiple aspects of local and very distant environments, and combined hunting, fishing, gathering of wild flora, and agricultural production. In general, men performed the more dangerous tasks that took them away from the village, often for months at a time, such as hunting during the late fall and winter seasons and trapping fish or birds during their spring and fall migrations. Women, on the other hand, performed their subsistence labor within a few miles of the village center. They tended the agricultural produce, gathered seasonal fruits and nuts, and cared for the old and young. In the post-­contact period, European-­ manufactured trade goods transformed the way Indians cultivated, caught, prepared, consumed, and stored their food. The pace and scale of this change depended upon native proximity to European traders, as well as the frequency of material exchanges. Despite rapid and aggressive assimilation of European material culture during the seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee adhered to their long-­standing mixed-­subsistence strategies.7 With a growing season that reliably exceeded 120 days without a killing frost, the Iroquoian subsistence economy revolved around the production of domesticated crops, especially maize. The Haudenosaunee practiced swidden, or slash-­and-­burn, horticulture, whereby they cleared a large area for cultivation, grew crops on the land for several years, and then shifted to a new field when soil productivity declined. Village relocations ideally occurred every ten to twenty years, as subsistence and fuel demands required. Men prepared the new fields over a few seasons. First, they girdled existing trees after the women tapped the spring sap. The following year, they burned the trees and remaining underbrush. After clearing a new field, the horticultural work was turned over to women while the men occupied the rest of their summer with village construction and repair projects, interspersed with occasional hunting excursions.8 The agricultural cycle began in the spring when the women, working in groups directed by a senior matron, planted the “three sisters” of maize, beans, and squash together in the same field. Haudenosaunee women cultivated more than fifteen varieties of maize, sixty types of beans, and eight varieties of squash. The women planted the corn in intervals of about three feet, with raised earth around each planting. Within each mound, the women also planted beans and squash. The beans grew up the stalk of corn, while the squash spread over the exposed ground. The “three sisters” i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 45

thus worked together to grow, replenish nutrients, retain soil moisture, and deter weed growth. In addition, women planted peas, cucumbers, watermelons, and muskmelons, to name only a few plants. Women tended the crops throughout the spring and summer. After the fall harvest, they dried the produce for winter storage. Until spring, the community subsisted on a diet of corn soup seasoned with fruits and vegetables and the occasional fish or meat.9 Although Europeans routinely disparaged native agricultural fields for their disorganized appearance and overgrown weeds, the size and productivity of Indian fields and harvests astonished European critics. Corn stalks measured between sixteen and eighteen feet in height, and produced cobs nearly eighteen inches in length. The volume of planted and harvested maize, combined with its high caloric value and the ability to dry and store it for consumption throughout the seasonal cycle, made this crop the most important food source in the Haudenosaunee diet. Communities often stored a one-­to-­two-­year surplus of maize to protect against an environmental disaster or military invasion.10 After the harvest, the main hunting season began in October and lasted until midwinter when deep snows hindered hunting. Except for the occasional bear confined in a small wooden structure until fat enough to consume, the Haudenosaunee raised no domesticated animals to supplement their diet. The archaeological evidence suggests a heavy dependence on hunting white-­tailed deer, bear, beaver, elk, and a variety of other small, fur-­bearing mammals. Men and older boys traveled a few days from the main village to favored hunting stations. A few women accompanied the hunters to prepare food, fetch water and firewood, and retrieve the kill. At times, entire families relocated with their male relations, particularly during periods of environmental distress. Most women and children, however, remained in the village to gather seasonal roots and nuts for food and oil, particularly from the numerous beech, hickory, walnut, and oak trees.11 During the spring and fall, seasonal migrations of birds and fish augmented the Haudenosaunee diet. Men and older boys trapped migratory birds and waterfowl such as geese, ducks, passenger pigeons, and robins, as well as the birds’ eggs. Spring also initiated the long fishing season when men, occasionally joined by their families, left the main village and headed for fishing camps. The Mohawk and Seneca River corridors, the Finger Lakes, and Lake Ontario provided a nearly year-­round supply of fish. Residents eagerly awaited the annual spring runs of salmon and eel, but men also caught bass, brill, bullhead, carp, catfish, herring, perch, pike, smelt, sturgeon, trout, whitefish, crayfish, clams, and turtles’ eggs.12 46 · c h a p t e r

two

One prolific Onondaga fishing station, Otihatangué, on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Salmon River, highlighted the importance and variety of fish in the Haudenosaunee diet. In 1655, the Jesuit missionaries Joseph Chaumont and Claude Dablon described the seasonal migration of the river’s fish. In the spring, as soon as the snows melt, it is full of gold colored fish; next come carp, and finally . . . a flat fish, half a foot long, and a very fine flavor. Then comes the brill; and, at the end of May, when strawberries are ripe, sturgeon are killed with hatchets. All the rest of the year until winter, the salmon furnishes food to the village. . . . Toward the end of winter, [the natives] break the ice and catch fish, or, rather, draw them up by the bucketful.13

Given the missionaries’ favorable assessment of Otihatangué, the French attempted to establish a permanent colony in 1656. The French, however, quickly renamed the landing “La Grande Famine” after starving colonists found no relief from their hunger. As Europeans discovered, fish sometimes failed to appear at the fishing camps and were often absent at the mouth of the Salmon River. But the river was not “altogether destitute of fish,” as the French officer Baron de Lahontan described it during a 1690s visit. Rather, the spawning runs had already moved upriver. The documentary record of missionaries underscores extensive ecosystem knowledge, as natives closely followed seasonal migrations and spawning runs to maximize their catch.14 As men left for their fishing stations, women turned to the nearby forest to gather ripening fruits. Wild strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, black berries, cranberries, and grapes, as well as wild and cultivated cherry, pear, plum, peach, and apple trees, provided annual supplies of fresh and dried fruits. Women dried the fruits and stored them for winter consumption. After the wild spring flora was gathered, the seasonal cycle repeated when the women returned to horticulture.15 While the Haudenosaunee mixed-­subsistence economy fully exploited local and distant environments, these strategies also guarded against a complete dependence on either hunting or agriculture. Various environmental crises such as epidemic diseases, enemy invasions, droughts, floods, and early or late frosts had the potential to significantly reduce or eliminate agriculture output for the entire season. During periods of unfavorable environmental conditions, villages relied on their stored surplus of dried corn, and shifted their subsistence emphasis. Without large fields of maize, i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 47

beans, and squash to tend, women turned all of their agricultural labor to gathering wild flora. Crop failures also prompted families to disperse earlier in the season to favorite hunting or fishing stations. Severe droughts, however, dried up lakes and ponds and further exacerbated pressure on local wildlife. Although this secondary subsistence system placed greater demands on the pursuit of wildlife, the subsistence patterns returned to normal when environmental conditions recovered, and animal populations quickly rebounded after one to two years.16 Throughout the seventeenth century, the documentary record of diplomats, traders, military officials, and missionaries, both visiting and captive, demonstrates that years of famine were few and far between. In 1687, for example, the French led a military invasion against the Senecas and spent more than a week destroying all stored and growing agriculture. Nonetheless, French officials responsible for the defense of Canada doubted the long-­term effectiveness of the military campaign. As Captain Duplessis argued in 1690, “The destruction in 1687 of the Indian corn belonging to the Senecas, subjected them to but a small amount of inconvenience. Not one of them perished of hunger, as two arrows are sufficient to enable a Savage to procure meat enough for a year’s support, and as fishing never fails.” Although Duplessis minimized the Senecas’ suffering, he recognized their ability to shift their subsistence emphasis and avoid famine.17 These mixed-­subsistence economies and seasonal migrations spanned thousands of square miles and demanded an intimate knowledge of the geographic region and ecosystems, as well as an understanding of spatial relations to the natural environment and its human inhabitants. Native routes, for example, avoided dangerous and time-­consuming passages along steep ravines and other treacherous terrain. Instead, they followed safe rivers, the easiest portages between rivers, and the paths left by dried-­up lakes. Although the Haudenosaunee exploited the rivers that fed Lake Ontario and located some of their villages along the lake’s north shore, they considered the waters on both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to be too unpredictable for routine canoe travel. While larger European vessels sailed the east-­west axis of both lakes in the 1700s, native canoes hugged the coastlines.18 The documentary record of the early contact period contains numerous instances of natives providing European explorers with geographical information and environmental knowledge. Natives arranged sticks on the ground or traced in the dirt to represent spatial arrangements graphically, and also provided their European solicitors with “sketches.” In September 1541, for example, four young St. Lawrence Iroquoian men met the French explorer Jacques Cartier along what would become known as the La Chine 48 · c h a p t e r

two

Rapids near Mont Royal (Montreal). The Iroquoians informed Cartier about the passage farther upstream “with certaine little stickes, which they layd upon the ground in a certaine distance, and afterwards layde other small branches betweene both, representing the Saults. And by the sayde marke, if their saying be true, it can be but sixe leagues by land to passe the sayd Saults.” Cartier did not refer to the spatially arranged sticks as a cartographic representation of the path upriver, nor did this case of indigenous mapmaking transfer to a European-­produced map of the St. Lawrence River. Nonetheless, this documentary record highlights the natives’ knowledge of the geographical environment, and their ability to communicate it to someone unfamiliar with the area—albeit in an ephemeral model.19 By the early 1600s, Europeans began to combine on their maps their own observations and delineations of the landscape with indigenous geographical knowledge and spatial representations as a way to claim North American lands through “discovery.” Samuel de Champlain, the French navigator, explorer, geographer, cartographer, soldier, and diplomat, gained firsthand knowledge of the eastern Great Lakes as he traveled widely to the north and west of the St. Lawrence River. His diplomatic and economic interests also took him south of the river in 1609 when he joined an indigenous military campaign against eastern Haudenosaunee fighters. This military expedition allowed him to map and name his own lake, Lake Champlain. More than most explorers, Champlain was a skilled and observant mapmaker and produced very accurate maps of the Acadian and New England coast. He relied extensively on native inhabitants—namely Huron and Ottawa informants, among other Northern Indian groups—for much of his geographic and ethnographic intelligence about the interior. As early as 1603, he solicited sketches from multiple native groups regarding spatial representations of the environment hundreds of miles upriver from present-­day Montreal. In the summer of that year he received two different “sketches” of the eastern end of Lake Erie, Niagara Falls, and Lake Ontario. These three geographic features later appeared in Champlain’s 1612 map of New France (fig. 2.1) as the “grand lac contenant” (Lake Erie), the “somewhat large” sault d’eau (Niagara Falls), and Lac Contenant (Lake Ontario). As of 1612, however, no Europeans, including Champlain, had traveled west of Lake Ontario to any of these areas.20 In 1616, Champlain produced another map that included Lake Huron (Mer Douce) and most likely Lake Michigan and the eastern part of Lake Superior. By January 1616 he had traveled extensively to the north and south of the St. Lawrence River, but his western exposure ended at the eastern end of Lake Huron, at Georgian Bay. Despite his wide travels and i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 49

Fig. 2.1 Samuel de Champlain, Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1612). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

intelligence gathering from natives all over the Great Lakes region, Champlain’s 1616 map did not represent the “grand” Lake Erie or Niagara Falls, as had the map he produced in 1612. This geographic omission highlights the importance of the context under which Europeans solicited and interpreted native geographical intelligence and environmental knowledge. Champlain may have neglected Lake Erie and the falls because this southern terrain did not serve his economic or military interests in the northern Great Lakes, or perhaps Lake Erie and the falls did not serve an important subsistence or cultural role for the natives who had provided the intelligence. Regardless of the reason for the drastically reduced size and missing name for Lake Erie, Champlain did not correct the misrepresentation in his 1632 map of New France. European mapmakers updated previous cartographic knowledge, but the high cost associated with correcting earlier errors allowed misrepresentations to persist.21 In 1632, Champlain produced a very detailed map of New France that summarized his personal explorations, incorporated information from other European sources, and assimilated indigenous intelligence (fig. 2.2). The map highlighted western water routes that might lead to the elusive “northwest passage” across the continent, and noted the numerous native communities along those routes. For the diplomat, soldier, and fur trader in Champlain, those communities were potential economic and military partners. His map, however, also emphasized the mixed-­subsistence strategies of Great Lakes indigenous groups. Although Champlain had never visited most of the native communities he depicted on the map, the native intelligence he assimilated detailed important ecosystems that stressed the proximity of rivers to village sites, the location of saults or rapids and falls important for fishing, the production of agriculture in large fields where appropriate, and the animals hunted. This native intelligence also revealed important footpaths connecting villages to favored fishing, hunting, or exchange stations. Most importantly, the breadth of geographic coverage stressed the comprehensive indigenous understanding of native spatial relations with the natural environment and its many human inhabitants.22 In specific ways, Champlain’s maps contain many features that demonstrated the native contribution to European geographical knowledge of the Great Lakes region. Native cartography favored culturally significant environmental areas. Rivers and lakes played a critical role in subsistence, communication, transportation, and trade. As a result, lakes, rivers, and the portages connecting different routes dominated the indigenous map. But native cartographers did not draw these important features to the scale that Europeans used or understood. They represented rivers as straight or gently 52 · c h a p t e r

two

Fig. 2.2 Samuel de Champlain, Carte de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1632). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

curved lines that fed into a larger branch system at similar angles and often symmetrically. They depicted lakes as oval, bean-­, or tadpole-­shaped with regular or smooth coastlines; and they combined river routes with portages, because that reflected the continuous path. Natives also measured topography in intervals of time, such as the number of days traveled, rather than on a scientific scale of distance along lines of latitude or longitude. The indigenous measurements varied greatly and depended upon the age, gender, purpose, and size of the traveling party, as well as the route, weather, and season, and any baggage transported.23 The native nomenclature for significant environmental features further complicated European comprehension of spatial relations. Different indigenous groups used different names to describe the same geographic space, or used the same name to refer to numerous geographic spaces. George Nelson, a fur trader in New France, captured both the clarity and the confusion Europeans experienced with indigenous maps. In reflecting on his early years in New France, Nelson noted, I have a thousand times wondered at their ingenuity of conveying, and their sagacity at discovering by means of the coarse, rough, but expressive hieroglyphs what they want to know or be known. A man must be very stupid indeed who cannot go by their charts. They are so clear, concise and expressive. I have myself frequently gone upon these maps drawn on my floor or hearth, or a piece of bark & yet, strange to say, sometimes at a loss to find my way back!

The European confusion surrounding native spatial representations and varying place names caused Champlain to misinterpret or leave out geographic features, as in his omission of Lake Erie and Niagara Falls in the 1632 map. In addition, the lack of consistent indigenous place names exacerbated Champlain’s frustration with Jesuit missionaries who failed to offer maps that would yield a more complete understanding of the terra incognita.24 At the same time, early contact with European traders, missionaries, and diplomats caused unprecedented social changes for indigenous communities. European bodies carried deadly pathogens to which native peoples had no immunities. As a result, Indians weathered dramatic population losses as men and women of all ages died from repeated epidemics. Haudenosaunee villages, for example, suffered death rates of at least 50 percent, and even as high as 70 percent, from exposure to new epidemics. The Haudenosaunee practiced a “mourning war” in which they sought enemy prisoners in 54 · c h a p t e r

two

order to ease their personal suffering and deal with their population losses. Raiders took enemy captives either to adopt into the grieving family or to execute ritually. If adopted, the captives literally replaced the deceased, inheriting their responsibilities and privileges. Warriors specifically targeted women and children for adoption, because they assimilated more easily and completely. Captured warriors, on the other hand, fulfilled the important social and cultural practice of ritual execution when adoption failed to assuage the mourner’s pain.25 Mourning war success depended in part upon access to superior European weaponry. But the need to acquire guns, as well as other desired trade goods, caused unprecedented environmental change. In exchange for all of the trade goods flowing west to Indian villages, one trade item monopolized the flow east: beaver pelts. After obliterating their own beaver supply, Haudenosaunee warriors traveled thousands of miles to the north and west in search of the much-­demanded pelts. This competition for beaver and access to European trade goods brought the Haudenosaunee into direct conflict with the French and their native allies, and triggered sixty years of warfare, known as the Beaver Wars.26 The Beaver Wars combined long-­standing Iroquois mourning war demands with new European material cultural needs. The introduction of European weaponry, however, contributed to more violent and deadly warfare. Together, the epidemics and violence brought unparalleled indigenous demographic collapse. By the end of the 1670s, Haudenosaunee warriors had forcibly adopted, dispersed, conquered, or annihilated most of their northern, western and southern native neighbors, including the Huron, Petun, Neutral, Erie, and Susquehannock. But during the last stages of the Beaver Wars (1687–96), the French and their Indian allies invaded Iroquois country and ravaged Haudenosaunee villages on a massive scale. These devastating invasions precipitated changes to settlement patterns as the eastern nations (Mohawks and Oneidas) moved away from extensive longhouses arranged in compact villages to construct one- and two-­family dwellings and farmsteads, dispersed over the landscape.27 More importantly, the dramatic French and Indian military successes of the 1680s through the 1690s prompted a significantly different approach in spatial relations between the western nations (Senecas and Cayugas) and French-­allied Indians. During the seventeenth century, after exhausting their own supply of beaver, many Haudenosaunee warriors engaged in theft and warfare to acquire needed pelts for the market. But in the eighteenth century Senecas and Cayugas emphasized peace and diplomacy and invited their former native enemies into their territory for trade. This shift i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 55

in strategy from warfare to diplomacy enhanced Iroquois prestige among native neighbors wanting to do business with Europeans, as well as colonial officials who looked to the Iroquois to develop economic ties with distant natives. Throughout the 1690s, Haudenosaunee leaders representing pro-­French, pro-­English, and neutralist factions adopted a peace strategy that sought to preserve a balance of economic and military power between the English and French. Consequently, each faction cultivated ties with favored European neighbors, whether English or French, and factions competed for leadership control within their respective Haudenosaunee communities. By ensuring that trade goods continued to flow to Haudenosaunee villages and peace prevailed between their European neighbors, the Five Nations retained their autonomy against aggressive imperial friends and foes.28 In 1700, the Iroquois Confederacy participated in two separate treaty conferences: one with the French and western Indians, and a second with the English. At both conferences, neutralists took the lead seeking peace and open trade relations. Pro-­French, pro-­English, and neutralist leaders followed up these initial talks with continued visits to Montreal and Albany. In Montreal, Haudenosaunee spokesmen pressed for peace and open trade between New France, western Indians, and Iroquois nations. In Albany, Haudenosaunee spokesmen worked to convince colonial officials that peace would bring western Indians into New York’s fur trade economy. In the summer of 1701, Haudenosaunee delegates signed one treaty with New France and western Indians, and a second with the English. Collectively known as the Grand Settlement of 1701, these two treaties initiated a long period of peace, over forty years, in which the Haudenosaunee could rebuild their villages and repair their relationships with native and European neighbors.29 While the Grand Settlement of 1701 brought new advantages for some Haudenosaunee communities when distant natives entered their territory for trade, other nations experienced few benefits. Neutralists, for example, desired open trade relations with both European powers, and adhered to the belief that the Iroquois had “a power to go where we please, to conduct who we will to the places we resort to, and to buy and sell where we think fit.” The French and the English, however, wanted to construct trade posts within Haudenosaunee territory to assert military and economic control. Although Haudenosaunee leaders invited Europeans into their communities to conduct trade with them or with western visitors, they stressed that those Europeans were guests. In addition, neutralists emphasized their economic independence from both New France and New York.30 56 · c h a p t e r

two

Fig. 2.3 A Mappe of Colonel Römer’s Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations (1700). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

In the midst of this diplomatic flurry, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, New York’s colonial governor from 1698 to 1701, instructed the colony’s chief military engineer, Colonel Wolfgang Romer, to survey Haudenosaunee territory for a suitable location for an English fort. As Romer toured Iroquoia in 1700, he detailed water routes, as well as the size and location of Haudenosaunee villages, for English military and economic purposes. Romer also noted areas of Haudenosaunee environmental and cultural significance, and resources important to native subsistence economies. In addition, he integrated English, French, and indigenous cartographic knowledge and lexicon. As a result, he produced a map, significant for the early 1700s, of the interior of the North American continent that appealed to a colonial and imperial English audience interested in extending economic and political influence up the Mohawk River and into western New York (fig. 2.3).31 In “A Mappe of Colonel Römers Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations,” Romer i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 57

outlined his path as he traveled north from New York to Albany and then headed west into Mohawk territory. After visiting the western Mohawk community of Deganahoge (Dekanohage), Romer traveled the Indian highway south of the Mohawk River to the “Second Nation,” the Oneidas. He then continued west to the “Third Nation,” the Onondagas. After visiting the Onondagas, Romer headed northwest to “Lake Cananda” (Onondaga Lake) and wanted to follow this water route north down the Oswego River to Cadragqua Lake (Lake Ontario). He was most interested in surveying the southeast corner of Lake Ontario, at the mouth of the Oswego River, because a fort in this area would allow the English to intercept western Indians on their fur trade route to New France. But, as the cartouche text explained, Romer failed to reach his desired destination because the traveling group ran out of provisions.32 Romer’s map of Iroquoia reflected the new settlement pattern of the eastern Haudenosaunee as residents developed more dispersed communities along the northern and southern banks of the Mohawk River. The map also highlights the native highways far south of the Mohawk River, as well as two important carrying places, or portages, along Wood Kill and Beaver Kill between Oneida Lake and the Mohawk River. Specific details showing Haudenosaunee village locations and topographical information, however, become increasingly vague west of the Onondagas. Oneida Lake, for example, is clearly shown, but the other Finger Lakes, and the rivers connecting them, are more distorted as a result of Romer proceeding no farther west than Onondaga territory.33 The map’s cartouche adds context to Romer’s spatial story. Two Indian warriors, each covered with only a cloth or hide wrap from their waist to above their knees, and carrying bow and arrows around their back, peer over the edges of the cartouche’s text that outlines Romer’s path. The corn growing behind one of the warriors emphasizes the importance of agriculture to Haudenosaunee subsistence patterns. As Romer visited, described, and mapped the natural environment of the eastern Haudenosaunee nations, his safety and success depended upon their goodwill, guidance, and environmental knowledge.34 The approving gaze of the two Indian warriors in the cartouche, however, contradicts Romer’s account of his expedition. For example, Romer expressed daily frustration with delays in travel while awaiting native leaders at different communities, the inability of leaders to compel their men to provide canoes and porters, and the refusal of guides to travel the routes Romer requested. That frustration peaked when his Onondaga hosts would not take him to the southeast corner of Lake Ontario. Instead, 58 · c h a p t e r

two

they led him through the woods to several swampy and isolated locations wholly unsuitable for a fort. Onondagas also claimed that native enemies made the route west too dangerous for them to procure any volunteers to Cayuga or Seneca country. Onondaga leaders recognized the imperial and military impositions of European occupation; they rebuffed English efforts to construct a fort, and would not cooperate in any attempts to survey their homelands. In addition, Onondagas protected their access to English traders to the east and blocked more western nations from gaining a direct connection to valuable and necessary English trade goods. As they maneuvered to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands, Romer grew weary of his uncooperative guides and returned to Albany in disappointment.35 Although Onondaga leaders discouraged Romer from continuing his search for a suitable fort location, Haudenosaunee communities could not escape the imperial designs of their European neighbors. The French and English competed aggressively for Indian trade partners, and worked tirelessly to gain control of the territory between their colonial frontiers. By 1730, this competition resulted in the establishment of British forts and trade posts among eastern Mohawks at Fort Hunter and among Onondagas at Fort Oswego, as well as some short-­lived trade houses among Senecas and Cayugas at Irondequoit Bay. The French also increased their trade activity among Senecas and Cayugas at Irondequoit Bay, and established their own trade post and fort at Fort Niagara during the early 1720s.36 In the post-­1701 period of aggressive imperial competition for native economic allies and territorial control, the footholds by imperial neighbors into Iroquois territory threatened the Haudenosaunee role as economic intermediaries. European trade posts and European traders intercepted western Indians before Haudenosaunee communities could capitalize on the economic and diplomatic benefits. These European trade posts confirmed European power, and represented a threat to Haudenosaunee autonomy and to the natives’ ability to control their own destiny.37 Despite such pressures, Haudenosaunee leaders creatively adapted to the demands and opportunities these new posts offered in the Atlantic world market economy. Through political and diplomatic maneuvering, village headmen invited European traders and their forts into Iroquois territory, hoping to become the primary beneficiaries. Leaders needed dependable and consistent access to trade goods. Without a steady supply of goods to distribute to their loyal supporters, they would not maintain community prestige. At the same time, new forts and trade posts shifted the locus of economic and diplomatic exchange as Haudenosaunee communities bei n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 59

came the final destination of traders, consumers, and diplomats. Consequently, hereditary village leaders exploited advantages of European trade posts and forts to gain personal, economic, military, and political benefits for themselves and their communities.38 New opportunities in the Atlantic world market economy also triggered significant changes to Haudenosaunee settlement patterns, as many residents left their customary homelands to transform seasonal hunting territories into permanent villages. New villages in distant hunting territories reflected a bid for improved position within the market. By relocating to hunting and fishing stations along key travel routes in southern and southwestern Iroquoia, particularly along the Susquehanna and Allegheny River systems, residents in new villages courted trade partners from Pennsylvania and New France, and encouraged familiar traders to follow them. Simultaneously with this southward migration, the Iroquois Confederacy opened its southern territory to provide a “refugee haven” to displaced natives fleeing colonial expansion in the east and south. During the seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee subjugated and forcefully adopted defeated refugees. But during the eighteenth century, Mohawks, Oneidas, and Onondagas allowed displaced Indians to retain their identity in their own villages.39 By the mid-­eighteenth century, as the imperial contest for control of North America intensified, the French and British sought to extend their territorial claims through settler occupation of the terra cognita, and economic and military alliances with native groups in the terra semicognita. As the rapidly growing British colonial population threatened to push west over the Appalachian Mountains, the French constructed numerous forts and trade posts throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys to connect their thinly populated colonial possessions from New France to Louisiana. John Mitchell, along with many other colonial and imperial officials, grew increasingly alarmed with French activity in the southern Great Lakes region, particularly the fertile Ohio Valley. Although trained in medicine and interested in botany, Mitchell redirected his energies to expose the French threat to British colonial expansion. Mitchell believed that a large map of the eastern half of North America would outline British territorial claims and colonial boundaries, as well as highlight French intrusion on these claims, more effectively than would a map that covered all of North America. After Mitchell produced a draft in 1750, the Board of Trade and Plantations granted him access to their official maps and reports of the colonies. It also solicited detailed maps and boundary information from 60 · c h a p t e r

two

Fig. 2.4 Detail of the Great Lakes region, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755). Library of Congress.

colonial governors. With this extensive data, John Mitchell produced a map of Canada and the Atlantic Colonies in 1755 that has been described as “the most comprehensive map of North America produced during the Colonial Era,” as well as “the most important map in the history of American cartography” (fig. 2.4).40 The cartouche in the Mitchell Map demonstrates the importance of the Iroquois Confederacy to the British Empire in America (fig. 2.5). The illustration of a beaver, for example, underscores the importance of this fur trade item for the colonial economy. The trade in beaver pelts had declined significantly as the eighteenth century progressed, but the beaver image in the cartouche reminded the viewer of its prominent role in English-­Indian relations. A Haudenosaunee male figure is more prominently positioned in the center of the cartouche. With his hands raised up in supplication, he i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 61

Fig. 2.5 Title cartouche, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755). Courtesy of the David Rumsey Collection.

is reading the map title and demonstrating his dependence on the British Lords of Trade, awaiting their protection against the French threat.41 Mitchell relied exclusively on secondary accounts of the geographic spaces he mapped, and did not seek native intelligence or explore the terrain himself. Nonetheless, his map reflected the native contribution to European geographic knowledge, and provided evidence of indigenous land use practices. Mitchell incorporated indigenous cartographic features present in colonial and official records, particularly the gently curved lines of rivers and oval- or tadpole-­shaped lakes with smooth coastlines. This inclusion of native-­specific cartographic features highlighted the limits of colonial knowledge of the interior of the continent, and marked the borderland between the terra cognita and the terra semicognita. In addi62 · c h a p t e r

two

tion, Mitchell noted rivers, critical portages, the distance traveled on Indian footpaths, and the locations of prominent salt licks or ponds that attracted wildlife and native hunters. As Mitchell mapped these principal components of nature, he underscored the vast environmental knowledge of the indigenous inhabitants, the geographic reach of their seasonal life, and their continued practice of mixed-­subsistence economies.42 More importantly, Mitchell captured the shift in Haudenosaunee spatial relations when he greatly exaggerated the territorial extent of the Iroquois Confederacy’s military domination to inflate British land claims. The map, for example, documented the violent relationship between the Haudenosaunee and their native neighbors during the Beaver Wars. By 1755, however, numerous non-­Haudenosaunee settlements dotted southern Iroquoia, and had demonstrated the shift to diplomacy with native neighbors. At the same time, Haudenosaunee residents exercised indigenous mobility and relocated to southern and western Iroquoian territory.43 As the 1700s progressed, the Confederacy’s sparsely populated southern territory was increasingly vulnerable to expanding colonial settlements, especially those moving north up the fertile Susquehanna Valley. As Red Head’s statement to William Johnson in 1753 made clear, Haudenosaunee communities recognized the threat that imperial and colonial intrusions represented to native autonomy and subsistence strategies. In building permanent communities in the fertile valleys and near extensive river systems in southern and western Iroquoia, the Haudenosaunee and their new native neighbors worked to protect ecosystems that were critical to their mixed-­subsistence economies. Natives constructed their new villages in close proximity to favored hunting territories and fishing stations, and along alluvial floodplains with excellent agricultural potential. The growth of the new villages reflected the long-­term strategic efforts of the Haudenosaunee to control the scale and scope of European intrusions into their homeland as they determined which European traders and diplomats would enter their communities.44 While Europeans had specific colonial or imperial reasons for producing the four maps described in this chapter, each map provides a window into indigenous land use practices and the impact of European contact on subsistence cycles, native spatial relations with the local environment and neighbors, and Haudenosaunee efforts to maintain their autonomy. These maps demonstrate that the Haudenosaunee exploited an expansive geographic territory for hunting, fishing, and trade, and worked to protect those ecosystems. In 1700, for example, Haudenosaunee leaders understood the long-­term economic threat of Romer’s mission, and refused to guide i n t o t h e i n t e r i o r  · 63

him deep into their territory or allow him to survey land that would benefit English imperial and economic interests. When they could no longer keep Europeans and their trade posts out, Haudenosaunee leaders and community members exploited new opportunities of the Atlantic world market economy. As is evident in John Mitchell’s 1755 map, these opportunities produced new settlement patterns and new spatial relations with native neighbors and the environment. Displaced natives and Haudenosaunee residents relocated to the Allegheny and Susquehanna River systems in western and southern Iroquoia. Their new communities underscored the continued importance of mixed-­subsistence economies, and reflected Haudenosaunee efforts to protect important ecosystems. Combining the documentary record with European-­produced maps reveals a more complete understanding of Haudenosaunee attempts to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homeland, and to slow colonial expansion into their critical subsistence ecosystems.

64 · c h a p t e r

two

chap ter three

currents of influence Indigenous River Names in the American South

Craig E. Colten

Many indigenous place names on the American landscape have survived long beyond the languages and the people who spoke them. The celebrated cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky noted that “practical geographical knowledge was passed on to the new settlers [ Europeans and Africans],” and that this is reflected in “the survival of many thousands of place names of Indian origin.”1 From this perspective, these names provided an essential building block in the comprehension of the hydrology, topography, and anthropology of newly claimed territories. Yet the density and persistence of these place names defies persuasive arguments offered by recent postcolonial scholarship on place naming. A series of recent studies have demonstrated, for other locations, that imperial powers actively replaced preexisting place names as a means to impose authority and further their political agendas.2 Certainly many indigenous names have disappeared, but given the extensive displacement of native peoples through various means, the presence of their languages on contemporary US maps is a remarkable fact. Prominent among the indigenous names that have shown a noteworthy tenacity on contemporary maps in the United States are those attached to 65

waterways—rivers, streams, bayous, and such—particularly in the American South.3 How have these names outlived the namers, the once-­prominent societies in the region? This chapter examines the inclusion of indigenous names on waterways in colonial cartography, and the persistence of those names in the formal toponymy of the new nation. It will focus on state and regional maps of three colonial territories: Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana. The initial claims and settlement of these seaboard colonies by different imperial powers enable a comparative view of the naming and renaming of the landscape. My purpose is to try to expose the processes by which multiple colonial governments and their mapmakers decided upon acceptable names for certain natural features, and how subsequent administrations made them permanent fixtures—all as a way to probe how indigenous names survived the colonial impulse to expunge local toponyms. In doing so, this chapter seeks to reveal the value of environmental history’s underused historical resource: the map. Tracing the imperial practices of naming natural features, this paper goes a step beyond establishing the exchange among American, European, and African societies and illuminates the acceptance of indigenous names for essential routeways by European explorers and settlers. By adopting American names for rivers that provided passage to the interior, European mapmakers acquiesced to the superior geographical knowledge of native societies. In effect, they conceded that local knowledge of nature was essential to the imperial enterprise. possession and cartographic labels

The historian Patricia Seed pre­sents a richly documented comparison of “acts of possession” carried out by the European colonial powers as they staked their claims to the New World. Seed argues that the Spanish followed a set of rules and ceremonial acts that amounted to a protocol for conquest of local inhabitants. The French also conducted elaborate ceremonies, but did so in the pursuit of establishing alliances with indigenous peoples. In addition, the French conceptualized their colonial holdings based on watersheds, as evidenced by their common use of river basins to describe the limits of their territorial claims. This practice reflected both cultural regions in France and ambitions to control unexplored territory. The English, in contrast, established possession by building houses and villages, and described their claims using natural features as landmarks. Seed does not consider the related and often somewhat belated act of cartographic possession taking—which ultimately legitimized claims of imperial powers and served as the basis for subsequent territorial realignments.4 Both French 66 · c h a p t e r

three

and English cartographic acts of possession clearly included waterways or watersheds in establishing their claims. Thus, the names given to those fluvial features became part of the cartographic documentation of taking possession and assertion of authority. Geographers and historians of cartography have addressed imperial mapping in detail. Brian Harley has critically reexamined colonial cartography. He makes the case that maps were “stridently geopolitical documents” that divided territories among competing powers, delimiting the reach of their power, or in some cases their ambitions. Thus the lines and names on the maps became symbols and records of spheres of influence.5 As Matthew Edney points out, these creations were intended for European audiences, not for the people being subjugated.6 Inserting European names for physical features—such as mountains, lakes, and rivers—already known locally by different terms was common. Use of English, French, or Spanish words on maps prepared for European audiences would be expected. In their discussion of Israel, Saul Cohen and Nurit Kliot report on the attachment of names as a step in nation building, and observe that “sweeping changes in the naming process reflect ideological upheavals and are often expressions of revolutionary values.”7 New World colonialism was a revolutionary change where place names served as powerful symbols in landscape transformation—a practice repeated many years later in the creation of the modern state of Israel, as discussed by Cohen and Kliot.8 Stuart Horsman traces the partial renaming of natural features in the Pamir Mountains of central Asia under different political regimes. The act of naming reflected an extension of power into a remote region, and imposed politically charged meaning to poorly known places.9 Harley argues that even when indigenous names are preserved in maps, they serve as an act of appropriation. He claims that preserving native names on a map that used European conventions for representing space was akin to including a stuffed bird in a museum, devoid of context and lacking in its indigenous meaning.10 He also suggests that the European maps need to be read for what is missing as much as for what is included. Numerous investigations of indigenous place names suggest that those names existed in much greater density than Europeans depicted on their maps. English cartographers rapidly imposed a Western geographic order on Hawaii in the late 1700s, for example. There and elsewhere, colonial maps never fully expressed the rich texture of local geographic knowledge.11 Matters of scale are partly to blame for the exclusion of the densely named precolonial landscapes. Atlas maps and mariners’ charts limited the ability of cartographers to transfer the fine-­grained detail of local cartographic labels. c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 67

That constraint, coupled with the more important imposition of imperial order on the new lands, reduced the number of indigenous labels on physical features even if these features were known to Europeans. The initial encounters of European explorers and indigenous inhabitants of the New World rendered portions of the pre-­Columbian cartographic collections obsolete. The earliest revisions of the global maps identified continental coastlines, major islands, large bays, and sizable rivers. These charts provided orientation for the largely coastal voyages of Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch mariners. Spaniards, who sailed along the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard, tended to give bays, islands, and rivers names that honored Catholic saints or members of the monarchy.12 English explorers gave Virginia’s prominent coastal bays, islands, and capes European names, but John Smith depended on local tribal groups to provide orientation concerning the little-­known interior rivers.13 In naming features, French expeditions likewise drew on notable figures or places in their homeland. In the early 1700s the French Huguenot Ribault, for example, named rivers along the Florida and Carolina coasts after waterways in France. The geographer Louis De Vorsey, along with historians and anthropologists, make a convincing case that Europeans placed tremendous confidence in indigenous geosophy (everyday geographical knowledge) in order to make their inland penetrations into the newly discovered territory. Malcolm Lewis observes that native people used maps in numerous ways before European contact, and for multiple purposes. Before contact, they used them to leave messages, to provide way-­finding guidance, and for recording traditions. Lewis notes that European mapmakers used indigenous maps as sources but did not always acknowledge them. Smith’s 1612 map in particular reflects significant input from native residents of Virginia. It exhibits the use of European cartographic conventions and the challenges of transliteration of words from native languages, while incorporating critical information obtained from Native Americans. This dependence on indigenous geographical knowledge elevated the value of some existing place names, and suggests limits to the bird-­in-­a-­case analogy offered by Harley.14 Heavy reliance on local knowledge is borne out by the narratives of the Spaniard Hernando de Soto’s sixteenth-­century explorations in the southeast. The accounts incorporate indigenous place names that subsequently were lost by European map makers, and this ultimately created some uncertainty among scholars about the precise path of de Soto’s wanderings.15 Initial encounters by the French also reflect the initial dependence on indigenous place names. Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette’s map 68 · c h a p t e r

three

of the Mississippi introduced subsequent generations of explorers to the upper river’s name—“Mitchisipi ou Grande.”16 The literary scholar Barbara Belyea states that, despite different conventions, native maps had functions comparable to those of European maps, and she suggests that Europeans who were adaptable and who accepted native conventions were best able to survive in a hostile environment.17 The geographer Andrew Sluyter likewise emphasizes the reciprocal relationships between European and American societies in his concept of a “colonial triangle.” He stresses that there were both material and conceptual exchanges between the established residents and the newly arrived explorers and settlers.18 Rivers, as essential corridors for exploration, travel, and trade, in some cases retained their indigenous names, but Europeans expunged indigenous names from other features and imposed European labels on them. Creek Indians had well-­ developed paths that followed streams inland which were used by colonists. The anthropologist Thomas Thornton has examined Native American place naming, and reports that indigenous people were prolific in their naming of natural features and their use of descriptive terms that often had deep cultural significance. The loss of the dense network of named places on small-­scale European maps reinforces Harley’s assertion that what is missing is as important as what is included. The persistence of some native place names for navigable waterways, even in reduced numbers and devoid of some of their original meanings, represents a degree of continuity of meaning and demands further inquiry. Nonetheless, what did disappear were many names of natural features associated with deep and long-­lasting cultural significance. The following sections will explore the naming of these natural features and examine the complex processes by which indigenous names persisted.19 multilingual landscapes

Initial exploration and settlement commonly relied on a blending of languages to designate physical landscape features. Take John Smith’s stunning 1612 map of Virginia (fig. 3.1). European terms are distinctly in a minority. Point Comfort, Capes Henry and Charles, Smyth Island, and Jamestown are the principal English names. Coastal features such as bays, islands, cliffs, and ports—visual cues used by English navigators—often acquired and retained European names.20 Chesapeake Bay, like most rivers in this region, bears the name of tribes who lived along the waterways. In the words of Smith, “The most of these rivers are inhabited by severall nations, or rather families [which are] of the name of the rivers.”21 Smith reported that much c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 69

Fig. 3.1 Detail, John Smith, Virginia (London, 1624). Library of Congress.

of the information came from indigenous people who knew the countryside. Certainly the names of indigenous settlements arrived via this important relay.22 The historian April Hatfield argues that, though the English succeeded in renaming many geographic features, “they were more likely to fail in their renaming efforts where Indian control over the geography lasted longest.”23 Yet, well before the end of the colonial period, English names began to replace numerous indigenous ones. The colonists renamed the Powhatan River, as depicted on Smith’s map, the James. Likewise, political subdivisions, or shires, of the colony overwhelmingly acquired English names despite tenuous British authority over the territory. Places controlled, in fact or in imagination, or created by the English acquired European names. Declining native populations by the end of the seventeenth century left much of the Tidewater under English domination. Nonetheless, a study of Indian place names in the Tidewater notes that, though few indigenous names survive, “the largest number is applied to the waters flowing into the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.”24 Thus, these routes of initial penetration, shared by locals with explorers, retained names passed from native residents to settlers. I suspect that, more than prolonged native control over territory, English acceptance of indigenous conventions for geographic orien70 · c h a p t e r

three

Fig. 3.2 Detail of Carolina and Florida Coast, Pieter van der Aa, Zee en Land Togten der Franszen Gedaan na, en in’t Americaans Gewest van Florida, allereerst door Ioh, Pontius Ontdekt (Leiden, 1706). French names for rivers designated by forts built by Ribault. Courtesy of the William P. Cumming Map Society.

tation led to the adoption of indigenous names. Consistency in names was essential for established routes such as rivers, and adoption of native terms facilitated communication with inland societies as Europeans traveled to the interior. Using a shared name for a river transformed it from merely a natural feature into a route for exploration and commerce. Southward along the Atlantic seaboard, Spanish and French explorers were mapping the coast and attaching names to littoral features and rivers (fig. 3.2). French mariners probed the coast from Florida to the Carolinas, and assigned names in their language to rivers emptying into the Atlantic. Jean Ribault interacted with indigenous people in the 1550s, but applied French names as he sailed northward from Florida’s Sienne (now the St. Mary’s) and Maye (now the St. Johns) Rivers.25 With no intent to penetrate inland, Ribault’s expedition had less need of indigenous terminology. Ribault’s mission was to establish a coastal settlement to ward off Spanish influence and remain outward-­looking. Even as he was establishing his settlement in present-­day South Carolina, a Spanish fleet arrived to contest his efforts. Under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Veiles, the Spanish troops massacred the Huguenots to restore both Catholic and Spanish dominion over this stretch of coast.26 Spanish naming practices largely attached the names of saints, or imposed other European words. A 1756 Spanish map, for example, employs c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 71

mostly Spanish names along the Atlantic seaboard emphasizing the saints John, Cathalina, and Simon, with a few exceptions such as Ocone and Acala (fig. 3.3). Significantly, the renaming of waterways from French to Spanish along the southern coast testifies to the fluid cartographic and imperial status of this territory, and the uncertainty of power and influence. Also, by the mid-­1700s multiple epidemic diseases had greatly reduced indigenous populations in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.27 Rather than placing a permanent toponymy on the landscape, maps reflected both the imperial urge to catalog physical features with European names, and the transient and somewhat uncertain nature of imperial rule. Bays and islands bore European names to aid coastal navigators. During the early explorative stage, rivers, as essential sources of fresh water for mariners, acquired European names for the benefit of mariners. Unlike the bold interior explorer de Soto, other Spanish and French adventurers did not mount serious inland expeditions from this coast, or acquire much knowledge of the coastal plain’s inland geography. Thus, when river mouths were mere markers for progress along the coast, or sources of potable water, there was less need for Europeans to adopt the names used by indigenous people. And at the scale those rivers were mapped, there was little opportunity to re­cord such information. Although the circumstances were quite different from the English expunging of native names in Virginia, there was a multilingual imperial mapping of this shore—albeit in two Romance languages. Along the Gulf Coast a similar discontinuity prevailed. In a thorough review of early European mapping of the Gulf of Mexico, Robert Weddle documents the propensity of Spanish mapmakers to affix Spanish names to river mouths in the course of coastwise exploration. When examining Pensacola Bay in 1693 as a possible outpost to guard against French influence in the Gulf, the Spanish geographer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora named it Santa Maria de Galve, and not the native term used in the twenty-­first century. Other rivers in the bay acquired European names as well. River Jordan and Perdido are examples. Sigüenza y Góngora also referred to the Mississippi as the Rio de la Palizada (Palisades).28 Yet, in the hands of the French cartographer Guillaume de l’Isle, “Pensacola Bay” replaces “Santa Maria,” and numerous rivers east of Apalachee Bay bear European names (St. Pierre and St. Martin) in 1717. Reflecting prior French inland river voyages, de l’Isle labels the Mississippi the “Mississipi or River St. Louis.”29 In the continental interior, still another form of inconsistency is apparent. Joliet and Marquette’s exploration of the Mississippi River in 1673 resulted in a map that depicted the river with an indigenous name and a

72 · c h a p t e r

three

Fig. 3.3 Detail, Joseph Francisco Badaraco and Juan Linares, Plano. I descripcion de la costa, desde el Cavo Cañaveral, hasta cerca de la boca de la Vir[ g]inia, contando, costa de Florida, Georgia y Carolinas del S, y N (1756). Library of Congress.

Fig. 3.4 Jean Baptiste Liébaux after Jacques Marquette, “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 dans l’Amerique Septentrionale,” in Melchisédec Thévenot, Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot (1681?). Library of Congress.

French translation—“Mitchisipi” and “Grande” (fig. 3.4).30 French ex­plor­ ers, as a consequence of this initial north-­to-­south venture, applied a term learned from natives on the upper reaches of the river while also providing a French translation alongside it. LaSalle used the names Mississippi and Colbert to identify the river when he extravagantly claimed the entire basin for France in 1682.31 Subsequent early-­eighteenth-­century French maps commonly display the name Mississippi along with the name St. Louis.32 As Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville set out to explore the Mississippi in 1699, he acknowledged that lower-­river people referred to it as the Malbanchya.33 Thus European explorers and map makers acknowledged names based in different languages, and did not appear to expect consistency. Multilingual place names persisted into the later colonial period. Indigenous residents of the delta knew the distributary bayou that carried a portion of the river’s spring flood into Lake Pontchartrain as the Ascan‑ [t]hya (Manchac), as described by Iberville. He reports that the waterway was named for him on his 1699 journey, and most French mapmakers typically applied his name to it.34 This multilingual toponymy reflects the changing imperial fortunes in the Americas, and it is particularly evident in the Gulf of Mexico. The French mapmaker Jean Baptiste d’Anville provided a splendid representation of the coast stretching from the mouth of the Apalachicola westward across the Mississippi River delta (fig. 3.5). Bays and islands in this map, 74 · c h a p t e r

three

with one exception, had European names. Indigenous names, in contrast, were affixed to most rivers. The Spanish-­held Apalachicola Bay received two native names; Cahuitas was the second. Rivers entering into the Bay de Sainte Marie de Galbes (or Pensacola Bay) all had Spanish names. The small waterways emptying into Mobile Bay received French names—­Poissons, Chiens, and Chevreuil, for example. The largest streams that offered the potential for inland penetration to native settlements continued to hold the names of indigenous groups: Tchicachas and Alibamons. The one bay that also bore an indigenous name, Pascagoula, and its principal river, of the same name, also continued to reflect native terminology. Immediately to the west, the Riviere de la Chasse aux Pascagoulas and its tributaries reflected the blending of European and indigenous names. D’Anville labeled tributaries with both indigenous and French translations: Bouk-­Houma or Riviere Rouge, and Oke-­Loussa or Les Eaux Noires. Further westward, into what is now the state of Louisiana, the rivers that flowed into the French-­ named Lake Pontchartrain he labeled Kefoncte, Tanzipoa, Nutabani or Riviere d l’ours, Amit, and Akankia or Riviere d’Iberville. He labeled two distributaries as Chetimachas (known as Bayou Lafourche today) and Riviere des Piakemines (Bayou Plaquemine). Small waterways emptying into the gulf appear nameless, identified only by the quality of their discharge as salty or fresh.35 This mid-­eighteenth-­century map clearly illustrates the transitional nature of naming. The coastal navigational features commonly bore European names, while routes into the interior largely retained words drawn from indigenous languages. And in some cases the French provided either literal translations or names of their choosing. A subsequent 1788 edition of d’Anville’s map of the Gulf region drops several of the French interpretations from the rivers in Alabama, and also only shows the label Akankia (Manchac) without Iberville’s name.36 As the British and later the United States began their involvement with West Florida, mapmakers substituted Iberville’s name for Bayou Manchac. Thomas Hutchins, an American-­born British military engineer who became the first geographer of the United States, compiled a 1784 account of the then Spanish territory along the lower Mississippi, and used French names—Iberville, Rouge, and Noir—for major waterways. He perpetuated the indigenous label Chieitimachas for the distributary now known as Lafourche. In other passages, he provided translations: Bayouk Pierre or Stoney River, and Lousa Chitto or Big Black.37 Barthélemy LaFon, the engineer who laid out New Orleans, included a complex mix of imperial and indigenous names in his 1806 map of the lower Mississippi territory. He employed “Red” for the major tributary of the Mississippi and “Yberc u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 75

Fig. 3.5 Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Carte de la Louisiane (1752). Library of Congress.

ville” for Bayou Manchac. He identifies other principal distributaries as the Atchafalaya, Plaquemines, and la Fourche.38 The geographer William Darby’s 1816 map of the region blends terms as well as providing some detail that was not present in colonial-­era accounts. The major transition during the mapping of Louisiana after statehood was the translation of most French place names to English. On Darby’s map, the Red and Black Rivers appear in their anglicized versions. Yet Iberville survives in several post-­ statehood maps, and Bayou Lafourche acquires a French name rather than an indigenous label. The Chitimacha tribe, along the waterway that once bore its name, was greatly diminished by the late 1700s but remained a viable tribe.39 Numerous other French labels remain on Darby’s map referring to natural features such as Vermillion Bay and Lakes Pontchartrain and Bourgne. Indigenous labels persist on the rivers flowing into Lake Pontchartrain, where a persistent albeit small native population lived into the nineteenth century; and the Atchafalaya appears as a distinct waterway with a native name. As the continuity of many Spanish words blended with English terms in Florida, a multilingual fluidity prevailed into Louisiana’s early statehood. Yet, where inland navigation was likely, indigenous names remained prominent and defied erasure. This cartographic practice underscored the Europeans’ recognition that by accepting the prevailing local knowledge of vitally important routes, they gained a modest advantage in communicating with interior societies. fixing a fluid landscape

Virginia remained in English hands until the American Revolution, but Louisiana and Florida underwent several colonial administrations before becoming American territories in 1803 and 1819 respectively. The changing imperial claims and their associated cartographic depictions of natural features trace this complex sequence. By the close of these territories’ colonial periods, various mechanisms had begun to formalize the names of rivers. Fluidity in naming ceased as the United States took possession of Louisiana and Florida, and a more consistent and enduring nomenclature settled across the landscape. Several related government functions under a consistent sovereign operated to fix toponymy in the nineteenth century, and in doing so it diminished the tendency to erase indigenous names. This process began even before US independence, when treaties or other official acts created territories and played an important role in establishing more permanent river names. A large portion of Virginia’s northern border

78 · c h a p t e r

three

followed the right bank of the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay, according to the royal grant to Lord Baltimore in 1632. Much controversy ensued over which upper branch of the Potomac was the river’s source and how close the border was to the Virginia shore. Nonetheless, the charter granting territory to Lord Baltimore in 1632 specified that the boundary would extend from the source of the Potomac and follow the southern bank to a place called Cincquack near the mouth of the river.40 Subsequent formal government documents creating colonial Maryland and establishing the states of Virginia and Maryland explicitly used the native river name, and created a lasting nomenclature for that waterway. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson published his Notes on the State of Virginia and included a tabulation of the principal rivers in the state and several beyond the Appalachians. Of the rivers within the current boundaries of Virginia, only the Patowmac appears in Jefferson’s inventory and is not included in the 1904 US Geological Survey gazetteer.41 In the process of formalizing names, there was no apparent deliberate effort to expunge indigenous labels, but European conventions for applying a single name to the principal channel of a river reduced the localized namings by indigenous people, as did the cartographic scale of representation. The Mississippi River basin, claimed by LaSalle in 1682, became the centerpiece of territorial reassignments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Near the end of the French and Indian War, in an effort to limit its losses to Great Britain in 1762, France secretly ceded to Spain “all of the country known under the name of Louisiana, together with New-­Orleans and the island in which that city stands.”42 The following year, when France surrendered to England to formally conclude war, it transferred its claims east of the Mississippi River to England. The 1763 Treaty of Paris stated that the French monarch ceded land with a western boundary “fixed by a line drawn along the middle of the Mississippi River from its source to the river Iberville; and thence by another line through the middle of that river, and the lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the sea. . . .”43 Thus, the pair of treaties, using minimal geographic reference points, carved the Mississippi basin into two separate colonial territories: English to the east and Spanish to the west. Subsequently, the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase offered incredibly vague territorial descriptions for their respective massive territorial transfers. Both documents merely mentioned the “Colony or Province of Louisiana,” as it had been understood while in Spanish and then in French hands. These international documents solidified the singular use

c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 79

of the name Mississippi River, extending use of the French name Iberville for Bayou Manchac, though the French explorer’s name eventually disappeared from maps. A series of topographical or geographic descriptions of the Gulf Coast region further reflected the acceptance of river names and their use in official documents. Thomas Hutchins recorded the indigenous river names for waterways flowing from Louisiana’s “Florida Parishes” into Lake Pontchartrain and the “Chafalaya.” As in the roughly contemporaneous treaties, Hutchins’s work refers to the Mississippi by only one name, and uses the name Iberville in reference to the distributary flowing eastward toward Lake Pontchartrain. Hutchins reported that this waterway only carried water during the spring floods: “It may be dignified, during that short period, with the title of river, but dries up as soon as the Mississippi ceases to overflow.” He used accepted names for natural features as he discussed the northern Gulf Coast.44 Bays, lakes, and islands almost exclusively bore European-­language words as names, while rivers were given a mix of indigenous and European names. Likewise, Darby’s geographical descriptions of Louisiana and Florida cemented numerous river names, though the text of his 1816 volume hints at the resurrection of the term Manchac for the waterway known by the French as Iberville.45 His accompanying map, however, labels it only as the Iberville River. Rivers flowing into Lake Pontchartrain retain their native names, while many of the small bayous entering the Gulf of Mexico from the coastal wetlands have no names attached—reflecting the absence of permanent settlement in the marshes, their inaccessibility, and a thin geographic knowledge of the territory. Formalization of place names in national-­era US documents was largely detached from the original colonial impulse, but certainly provided an opportunity for nomenclature in alignment with nation building. Nonetheless, it did not completely remove indigenous river names—or prior French or Spanish names, for that matter. When Darby assembled his geographic description of Florida in 1821, he was unimpressed with much of the coastal territory and largely dismissed most of the coast. He carefully identifies the Spanish- and native-­named rivers feeding Pensacola and Apalachicola Bays. Yet, along the long southward stretch of the Gulf Coast and northward to St. Augustine on the Atlantic shore, he acknowledges poor geographic knowledge and notes, “In the great distance from Espiritu Santo to the harbour of S. Augustine, though the coast is indented by an intricacy of small bays, creeks, and inlets, with intervening islands, not a harbour of any particular consequence has been discovered. There is indeed strong reason to believe, that the southern part of the peninsula is much cut 80 · c h a p t e r

three

Fig. 3.6 Detail, John Mackay and J. E. Blake (US topographic engineers), Map of the Seat of War in Florida (Washington, 1839). Library of Congress.

by deep and interlocking inlets running fare [sic] into the interior, some of which, it has been suggested, communicate with St. John’s River.”46 This geographic depiction omits indigenous names, due to Darby’s unfamiliarity with the coast. As the US government actively sought to dislodge Native Americans from portions of Florida, the Army Engineers mapped the new state, and its maps exhibit considerably improved geosophy since the 1820s. Toponymy reflects the multiple layers of colonial influence, along with the resurrection of some highly persistent indigenous names despite military campaigns against Native Americans. The 1838 map of the “Seat of War” reveals Spanish influences, translated to English along the Atlantic seaboard (fig. 3.6). The St. Mary’s and St. John’s Rivers, along with numerous smaller streams and Amelia Island and Cape Canaveral, exemplify the practice of direct translation. English names for coastal features appear, and include Hutchinson’s Island and Gilbert’s Bar, along with several small inland tributaries of c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 81

the larger rivers, and Lake George, Dunn’s Lake, Spring Garden Lake, and Lake Beresford. In addition, the Tomoka and Miami Rivers are among the few waterways that hold native names. In the interior, Okeechobee receives its traditional name, along with the English translation: Big Water. Near the west coast, where federal troops assigned land to the Seminoles, multiple languages appear in place names. Draining into Charlotte Harbor are the Carlosahatchee and Talakchopko (or Pease Creek) rivers. North of Tampa Bay, which receives the Hillsboro River, a series of indigenous-­ named rivers extends uninterrupted to the St. Mark’s River in Appalachee Bay.47 Nearly two decades later, the Suwannee, along with fifteen other rivers in western Florida, would retain their native names in an 1855 US Coast and Geodetic Survey map.48 The cartographers added Anglo names for two of these, and only three rivers between the southernmost point of Florida and Appalachee Bay had European names. There was inconsistency in the names applied by the federal authorities. In its 1851 chart, the US Coast and Geodetic Service translates “Chassahowitzka” to “Pumpkin Field River.” In its 1855 survey, however, it uses the indigenous term.49 Other landscape features such as bays and islands predominantly bear European names. While there was obvious inconsistency in the practices of sustaining indigenous names or replacing them in the mid-­nineteenth century, the final cartographic designations do not support the notion of complete colonial renaming of the landscape. Although commercial atlases do not reflect official government toponymy, they offer one of the best views of accepted place names. By the mid-­nineteenth century, river names exhibit the complex linage of place naming (table 3.1). Indigenous languages and English dominate the toponymy in Virginia. Florida’s waterways illustrate the prevalence of indigenous names on the western coast, and the mixture of Spanish (sometimes translated) and English terms on the Atlantic seaboard. In Louisiana, French and indigenous prevail, with some use of English and Spanish.50 The General Land Office provided still another method to permanently attach place names. In the 1860s it adopted a mix of colonial and indigenous terms. Indigenous names are very evident in Louisiana’s “Florida Parishes” and on the west coast of Florida (table 3.2).51 Later nineteenth-­century endeavors made the names and their spellings more consistent. When the Census Bureau tallied water-­power potential in the 1880s, it carried out a systematic national inventory of waterways, including the Eastern Seaboard, as part of a national effort to “give an idea of the available power of the country, describing privileges actually in use, and calling attention to location where power could be advantageously devel82 · c h a p t e r

three

3.1 

River names in Tanner’s 1849 atlas

virginia

florida

louisiana

Coastal Plain Potomac Rappahannock York Pamunkey Chickahominy James

Atlantic St. Mary’s Nassau St. John’s Kissimee Potomac Opossum New Rio Ratones

Pearl Bouge Chito Tchefunte Tanchioah Notalbany Tickfaw Amite Iberville R Mississippi B Dupont Lafourche B Pet Callou B Gr Calliou B Bufflao Atchafalaya B Cypress Vermillion Lobos R Mermentou Calcasiu Sabine

Piedmont Black Water Warwick Scony Sappony Kowapt Nottoway

Gulf Sharks Caximbas Young North Sanybel Pease Creek Hillsboro R Weekiwachee R Crystal Withlacoochee Wacasassa R Suwanee Stinhatchee Fenaholoway Econtena Ocilla Oclockonnee Appalachicola Econtina Choctawhatchee R Pensacola Bay Yellow Water River Black Water R Escambia R Perdido R

Source : Henry Schenck Tanner, A New Universal Atlas (Philadelphia: S. Augustus Mitchell, 1849). Library of Congress.

oped.”52 Extensive fieldwork brought federal employees to the basins they inventoried, and they relied on local expertise to assemble their massive compendium. The report contains no discussion how the report settled on stream names, but names reflect other contemporaneous sources. In Virginia, twenty of the thirty-­seven named waterways have European names. As part of the broader growth of the modern political state, in 1890 the US government created an authority to establish consistent geographic c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 83

3.2 

River names in General Land Office maps, 1866

florida

louisiana

Atlantic St. Mary’s Nassau St. Johns Halifax Spruce Crane Turker St. Sebastian Indian Miami

Pearl Bogue Chito Chefunette Tangipaho Tickfaw Amite B. Manchac Mississippi Lafourche Bayou Terrebone Bayou Petit Caillou Bayou Grand Caillou Bayou de Large Atchafalaya Mermento R Calcaieu R Sabine

Gulf Corkscrew Caloosuhachee Tsalo Papko Hatchee Peas Myakka Monatee Hillsboro Sulpher Wekaiwoochee Cheesowilska Withlacoochee Wacasu Sawanee Isteen Hache Finnalana Ecofine Ocitta Wacissa St. Marks Socklokony Ocklockony New Black Alligator Appalachicola Econfuie Choctawhi (formerly European name) Alaqua Yellow Black Water Escambia Perdido

Sources : US General Land Office, Map of the State of Florida, Showing the Progress of Surveys Accompanying the Annual Report of the Commission General Land Office (Washington, 1866), US Congress, ex. doc. 1, 36th Congress, 2nd session; and US Department of the Interior, General Land Office, Annual Report of the General Land Office, Map of Louisiana (Washington, 1866).

names and thereby increase the legibility of the state in the landscape. Just before Fredrick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed in 1893— and with a more complex federal bureaucracy that sought to avoid confusion in the sprawling Western lands, especially the Alaska territory—­ President Benjamin Harrison issued an executive order creating the US Board on Geographic Names. Its mandate was to deliberate on contested place names, establish “uniform usage,” and resolve “all unsettled questions concerning geographic names which arise in the departments.” Its decisions were “to be accepted by these departments as the standard authority in such matters.”53 Its creation represented a systematic national effort to catalog place names—to inventory places as other agencies inventoried natural resources. The board fixed the spelling of one of Virginia’s rivers, the Mattaponi, in 1897.54 Overall, this body did not attempt to deliberate on every geographic label. It addressed specific queries about inconsistency, but never compiled a single catalog of names that eliminated duplication or inconsistencies. Its decisions on some thirty-­two thousand names from 1890 to 1932 appeared in its sixth report in 1933.55 The board reported that by the 1930s, preference was given to local usage of “names indigenous to the region”—meaning accepted local usage, not Native American usage. It also actively sought to apply just one name to each feature, such as a river, and this eliminated the possibility of following traditional indigenous practices that assigned multiple names along long rivers.56 Additionally, the US Geological Survey created some gazetteers that further fixed terminology. Through its compendium of Virginia place names, the disappearance of colonial-­era indigenous names is evident. For example, indigenous stream names reported by Robert Beverly in 1722 that disappeared by the early twentieth century include the Corotoman, Wiccocomoco, the Pocomoke, the Chissenessick, and the Pungotegue.57 Through multiple layers of federal administration, however, tendrils of indigenous language persisted on the landscape. conclusion

Prominent geographers have noted the profusion of indigenous names that remained a part of the toponymy in the United States, and this is particularly true for waterways in the South, especially those offering some degree of navigability. This observation runs counter to the powerful processes of imperial mapping reported upon in critical histories of place naming. Unquestionably, countless indigenous names have been erased from the landscape in the centuries since colonization began. Nonetheless, indigenous c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 85

names have endured, and in some cases have outlasted the people who first used the terms. What does this tell us about the processes in naming nature, in the bidirectional exchange of geographical knowledge between European and Native American societies? First, despite a predilection among European explorers to affix words from their own languages on prominent coastal features such as islands and bays, and initially even rivers, inland penetration demanded the reliance on indigenous geosophy. Explorers transformed natural features such as capes and bays into navigational fixtures, and attached familiar European names to them. Rivers seen merely as freshwater sources also acquired European names. Coastwise explorers and their mapmakers assigned European names to noteworthy features used to aid maritime navigators. Inland exploring parties, from de Soto to Marquette and Joliet, often accepted indigenous names for waterways used as transportation routes. Early English and French maps incorporate native terms for these important routes as an apparent concession to the local geographic knowledge of natural features that was critical for successful exploration. Where there was overlapping use of natural features, indigenous names survived in many cases. Indigenous names provided critical orientation for Europeans as they passed through different tribal and linguistic territories, and they enabled a first step toward communication with diverse native societies. Governing authorities further fixed these names when rivers as routes became international boundaries. Colonial mapmakers, often based in European cities, replaced a landscape of dense names that designated places with cultural and traditional significance and basic local orientation with a toponymy that emphasized the function of natural features. They obliterated local meanings and replaced them with cartographic utility. Second, there was considerable fluidity in colonial toponymy. English cartographers replaced the indigenous name Powhatan with James River in the seventeenth century, and Spanish officials scrubbed both indigenous and French labels from rivers along the Atlantic seaboard. In Louisiana the Mississippi River, Bayou Manchac, and Bayou Lafourche all had different names attached to them at different points in time, depending in part on the sovereign controlling the lower river. As the coastal territories became states and the US government assumed authority, the military and other government bodies began a more systematic effort to make names more consistent. Even as military campaigns against the Seminoles in Florida were underway, indigenous river names remained on the maps of the occupying force. Eventually, government policy explicitly stated a preference for “names indigenous [in local usage] to the region.” 86 · c h a p t e r

three

As some scholars argue, the rise of formal scientific classification and categorization of the landscape imposed European names on the landscape, but at the same time it also perpetuated numerous indigenous names. The original meanings may have disappeared, but the persistence of ancient languages in river names across the US South speaks to a powerful legacy of the transfer of geographical knowledge of natural features from native people to European mapmakers, and its incorporation into imperial and subsequent maps. And the notion of a river’s colonial-­era navigability enhanced the possibility that its native name would endure. Maps provide evidence of this process, however inconsistent with colonial theory, which illustrates a slight concession of European colonizers to native environmental knowledge and reflected one part of the effort to map nature. In order to tap the interior territories, taking advantage of principal waterways, Europeans adopted indigenous river names. An analysis of this process as evidenced in historical maps can expose important nature/society relationships of interest to historical geographers and environmental historians. The naming of nature reveals a potent imposition of colonial power, but also the subtle persistence of indigenous ideas about place and space that escaped the wholesale colonial transformation of the American l­ andscape.

c u r r e n t s o f i n f l u e n c e  · 87

chap ter four

oysters and emancipation The Antebellum Shellfish Industry as a Pathway to Freedom

Michelle Zacks

Connecticut Captain James H. Woodhouse remembered the winter of 1856–57 as “the coldest and longest spell of cold weather ever known” along the northeastern coast of the United States. En route to New York with hides and wood from Texas, Woodhouse’s schooner, the Florence, became icebound inside the Chesapeake Bay along with thirty other vessels.1 For weeks, the nation’s largest estuary had been frozen from its head southward to the York River, with ice preventing passage at its entrance. In February 1857 the New York Board of Underwriters sent a steamship to the Chesapeake with barrels of beef, pork, bread, and coffee to relieve the blocked vessels. About a week before the steamship began its southward journey, the schooner John G. Ferris arrived in New York City, heavy with the last Virginia oysters loaded “before the ice embargo was laid on the oyster beds.” Throngs of customers gathered to purchase the “much-­needed article”; and before the week was out, the schooner load had sold for more than double the usual price.2 Maneuvering small skiffs near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, US Coast Survey assistant J. J. S. Hassler also struggled with the deep freeze. Ten-­foot floes forced Hassler’s team to temporarily abandon their triangu88

lation of the region’s terrain.3 A fundamental purpose of Hassler’s cartographic work, and of the US Coast Survey as a whole, was to facilitate the “prosperity” and “free development” of maritime industry during this peak period of the nation’s commercial shipping.4 The Coast Survey’s mission of facilitating national commerce was inextricably tied to an economy based on chattel slavery. By the start of the nineteenth century, the domestic coastwise trade between the Gulf and South Atlantic states and the Northeast occupied a larger portion of the nation’s economy in terms of value than did internal trade with Western states and foreign countries combined. This trade was fueled largely by the production and distribution of cotton and other products of slave labor. When antebellum trading vessels and US Coast Survey personnel plotted Atlantic and Gulf Coast waterways, they regularly traversed the complex boundaries of slavery in the United States, as well as the nation’s busy sea lanes.5 Maritime commerce also offered pathways of emancipation. Nine months after the hard winter of 1856, a twenty-­two-­year-­old enslaved carpenter named Henry Johnson landed at the New York City docks. In Richmond, Virginia, Johnson had secreted himself aboard a schooner hauling Chesapeake oysters northward. When he arrived in New York, he was directed to the offices of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, likely under the guidance of Louis Napoleon, a free Black man employed as a porter on the city’s wharves.6 Johnson and Napoleon, along with thousands of others, were part of a broad community throughout the Atlantic world for whom maritime labor and transport served as “a pipeline to freedom and refuge” from enslavement.7 As many scholars have demonstrated, the work of free and enslaved Black people in maritime and riverine occupations facilitated the flow of antislavery ideology and activism throughout North America and the Caribbean.8 The seaborne transportation of Chesapeake oysters to New York City and New England was part of the broad antebellum movement of vessels, goods, and people that regularly crossed the Mason-­Dixon line. Northern ships visited Mid-­Atlantic and Southern ports on their way to and from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. New England livestock, lumber, cloth, and manufactured and agricultural goods moved southward. Products of slave labor such as sugar, rum, molasses, cotton, rice, and spices traveled north in exchange. Commodities shipped from Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, Richmond, and Baltimore included locally harvested oysters as well as fish, sweet potatoes, fruit, corn meal, and naval stores.9 If the Flor­ ence’s holds were not otherwise filled, Captain Woodhouse hauled oysters from Virginia and Maryland to Northern ports.10 Vessels bearing Chesao y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 89

peake oysters were a regular sight in New York and New England harbors. As national food industries consolidated and New York City emerged as a wholesale distribution hub, the shellfish occupied a significant portion of the coastal trade that fed Northern consumers.11 The antebellum oyster industry also became a component of the system of “geopolitical literacy” that allowed people of African descent to navigate within and out of slavery.12 Comprising Northern and Southern workers, Black and white, free and enslaved, the industry that connected the Mid-­Atlantic and New England regions constituted an interdependent network. Multiple parties within the oyster industry profited by sharing place-­specific geographic and environmental information. With their allies, enslaved and free Black people used their labor to construct interconnected spaces of relative freedom. Through oyster-­based occupations, they built cultural landscapes along the Northeastern seaboard that accommodated aspirations for autonomy, security, and community. The US Coast Survey’s field manuscripts and published charts marked these coastal domains in meticulous detail in the service of developing the US capitalist economy. Oyster-­based pathways to freedom were covert and not inscribed. Reading these emancipatory placemaking practices into the Coast Survey’s spatial representations sheds light on the ways people of African descent worked to undermine the slave-­based economic order from within. commerce, government, and science

The New York City wharves where Johnson disembarked in November 1857 were a busy place, made all the more so by the oyster trade. During the 1850s, an estimated fifteen hundred vessels annually delivered some five million dollars’ worth of oysters from New England and Chesapeake waters to the city’s markets. Customers satisfied their cravings by patronizing streetside peddlers, stalls, and shops; rough-­and-­tumble oyster saloons and cellars; and restaurants such as Thomas Downing’s Wall Street oyster parlor, or his three-­story fine-­dining oyster saloon on Broadway. Distributers shipped millions more oysters upstate and to the Midwest and California. With thousands of bushels delivered daily during the cold-­weather peak season, and as many as fifty thousand people employed in various aspects of the trade, oystering was big business.13 Oysters transported as wholesale cargo emblematized the importance of coastal and inshore commercial shipping more broadly. The spread of slave-­ based cotton production during the antebellum period stimulated maritime commerce. Production relied on the forced movements and forced 90 · c h a p t e r

four

labor of enslaved people throughout the South, and the northward shipment of cotton, especially to New York City. The schooners, brigs, and sloops that plied domestic waterways wove together Southern and Northern ports in networks that connected merchant capital, artisanal labor, industrial production, wage and unpaid labor, social institutions, households, and personal lives.14 The ubiquity and importance of the coastwise trade brought the federal government’s attention to bear on minimizing or mitigating dangers to crew, cargo, and vessels. Seafarers faced all manner of hazards in the age of sail. Gales and bad leaks in deep water could sink a ship, but everyday dangers such as running aground in shoal water or colliding with unseen underwater obstacles also posed threats. The marine insurance industry provided a financial mechanism to manage the risks, but could not prevent the perils to commercial shipping.15 To forestall such dangers, the government prioritized “security of navigation” from its earliest decades. Investments in coastal infrastructure—such as the construction of lighthouses and breakwaters, harbor dredging, and the removal of wrecks—were the nation’s “first public works,” funded through the taxation of seaborne commerce.16 Coastal cartography offered another means to address the dangers. First authorized by Congress in 1807 under the Treasury Department, the US Coast Survey used state-­ of-­ the-­ art hydrographical and trigonometric methods to chart the nation’s inshore and territorial waters and coastal terrain. Along with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, the Coast Survey employed “formalized scientific knowledge” in attempt to displace “ocean wilderness with the ordered empiricism of hydrographic science.”17 Under the direction of its first superintendent, Ferdinand Hassler, the agency initially focused on topographic and hydrographic surveys of the coastal waters around New York City, the nation’s most important commercial port. The work soon extended northward to Connecticut and Rhode Island and southward to Philadelphia and Delaware. Beginning in 1843, the agency’s second superintendent, Alexander Dallas Bache, expanded the Coast Survey’s geographic reach to include the coasts from Maine through Texas and, by 1850, the Pacific coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.18 With growing national confidence in the ability of science and technology to render the natural world legible and manageable, the agency began printing charts of the continent’s shorelines and inshore waters. The first published maps in 1844 represented New York City’s harbors (fig. 4.1). Urging Congress to appropriate additional funds, Bache distributed copies of the maps to its o y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 91

Fig. 4.1 Survey of the coast of the United States, New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs (Washington, 1845). National Archives II.

members, as well as to other federal officials, the US Navy, foreign governments, and commercial, scientific, and literary associations.19 In the constantly shifting littoral world, the contours of a shoreline may change overnight. Bold lines on a map and representations of marine space meticulously marked by soundings, however, conveyed a sense of fixity. The “limit of land and water is the most striking and important feature that exists in nature,” wrote US Coast Survey topographer Henry L. Whiting. “To give proper effect to this feature in publications, the actual shore-­line should be made strong and conspicuous.”20 At the same time, the Coast Survey’s maps attempted to capture the movements of marine space through, for example, marginal textual commentary such as detailed “directions for sailing,” and tidal notes distinguishing between depths at mean low and high water, and between the mean rise and fall of spring and neap tides. The sophisticated representation of spatial stability on the one hand and natural movement on the other served to create an authoritative “instrument of governance.” Such cartographic productions worked both as practical aids to navigation and as ideological support for an expanding maritime-­based economy and empire, conveying a sense that the United States could indeed be the master of all it surveyed.21 Like Hassler, Bache worked to professionalize the practice and institutional capacity of the sciences in the United States. Unlike his predecessor, Bache actively promoted the Coast Survey as instrumental to the commercial development of particular ports and the nation at large. To this end, he explicitly enlisted public backing in order to ensure continued congressional support for the agency’s work, which was both costly and slow. Generous with Coast Survey resources, Bache responded to specific requests and insisted that the agency’s workers adopt local customs as they worked around the nation, partly to counteract Hassler’s reputation for haughtiness. In an 1854 letter thanking the superintendent for the gift of a large state-­of-­the-­art map of their plantations—where enslaved people produced sea-­island cotton—the Townsend family of Edisto, South Carolina, expressed the pride generated by seeing their “domain . . . delineated on a well-­traced map.”22 Such efforts generated public support and warded off regional hostility to federal presence on private lands. This approach was particularly successful in the South, where coastal charts and infrastructure were most lacking. The 1845 Annual Report of the Coast Survey noted the need to develop navigational infrastructure in North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound in order to “open up more readily the corn-­growing region . . . to a market, which would add much to the wealth of the nation.”23 In the Florida Keys, Coast 94 · c h a p t e r

four

Survey workers studied the agricultural potential of soils and climate; in Mobile, the Survey responded favorably to requests by business leaders for infrastructural improvements; and in Louisiana, Coast Survey personnel recommended enhancing the region’s commercial navigation for the transport of cotton and sugar.24 For the most part, the Coast Survey’s cartographic texts naturalized the physical manifestations of slavery. A built environment significantly constructed and maintained through the unpaid work by people of African descent suffuses the agency’s field sketches and engraved maps of the region: farms, orchards, and fields; transportation infrastructure; domestic dwellings and commercial buildings. On rare occasions, sketches from triangulation fieldwork in coastal areas of Virginia and Maryland during the 1840s include structures labeled “quarters,” and at least one set of field notes includes repeated mention of property owners’ “negroes.” More typically, Coast Survey maps and sketches depict the physical features of slavery in detail without designating them as such.25 For example, a 1845 Coast Survey sketch by survey assistant Ferdinand Gerdes, of the Wades Point property in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, depicts waterfront fields, orchards, a duck blind, and dwellings (fig. 4.2). Wades Point owner John W. Kemp listed in his diary the “eight head of blacks” who maintained his property, but these enslaved African Americans are not identified in the sketch or its accompanying notes.26 Designed to facilitate maritime transport, the Coast Survey’s maps and charts tacitly supported the products of slavery and the domestic trafficking of people. Working in South Carolina in 1849, Coast Survey assistant Charles O. Boutelle wrote Bache, “Nowhere does the Coast Survey have warmer friends.” The superintendent’s success in taking “into account public opinion and expand[ing] public involvement in science,” argues historian Hugh Slotten, helped to address a “democratic desire for a ‘politically responsive public policy.’”27 In South and North alike, responding positively to “public opinion” meant improving marine transportation networks that serviced the flow of the slave-­based economy. new england, new york, and the southern oyster trade

The US Coast Survey’s gifts to individuals were not confined to the South. Captain Charles H. Townshend, a member of a prominent maritime family in Connecticut, received a hand-­drawn replica of an 1846 harbor map of New Haven. The gift may have been in appeasement for what the capo y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 95

Fig. 4.2 F. H. Gerdes’s sketch of Wade’s Point Signal; Section III. Description of Signals. Station: On Chesapeake Bay, below the baseline on Kent Island, 1845. entry 128, scientific records, descriptions of stations, box 43, record group 23; National Archives at College; College Park, MD.

tain’s father called the “wreckage and debris” left by the survey team that encamped from 1833 to 1838 on Raynham, the family’s estate along New Haven Harbor’s southeastern coast. The Townshend property was the site of one of the earliest experiments in planting Chesapeake oysters in New Haven waters. The Raynham estate and the Townshend family helped establish the city as the foremost center for what became known as the “Southern Trade.”28 Following the Civil War, Charles Townshend became famous for using methods acquired from his travels in France to experiment with oyster cultivation in New Haven Harbor, but his homegrown interest in the shellfish industry began much earlier.29 In 1835, Charles’s father, William Townsend, was part owner of an oyster schooner that voyaged regularly from Fair Haven to Virginia waters. In March of that year, the elder Townsend suc96 · c h a p t e r

four

cessfully planted Chesapeake oysters in Morris Cove, a large embayment just inside the southeastern opening of the mouth of New Haven Harbor. By September, the oysters “increased in size at least one-­third and in flavor not to be excelled by any on the coast, and those not stolen were sold at good profit.”30 Regardless of whether Townsend was the first New Havener to initiate the practice, as his son claimed, the custom of “laying down” Chesapeake oysters in the spring and harvesting them in late fall or early winter became routine. New Haven and its vicinity emerged as key sites for commercial oyster production and distribution. Regional farmers regularly traveled to the Quinnipiac River to harvest oysters for home use, while professional fishing crews supplied local consumers as well as markets in Canada, Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts. The 1846 US Coast Survey harbor map of New Haven highlights oystering efforts as fundamental “sources of prosperity” (fig. 4.3).31 The primary purpose of the map was to aid navigation northward through the long, narrow channel leading from Long Island Sound to the harbor, which required steering clear of broad banks of mud, loose sand, and tidal flats to the east and west. The map also signals what sections of the social landscape the Coast Survey deemed important.32 In terms of harbor infrastructure, it clearly marked the Long Wharf, which served as “the center of New Haven’s commercial life” during the city’s lengthy history as a hub for the coastal, West Indies, and China trade. By 1846 the pier extended 3,500 feet into the harbor to allow vessels to load and unload at the edge of shallow water. William Lanson, an African American who settled in New Haven in 1803, was responsible for the planning and labor involved in the 1810 extension of the pier.33 No other signs of a built environment appeared on the map in the area of Long Wharf, despite the customhouse, warehouses, shipping offices, flour mills, and ship chandlers that filled the bustling commercial waterfront. Prominent on the harbor map is another area at the southwestern mouth of the harbor, labeled Oyster Point. Used to plant oysters, this outlying section had few factories or residences.34 The clearest indications of a built environment appear at the confluence of the Mill and Quinnipiac Rivers, just east of New Haven city proper. In densities far greater than any other neighborhood depicted on the map, tight clusters of buildings line the banks of the Quinnipiac, the main artery of the village of Fair Haven. As the economic heart of New Haven’s early-­nineteenth-­century oyster industry, Fair Haven abetted the larger city’s growth and the state’s reputation as a center for financial acumen. In 1808 the population was 150. By 1870, when New Haven annexed the village, it housed 5,600 people, with o y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 97

Fig. 4.3 New Haven Harbor, NOAA National Ocean Service (Washington, 1846)

most households directly involved in the oyster industry and supporting occupations.35 A commercial map of the village from 1859 specifies some structures indicated in the Coast Survey map, depicting more than fifty riverfront “oyster barns,” where shellfish were shucked, rinsed, and packed into wooden kegs or tin cans. Supporting the industry were four ship yards, several wharves, a sail loft, and a keg factory, all tightly clustered along both banks of the Quinnipiac.36 In the 1850s the industry employed between 100 to 250 Fair Haven oyster schooners, each capable of hauling between 2,000 and 7,000 bushels per trip. Even during the bitter winter of 1856–57, one Fair Haven firm shucked and marketed more than 150,000 gallons of oyster meat.37 As the demand for oysters increased, shellfish dealers complemented local harvests with supplies imported from farther afield. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Fair Haven dealers also procured bivalves from other Connecticut waters and the New Jersey coast. Yankee vessels continued to move southward in search of abundant supplies of the popular and lucrative shellfish. By the 1820s, the Fair Haven fleet reached Delaware Bay and Chincoteague on the Atlantic side of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, eventually rounding the tip of the southern mouth of the estuary and entering the waters of Chesapeake Bay.38 Some Chesapeake oysters were destined for immediate sale in regional markets, but others, like those with which William K. Townsend experimented, were planted in local waters for weeks or months. Planting allowed the oyster meat to “fatten,” take on the familiar flavor of local waters, and increase in overall size, all of which enhanced profitability. During the antebellum period, bedding Virginia and Maryland oysters in New England waters in the spring in preparation for winter harvest served as a means to store juvenile and adult bivalves in order to meet seasonal market demand.39 An outgrowth of the centuries-­old coastwise commercial circuits, the “Southern Trade” of oysters to New England from Virginia and Maryland waters formed a transregional system that fed urban appetites as far away as Missouri and Minneapolis.40 These commodity flows also were the basis for long-­standing environmental exchanges, as Chesapeake oysters were transplanted to northern beds throughout the nineteenth century. According to an 1867 newspaper article, the first cargo of Chesapeake oysters purchased specifically for planting in the Quinnipiac River occurred in 1817, when prominent Fair Haven captains and businessmen, including Elijah and John Rowe, chartered the schooner Old John.41 Accurate estimates of the volume of trade are impossible to make, but the use of “millions” to describe Fair Haven’s oyster business during the late-­1850s peak confirms its sigo y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 99

nificance. Annually, between one and four million bushels were delivered from the Chesapeake, one million oyster kegs and half as many cans were produced, and village-­wide, about one million dollars was invested in harvesting, processing, and shipping the bivalves.42 Coastal Connecticut was not alone in the oyster-­based network that bridged northern and southern marine ecosystems and social domains. As early as 1800, seafood dealers in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, planted mature Chesapeake oysters in local waters before selling them to Boston, Salem, and Portland markets.43 In 1817 and 1818, Chesapeake oysters, particularly from Norfolk, were among the commodities regularly delivered to wholesale markets in New York City.44 By the late 1850s, when these markets relied heavily on Chesapeake oysters, more than one million dollars’ worth of transplanted Virginia and Maryland shellfish sold during the summer months. Staten Island, a center for shellfish harvesting and trade since the colonial era, also engaged in the Southern trade. Residents sold directly to city markets and, sometime after 1820, formed “oyster-­plantations” in Prince’s Bay, along Staten Island’s southwestern coast. These beds were planted with oysters from local waters, Delaware Bay, and “the ‘rocks’ of Virginia.”45 Transplanting oysters also relied on the movement of people across the Mason-­Dixon Line. Like the oysters, the seasonal workers who maintained Staten Island’s cultivated oyster beds came from various sources. According to an 1853 report, they included “native Jerseymen or Staten Islanders,” as well as “Chesapeake men, who came up for a brief season’s work, and then returned to their homes.”46 However, some Chesapeake laborers chose to remain. In the 1830s, free Black families from Snow Hill in Worcester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore helped establish an oystering community on Staten Island called Sandy Ground, initially referred to as Little Africa.47 Most men from these families continued to be involved in the oyster industry in their new homes, cultivating the beds, delivering oysters to the city in small skiffs, or crewing on schooners sailing to the Chesapeake Bay to supply insatiable northern markets. Exchanges of organisms from Southern to Northern ecosystems complemented the networks of communication forged through repeated lines of trade.48 During the antebellum period, many interactions in the coastal oyster trade occurred on an intimate scale. The schooners involved in the “Southern trade” were coastal freight vessels, generally from forty-­five to two hundred tons, each with a crew of two to five seamen in addition to the captain, mate, and cook.49 Some Northern dredging vessels used their own crews to harvest oysters from Chesapeake waters, though they 100 · c h a p t e r

four

were primarily Philadelphia and New Jersey vessels that concentrated in the lower sections of the bay.50 Most New England and New York schooners, however, purchased shellfish by the bushel from local people. Tonging was the most common method to harvest oysters, practiced by white property owners, white tenants, and free and enslaved Black people alike.51 Still used today, an oyster tong is a set of double wooden-­shaft “pinchers,” fifteen to twenty feet long, ending in iron rakes that interlock when the shafts are closed.52 A hand-­operated harvesting method deployed by an individual standing on the edge of a small vessel, tonging requires strength, stamina, and balance, but relatively little capital. As early as 1808, Fair Haven and other New England–­based ships purchased shellfish in the southern Chesapeake Bay from “the tongmen living along the shores, who oystered especially for those vessels.”53 In the mid-­1850s, the Fair Haven Tribune noted that Chesapeake oysters were delivered in baskets to the Connecticut village by “men of various shades of color—native American, native Africo-­American, and foreigners,” some of them presumably being the Maryland and Virginia tongmen who loaded shellfish at the source.54 Oyster tongers, now as then, immerse themselves in the environment, feeling the bottom with the shafts and mapping marine space with their bodies and minds. Knowledge of the location and patterns of particular ecosystems acquired over individual lifetimes and through the course of generations was a treasure that Northern captains and crew keenly sought. For example, an unidentified schooner sailing from New Jersey’s Great Egg Harbor anchored at Hooper Strait on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on January 13, 1838. The first few days were slow—only forty bushels delivered from area harvesters—but after the keeper of the log went “ashore and took tea with the ladies,” the bushels arrived in greater volume. The crew “took in” approximately 1,735 bushels of oysters at twenty cents per bushel, and by January 20 the schooner was underway for New York Harbor.55 Whether it was the first trip for this vessel or one of many, a respectful visit to the women of Hooper Strait communities—probably family members of local watermen—may have been the equivalent of Superintendent Bache’s instructions to his Coast Survey crews to follow local customs. Tea and polite conversation signaled local fishing families that the northern oyster-­crewmen were available to load shellfish and make payment; perhaps the “ladies” helped to negotiate the price. Developing relations with Chesapeake actors facilitated the trade over time, and Northern traders relied on experienced agents. By the 1820s, the Rowe family and other Fair Haven dealers regularly sent their own vessels o y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 101

to the Chesapeake or chartered others to make the trip. In 1824, Captain Edwin Thompson, under instructions from Ruel Rowe, signed a contract with Captain Daniel Griffins, master of the schooner Planet, to sail “down the Chesapeake Bay . . . then to take on a cargo of oysters with which to proceed forthwith to New Haven Conn,” with the stipulation that the oystermen not be furnished with liquor while loading the shellfish. During the fall and winter months of 1834, Thompson was stationed in Baltimore, closer to the source of “good oysters,” where he received instructions from Rowe regarding finances and the need to “be particular and get the right kind.” Three years later, Thompson operated from New York, where he signed contracts with at least two captains, one based in Great Egg Harbor and one in Perth Amboy, instructing them to proceed “to Nanticoke or such other port or ports in the Chesapeake Bay” to procure oysters for delivery to New Haven and Fair Haven.56 Through sustained interactions with local harvesters, Northern oyster dealers acquired knowledge of the region’s biological and cultural environment, gradually laying claim to some of these spaces themselves. The Nanticoke River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—where Thompson concluded that the “good oysters” were to be found—is located nearly halfway up from the mouth of the bay in the northeastern segment of Tangier Sound. This mid-­bay region contains the moderately salty waters that provide ideal conditions for the growth of large, subtidal oyster bars.57 According to the New York Tribune, by the 1840s, Rowe & Company had obtained about 1,800 acres of oyster ground in the Nanticoke (fig. 4.4) One employee of the company, presumably Thompson, remained in the Chesapeake full-­ time in search of oysters to purchase. From its Norfolk base, the company shipped some whole oysters directly to Fair Haven, and thence to entrepôts in Buffalo, Detroit, and Hamilton, Canada. The company also owned a number of small boats that planted bivalves in the Nanticoke grounds year-­round. In addition to the larger freight vessels it chartered, Rowe & Company’s twenty schooners plied fruit from the Bahamas in the summer, and Chesapeake oysters in the winter.58 Northern oyster dealers’ Chesapeake-­based operations had enormous long-­term impacts on the region. Setting the stage for a long history of dramatic alterations of the bay’s ecosystems, the antebellum Southern trade expanded the economic structures through which goods and people moved in and out of the region. Responding to Virginia and Maryland restrictions on out-­of-­state harvesting, a number of New England and New York oyster dealers became Chesapeake residents and moved their operations closer to the source of the product and the harvesters.59 In the 1820s, mariners and 102 · c h a p t e r

four

fishermen from New England, New Jersey, and Delaware began settling on Chincoteague Island, on Virginia’s lower Eastern Shore. Within two decades, they and other island residents established a seafood industry based largely on supplying oysters and fish to “shallopers”—dealers from Philadelphia, New York, and other Northern cities.60 Along with Norfolk, the expanding port city of Baltimore became a major center for the Chesapeake shellfish trade, offering a forecast of the post–­Civil War industrialization of the oyster industry.61 The New Haven dealer Caleb S. Maltby, for example, relocated to Baltimore in 1836, where he opened an oyster-­shucking and distribution business. With the ongoing expansion of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the nation’s first common carrier, in the 1830s, Maltby’s operations stimulated the growth of local and regional oyster markets. Thomas Kensett Jr., whose family had moved its food preservation business from New Haven to New York, established a Baltimore oyster canning operation in 1849. By 1860, approximately sixty oyster firms occupied Baltimore’s waterfront.62 During the antebellum period, the New England–­Chesapeake oyster industry served as a social watershed. Within these commercial networks, diverse classes of people interacted, cooperatively and contentiously, including people from Northern and Southern states as well as migrants from the Caribbean and Europe. Notwithstanding the enormous imbalances of power between white and Black, wealthy and poor, and free and enslaved, numerous parties had something to gain through participation in these networks. One advantage was the money to be made, in large amounts by some and in small but reliable increments by others. Another advantage involved space, time, and movement. Labor in the oyster industry and the coastal trade allowed people of African descent to accrue knowledge about daily and seasonal routes of transit within and between both sides of the Mason-­Dixon Line. chesapeake oystering, black mobility, and legislative control

From the outset of the nineteenth century, the regular presence of Northern oyster vessels in Chesapeake waters troubled local authorities. In 1811 the Virginia legislature outlawed dredging within state waters. Nine years later, decrying the “great number of large vessels from the Northern and Middle States [that] frequent our waters for the purpose of transporting oysters,” as well as the “destructive implements” employed in the harvest, Maryland’s General Assembly banned both the use of dredges and out-­of-­ o y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 103

Fig. 4.4 1862: Coast Chart 33: Chesapeake Bay: From Choptank River to Potomac River. American Geographical Society Library.

state shipment of oysters by vessels not owned by full-­time residents. Between 1830 and 1852, Maryland passed a series of further restrictions on oyster harvesting, creating distinctions between inshore “county” waters and deeper “state” waters, with rules of access governing each.63 Legislatures coupled such bans with legal restrictions on the movements and rights of free Black people. As Northern oyster schooners increasingly frequented the bay, Maryland banned “free negroes and mulattos” who resided outside the state from relocating to the state to live or work temporarily. Another 1836 Maryland law prohibited “Negroes or Mulattoes” from serving as the sole operators of vessels in state waters, because of the “great inconvenience and injury” it occasioned by virtue of the “clandestine trade . . . carried on and slaves intending to abscond from their masters and owners.”64 In 1841, concerned about the frequency with which New York–­based vessels facilitated escapes and distributed antislavery literature, the Virginia and South Carolina legislatures passed acts commonly known as the New York Ship Inspection Laws. The laws required all ships from New York to be inspected for stowaways, to pay a large bond for each inspection, and to cover damages should an escaping person be discovered.65 Virginia and Maryland officials, however, had little success enforcing such laws. Lacking regulatory funds and adequate personnel, their ability to monitor the crenulated coastlines of the Chesapeake Bay was limited. Tidewater residents, white and Black, were intimately familiar with local waters, and they easily evaded would-­be regulators. In 1818, white residents of Accomack and Northampton Counties, which constitute Virginia’s lower Eastern Shore, complained to the state legislature about enslaved fishermen harvesting oysters at night, consorting with the white crews of oyster vessels, and neglecting their work during the day. This area also was home to significant numbers of free Blacks and pockets of antislavery sentiment, due in part to a resident community of Quakers who manumitted large numbers of enslaved people in the late colonial and early republican eras, and who encouraged their neighbors to do the same.66 White residents of Richmond, up the James River on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake, raised similar grievances as early as 1804, arguing to state authorities that the Northern sea captains who traded with locally enslaved people exerted a morally corrupting influence, “inculcat[ing] in their weak minds a spirit of discontent, tending to insurrection,” and encouraging slaves to steal in order to pay for transport from the slave states.67 As the century progressed and Northern oyster enterprises took root in the Chesapeake, slaveholders’ fears about the presence of “outside oystermen” intensified.68 In 1831, the same year as Nat Turner’s rebellion, Nort106 · c h a p t e r

four

hampton County whites again registered an official complaint, noting that Northern oyster vessels employed both free and enslaved Blacks. Working at night made Black workers unfit for daytime labor. Even worse, from the perspective of white residents, this illicit employment exposed people of color to the dangerous idea of “universal emancipation.” Whites from the Western Shore of Virginia repeated their objections to Black people engaged in selling oysters to Northern dealers in 1836, 1843, and 1851.69 White residents of Maryland’s Western Shore also were wary of outsider “depredations” of local oyster beds. In 1858, William W. Dix of St. Mary’s County published a newspaper notice in which he claimed exclusive rights to oyster beds near his property and warned “Owners of Slaves, Parents and Guardians of Children, Captains of Vessels and Free Negroes” to steer clear of Piney Point Creek. A month earlier, an anonymous St. Mary’s resident expressed opposition to the idea of permitting county residents to engage in oyster dredging. Such activities, he asserted, favored “Philadelphians, Baltimoreans and York river Virginians” at the expense of “the poor man . . . with his canoe and rakes,” while also increasing the numbers and autonomy of the “peculiar population” within the county.70 For many whites, the primary problem with the expanding oyster industry was less the potential damage to the physical and biological landscape than the degradation of a cultural and economic landscape based on slavery and the control of Black people’s bodies and social lives. The revenues that flowed to Northern bank accounts from the antebellum trade in Chesapeake oysters also concerned regional commentators. Given Connecticut’s rocky soil and cold climate, the Richmond Daily Dispatch proclaimed in 1854, “no earthy reason” for the existence and prosperity of Fair Haven could be conceived apart from the oyster trade. Not only did their vessels purchase Chesapeake oysters for a “mere song,” but enterprising Yankees sold schooner-­loads of empty shells back to the Virginians to be converted into lime fertilizer for rejuvenating depleted soils. Connecticut’s oyster industry, the newspaper concluded, was evidence of its residents’ knack for simultaneously putting themselves out of debt while indebting others. In a similar vein, DeBow’s Commercial Review estimated in 1858 that the eighteen million bushels of oysters conveyed annually out of Virginia waters primarily enriched Fair Haven and New York City merchants. Declaring that Fair Haven streets were “paved with Virginia oyster shells,” the article castigated Northern businessmen who profited from the trade while Virginia oystermen earned “a bare subsistence” and the commonwealth’s coffers suffered. Such sentiments captured Southern resentments about trade imbalances in the antebellum era.71 o y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 107

As the oyster industry continued in the face of growing sectional divisions, some Chesapeake authorities grew more pointed about the “Southern trade” in shellfish as an element of the conflicts over slavery. In 1856, the Virginia legislature passed a law intended to provide “additional protection for the slave property of citizens of this commonwealth.” A more rigorous version of the 1841 New York Ship Inspection Law, it mandated inspections of all vessels bound for Northern ports, with the exception of those owned by the federal government, state residents, or foreigners. To improve enforcement, the act created a body of armed port and river inspectors to intercept and search ships. The inspectors had the authority to impose fines or bring to jail those deemed in violation.72 In tandem with this law, Virginia’s newly elected Governor Henry A. Wise proposed a tax on commercial oyster production to fund the modernization of government activities, such as an expanded public education system for white children. Some Maryland residents also proposed directing oyster revenues toward state and county treasuries. An unsuccessful 1858 petition from a group of St. Mary’s County businessmen, for example, requested that dredging by county residents be permitted, with vessel license monies directed toward school financing.73 The Virginia proposal was as much a reaction to antislavery agitation as it was a fiscal initiative. In an 1856 speech, Wise hinted at the role of the oyster industry in creating pathways out of slavery. Emphasizing the “necessity of a reciprocity of trade,” he spoke about the need to maintain the “filaments of interest, elements which enter from North to South, and from South to North.” Referring to “Northern abolitionists” as the true “disunionists,” Wise sought to undermine the financial might of these destabilizing forces. A tax on the shellfish trade, he argued, would ensure that Virginians, rather than Yankees, would “possess ourselves of [such] sources of wealth” as Chesapeake oysters as well as newly discovered coal deposits in the western part of the state. Blocked by Tidewater Virginia politicians, Wise’s oyster tax initiative failed. The inspection of Northern vessels for freedom-­seeking stowaways, however, continued until Virginia seceded from the nation.74 oysters and emancipation

Resentment over the Yankee oyster business reflected concerns that the Chesapeake Bay’s marshy backwaters were drawn into a commercial circuit that operated parallel to but independent of the slave economy. Attempts by Virginia and Maryland to restrict out-­of-­state shellfish operations had 108 · c h a p t e r

four

greater impacts on resident Black oystermen and their families than it did on white northern businessmen, many of whom circumvented the laws.75 Despite restrictions, people of African descent in the Chesapeake successfully used the antebellum oyster industry to construct material spaces and conditions for expanded notions of freedom. For the most part, Black people in Virginia and Maryland prior to the Civil War were unable to sustain independent oyster businesses, but some were able to use money earned through tonging to purchase the freedom of themselves or others.76 Many others used oyster-­based commercial circuits to remove themselves or others from the spatial boundaries of active enslavement, if not from the legal parameters that protected the institution nationwide, such as the Fugitive Slave Law. And some used oyster-­related labor to create general pathways out of the South and establish relatively independent households and communities on the Northern side of the Mason-­Dixon Line. Henry Johnson, the Richmond-­based blacksmith who freed himself in 1857 via an oyster vessel bound for New York, was not alone in effecting his emancipation through that means. Ten years earlier, oysterman Joshua Davis, who hired himself out in Portsmouth, Virginia, and had friends in Boston, freed himself by boarding a schooner bound for New York.77 Peter Robinson, an enslaved marine engineer and vessel pilot from Wilmington, North Carolina, worked with two white Quaker oystermen who used their vessel to convey enslaved people to freedom in Canada.78 William Still, the director of Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee, recorded the repeated assistance provided to runaways by steamboats and schooners mastered by Captains William Baylis, Alfred Fountain, and William H. Lambdin. As noted by Still and reported in newspaper accounts and legal proceedings, anonymous oyster captains, crew, or vessels frequently helped these captains escort freedom-­seeking people within the Chesapeake and en route to Philadelphia through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.79 In 1848, Daniel Drayton, the captain of the schooner Pearl, unsuccessfully attempted to free almost eighty people from slavery in Washington. Drayton developed his opposition to slavery through engagement in the coastwise trade, including the shipment of Chesapeake oysters.80 Oyster merchants also were involved in the Underground Railroad. John David Oliver, a white member of Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee, was an oyster dealer.81 Thomas Downing, a free Black man who moved in 1819 to New York from Virginia’s Eastern Shore, used prior Chesapeake shellfish experience to establish a highly esteemed oyster restaurant in the city. Downing and his son, George, were active in abolitionist and Black suffrage movements, as well as in the Underground Railroad.82 In New Haven, Wilo y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 109

liam Lanson, the African American marine engineer responsible for the 1810 extension of the city’s Long Wharf and for constructing the Farmington Canal’s harbor basin, assisted and employed runaway slaves and was active in the Black suffrage movement. Sometime before his death in 1851, Lanson bought property along the Quinnipiac River in Fair Haven with plans to engage in the city’s oyster industry.83 For all these people, and for many others not mentioned here, commercial oyster labor was foundational to their emancipatory work. Antebellum oyster production represented a means to accumulate wealth, the integration of ecosystems across regions, and an early example of centralized distribution of seafood throughout the nation. It was also a mechanism for liberation. Antislavery activists and sympathizers helped fashion specific vessels, sites, and commodity flows into nodes of potential refuge and safe passage within the “most important artery of interregional commerce,” the coastwise trade between the US South and North.84 Two stories provide examples of the dialectical ways in which the antebellum oyster industry simultaneously was enmeshed in and helped unravel a social structure based on slavery. The first involves a white man from Staten Island, Captain Cornelius Cruser. In 1853, having purchased four acres of land on Tanner’s Creek in Norfolk County, Virginia, Cruser shipped a frame house from Staten Island to the property, where he had it erected on a base constructed of “New York pressed brick.” A Northern foundation built on Chesapeake soil, Cruser’s oyster operation reflected the blurred lines between the economic and cultural systems on either side of the Mason-­Dixon boundary. Beginning by shipping oysters to New York markets with the help of his sons, Cruser eventually purchased a number of enslaved people along with five small sloops. Perhaps inspired by Rowe’s operations on the Eastern Shore, Cruser planted oysters in Tanner’s Creek, a business likely operated by the people he claimed to own.85 Two years later, four men—Anthony and Albert Brown, Jones Anderson, and Isaiah— escaped from one of Cruser’s neighbors on Tanner’s Creek. Enslaved by two white watermen, the four Black oystermen “selected one of their master’s small oyster-­boats, which was pretty-­well rigged with sails, and off they started.” The men landed the boat north of Baltimore and eventually made their way to Canada.86 The second story focuses on the free Black settlers from the Chesapeake who built the Staten Island community of Sandy Ground in the 1830s. The Maryland members were part of a large network of free Blacks from Snow Hill in Worcester County who worked in the Eastern Shore’s oyster industry. Strict restrictions placed on Black people in the industry prompted 110 · c h a p t e r

four

them to leave Maryland.87 As “fairly prosperous oystermen,” they were able to purchase land in the vicinity of an existing African American community. Likely already familiar with Staten Island from their experience in the coastwise trade, the Snow Hill transplants became successful participants in commercial oyster production centered around Prince’s Bay, including the continued transfer of shellfish from the Chesapeake to New York. Another migrant to Sandy Ground, Philip Cooler, had worked as an enslaved oysterman in Gloucester County, Virginia. Purchased and freed by his free wife, Eliza Morris, Cooler was forced to leave Virginia by a law that banned manumitted people from remaining within the state. The couple relocated to Sandy Ground, where they resumed work in commercial oyster production.88 Like Cruser in Virginia, Cooler and Morris bought property and built a house, founding their livelihoods on the knowledge and proceeds of the oyster industry. Unlike Cruser, Cooler and Morris were part of an economic network that simultaneously functioned as a source of livelihood for self-­emancipated people, and as the Staten Island leg of the Underground Railroad.89 conclusion

The commercial exchange of oysters and other goods between the Chesapeake, New York, and New England opened up mechanisms for enslaved people to navigate within and out of the boundaries of slavery. As the landscape archaeologist Thomas Tartaron explains, regarding a different time and place, experiential knowledge of the physical and social features of maritime cultural landscapes allows coastal residents to operate “‘under the radar’ of mechanisms of central control.”90 Antebellum oyster-­based commercial pathways along the northeastern coastal corridor constituted covert worlds within slavery. Through shared, embodied experience in the industry, enslaved and free Black people along with white allies constructed an “under the radar” network of commercial enterprises, occupational communities, and political associations premised on ideological commitments to emancipation. Graphic depictions of these emancipatory pathways do not appear within representations of space from the period. As demonstrated in recent scholarship, the US Coast Survey and its personnel worked assiduously to assist the Union war effort just prior to and during the Civil War.91 In the 1830s through the 1850s, however, the agency’s manuscripts and publications did not engage directly in questions about slavery and freedom. Rather, the Coast Survey’s maps and charts naturalized a coastal environo y s t e r s a n d e m a n c i p a t i o n  · 111

ment and economy structured by forced labor. Active in triangulation and topographic field work in the Chesapeake region beginning in 1843, Coast Survey teams were immersed in the aquatic and terrestrial domains within which the oyster trade flourished. Surrounding them were lived practices and covert worlds that helped undermine the institution of slavery from within. Occupational and antislavery activities based on oystering and other maritime labor are not apparent in the Coast Survey renderings of these spaces, but such tactical maneuvers can be interpolated within the silences. Rather than existing as marks on paper, the spatial knowledge of producers and distributors within the antebellum oyster industry’s “Southern Trade” was an element of the concept of geopolitical literacy. Phillip Troutman defines this as “words in motion, news and information categorized and passed on surreptitiously across the space of slavery.”92 The representations of fixed spatial coordinates, exemplified by the publications of the US Coast Survey, were in the service of maintaining and expanding existing property relations, divisions of labor, and power structures. In contrast, the connected nodes of oyster production established by Black people along the northeastern coast of the United States were designed to fracture those slavery-­based social dynamics from within. Communities such as Sandy Ground and other elements of the antebellum oyster industry were founded on commercial circuits and occupational practices within which imagined spaces of freedom could take physical shape.

112 · c h a p t e r

four

chap ter five

transcending the alps in the andes Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the Graphic Invention of the Mountain Range

Ernesto Capello

i, demens, et saeuas curre per Alpes Juvenal, Satires X

“Go madman and climb the hostile Alps.”1 These words, taken from Juvenal’s description of Hannibal’s famed Alpine crossing during the second Punic War (c. 218 CE), provide the epigraph to Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1751 travelogue relating his journey to Quito (today’s Ecuador) to measure the arc of the equatorial meridian.2 On the face of it, the reference is obvious: like the Alps, the Andes represent one of the world’s great mountain ranges. Traversing their mammoth heights therefore links La Condamine’s deeds with those of the famed Carthaginian in a narcissistic gesture of self-­aggrandizement. Such an interpretation has great validity. As Neil Safier has highlighted, La Condamine left a trail of commemorative objects dotted across the Andes, ranging from stone plaques to inscriptions on seaside rocks to the famous ceremonial pyramids marking the end of the baseline for the geodesic measurements of the arc of the Quito meridian.3 These objects, along with the equally vivid accounts and images of the “exotic” nature of the 115

Andes and Amazon included within his travelogues, can thus be read as tools in an imperial project. As many scholars have noted, the scientific representation of colonial geographies relied on a series of discourses— quantitative, textual, visual, cartographic—that formed part of a broader corpus of works justifying imperial domination over a “barbaric” and “exotic” colonial landscape.4 Despite the valuable insights that we have gained from this approach, the emphasis on imperial domination of an exotic (and distant) nature obscures the importance of La Condamine’s reference to the Andes (and the Alps) as mountains in and of themselves. As I will argue in this chapter, La Condamine, as well as his colleague Pierre Bouguer, drew upon an extensive archive of visual and textual representations of Old World mountainous landscapes in their accounts of the Andes. As “high places,” to borrow Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora’s term, the extreme geological and climatic features of mountains had long been associated with danger and tenuous state control in Europe.5 La Condamine and Bouguer’s ambivalent depiction of the Andean cordillera—with its extreme altitudes, uneven terrain, and tropical flora and fauna—thus echoed already existing French anxieties regarding control over their own mountainous zones. Indeed, the fact that their travelogues can be read as tracing a narrative arc from confusion and frustration to a performative vision of control succeeded in drawing an audience precisely because of the already existing anxiety over European mountains. One of the major reasons why mountains inspired anxieties stemmed from a lack of clarity as to what exactly constituted “a mountain.” As I will further discuss below, La Condamine and Bouguer’s travelogues and reports and their cartographic representation of the Andes contributed to a broader attempt to define “the mountain” in scientific terms. In particular, their innovative graphic and textual strategies accelerated and helped shape the definition of the mountain as a geological promontory existing within a range. A chief tool in this process was the act of geodesic measurement itself; however, equally crucial was an innovative graphic strategy decentering the vertical (altitudinal) view of an individual peak in favor of a horizontal (longitudinal) view of the Andean range as a whole. These strategies would be articulated in both text and illustration, most dramatically in La Condamine’s writings. Finally, as I will argue in the closing pages of this chapter, they also served as the inspiration for the remarkable graphic experiments of subsequent theorists of mountainous landscapes, notably those of Alexander von Humboldt in the early nineteenth century.

116 · c h a p t e r

five

the andean anxieties of la condamine and bouguer

The Franco-­Hispanic geodesic mission to Quito (1735–45) sought to settle a long-­standing dispute in the physical sciences that pitted Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory against Descartes’s vortex theory of planetary motion.6 By the 1730s, this debate had engaged the basic shape of the earth. Newtonians in the French Academy, led by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, argued that the planet was an oblate spheroid, bulging at the equator and flattening at the poles. This contrasted with the astronomical establishment, represented by Jacques Cassini, a second-­generation director of the Paris Observatory whose measurements in southern France and northern Italy seemed to suggest the inverse, that the earth was a prolate spheroid elongated at the poles. As the controversy raged, calls emerged to settle the dispute by conducting new geodesic measurements in the Arctic and at the equator. This resulted in two expeditions: one to Lapland headed by Maupertuis, and a second to Quito, each charged with measuring the arc of the meridian across three degrees of latitude. Despite the Quito expedition being outfitted first, Maupertuis’s Lapland voyage concluded long before the equatorial mission, successfully validating Newton’s oblate thesis and potentially rendering the Quito voyage redundant. Upon returning to Paris, Bouguer and La Condamine thus faced the contradictory tasks of corroborating Maupertuis’s findings while also establishing their own credentials as reputable scientists. Bouguer arrived first, and soon learned that various Academy members doubted the precision of Maupertuis’s measurements. As such, his report to the Academy, delivered in July 1744, features an exhaustive account of the mathematical calculations he had completed during the voyage, as well as the extensive pains that he had taken to calibrate his instruments. La Condamine, who arrived the following year, corroborated Bouger’s calculations in his own report to the Academy. However, he took a slightly different tack publicly by penning a melodramatic travelogue featuring his return voyage through the Amazon, as well as a dramatic account of a riot at a bullfight in Cuenca where the French surgeon Jean Seniergues was stabbed in part due to a scandalous love affair.7 This coordinated double strategy established La Condamine—already notorious for his bosom friendship with Voltaire and as the math shark who made his money by fixing the Paris lottery—as the official “narrator” of the mission, and Bouguer as its mathematician.8 Nevertheless, over the

t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 117

next several years, each also crafted a scientific travelogue for publication. Bouguer’s La figure de la terre (1749), which presented a dry account of his measurements as well as his experiments concerning the gravitational attraction of mountains, again appeared first.9 La Condamine’s two volumes followed, beginning with the aforementioned Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi, a l’equateur (1751), which presented an evocative description of their work in the Andes as well as a reprint of his account of Seniergues’s demise in Cuenca. To Bouguer’s consternation, La Condamine then published his own book of measurements as Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral (1751), complete with a Virgil epigraph celebrating ratio.10 Despite the growing rivalry between the two colleagues, their substantive depictions of the Andes demonstrate a shared ambivalence toward the equatorial landscape. Their descriptions of the rugged terrain emphasize the sheer drop of cliffs, rushing rivers, or mudslides in an effort to detail the dangers of the region. This begins in both journals by highlighting the difficulties of simply ascending the mountains. La Condamine, for example, first mentions the cordillera as he ascends a path “bordered by precipices created by the torrents of melting snow, that fall noisily from the top of this fabled mountain range known as the Cordillera of the Andes.”11 Bouguer similarly recounts the difficulties of crossing deep ravines, and the slow and interrupted progress upon encountering the mountain range. Bouguer also lists a prodigious litany of difficulties endured, from bemoaning the poor cheese he was forced to eat, to the discomfort caused by the alternating daytime heat and nighttime cold, to the vast deserts he had to cross in his ascent into the Chimborazo region, then thought to be the highest peak on earth.12 These preludes set up extensive and repetitive complaints regarding the difficulty of conducting measurements in the Andes. As La Condamine points out in his description of the overall contours of the equatorial Andes, one of the greatest challenges concerned the lack of well known landmarks whose height was already known.13 It is worth recalling that geodesic triangulation requires sighting specific markers whose heights are easily measurable and which come to a point. In Europe this procedure often involved using readily available markers such as church steeples, but in the Andes it frequently necessitated the erection of crude structures on mountain peaks, which proved vulnerable to storms, as well as to theft of their metal shafts or cloth coverings if left abandoned. These structures proved not only costly but unstable, making confirmation of measurements difficult to achieve—doubly so after the mission began using the points of their tents as signal towers in an effort to curb costs. 118 · c h a p t e r

five

Both La Condamine and Bouguer also explained the delay in completing their measurements as a result of climatic and geographic hindrances. Chief among these was the frequent cloud cover that made sighting signals an onerous task. Bouguer again blames this problem on the Andean altitude. Indeed, in one of his first descriptions of the cordillera, he notes that this is but “a long succession of mountains with an infinity of points lost in the clouds.”14 He repeats this conceit of “points lost in the clouds” on describing the placement of signals, which were often erected on the sides of mountains or upon smaller hills, as the peaks of the great massifs could not impede a cloud’s watery passage.15 La Condamine, for his part, also highlights the problematic nature of cloud cover in his aforementioned description of geodesic methods. This begins with a formal description of the two chains of the cordillera, whose summits “se perdent dans les nues.”16 However, where Bouguer emphasizes the specificity of the Andean massifs, La Condamine immediately shifts into a comparison of the Andes to other peaks that would have been familiar to his European readers, including the Pyrenees or Mount Teide in the Canary Islands, then considered the highest mountain of “l’ancien hemisphère.” The conclusion, though, is the same—the South American mountain range is too high. At least too high for easy measurement. Bouguer’s account also engaged the difficulties the Andes represented to geodesic measurements, not only because of their cloud cover but also because of their mass. Since Jean Richer’s 1672 voyage to Cayenne, scientists had been aware that the swing of a pendulum varied across different latitudes. Newton posited that this slight variation resulted from the pendulum’s distance from the earth’s gravitational center, as would be the case in distinct latitudes if the planet was indeed an oblate spheroid. Bouguer had long wondered whether the path of a pendulum would also be altered by the gravitational pull of a mountain, but he had been unable to identify a mountain in Europe large enough and isolated enough for his purpose. As such, he spent the last two weeks of December 1738 circling Mount Chimborazo, the famed equatorial volcano then considered to be the highest in the world. As Chimborazo sits on an isolated plain, Bouguer’s observations of slight shifts in pendular swing enabled him to theorize that sufficient mass, even that of a solitary mountain, could alter and impact the accuracy of scientific measurements. Though his experiment would not be repeated until 1774, when Nevil Maskelyne conducted similar experiments at Schiehallion in the Scottish highlands, Bouguer’s account provided yet another example of gravitational dynamics.17 At the same time, however, the experiment demonstrates a certain t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 119

anxiety concerning the efficacy of taking measurements in proximity to the great Andean volcano and, by extension, along the entire mountain range. When considered in light of La Condamine’s own vision of mountains as boon and hindrance, Bouguer’s observations seemingly indicate a visceral response to the great promontories that dotted the Andean equator, whose very masses could potentially alter gravitational conditions in a way comparable to the very shape of the earth itself. The anxiety, however, was not merely due to the size of the mountain in and of itself, but instead was linked to the inability to comprehend or account for its impact upon the measuring process. As such, Bouguer’s comments seem analogous to those of La Condamine concerning the imprecision emerging from the fog screening a mountain peak, the difficult deoxygenated conditions of great altitudes, or even the capricious attitude of local indigenous guides. In effect, mountains, and particularly great mountains such as the majestic Andes, thus stand as examples of unknowable, inconceivable, and even sublime aspects of nature whose very implausibility needed to be wrestled with in order to comprehend the magnitude of their expanse and their impact. This conceit, despite being located by both Bouguer and La Condamine within the particular geography of the Andes, has its roots in an extended discourse in European letters presenting mountains as unknowable and uncontrollable spaces. This trajectory dates back to antiquity, yet was particularly germane within contemporary French geographical texts. As I shall discuss in the next section, both geographic and cartographic representations of French mountains, particularly of the Haute-­Savoie and Auvergne regions, are laden with textual and visual rhetorical markers signaling danger and chaos. During the early eighteenth century in particular, this iconography also began to be deployed graphically to represent American mountains as well, preparing the ground for Bouguer and La Condamine’s description of their Andean anxieties and travails. the mountain and the unknown in french cartography

In their encyclopedic political history of “the mountain,” Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz highlight the eighteenth century as a moment when mountains began to be defined by internal geological characteristics by an ascendant Enlightenment scientific community.18 Prior to this shift, local circumstances played an active role in determining a mountain’s identity as a mountain. As such, pastureland in upper altitudes, or simply slight shifts 120 · c h a p t e r

five

in elevation, could be interpreted locally as “mountainous.” Geological sites as varied as Mont Blanc—the highest peak in Europe—or the Mountain of Reims, an escarpment of some 280 meters in the Champagne region, were each defined as being mountains. As late as the 1750s, they note, other plateau escarpments such as the “mountain of Étampes” were identified as “mountains” in scientific reports.19 This ambivalence regarding the definition of mountains was reflected in cartographic representations of mountains and mountain ranges. Prior to the development of cross-­hatching and, later still, the invention of contour lines to signal changes in relief, the designation of upper elevations tended to feature pictorial representations of individual peaks, repeatedly placed near one another with minimal attention to altitudinal differences or the specific contours of individual massifs. The use of this iconography thus would flatten or naturalize difference between contours as varied as Reims or Mont Blanc, in a way that would render such representations useless for a traveler, surveyor, or agent of the state. Take, for example, the 1695 edition of Nicholas Sanson’s atlas, Nouvelle introduction a la géographie.20 This atlas pre­sents a global map featuring the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, focused presentations of the various continents, and more detailed representations of European nations and the Holy Land. Mountains, which vary in size and shape across the globe, are represented almost exclusively by a small outline of a hillock joined up with others of its ilk—what Eduard Imhof has referred to as fish scale representations.21 While a few of these are slightly larger, the more common means to demonstrate broad differentiation in altitude, or in the “mountainous” quality of a given zone, was to include more fish scales. Hence, the map of the Alpine region is presented as completely covered with hillocks. This method is not followed exhaustively, however, as certain mountainous zones such as the Andes are represented with single hillock chains, and are periodically interrupted—including at the equatorial zone that would be visited by La Condamine and Bouguer. A second alteration can be seen in the maps of the Holy Land, where the fish scale hillocks are sometimes replaced with reproductions of Mount Sinai’s profile, in effect signaling its unique importance geographically and culturally. The impossibility of demarcating altitude at times also caused distinct confusion. Not only were the escarpments of France routinely depicted as iconographically identical to the Alps of Haute-­Savoie or the Pyrenees, but French cartographers often placed such hills in relatively undersurveyed areas of the world, in which the presence of fish scale mountains appears as a stand-­in for the unknown. A dramatic example of this phenomenon t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 121

Fig. 5.1 Detail, Guillaume Sanson, Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (Paris: Alexis Hubert Jaillot, 1693). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

can be seen in Sanson’s aforementioned Nouvelle introduction, where the entire upper Midwest of what is now the United States is depicted as dominated by an extensive mountain range of the same intensity as the Alps. In actuality, except for bluffs alongside the banks of the Mississippi and Saint Croix Rivers in Minnesota, slight hills in the Wisconsin Dells, and the sedimentary deposits of the so-­called Iron Range along Lake Superior (part of the Animikie Group of iron deposits along the Great Lakes), this section of North America is particularly renowned for its flatness. Given the lack of an appropriate graphic technique to depict altitudinal distinction, French cartographers often relied upon cartouches or other iconographical elements to showcase the severity of a mountainous landscape. In the 1693 edition of Sanson’s Introduction a la geographie, for instance, the depiction of the Dauphiné province in Alpine southeastern France, in122 · c h a p t e r

five

cludes not only fish scales but also a vibrant cartouche.22 The cartouche features a scene in which peasants holding pikelike poles are attempting to scale sheer cliffs (fig. 5.1). A pair of ibexes (an Alpine goat with extraordinarily long curved horns) sneer at their efforts. While the cartouche is adorned with the rising sun, signifying its political rule by the Dauphin, which may signify the broad extent of royal rule, the inefficacy of the Alpine climbers and freedom of the ibexes undercuts such an interpretation. This representation of an uncontrollable mountainous terrain appears in several other French atlases produced during the seventeenth century, often in depictions of zones under tenuous state control. One of the most dramatic is in Nicolas de Fer’s 1705 map of the Americas, which not only includes a famous image of enterprising beavers building a dam in a section of French Canada, but also a peculiar representation of the Andes (plate 2). This consists of a scene located in the “montagnes de Chili,” depicting Spaniards on horseback and on foot, crossing near craggy cliffs reaching above the clouds. On the bottom right, two figures have collapsed, overwhelmed by altitude sickness. Resting upon the ribbon outlining the cartouche, as if it were a bed, is an Andean noble in headdress and golden adornment, perhaps a nod to the royal sunlight typically found in depictions of Dauphiné as noted earlier. Unlike the industrious nature of North America, the South American Andes are thus depicted as not only too high for European bodies, but also under the control of an indigenous community at rest. While this particular map relies upon the cartouche to demonstrate altitudinal changes, de Fer did experiment with alternative graphic representations in his Atlas curieux. The depiction of the island of Martinique, for example, deployed varied mountain icons at different sizes to showcase distinct elevations. While not fully representative of the island’s landscape contours, this approach allowed for a more variegated depiction of altitudinal difference. Such experiments also appear in other maritime cartography of the early eighteenth century. A particularly instructive example can be seen in the Newberry Library’s Cartes marines, which comprised a set of beautifully illustrated manuscript maps of overseas territories, forts, and seaports. The map of the Cape of Good Hope pre­sents a particularly intriguing combination of orthogonal projection and profile views (fig. 5.2). The profiles operated as a helpful tool for a mariner approaching the port; however, they facilitate the demarcation of altitudinal gradations in a manner that anticipates the choices made by Bouguer and La Condamine in their depictions of the cordillera of the Andes as a whole. As I shall argue in the next section, these strategies would also pre­sent an opportunity to allegorically control the mountainous territories under consideration. t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 123

Fig. 5.2 “Carte de la Baye de la Table au Nord du Cap de Bonne Esperance,” Cartes marines, early eighteenth century. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

This was not merely an academic exercise. Several mountainous regions of France had long been difficult for the Crown to manage. The region of Cevennes in Haute Languedoc, for instance, had been the site of extensive conflict with the Protestant Huguenots, a fact depicted in C. Danckerts’s evocative 1703 map by a cartouche representing the highland Camisards in full-­fledged revolt yet sheltered by the craggy cliffs.23 Even as late as 1744, Pierre Charles Le Monnier, who had just returned from Maupertuis’s mission to Lapland, lamented the difficulties mountain dwellers from Auvergne had presented during the remeasurement of the Paris meridian. Indeed, in language that echoed La Condamine’s depiction of the Andes, Le Monnier went as far as to claim that the verdant greenery and sweet air of the nearby plains of Limagne fostered gay and hardworking people, whereas the desert of the Haut-­Pays created savages.24 As such, La Condamine and Bouguer’s attempts to transcend their own Andean anxieties 124 · c h a p t e r

five

echoed and illuminated possibilities to reframe the French state’s relationship with its own mountainous periphery. transcending the alps in the andes; or, the graphic invention of the cordillère

One of La Condamine’s first descriptions of the Andean cordillera contains an evocative passage describing their contours and appropriateness for the measurement of the equatorial meridian, and is worth citing in full: The two mountain ranges that border the Quito valley extend roughly from north to south. This situation proved favorable for the measurement of the meridian, and offered us, alternately upon one and the other chain, points of support to complete our triangles. The greatest difficulty consisted of choosing the most favorable places to place signals. The highest peaks were buried under the snow, the others most often plunged in clouds, which robbed us of their view. Situated in lower places, the signals were projected on the earth, and became very difficult to perceive from afar. Moreover, not only was there no path cleared which led from one signal to another; but it is often necessary to traverse, taking long detours, gullies formed by the torrents of rain and melted snow, sometimes excavated from 60 to 80 toises in depth, of which I will often have occasion to speak.25

In this passage, La Condamine draws a marked distinction between the “favorable” contours of the Quito region, seen in its entirety, where the two chains of mountains passing north to south provide an easily accessible horizon. As he notes, this facilitated a simple means to delineate the geodesic triangles: simply crisscrossing the relatively flat interandine valleys and then climbing to a prominent peak upon first one chain and then the other. The problems, which he emphasizes throughout the book, stem from where to place the signals for them to be readily visible given the excessive cloud cover and snow—not to mention the difficult terrain en route. As such, this passage pre­sents two alternative perspectives from which to consider the Andean cordillera. Seen in their totality, from an orthogonal or God’s eye view, the Andes are a boon to the expedition. We might call this a geological, longitudinal, or even a geodesic view. However, seen as a series of points, as the vertices of the vast (imaginary) triangles, or as a terrain to be crossed, the Andes are a hindrance. Cold, foggy, rough, filled with ravines, impossible to sight along quadrants, the mountains themt r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 125

selves pre­sent an inordinate challenge. We might call this a point-­based view, a ground-­based view, or, even a man’s-­eye view. La Condamine’s articulation of this distinction between the longitudinal and the point view appears regularly throughout both the Journal de voyage and his subsequent “scientific” presentation of measurements—namely, Mesure des trois premiers degrés.26 Given the limits of this chapter and its focus upon mapping and visualization technologies, rather than delving into a close textual reading of these two works, I will instead focus upon how the two perspectives play out in the image-­text interlaced in them. Indeed, I would argue that for La Condamine, much more than for Bouger and many other contemporaries, images appear as a paratext rather than as illustrations. In this particular case they pre­sent a clear indication of the relationship between the longitudinal view, which is established as the view of science and God, and the point-­based view, which is that of human bodies and the ground. The former is abstracted, the latter concrete. And yet, given the particular activities demonstrated on the ground, particularly in Mesure des trois premiers degrés, it is only through the activities of human bodies traversing an inhospitable territory that the God view can be ascertained and approximated. The image paratext for both Journal du voyage and Mesure des trois premiers degrés follows a similar pattern. Each book begins with a title page, includes a macro-­map of the geodesic triangulations as an initial frontispiece (with some differences), and then deploys depictions of human bodies marking specific points or geodesic vertices as narrative devices. Broadly speaking, the inclusion of human bodies (and human inscriptions) appears to identify the point-­based view as well as the attendant difficulties experienced by La Condamine and company. Those images where human bodies are erased pre­sent the longitudinal—and thus God’s-­eye, or scientific—view, in which the Andes appear as a boon to the project as a whole. The Journal du voyage opens with an anodyne title page, adorned only with a generic seal, before presenting a map of the province of Quito. This map is based on another by La Condamine’s friend and colleague, the Riobamba-­born creole Pedro Vicente Maldonado, which had been posthumously published in 1750. As Neil Safier has described, La Condamine diligently worked to correct elements of his friend’s map, including the inclusion of three-­dimensional images of picturesque volcanos such as Cotopaxi, but he was upset that some of Maldonado’s corrections to the contours of mountain ranges had been ignored by the publisher.27 La Condamine’s Carte de la Provincia de Quito au Perou thus includes some cartographic corrections, but also employs a more abstracted style than that used 126 · c h a p t e r

five

in Maldonado’s map. The precise depictions of mountains are removed, for example, as is the melodramatic cartouche describing a fictional tropical town that had adorned Maldonado’s map. Instead, La Condamine deploys rudimentary cross-­hatching on his mountain ranges, and also overlays an image of the geodesic triangles over the Andean spine. As such, the map declares La Condamine as the author of the measurement of the equatorial meridian, a claim underscored by the placement of Maldonado’s name below that of la Condamine, in smaller type.28 The map’s inclusion of the geodesic triangles signals La Condamine’s approximation of a longitudinal view of the Andes. This claim is bolstered textually by the preface that follows the map. Its thirty-­five pages pre­sent an overview of the cartographer’s voyage and the operations conducted throughout, bereft of the kind of dramatic language that characterizes the rest of the work. Similarly, when La Condamine shifts to the main body of his travelogue, the change of perspective is announced by two illustrations that focus upon individual movement. The first is a map of the route taken by the academicians, followed by an engraving of La Condamine seated on a beach, carving upon a stone, surrounded by geodesic tools: a pendulum clock and a quadrant. This image also speaks to the travails he encountered, as the incident represented occurred after he ran aground on the Esmeraldas coastline—incidentally the same place where he had first met Maldonado, who, as governor of the province, had been dispatched to save him. The systematic alternation between God’s-­eye and man’s-­eye views continues in one of La Condamine’s most famous illustrations: the exquisitely detailed view of the plains of Yaruquí, where the French and Spanish contingents measured their baseline (fig. 5.3). The image is included after the extended passage discussing the measurements themselves, which, in typical fashion, includes an extended consideration of the deep ravines that had to be traversed. However, unlike similar images in other contemporary geodesic reports—such as Cassini de Thury’s 1744 representations of the revised measurement of the Parisian meridian—the image is bereft of a human presence. Indeed, only the rooftops of the Jesuit hacienda of San José de Checa, located just above Yaruquí, indicate the existence of humanity as well as scale. Bodies reappear just a few pages later, however, in La Condamine’s map of the city of Quito, itself one of the vertices of the great geodesic triangles. In this case, an allegorical cartouche depicts two couples, one European and one Andean, reviewing the equator on an enormous globe between them. The final illustrations in the work concern monuments, and do not conform precisely to this system. This schema reappears in Mesure des trois premiers degrés, with greater att r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 127

Fig. 5.3 Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Vue de la Base mesurée dans la plaine de Yarouqui,” in Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du Roi, a l’equateur, servant . . . la mesure de trois premiers degres du méridien (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

tention to the travails and potential of geodesic triangulation in general. As in La Condamine’s Journal du voyage, this begins with maps. These begin on the title page, which replaces the anodyne seal from Journal du voyage with an image of the globe tilted so as to have the Andean equator at its apex, with a compass splayed over the three degrees of the arc of the equatorial 128 · c h a p t e r

five

meridian. Next come two overview maps: first a presentation of the Yaruquí measurements in a profile view, followed by a fascinating representation of the triangles alongside a profile of the Andean cordillera as a whole (fig. 5.5), an image that I’ll discuss further below. The first and second parts of Mesure des trois premiers degrés are then introduced with representations of geodesic bodies involved in the difficult process of determining the points of the triangle vertices. The first part includes two men climbing a steep and barren mountainside to place a geodesic signal, while two others sight t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 129

the signal through a quadrant. The image introducing the second part of the book depicts two men burning the midnight oil, sighting the North Star through a telescope and watching the swing of a pendulum clock. A young boy, perhaps a servant, peeks through the door, presumably to offer them food—but they seem unaware of his presence, absorbed as they are in their work. While La Condamine made extensive use of imagery as an additional element of his narrative claim over the Andes as an object of inquiry, Bouguer’s La figure de la Terre is relatively restrained graphically. Indeed, all but one of his images are stock illustrations common to several other geographic texts of the early eighteenth century. The one original image, however, essentially challenged dominant representations of mountains as individual peaks, while anticipating one of La Condamine’s great innovations, for which Bouguer has received little credit.29 The illustration (fig. 5.4) consists of two views of the Andes. One of these essentially duplicates La Condamine’s view of the Yaruquí valley, but without the inclusion of the Hacienda de San José buildings and reproduced in much less detail. The second view, which is larger and also atop the sheet, consists of a profile view of the Andes cut by a vertical cross-­section of the equatorial corridor. This device marks differences in altitude along the length of the equatorial Andes. However, since Bouguer has not obscured the snowcaps of the peaks, he has essentially produced a topographic relief profile that moves from subterranean strata to external glaciers. The incorporation of some pictorial elements, such as clouds around Cayambe, expands the illusion of three-­dimensionality. While Bouguer may have invented the topographic relief profile, La Condamine perfected it in this image while also attending to his macronarrative regarding longitudinal versus point-­based perspectives. In the aforementioned profile from Mesure des trois premiers degrés (fig. 5.5), La Condamine expands not only on Bouguer’s relief profile but also on his three-­dimensional portraits of the major peaks. Cayambe, Cotopaxi (with its distinctive conical peak and a plume of smoke, reflecting an eruption the group had witnessed), and Chimborazo, among others, are all easily identified, as are their altitudinal contours. The genius in La Condamine’s figure, however, lies in his juxtaposition of this profile with an overhead view of the geodesic triangles arranged at the same scale. As such, the reader of the map can view a profile and an orthogonal image simultaneously, and can match the points of the triangles with the peaks of the longitudinal profile. The heights of the major peaks are also marked, as are those of the geodesic signals—information that highlights the grandeur of the Andes, but 130 · c h a p t e r

five

also the perspicacity of La Condamine and his colleagues in braving such high places. In this map La Condamine found a way to bring together the two points of view that dominate his narrative: the God’s-­eye and man’s-­eye views. The Andes range, both as a boon for measurement and as an inhospitable terrain for the scientist, is readily apparent in a simple and elegant multiperspectival arrangement. And in providing such a view, La Condamine not only “tamed” the Andes for a learned audience but also acknowledged their specific contours, at least as measurable by the instruments of the day. concluding reflections

The work of both La Condamine and Bouguer would have an extended influence on the history of geodesic measurement, and also of exploration. The conceit of the mountain range as simultaneously a longitudinal breadth and a collection of points, and the technical innovation of incorporating both abstracted geographical data and extended pictorial information, would be repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, given the influence that La Condamine’s collage-­like combination of metric and pictorial information had particularly on Alexander von Humboldt’s celebrated “Tableau” from his Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805), and the outsized influence Humboldt had on nineteenth-­ century thematic cartography, an argument could be made that La Condamine invented thematic cartography in his profile. While delineating such an argument lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it is fair to say that La Condamine’s work deserves more attention than it has received.30 Besides their great technical strengths, however, I would argue that, with regard to the mapping of mountain ranges, perhaps the most influential element of La Condamine and Bouguer’s writing concerned their ability to directly address the anxieties about instruments, gravitational pull, mountainous terrains, and mountainous peoples, and provide a graphic means to represent the unrepresentational. Just a few years after their publication, Phillipe Buache would articulate his theories about mountain ranges providing a spinal structure to the entire planet. For Buache, the mountain range—as seen not just longitudinally, in the style of La Condamine, but globally—proffered none of the anxieties previously associated with such regions. In my estimation, this shift in understanding may well have been in part due to the narrative strategies followed by both La Condamine and Bouguer, and the ways in which they depicted both their anxieties and their t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e a l p s i n t h e a n d e s  · 131

Fig. 5.4 “Profile de la cordeliere de Pérou,” in Pierre Bouguer, La Fig. de la terre: Messieurs Bouguer, & de La Condamine, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, envoyés par ordre du roy au Pérou, poit observer aux environs de l’Equateur. Avec une relation abregée de ce voyage, qui contient la description du pays dans lequel les operations ont été faites (Paris: Jombert, 1749). Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries.

Fig. 5.5 “Carte de la meridienne de Quito,” and “Coupe du Terrain de la Meridienne de Quito,” in Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du mériden dans l’hémisphere austral (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

ability to transcend them. Their obsession with precision, in particular, reflected both their desire to achieve scientific exactitude and their sure knowledge that their future prospects depended upon successful completion of the goal. Precision therefore functioned both as a goal to be achieved and as a reminder of the stakes involved. For La Condamine and Bouguer, the difficulties of traversing the Andean mountain range potentially impeded not only the specific goals of the mission but also their future prospects. Given that these difficulties stemmed from the peculiarities of an equatorial climate with its attendant metereological phenomena (frequent rains, clouds), alongside an already anxiety-­inducing landscape (mountains), it is no wonder that the process proved nerve-­racking. This daily anxiety, however, eventually translated into an innovative graphic strategy that sought to transcend the tensions of the individual peak by emphasizing the entire cordillera. In so doing, La Condamine and Bouguer arguably developed a form of precision that enabled them to move from the man’s-­eye view to the God’s eye view.

134 · c h a p t e r

five

chap ter six

on the trail with humboldt Mapping the Orinoco as Transnational Space

Adriana Méndez Rodenas

One of the most riveting portraits of Alexander von Humboldt’s New World exploration is the German artist Friedrick Georg Weitsch’s 1806 rendering of the traveling scientist, drawn upon his triumphant return to Europe.1 The large canvas pictures a young Humboldt, flower in hand, looking straight at the spectator and surrounded by a green canopy of tropical plants.2 The flowing Orinoco, faintly outlined in the background, signals a climactic moment in Humboldt and his companion, French naturalist Aimé Bonpland’s saga. Following Charles Marie de La Condamine’s trail into the jungle interior, Humboldt and Bonpland traversed the inner recesses of the Amazon with the aim of solving a long-­standing dispute regarding the origins of the Orinoco, whose labyrinth of waters had eluded the grasp of Western cartography. Forging ahead amid the turbulent waters on a canoe laden with compass, quadrant, and sextant, La Condamine had conjectured that a canal linked the Orinoco and the Amazon. Despite considerable efforts to determine its precise location, proof of its existence eluded him at every bend of the Great Marañón, the eighteenth-­century toponym for the Amazon River.3

135

In his hair-­raising Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale (1745), the French Enlightenment explorer refuted the claims of the headstrong Jesuit Father Gunilla, author of El Orinoco ilustrado (1745), who had denied that such a canal existed. Seeking to make a name for himself in the annals of European exploration, La Condamine tucked a fold-­ out map into the end of his Relation abrégée, tracing over Father Samuel Fritz’s 1707 Map of the Great River Marañón, until then considered the most authoritative of the region. With the texts of other European explorers as beacon and guide, La Condamine’s exploits emblematize the trope of European exploration: a solitary male adventurer whose journey to previously untrod regions authenticates territorial claims, which are bolstered in turn by a map strategically placed at the end of the narrative as apotheosis of the Western cartographic imagination.4 Despite the landmark status of the Relation abrégée, La Condamine’s text and map hinge on a geographical “black hole.” Just as La Condamine had done half a century earlier, Humboldt and Bonpland set out to discover the origins of the watery South American labyrinth. Imitating La Condamine’s gesture of placing a map as culminating endpoint of his journey, Humboldt proudly displays a map of the Orinoco in the Atlas géographique et physique du nouveau continent.5 While this multilayered map sustains Humboldt’s claim to have “discovered” the Casiquiare Canal, a tributary of the Río Negro that was the missing link between the Amazon and the Orinoco, it is not the whole story. For Humboldt’s cartographic feat is complemented by the harrowing tale of the journey downriver in an effort to solve the mystery of its origin. In riveting passages that exemplify the best of exploration narrative, Humboldt and Bonpland take the reader by the hand and force us to enter an uncharted land lying beyond the Great Cataracts: a misty region full of raudales or rapids which branch out from the Orinoco in multiple directions, a natural barrier not easily mapped by scientific scrutiny.6 This chapter studies two moments of the Humboldtian geographic imagination as well as two types of spatial practices: description and mapmaking. First, I analyze Humboldt and Bonpland’s passage through the labyrinthine waters of the Upper Orinoco in the summer of 1800, a journey whose scientific intent was to solve the riddle of the origins of the Orinoco and its presumed connection to the Amazon. A singular text of scientific exploration, these climactic passages of the Rélation historique (Personal Narrative) narrate the journey through the Maypures and Atures Falls toward the terre inconnue lying beyond the grasp of European cartographic knowledge, which marked a turning point in Humboldt’s self-­fashioning, 136 · c h a p t e r

six

as well as in his rhetoric of travel. A key scene of Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions, the canoe crossing of the Orinoco River trail illustrates a central tenet of Humboldtian aesthetics: what Laura Dassow Walls has termed “consilience,” the apparently seamless texture of word, image, and empirical observation that lends a unique tone to Humboldt’s writings.7 As the term “consilience” implies, Humboldt’s narrative method was based on the conjoining of science and art, empirical fact and imagination, a “willed seeing” or acute method of observation intended to grasp the numinous, multifaceted qualities of the natural object.8 In short, the wonder or deslumbramiento that colors Humboldt and Bonpland’s river voyage figures Nature as “ultimate ‘other.’”9 One of the most dramatic passages of the Rélation historique, the Orinoco crossing, is in turn embedded in a vast thirty-­volume canvas called Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent).10 A rambling oeuvre including pictorial atlases, treatises on flora and fauna, and a travel account (Rélation historique), its varied rhetoric and format reiterates a pivotal concept of the Humboldtian aesthetic: envisioning, imagining the whole of Nature as a system of interconnected and self-­sustaining parts.11 The second part of this chapter turns to the multiple maps strung together in the Atlas, an obsessive cartographic survey that ends with Humboldt’s own “Carte itinéraire . . . de l’Orénoque.”12 In a gesture imitating La Condamine’s feat, but clearly meant to unseat the philosophe as well as all previous explorers, the map is prominently displayed in the Atlas as the climactic end product of the Orinoco River trail. Humboldt the mapmaker rewrites tradition not only in an effort to tame the tumult of waters, but also to stamp his own name and authority over an unwieldly catalogue of maps. A comparison between the maps of the Orinoco pictured in the Atlas with the narrative account of the canoe trail upriver opens a fissure, a rhetorical “break” that momentarily suspends the seamless “consilience” between science and art typical of the Humboldtian text. While Humboldt’s maps purport to correct, and hence erase, the previous cartographic record regarding the origins and division of the Orinoco River—thus proving that the expedition has achieved its main scientific goal—Humboldt’s carefully crafted authorial presence unravels due to the experience of disorientation and loss of geographic markers evident throughout the river passage. In these scenes, the Orinoco appears as a transnational space criss-­crossed by the texts of European explorers and their multiple imaginings, which includes not only the spatial practice of mapmaking but also myth and legend. o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 137

Humboldt’s claim to cartographic knowledge is in tension with the narrative account of the Orinoco crossing. Writing the river trail pre­sents a challenge both to chronological time and to linear narrative. While rhetorical tangents and hyperbole strive to imitate the natural object it attempts to describe, the narrative flow resembles “intersecting trajectories” made up not of a single, forward-­moving path, but rather of multiple circuits, digressions, and cross-­currents—a combination of real and virtual routes.13 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climactic scene of Rélation historique narrating the treacherous passage through the upper Orinoco, the ultimate test of whether the Casiquiare connection was fact or fiction.14 The “Casiquiare crossing” entails the physical ordeal in treading turbulent waters, as well as a series of challenges that upset the visual mastery associated with the explorer’s pose.15 What was at stake was not only the attainment of more precise geographical knowledge, but also the scientific accuracy and credibility of Humboldt’s account; indeed, the integrity of his narrative persona. Contrasting sharply with the overlay of European mapmaking, Humboldt’s claim to cartographic authority, the Casiquiare River crossing builds in narrative crescendo. The literary quality of the narrative, in tension with the exhaustive review of a centuries-­long cartographic record, upsets the “power/knowledge relation” implied in the unified spatial reference points of European cartography.16 The gap between Humboldt the mapmaker and Humboldt the traveling scientist serves as prelude to understand how the Orinoco is configured as a transnational space by two types of spatial practices: description and illustration. In what follows, I analyze the tensions between the narrative account of the voyage upriver and the flatter, two-­dimensional cartographic claims that sustain the Humboldtian hubris of “discovery.” Ultimately, Humboldt’s ambitious cartographic project unwinds, a meditative coda attached to a long litany of Western mapmakers. Despite Humboldt’s efforts at fixing the Orinoco region in a Master Map that would erase the accumulated European cartographic archive, in the end he is forced to concede that indigenous geographical knowledge was a major factor precipitating his “discovery.” the sublime tropics: on the brink of paradise

Spread out over four chapters of the Rélation historique, the navigational route into the heart of the Orinoco is a classic river odyssey engaging the recurrent tropes of European travel writing, tropes which establish tropical nature as different from the “tamer” nature experienced in Europe.17 “Radeau 138 · c h a p t e r

six

de la Rivière de Guayaquil,” one of the most eloquent and beautiful landscapes in Humboldt’s eclectic Vues des Cordillères, suggests a series of recurrent topoi throughout the river journey (plate 3). To begin with, the image graphically sets up contrast and ambiguity between foreign traveler and native assistants: whereas the European explorers remain noticeably absent, indigenous subjects are associated with proximity to nature (bountiful fruits, naked bodies); yet they, and not the European, command the “technologies of travel” (the raft). Interspersed with philosophical reflections on nature, time, and space, the Orinoco River trail forges a distinct spatial imagination, which will set the parameters for Humboldt’s unique “views of Nature.” In short, “Guayaquil” suggests movement through space simultaneous to an arrest in time, a spatial paradox surfacing throughout the river trail. Close to the start of their journey, near Cumaná, Humboldt warns future travelers of the intense emotion that would result upon their first encounter with a different geography: When a traveler newly arrived from Europe penetrates for the first time into the forests of South America, nature pre­sents herself to him under an unexpected aspect. . . . He feels at every step, that . . . he is . . . on a vast continent, where everything is gigantic, the mountains, the rivers, and the mass of vegetation.18

Like other geographic explorers, Humboldt brought with him a concept of nature to guide him on his way: the belief that “the greatest emotional impression nature could make on the human senses” was the luxurious foliage characteristic of the tropics.19 The explorers’ crossing through the upper reaches of the Orinoco confirms Humboldt’s earlier characterization of tropical nature as “a place of radical otherness.”20 The accent on “cette majesté des formes végétales”— “that majesty of vegetable forms”—repeats the trope of “hyperfecundity” associated with the tropical region.21 The sweep of vegetation comes to represent the distinctiveness of space, a metonymic association which lends proof to Humboldt’s belief in geographical determinism: “The forms of plants determine the physiognomy of nature; and this physiognomy influences the moral dispositions of nations.”22 The view of innumerable lianas covering the forest floor lends an air of melancholy to the tropics: “An immense forest extended itself at our feet to the edge of the ocean. The tops of the trees, intertwined with lianas, . . . formed a vast carpet of verdure, the dark tint of which augmented the splendor of the aerial light.”23 This icoo n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 139

nography is best captured in French explorer Jean-­Baptiste Debret’s Forêt Vierge, a somber lithograph included in his Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil [. . .] (1834–39), which codified the “virgin forest” trope in European travel writing.24 Since the first landing at Cumaná, Humboldt had signaled the profusion of palm trees as the principal trope defining the tropics, one that confers a paradisiacal aura to the entire region.25 Along the banks of the Orinoco, near the mission of San Fernando, Humboldt surveys the “pirijao palm,” “ce qui donne une physionomie particulière au paysage,” emphasizing the palm canopy as visual and narrative icon of tropicality: “What struck us most in the mission of San Fernando, and gives a peculiar physiognomy to the landscape, is the pihiguao or pirijao palm.”26 At the same time, the scene anticipates the upsetting of empirical categories over the arduous river trail: In those wild regions are we involuntarily reminded of the assertion of Linnaeus, that the country of palm-­trees was the first abode of our species, and that man is essentially palmivorous.27

Images such as these conveyed to a distant European audience a glimpse of a “lost world” lying beyond its shores, the imprint of an originary source haunting the Western imaginary.28 The eternal green associated with the tropics establishes the difference of tropical nature. If here Humboldt conjoins Linné’s systematic classification of nature with the sublime emotions provoked by sight, the Orinoco trail opens the gap between observation and experience, setting up a contrast between the narrative “mapping” of the labyrinthine trail and its empirical and visual counterpart. through the deep waters: trailing the orinoco and its tributaries

In the tradition of travel writing to the New World, the practice of taxonomy and scientific nomenclature were means by which the European traveler sought to establish distance in the midst of a natural world that threatened to engulf him.29 Yet, on the Orinoco trail, the naturalist’s precise “order of things” breaks down; it is precisely the appearance of the rain forest as “une nature sauvage et indomptée”—“an untamed and savage nature”—that “threatens to degrade or fully overwhelm the coherence of the European subject.”30 The tropics’ most powerful effect is to upset the categories of European science, as well as erode the traveler’s subjectivity. The Orinoco River trail tests the limits of classification. Tropical flora 140 · c h a p t e r

six

and fauna throw into question the Linnaean system of typifying species, but also the figurative language of Humboldtian aesthetics, tipping the balance of “consilience” toward literary modes of apprehending nature. On approaching the Atures Falls, the surrounding vegetation evokes Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre’s bucolic landscapes. In contrast to his own “willed seeing,” Saint-­Pierre was able to faithfully depict the tropics, not because he had been there physically, but because of his ability to feel it “in all it’s [sic] harmonious analogies of forms, colours, and interior powers.”31 The profusion of life forms amid the thick forest interior—orchids, parasitic plants, mosses—transcends the categories of European science.32 Parasitic plants, particularly orchids, evade the utility of scientific categories. At the first tread on the forest floor, the Amazon appears as a green threshold, an experience of limits seen when Bonpland finds himself at a loss for useful botanical categories that would encompass, order, and systematize the surrounding profusion of greenery: The earth, overloaded with plants, does not allow them space enough to unfold themselves. The trunks of the trees are every where concealed under a thick carpet of verdure. . . . The same lianas as creep on the ground, reach the tops of the trees, and pass from one to another at the height of more than a hundred feet. Thus, by a continual interlacing of parasite plants, the botanist is often led to confound the flowers, the fruits, and leaves, which belong to different species.33

At every bend of the river, hybrid forms of life defied the boundaries of the rational. Besides vegetable excess, the tropics unsettled binary distinctions that sustain scientific taxonomy, such as the gender and animal/ human divides. Here the naturalist’s urge for rational apprehension of the physical world was stymied by the apparent negation of the animal/plant distinction. The “arbre de la vache” or “cow-­tree,” so named for its distinctive property of extracting a thick, milklike substance from its trunk, exhibits surprising cross-­fertilization among plant and animal life, leading to further affirmation of the fundamental unity of nature: “Nothing appears isolated; the chemical principles, that were believed to be peculiar to animals, are found in plants; a common chain links together all organic nature.”34 The Orinoco emerges as “a complex network of associations,” a multilayered ecosystem joining the river in its flow, composed of myriad forms of life, and multiethnic human communities which live along its banks.35 In short, Humboldt’s vision sustains a “planetary ecology [which] reminds us of our ultimate dependence on foreign lands, on the rest of nature”—a pilo n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 141

lar of “Humboldtian science” upon which rests his concept of an exalted Nature.36 As the journey progresses, the act of traversing a “strange” geography topples belief in the harmony of nature, as well as scientific expectations. The incessant waterfalls defy efforts at classification. Humboldt’s efforts at naming different types of waterfalls, mixing both the presumably more scientifically accurate French with Spanish and Portuguese equivalents, falls short of providing an accurate view of the phenomena: “The vague names of cataracts, cascades, falls, and rapids (saltos, chorros, pongos, cachoeiras, and raudales), which denote those tumultuous movements of water, . . . are generally confounded with one another.”37 This attempt at taxonomy recalls similar efforts to classify flora and fauna, now applied to the complex hydrography of the region. Its pictorial equivalent is the image “Chute du Tequendama,” included in Vues des Cordillères, which is referenced in the same passage of the Rélation historique as if only a pictorial view could adequately portray the immensity and variety of these iconic waterfalls (fig. 6.1).38 Humboldt’s first attempt to map the high Orinoco in words—a literary map created by descriptive devices—falls short, as the torrential overflow of the Atures is impossible to contain, either by nature or by Humboldt’s characteristic rhetoric of excess. In the climactic moment of Humboldt’s travel account, the Orinoco trail demands a shift in rhetoric and, consequently, in the aesthetic response elicited by tropical nature. As if to mimic the effect of the thundering waterfalls, his prose “overflows” as he describes the effect of raudales upon the traveling party.39 Again we see a tension between the rhetoric of el deslumbramiento—enchantment or awe—and the impulse of scientific observation, a tension that erodes the traveler’s authority, whose references to scientific taxonomy appear as futile as attempts to stay afloat amid the swirling rapids. The next scene pre­sents us with the limits of the “willed seeing” that is the most engaging aspect of the Humboldtian oeuvre. For, at the first sight of “the rapids of Atures and of Maypures . . . the eye can at once take in the long succession of cataracts, the immense sheet of foams and vapours . . . as if you saw the whole river suspended in it’s [sic] bed.”40 Soon, however, the Orinoco becomes impenetrable to visual scrutiny, as the “two great cataracts” compete in clouding the scientists’ vision and, consequently, their ability to name, measure, and compare this natural phenomenon to others. Indeed, many visual impediments complicate the primary motif of the crossing and crisscrossing of waters—a resistance to sight that can only be conveyed metaphorically: 142 · c h a p t e r

six

Fig. 6.1 Chute du Tequendama, based on a sketch by Alexander von Humboldt and engraved by Wilhelm Friedrich Gmelin. Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, plate 6 (Paris: Chez F. Schoell, 1810–13). Library of Congress.

The Oroonoko [sic] seems divided into a multitude of arms or torrents, each of which seeks to force a passage through the rocks. We were struck with the little water to be seen in the bed of the river, the frequency of subterraneous falls, and the tumult of waters breaking on the rocks in foam.41

Both geographically and rhetorically, the Orinoco marks a limit, an aquatic border zone between two confluent basins, as well as an entryway to an “unknown land” beyond the thundering waters.42 “The river is really a watershed,” a challenge to scientific ambition and visual mastery of the scene.43 The overabundance of nature conveys the trope of “newness,” as in this o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 143

poignant passage: “You find yourself in a new world, in the midst of untamed and savage nature.”44 The sense of “newness” emerges here as a way to visually chart unknown territory: When the traveler has passed the Great Cataracts, he feels as if he were in a new world; and had overstepped the barriers, which nature seems to have raised between the civilized countries of the coast, and the savage and unknown interior.45

Yet the metaphor of “newness” has further implications for the literary mapping of the region, as it links the Humboldtian text to earlier exploration narrative. At the brink of the Great Cataracts, Humboldt echoes La Condamine’s scene of arrival at Borja, his delight at finding himself “in a new world, separate from all human intercourse, on a freshwater sea, surrounded by a maze of lakes, rivers, and canals, penetrating in every direction the gloom of an immense forest, which but for them were forbidden to access. New plants, new animals, and new races of men were exhibited to view.”46 Humboldt further echoes his precursor when he mentions the “pongos” of High Marañón, a site well marked in La Condamine’s literary cartography as a nearly unsurmountable barrier. What was for his precursor a life-­threatening peril, Humboldt brings down to a managable size: “The highest and most formidable of these pongos, . . . that of the Mayasi, is however only three feet in height.”47 These veiled allusions to La Condamine’s Rélation abrégée anticipates the cartographic rivalry with his Enlightenment predecessor. Baffled by the sense of nature as spectacle, Humboldt tried to meet his own self-­assigned imperative to register the fleeting forms of life in all their “heterogeneity and supplementarity.”48 Yet the picturesque passages turn into a looser, albeit more conventional, form; like a new Columbus, Humboldt chooses to keep a nautical log,49 a shift in register that results from futile efforts to convey a landscape that defies representation: The Orinoco had presented a bewildering landscape without relief or landmarks, strung along a network of rivers flowing in all directions (even one that was said to be geographically impossible, that flowed both ways at once) through a forest that defeated even Humboldt’s attempts to find in it order or meaning. Where was the pattern in that maze? . . . How else to organize such a landscape than to thread it step by step onto the linear narrative of motion forward through time?50

144 · c h a p t e r

six

Traversing the hidden tract dramatizes the tension between the excess of tropical nature and the aesthetic demands of its representation.51 This gap or fissure conflicts with the self-­assigned tasks of the naturalist-­explorer— observation, cataloguing of species, measurement—a break that not only is textually marked, as in the shift to a diary format, but also entails a more radical break with scientific conventions. While Humboldt constructed himself as a seer of Nature—not merely an empirical observer, but also a kind of prophetic witness surveying the land—the journey up the Orinoco marks a shift in his style of self-­ fashioning. Whereas up to this point the visual impulse has filtered the account of nature, now the task of perception falls on the ear, following the practice of earlier colonial explorers, particularly Friar Gaspar de Carvajal’s 1541 account.52 At this point the narrative strives to re­cord, in particular and intricate detail, the myriad auditory stimuli which greet the visitors as their canoe floats through this remote recess of the jungle. In beautifully crafted prose, Humboldt describes the cumulative effect created by birdsong, murmuring leaves, and insect choirs, an effect which leads to “un bruit confus”—“a confused noise”—that seems to emanate from everywhere in the jungle.53 Various registers of this animated sound are recorded; then, as the “noise” rises and falls, it leads to a surprising auditory phenomenon. As the journey proceeds, the entire breadth and length of the forest floor reverberates in deep silence: “. . . When we lean an attentive ear to the most feeble sounds transmitted by the air, we hear a dull vibration, that fill . . . all the lower strata of the air.” Paradox conveys both the subtle quality of the atmosphere and its particular tone: “un frémissement sourd,” literally a “deaf vibration,” which leads to a heightened awareness of an invisible but all pervasive force.54 In contrast with the first sight of the “gigantic nature” of the tropics at Cumaná, at this climactic endpoint it is the silence of the Great Cataracts which suspends the rationalist faith of the explorer. The Orinoco river trail aligns with the tropes of the Romantic sublime, instilling a sense of Nature as omnipresent, multivaried, and beyond established paradigms.55 humboldt the mapmaker

Enmeshed in a labyrinth of waters, the Amazon is also a textual labyrinth, a river mapped and remapped by earlier explorers, each bent on charting contours of rivers, “correcting” earlier mappings, and projecting their own spatial imaginaries onto a contested territory. The bifurcation of the Ori-

o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 145

noco and its connection to the broader Amazon system had been the object of dispute by earlier explorers and cartographers—a debate fueled not only by geographic markers, but also by political boundaries. Daring the reader to survey the Orinoco’s labyrinthine trail traced on a series of old maps, Humboldt lays out the stakes for European cartographic knowledge: proof that “One arm of the Oroonoko [sic], the Cassiquiare, running from north to south, falls into the . . . Rio Negro, which . . . joins the Maragnon, or river of the Amazons.”56 Colonial and Enlightenment explorers had conjectured that a canal linked the two rivers yet were unable to determine its precise location, while the more headstrong Father Gunilla, the Jesuit author of El Orinoco ilustrado (1745), categorically refuted this claim.57 The texts of previous explorers—La Condamine and Father Gunilla’s classic overtures, but also the intrepid forays of Sir Walter Raleigh (also known as Ralegh) and Lope de Aguirre—wind their way into the fabric of Humboldt’s writing, not only as a means to authenticate his new findings, but also as shields to protect him through the thick jungle interior with the security afforded by European forms of knowledge.58 The spatial-­geographic project of mapmaking unfolds in chapters 23 to 25 of Rélation historique, a dazzling tour de force of digressions, notes, and commentary that virtually translates the archive of Amazon exploration into word. Before cartography, political divisions overlay geographic boundaries. While Spain controlled the northwest and central reaches of the Amazon River basin, including the Viceroyalty of New Granada (established in 1739), Portugal commanded the northeastern portion, under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of Brazil. Established by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the papal demarcation between Spain and Portugal between 1515 and 1529 led to intensified rivalry between the two Iberian empires. Humboldt critiqued the line of demarcation as a result of “vain territorial disputes” (“vaines contestations territoriales”).59 Traveling under the aegis of the king of Spain, Humboldt noted that possession of the Orinoco was of great interest to Spain, since the river facilitated its rival, Portugal, easy access to Guyana as well as a navigation route to the Captain Generalcy of Venezuela. In this way, the Prussian underscored the geographer J. B. Harley’s claim that Spain and Portugal weighed the strategic role of maps as “key documents in the launching of empires.” While the pose of scientific detachment disengaged Humboldt to serve as mediator between empires, mapping the Orinoco reflected the alliances and counteralliances between European mapmakers and the state.60 Humboldt’s obsessive mapping practices, in both visual and textual form, show how maps functioned as “an instrument of power” in early modern Europe; maps were “appropriated 146 · c h a p t e r

six

as an intellectual weapon of the state system,” leading to silences and complicities in the struggle for legitimacy and control of territories.61 Humboldt and Bonpland had aimed to reach “une terre inconnue . . . au-­ delà des Grandes Cataractes” (“an unknown land beyond the Great Cataracts”), a region at the margins of European cartography.62 A blank space in D’Anville’s then definitive map of the Americas, Carte de l’Amérique meridionale, it had appeared erronously in other sources. How to map this previously uncharted territory? The unknown region seems to defy attempts at categorization; it is the stuff of imagination and fancy, “le sol classique des fables et de la féerie” (“the classical soil of fable and fairy visions”). Alluding to the fantastic quality of these tales in both French and Spanish—“contes de voyageurs et de moines (cuentos de viageros y frailes)”—Humboldt downplays what he considers a crude form of geographic knowledge derived from monks and travelers’ tales.63 The epic journey narrated in Rélation historique requires mapping the Orinoco as a mixture of fact and fiction, which highlights not only that “maps read as literary texts,”64 but also the idiosyncratic mixture of myth and history that characterizes the Latin American world. Humboldt first surveys the spread of the river, constructing a verbal map with a series of binary divisions: the Raudal d’Aturès corresponds to missions of the lower Orinoco and the mouth of the river, whereas the high Orinoco corresponds to the Raudal de Maypures, its nearby mountain range, and missions.65 This binary classification echoes Humboldt’s earlier attempts to classify flora and fauna, species that defied the classificatory impulse of Linnean taxonomy. A similar binary logic applies to the typology of native peoples, who are, in a crude and rudimentary ethnography, divided into two distinct groups on the basis of language, social customs, and intellectual capacity.66 This “social taxonomy” recalls the blurred distinctions between the animal and human and the vegetable and mineral realms encountered at the heart of the rain forest; and it proves just as ineffective.67 Mapping the Orinoco was not a tabula rasa but rather a palimpsest,68 an overlay of the European cartographic archive, which is graphically displayed in the compendium of maps included in the Atlas. Planche XIV, “Histoire de la Géographie de l’Orénoque et du Dorado,” is the visual analogue of the extensive cartographic commentary carried out in chapter 23 of the Rélation historique. The Orinoco appears as transnational space, showing that “the map is not the territory,” but rather a “transposition into American geography of European values and preferences, in relation to landscape.”69 As if to offset the experience of disorientation and loss evident in the narrative account of the Orinoco crossing, the attempt to fit a complex web of rivers into the spatial grid of European cartography gains o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 147

rhetorical momentum. Like the image of the raft about to sail down the Guayaquil, the presence of indigenous informers intrudes into the “power/ knowledge” assumption of European mapmaking, either as oblique reference or as direct geographical intervention. At the start of his review of early Spanish explorers, Humboldt attributes to the Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña’s 1638 expedition the first, though mistaken, mention regarding the mouth of Río Negro, an error later propagated by the French cartographers La Condamine and D’Anville.70 More significantly, he hints that indigenous informers purposely led the Jesuit on the wrong track: It remains doubtful, whether the Indians whom Acunna [sic] interrogated meant to acquaint him with the communication between the Oroonoko [sic] and the Rio Negro by means of the Cassiquiare, a natural channel, which I went up from San Carlos to Esmeralda; or only to give him a vague idea of the portages between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Rio Essequibo.71

The fact that Acuña did not recognize “the great river” as the Orinoco in his Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran río de las Amazonas (1612) becomes the epistemological flaw that led Humboldt to his own purported “discovery”; hence the label attached to Acuña’s hypothesis as “very conjectural” (a translation that does not quite do justice to the biting irony of the French original, “très-­hasardée”).72 Acuña’s error, based on allegedly faulty communication by indigenous sources, prompts a long series of “cartographic silences” wherein Humboldt singlehandedly refutes the series of mapmakers who had preceded him, showing relatively little anxiety about this confidential assertion of geographic certainty.73 The exhaustive history of Amazon exploration reads, then, as narrative equivalent of planche XIV, “Histoire de la Géographie de l’Orénoque et du Dorado,” a centerpiece of the Atlas géographique and the basis for Humboldt’s cartographic authority.74 Nicholas Sanson’s 1680 map traces a faint semblance of the Orinoco but, since it was based on Acuña, Humboldt disqualifies this early map as “purement hypotéthique.”75 Considered “a milestone in Amazon exploration”—“le meillure de celles [cartes] qu’on possédoit avant le voyage de M. de la Condamine”—Father Samuel Fritz’s 1707 map served the French academician as a kind of “master-­map” (fig. 6.2).76 Humboldt wryly concludes that the German Jesuit lacked any notion of the Casiquiare canal.77 The next Enlightenment cartographer under review is Jean Baptiste Bourginon D’Anville, who as an “armchair cartographer” 148 · c h a p t e r

six

Fig. 6.2 Samuel Fritz, “Plan de la riviere de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones,” in Cartes marines (early eighteenth-­century copy of the 1707 original). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

had produced a series of scholarly maps of the Americas based on a distillation of earlier texts and reports.78 Although Humboldt acknowledges that D’Anville corrected errors of earlier cartographers, he concludes that his map belongs to an “older school” of geography, a school disparaged as “speculative” and based on “divination.”79 Only later does Humboldt grant D’Anville partial geographical knowledge on the basis of a map included in the second edition of Amérique meridionale, where D’Anville shifts the origin of the Orinoco and effectively shows that the Casiquiare “carries the water of High Orinoco to the Río Negro;” hence corroborating Humboldt’s claim.80 This “imaginary system,” as Humboldt dubbed his precursor’s cartographic efforts, surfaces in the map titled “Mer du nord” (“Northern Sea”), included in D’Anville’s Cartes géographiques.81 The discussion of D’Anville serves as a prelude to Humboldt’s most formidable competitor. As “star” of the Académie française, La Condamine o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 149

Fig. 6.3 Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, “Carte du Cours de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones,” in Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique mériodionale (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1745). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

had achieved scientific credibility and notoriety for his adventure-­packed tale recounting his canoe journey down the Amazon, punctured at each turn by detailed measurements of latitude and longitude. Full of the topos of European exploration, La Condamine added to the drama of the river trail a constant litany of obstacles that interrupted, delayed, or otherwise obstructed the scientist’s “willed seeing.” Like Humboldt on the upper Orinoco, this tale of survival required a new format: an eclectic style of re150 · c h a p t e r

six

porting that mixed empiricist data with geographical detail, natural history observation, and ethnographic commentary. The philosophe’s rhetorical twists and turns mirror the meanderings of a great river tamed in prose and image: “Relation abrégée flowed as smoothly as the river it described.”82 As if to crown his daunting firsthand account, La Condamine’s Relation culminates in the map attached to the close of the narrative.83 Hailed as “the first graphic representation of the entire navigable length of the Amazon,” Carte du Cours du Maragnon ou de la Grande Riviere des Amazones [sic], became “the most accurate eighteenth-­century view of the Amazon river system” (fig. 6.3).84 La Condamine’s Carte claimed its definitive status with a last gesture o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 151

of cartographic authority: his map is superimposed over Father Fritz’s 1707 map, a graphic depiction of the superiority and greater accuracy of his own version.85 By “eliding” the earlier map and supplanting it with his own spatial configuration, La Condamine legitimates his cartographic project vis-­ à-­vis that of the Jesuit explorer who had preceded him.86 Humboldt takes a different tactic, refuting La Condamine’s version of the Amazon River, calling it, as he did with D’Anville, “an imaginary system,” and claiming that his precursor had a “muddled understanding of the Amazon River system” because his facts were based on “speculation” rather than “observation.”87 By pointing out the “silences of cartography” in Amazon exploration, Humboldt bolsters his own authority, canceling out the palimpsest established by previous sources, and presenting his own detailed map of the Orinoco in the Atlas as the definitive version. In this belitting of previous mapmakers, Humboldt followed the practice of “metalepsis” in travel and exploration. Much in the manner of Richard Schomburgk’s “discovery” of British Guiana through the traverse survey, Humboldt retraced the Orinoco trail established by earlier explorers, meticulously “erasing” their previous tracks and “emptying” out their mappings in an effort to lay out a stake for science and authorize his own journey as conclusive.88 As was the case with La Condamine’s Rélation abrégé, for Humboldt, “creating a more accurate map of the Amazon became the central focus and organizing principle behind his entire project.”89 Planche XVI, “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, de Casiquiare et du Rio Negro, offrant la bifurcation de l’Orénoque et sa communication avec la rivière de l’Amazone,” is displayed prominently in the Atlas géographique et physique du nouveau continent as the culmination of the Humboldtian odyssey (fig. 6.4). The view provided—a vertical bend of river with its tributaries—“strips [earlier explorers] of [their] geographic authority.”90 “More than a simple navigational chart, . . . the map is a complete text, a travel chronicle in itself.” Its title, “Itinerary of the Orinoco,” shows that “the goal of the text is to map not only the territory traversed by a river, but also the voyage of a traveler along it.”91 Pérez Mejía has argued that European cartography systematically sought to disparage, repress, and omit indigenous sources. One of the most salient “cartographic silences” concerns the suppression of Amerindian voices and their localized geographical knowledge.92 In this light, Humboldt has been a particularly pointed target of postcolonial critics, who argue, as does Pérez Mejía, that “the narrator of Voyage aux régions équinoxiales does not recognize the contribution of enormously valuable empirical scientific knowledge in the making of geographic science.”93 Yet this alleged omission does 152 · c h a p t e r

six

Fig. 6.4 Alexander von Humboldt, “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, du Casiaquiare, et du Rio Negro,” in Atlas géographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle-­Espagne (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811). David Rumsey Collection.

not do justice to the Humboldtian text for, at various points, Humboldt acknowledges his dependence on the expertise provided by native guides, to the point that he considers them “excellent geographers,” with an expertise particularly evident in their extensive knowledge of riverways and tributaries.94 At various points the Prussian nods to the uncodified geographical knowledge provided by indigenous informants, by prefacing his observations with “According to the accounts of the natives . . . ,” a subliminal phrase inserted within the folds of the Humboldtian fabric that gives local knowledge a status similar to that of observation-­driven science.95 In what reads almost as a subconscious gesture of acknowledgement, the oft-­ repeated phrase establishes a counter-­discourse to the rigid grids and lines of European cartography. Harley claims that “conquering states impose a silence on minority or subject populations through their manipulation of place-­names.”96 The errors and “silences” of European cartography are due, to a great extent, to the interpretive rivalry between missionaries and indigenous peoples in “reading” the landscape. Since the start of the Orinoco trail, Humboldt had pointed out the stark difference between European-­imposed toponyms and the more exact names given river and tributaries by the people who daily traversed its waters: The great tributary streams of the Amazon are designated even by the missionaries of European race by different names in their lower and upper course. . . . The researches made in the mission of the Andaquies on the real origin of the Rio Negro have been so much the more fruitless, because the Indian name of the river was unknown.97

In certain cases, such as in the location of the fabled El Dorado, indigenous place names lead to precise geographical locations, unlike the often confusing toponyms proliferating in European maps.98 The discrepancy between native knowledge and European cartography led Humboldt to realize that even his own efforts at demarcation were arbitrary: “Our maps are loaded with names arbitrarily shortened or disfigured.”99 The simplicity and accuracy of indigenous geographic practices is acknowledged in Humboldt’s later Views of Nature, where he claims that “the greatest rivers, among the people who inhabit their banks, are called ‘the River,’ with no other special designations.”100 More surprising, as if to reverse the Columbus-­inspired trope, Humboldt’s alleged “discovery” of the Orinoco relies on indigenous sources; more precisely, on accumulated oral testimonies that expand the explorer’s 154 · c h a p t e r

six

vision of the Amazon delta as an ecological system. As we saw, Humboldt’s efforts to classify indigenous groups led to a reification of indigenous communities to fit the binary logic of Western taxonomy. The silenced archive of indigenous sources is likewise determined not only by ethnicity but also by gender. Pérez Mejía raises the pointed question: “Why are there no women in Humboldt’s atlas?”101 A closer look reveals that there is indeed a woman, and that she surfaces twice in the Orinoco mapping sequence: first in an oblique reference in La Condamine’s Rélation abrégée, and second as a last, nearly forgotten gloss in Humboldt’s narrative of travel. After the exhaustive cartographic review which lays empirical claim to his “discovery,” Humboldt mentions La Condamine’s tale of the testimony of a native Cauriacani woman who had traveled by canoe from the borders of the Orinoco to Gran Parà. At the penultimate hour, it is her silent presence that ultimately “proves” both La Condamine’s and Humboldt’s hypotheses: M. de la Condamine, during his memorable navigation on the river of Amazons in 1743, carefully collected a great number of proofs of this communication of rivers. . . . The most decisive proof then appeared to him to be the unsuspected testimony of a Cauriacani Indian woman, with whom he had conversed, and who had come in a boat from the banks of the Oroonoko [sic] . . . to Grand Para.102

If in La Condamine “her testimony is erased from the cartographic record,” in Humboldt this anonymous source is introduced alongside a final, almost delusional reappraisal of European cartography.103 Surfacing precisely at the point where La Condamine and D’Anville are shown to have “corrected” their earlier maps, and subsequently having offered definitive proof of Humboldt’s hyphothesis,104 the unknown informant is granted limited geographical authority amid the tissue of maps of the European episteme. For without her testimony, Humboldt’s presumed “discovery” would have been lost. Although later editions of the Atlas place the Orinoco map atop a textual pyramid, in a tangible way, Humboldt’s “map was dictated” to him by an unknown—and female—indigenous informant.105 the view from the river

In the Amazon, as elsewhere on the globe, nature supersedes European reason and its established categories: “Nature has pursued a much less complicated plan than has been believed by those, who have suffered themselves to be guided by . . . a taste for the marvellous.”106 The rivers run their course o n t h e t r a i l w i t h h u m b o l d t  · 155

according to le goût du merveilleux, a term implying those “secret laws of nature” that form one of the basic postulates of “Humboldtian science.” The multiethnic populations that inhabit river basins and the forest interior are likewise subsumed into nature: “The nations of the Upper Oroonoko [sic] . . . have no other worship than that of the powers of nature.”107 But so is the traveler himself, for his explorations ultimately push Humboldt to discard yet another scientific postulate: the distinction between subject and object, an “erasure” leading to the awareness that both subject and object are part of a shared nature.108 The forest-­beyond-­the-­forest, or meta-­forest, threatens to subsume the traveling subject to the point that he too blends into nature. Humboldt’s self-­fashioning thus mirrors the way that “in the tropical zone, the superabundance of life . . . reduce[d] the place to nature itself.”109 As Humboldt’s narrative persona dwindles before the forces of nature, he paves the way for European commercial expansion. Upon his “discovery” of the Casiquiare, Humboldt singles out the commercial as well as the truth value of his expedition. At the end of the Orinoco river trail, Humboldt “fixes” the geographic and intellectual quandary regarding the origins, flow, and ultimate possession of this river; he further prophesizes that the Casiquiare will turn into a navigable route between two rivers, which will open the Orinoco and the Amazon to commerce and trade, ushering “a new era” of prosperity for native peoples.110 The image of progress is countered, however, by an equally compelling image of solitude— “la vaste solitude que l’on traverse,” (the vast solitude we have traversed); which evokes the effect of infinite silence that surrounds the forest.111 Yet Humboldt’s Personal Narrative provides “a clearing in the South American jungle,” a space allowing light to enter in the midst of the “dense forest canopy.”112 It is this light that surfaces in major texts of Latin American literature, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1963), an iconic text of magical realism inspired by the Humboldtian sense of the marvelous. Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953) in turn reenacts the journey to that primitive palm grove that is the “origin of the species,” which to this day conditions representations of the Amazon and its imaginary.113 Humboldt’s contribution to Latin American cultural identity has shifted from an ontological hold—nature as centerpiece of the continent’s “historical uniqueness”—to a critical understanding of his relevance to the environmental humanities.114 On the trail with Humboldt, we learn new routes for the observation, appreciation, and preservation of the natural world. Combining European and indigenous cartographic practices, Humboldt’s maps recompose the geographical imagination. 156 · c h a p t e r

six

chap ter se ven

palms and other trees on maps Exoticism, Error, and Environment, from Old World to New

Brian Bockelman

Several years ago I took a break from a workshop on Argentine history at the College of William & Mary to see nearby Historic Jamestowne. As I approached the well-­curated museum in the visitor center, my eyes were instantly drawn to a familiar map of the Atlantic seaboard enlarged on a wall by the entryway. Though I could not immediately identify the image as a detail from the world map in Abraham Ortelius’s late-­sixteenth-­century atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, a single word running below the Río de la Plata estuary—“Palmares”—filled me with an unnerving sense of déjà vu (fig. 7.1).1 So big that it has to be hyphenated, this peculiar toponym (place name) inhabits a spot just southeast of where one would today find Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. That town is understandably absent on the map, as native resistance quickly destroyed the original 1536 settlement and Spanish colonists only managed to reestablish it in 1580, a decade after Ortelius’s atlas first appeared. Then again, the celebrated Flemish mapmaker did include neighboring “S. Espirito” (Espíritu Santo), another long-­abandoned outpost that Italian explorer Sebastian Cabot had founded for Spain during his expedition up the Paraná River in the mid-­1520s. That

157

Fig. 7.1 Detail of Abraham Ortelius, “Typus orbis terrarum,” in Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), showing “Palmares” toponym. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

odd survival should have been the first clue to unraveling the cartographic mystery beginning to envelop me. I had seen the “Palmares” toponym before on copies of Ortelius, but at Jamestowne it suddenly struck me as one of the most inexplicable features on any map of the region. In both Spanish and Portuguese, palmares means “palm groves”—an arboreal cluster rightly associated with the South American tropics (and made famous by Brazil’s seventeenth-­century maroon community Quilombo de Palmares) but environmentally implausible 158 · c h a p t e r

seven

south of the Río de la Plata, where no species of palms grows naturally. In fact, the hardiest of the few palm trees native to Argentina, a mostly temperate country, reach the southeastern limits of their natural range about twenty miles north of Buenos Aires, and even there they tend to be restricted to the well-­watered gallery forests of the Paraná Delta.2 Given the degree of topographic and toponymic inaccuracy on early European maps of the New World, it is not unusual to find an errant indication of trees or other natural formations in places where they did not really exist.3 Yet “Palmares” was such a clear reference to a distinctive family of vegetation that I had to wonder where the label came from and what it originally meant in this remote corner of the Spanish empire, still so little known by geographers and mapmakers at the end of the sixteenth century. This was no mere antiquarian curiosity on my part. I had come to William & Mary to pre­sent research on a political and cultural scandal that roiled modern Argentina when city officials planted palm trees for the first time in the showpiece central plaza of Buenos Aires. That colorful event occurred in 1883, more than three hundred years after Ortelius issued his world map. By then, the association of their country with palms was enough to injure the pride of some Argentines, who were beginning to cultivate a landscape and floral nativism that celebrated the pampas—the vast and largely treeless plains stretching west and south of Buenos Aires—as a uniquely beautiful terrain, no longer to be judged aesthetically inferior to the dark forests and craggy mountains that dominated nineteenth-­century European ideals of sublime nature. More importantly, critics protested that palm trees were woefully out of place in the temperate Argentine environment. Not only would they struggle to thrive in pampean soil, ruining any ornamental splendor they possessed in the tropics; they would also give the false impression that Argentina was more ecologically, economically, culturally, and even racially similar to other palm lands—North Africa, Mesopotamia, or, worst of all, the rest of Latin America—than to Europe or North America. Stop making us look like “a Jamaican village or a Paraguayan or Brazilian sugar mill or pasture,” said the most vocal opponent of the plaza trees.4 With this later conflict over palms and Argentine national identity fresh in my mind, the wayward “Palmares” on Ortelius appeared potentially more significant than the common mapping misnomer. While surely there was some concrete explanation for this toponymic incongruity, it also raised the question of how common it was for early European cartographers of the Americas to suggest that palm trees grew naturally south of Buenos Aires. I soon discovered that Ortelius was not exceptional in this p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 159

regard: mapmakers struggled for centuries to fix the southern boundary of palm growth in the Western Hemisphere. This persistent problem was obviously due in part to imperfect information about the flora of southern South America in faraway Europe. But as examples of out-­of-­place cartographic palms piled up, even reaching into the nineteenth century, I began to doubt that the phenomenon could be explained by the limits of geographical knowledge alone. Such a view, like the old positivist reading of map history as a story of ever-­increasing progress toward objectivity, would presume that the primary reason early modern mapmakers put palms and other trees in specific locations around the world was to re­cord regional vegetation faithfully—and, by extension, that any errors of placement they made could only be failures of that ambition.5 But what if that was not their aim in the first place? Unfortunately, despite the frequent appearance of arboreal illustrations, woody toponyms, and shaded forests in the history of Western cartography, we still know so little about how and to what effect cartographers have represented trees and other plants on maps over time. One searches in vain through Imago Mundi, the flagship journal of the field, and the otherwise indispensable early volumes of The History of Cartography for any focused examination of the subject.6 More surprisingly, vegetation mapping, a serious specialty among practicing cartographers since the late nineteenth century, has not received much historical study. When Myriem Foncin of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris presented a brief overview of trees on old maps at an international colloquium on vegetation cartography in 1960, the assembled experts barely took notice, concerning themselves only with what her findings might reveal about the distribution of plant species before human intervention, which they desperately wanted to reconstruct.7 Even those historians most attentive to the mapping of nature in the past have shown greater interest in cartographic fauna than in cartographic flora—perhaps forgetting that plants long outlived animals on modern topographical maps. Still today there is no study for the vegetable kingdom on par with Wilma George’s classic Animals and Maps (1969).8 No such comprehensive treatment can be attempted here, but some attention to the long-­term use of tree mapping to characterize territories distant from Europe is necessary to understand the placement of “Palmares” and subsequent cartographic palms in improbable Argentine locales. As world and other small-­scale mapmakers began to chart the Americas, they continued a tradition of differentiating global regions from one another environmentally and even culturally by noting their typical or unusual plants. Though increasingly after 1500 the representation—by text 160 · c h a p t e r

seven

or picture—of a particular kind of tree in a specific cartographic location might double as an enticement to commerce or colonization, it was always a gesture of conveying the nature of a foreign land through one of its most visible landmarks.9 Like the mythical beasts that filled empty spaces on many medieval and early modern world maps, trees normally marked areas that remained wild and vaguely inferior in the minds of cartographers who were used to mapping familiar worlds closer to home by their cities, kingdoms, and roads. Unlike those mythical beasts, however, vegetation tended to appear not in completely unknown margins, but in places where mapmakers believed them to typify the surrounding habitat in the broadest sense. In this, the early cartographic deployment of trees was similar to that of exotic animals, which—as George’s study proved—occupied spaces on maps that loosely corresponded to their natural environments.10 Even if misplaced, these arboreal references could still represent a geographically approximate exoticism rather than a wholesale invention or error. Palms are a special case of this general rule. Because of their unique physiognomy, they stood out to Europeans as archetypal foreign plants and were some of the first trees that cartographers distinguished by shape from the unspecified deciduous variety that usually sufficed to indicate forest on a map. But palms also became the tropical tree par excellence in the European imagination, associated with the warm climes of Africa, Asia, and the Americas that were the focus of imperial and cartographic expansion from the thirteenth century on, and especially after 1500.11 They offered mapmakers a ready sign of environmental and cultural difference when placed in any dimly understood region, including territories where they did not grow and could not survive. One recent study even suggests that palm trees became portable icons, usable across global contexts to suggest the exoticism of foreign lands regardless of their existence in local environments.12 Insofar as palms appeared out of place on world and other small-­scale maps before 1850, however, it would be more accurate to say that they often adorned locations contiguous to their natural habitats, where they expressed an essential similarity between adjacent regions that were equally distant in the minds of Europeans. Nowhere was this impulse stronger than in the early mapping of the Americas—particularly that of the temperate far south, which long confounded global cartographers. roots of (palm) tree mapping in the old world

While trees have appeared on maps throughout history, they belong to a second tier of cartographic natural phenomena. They are less essential than p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 161

the form-­g iving land, sea, and river, without which it is difficult to represent the spatial arrangement of anything else on earth. They also lack the ancient pedigree of the wind, which has often materialized on parchment or paper despite being only indirectly visible to the naked eye. The simplest world maps—the tricontinental T-­O and Macrobian climatic zonal maps that illustrated many late antique and medieval manuscripts—conveyed basic geographic distinctions between global regions without recourse to vegetation. Portolan (nautical) charts fashioned in the unadorned “Italian style,” including the renowned Carte Pisane (c. 1290), made room for wind roses but not for trees, so little did such inland details interest Mediterranean sailors and merchants.13 Nor did these large woody plants—despite numbering in the trillions globally—appear in the influential instructions for plotting a world map that the Greek cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy set forth in his Geography (c. 150 CE). While some fifteenth-­century Europeans added small pictorial clusters of forest to their Ptolemaic world maps, these tiny trees were dwarfed by mountain chains crisscrossing the globe and large wind-­heads blowing from all corners of the earth.14 They suffered the same obscurity on Martin Waldseemüller’s famed Universalis cosmographia (1507), the first to label the Western hemisphere “America.”15 Clearly, maps can live—and have lived—without trees. Yet the fact that the giants of the vegetable kingdom are cartographically dispensable makes it all the more significant that mapmakers have so often chosen to include them. Trees have always been more prevalent on small-­ scale maps than ephemeral natural phenomena such as temperature or precipitation, and they have generally superseded swamps, canyons, and other topographical irregularities in importance. They also appeared long before any cartographer took an interest in what lay beneath the surface of the earth or thought to map life-­forms measuring in inches rather than feet. Among organisms big and small, only animals have rivaled trees in cartographic longevity, appearing frequently alongside pictures of mythological figures, sea monsters, angels, and human beings on maps from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. But while animals subsequently exited the scene, except on specialized thematic range maps, trees—in the form of shaded forests—became more prominent and precisely indicated on many general world and continental maps over time. Taking the long view, these tall plants have nearly matched the cartographic visibility and significance of mountains, which have also often appeared on maps in order to highlight a distinctive environment or suggest an enigmatic wilderness. Indeed, before medieval mapmakers gave trees a genuinely independent

162 · c h a p t e r

seven

graphic existence, they commonly associated them with distant mountain ranges. Several Beatus maps, notably the Escalada (c. 950) and Silos (1106) versions, depict vegetation growing out of hilltops and nowhere else, as if forest and mountain were one. Though it is unclear whether this was meant to indicate trees, a pattern of topping peaks with “little green tussocks, representing woods,” emerged in other more obviously arboreal contexts.16 The Munich “Isidore” mappamundi (c. 1130), for instance, employs two wispy plants emerging from the Caucasus Mountains to represent the contiguous forests of Hyrcania, long reputed for wildness by classical and medieval authorities. Similarly, on the 1428 nautical chart of the Mediterranean world by Joan de Viladesters, small clusters of spiky vegetation adorn the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, a terra incognita of cedars, pines, and oaks that consistently intrigued designers of the more highly embellished “Catalan style” portolans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even the 1478 Rome edition of Ptolemy’s world map shows the persistence of this trope with its tree-­topped image of the hypothetical Garamantica Mountains, located deep in the Libyan interior.17 Of course cartographers could also suggest the same connection simply by painting their mountains green, as did the makers of the Anglo-­Saxon map (c. 1025), the Burgo d’Osma Beatus map (1086), the Catalan-­Estense map (c. 1450), and many others besides. When trees do show up autonomously on medieval world maps, they tend to be either legendary plants of biblical or classical inspiration or vegetative marvels unknown at home. Mapmakers treated the two equally, planting them in specific places as foreign landmarks both astonishing and geographically real. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, once merely an inset image at the top of many Beatus maps, came to inhabit a terrestrial Garden of Eden in easternmost Asia on the richly decorated mappaemundi of the thirteenth century. These great monastic maps—Vercelli (c. 1200), Ebstorf (c. 1235), Psalter (c. 1265), and Hereford (c. 1290)—also feature the oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon, from whom Alexander the Great unhappily learned that he was to die abroad.18 A related arboreal mystery was the Dry Tree, mentioned in the Alexander legend (“with neither foliage nor fruit”) as well as various Christian, Near Eastern, and Indian myths.19 The creator of the Hereford map not only took the Tree of Knowledge to be the Dry Tree, but further conflated it with the “balsam tree”—a fabled but real balm-­producing plant associated by classical and Christian authors with Palestine, Egypt, and India. The Vercelli map, which has a fine row of balsams between Gaza and Damascus, also rhapsodizes about some Persian

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 163

trees that “bear fruit every day and at all times.” Lauding the same grove, the Ebstorf map expresses still greater delight about a place in India “where the trees are so big, that the trunk of the fig stands 40 yards high.”20 Among these arboreal wonders, medieval cartographers took a lively interest in palms, though none seemed to know how to draw them. One tree on Vercelli now looks like a date palm, but close inspection through multispectral imaging reveals that the ink has worn away from its balsam outline (plate 4).21 Elsewhere on the map, a legend in lower Egypt reads “Succus palmaris inhebriat gentes”—roughly, “People here get drunk on [fermented] palm juice.” Sadly, there is no corresponding illustration. The Hereford map marks the same spot near Memphis with a palm toponym, but adds only some “ambiguously drawn vegetation.”22 While Matthew Paris omitted palms from the trees on his thirteenth-­century cartographic itineraries between London and Jerusalem, he did put them in Egypt on a related map of the Holy Land (c. 1250). However, the stick-­figure plants he labeled “palme” resemble the schematic pines he drew on his pilgrimage routes through France and Italy.23 Perhaps the closest approximation of palm trees on a contemporary map of considerable geographic extent appears near Antioch on the medieval copy (c. 1265) of the Roman Tabula Peutingeriana, which also shows an unusual degree of interest in the different species of trees and plants found in the forests near the Alsatian monastery where it was made.24 The rise of portolan charts at the dawn of the fourteenth century added little initially to the representation of trees on small-­scale maps. Their creators sometimes drew on local vegetation to improvise new toponyms along unpopulated Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, as Pietro Vesconte did in 1311 when he dubbed a spot on the Libyan shore simply “palmeris.”25 But given their maritime emphasis, many portolans offered few embellishments and sparse geographic information inland. Even cartographers who rejected such “Italian” austerities often reserved illustrations for cities, castles, and encampments—all essentially political sites, further adorned with identifying flags. The only hint of vegetation on Petrus Roselli’s 1456 chart is an oversized green drawing of the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain (plate 5). Although “Catalan-­style” chartmakers added copious pictures of exotic animals and foreign rulers straight away, they were slower to visualize trees. On Angelino Dulcert’s paradigmatic 1339 chart, both sides of the Mediterranean are strewn with standards, rivers course everywhere, and mountains appear here and there. A few animals—birds, a camel, an elephant—roam the edges, particularly across North Africa and the Middle East, where they accompany images of sultans, merchants, and mythical 164 · c h a p t e r

seven

potentates. Yet the half-­dozen treelike illustrations in Nubia are actually flag icons, as are the two date palms clearly drawn by Organa and Tripoli.26 And while Abraham Cresques and associates made more room for trees on their equally renowned Catalan Atlas (c. 1375), including some in Asia that were “so tall their tops touched the clouds,” these fanciful plants were more a mappamundi survival than a portolan innovation.27 Nevertheless, as nautical charts and atlases became more elaborate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, their makers began to fill the ample empty spaces of unfamiliar continents with visual and textual references to the natural world, including trees that were at once foreign to European eyes and believed to be typical of the local environment. At first such vegetative details came in the form of isolated illustrations of individual plants or plant clusters, typically added to please customers willing to spend more for decorated charts.28 While this pay-­to-­display arrangement made the decision to include trees somewhat arbitrary, their geographic placement when they did appear was anything but. Though chartmakers depicted mountain chains and major rivers everywhere, they almost never put flora (or fauna) in European lands, which continued to be packed with political information and illustrations. In this sense, the very appearance of vegetation on a small-­scale chart signaled the cartographic passage into an alien environment. However, trees were usually not located just anywhere abroad but in places where they were thought to be characteristic. Depending on how precisely the cartographer sought to represent a particular species, these arboreal images could convey not only a generic foreignness, but an exoticism particular to the region they inhabited. Nowhere was this more evident than in North Africa, the chief geographic “other” of European-­made portolan charts and related world maps up to 1500. As Foncin noted long ago, early modern cartographers seldom bothered to specify the trees they drew in different parts of the world— but the oasis date palms of North Africa were an exception.29 For reasons that remain obscure, in the 1420s chartmakers started to depict wild palm trees and other vegetation growing Beatus-­like atop the Atlas Mountains. The first known example comes from the Genoese cartographer Battista Beccario, whose thriving Atlas palms of 1426 are clearly distinguished from nearby palm-­crested flags.30 The portolan-­tinged Catalan-­Estense map (c. 1450) goes on to describe “a great abundance of dates” near Organa, south of the mountains. While the so-­called London Roselli (1465) picks up both references and adds more palm illustrations beyond the Atlas range, another late chart by Roselli or a follower (c. 1480) has no fewer than twelve stands of date palms.31 By that point the tree had become no less a p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 165

cartographic representative of the North African landscape than the usual pictures of camels, tents, and lords. So compelling was its symbolism that it continued to appear on maps of the region well after the European encounter with the much more palm-­covered American tropics. It had become, as Christian Jacob puts it, “a vegetal stereotype . . . there not to mark a place but to qualify a zone.”32 Although the development of printed maps in the two decades before the discovery of the Americas made it cheaper and easier to decorate the entire world with trees, their common use of generic pictorial symbols to indicate woodlands actually minimized regional differences in vegetation at first.33 Ironically, the most extensive and environmentally discriminating cartographic incorporation of plants in the fifteenth century occurred instead on a lavishly reconceived mappamundi. Trees simply abound on Fra Mauro’s world map (c. 1450), lining waterways, encircling towns, and topping mountains on almost every inch of its highly decorated surface. They also take a variety of forms intended to signal different species, from lollipoplike deciduous trees to conical poplars and evergreens to several shapes of pines and fruit trees, all consciously arrayed on the map to distinguish places by their flora. Unmistakable palms flourish around the Persian Gulf, run down the East African coast, skirt the southwestern edge of the Mediterranean, and pop up by Delhi, the Egyptian-­Libyan border, and the Atlas Mountains. “In this desert there are date trees,” we are told near Marrakesh, but “beyond them no more are to be found.”34 Few European cartographers had paid such close attention to tree species as a constitutive element of local landscapes around the world. That was about to change. palm groves on the pampas and other arboreal approximations from afar

The dawning realization that a New World existed on the other side of the Atlantic more than doubled the challenge of mapping the entire earth on a single sheet of vellum or paper. Not only was the old problem of projection further complicated, but mapmakers now faced a radically expanded global geography to document and describe. No wonder the atlas gained in popularity after 1492—it was the cartographic equivalent of divide and conquer. With so much new room for pictures of far-­flung peoples and their habitats, the creators of world maps, continental maps, and global atlases dramatically increased their use of arboreal and other illustrations during the sixteenth century. In an important new development, some cartog-

166 · c h a p t e r

seven

raphers—such as the maker of the sumptuous Vallard Atlas (1547)—even began to insert sizable landscape vignettes into poorly understood interiors, particularly in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.35 Such panoramic illustrations provided, in theory at least, representative tableaux of local environments, both natural (topography, flora, fauna) and human-­built (cities, strongholds, dwellings), as well as occasional hints of daily life in surrounding regions. Trees figured prominently in these vignettes, framing the view and setting the scene geographically in a way that other, less regionally specific natural features, such as mountains or lakes, could not. More than any other detail, save perhaps the exotic animals that ranged beneath them, these tall plants signaled the character of the place momentarily brought to life for European eyes on the map. Yet the inventors of tree-­lined cartographic vignettes never attempted to represent the vegetable kingdom in all its diversity, preferring instead to highlight a distinctive species or two that ostensibly revealed the nature of the place depicted in the widest sense. Given their prior cartographic reputation, palms lent themselves readily to this purpose in Africa. For instance, the colorfully decorated portolan atlas attributed to Sebastião Lopes (c. 1565) contains several landscapes of forbidding African castles and Portuguese outposts surrounded by palm trees, including a dramatic northern scene in which two horsemen charge each other while a train of pack camels passes warily by (plate 6a).36 Meanwhile, in the same atlas the tropical Atlantic coast of South America is dominated not by palms but by a portrait of natives alternately harvesting and resting beneath brazilwood (Caesalpinia echinata), the tree that gave the colony both name and fame in the sixteenth century (plate 6b). Reflecting rising European commercial and ethnographic interests in Brazil, the appearance of this species on many other mid-­century maps lent greater environmental specificity to a place previously imagined—notably on the Cantino (1502) and Canerio (1506) planispheres—as a neo-­Edenic paradise, lined with fantastical trees peacefully topped by parrots.37 Despite their number and variety in the region, palms did not fit this sylvan image well, and they rarely turned up in Brazilian vignettes before the seventeenth century. The proliferation of trees on small-­scale maps after 1492 cannot be attributed entirely to the burst of cartographic iconography that followed the discovery of new lands far from Europe. Instead, a good part of the arboreal expansion appeared in words. With the addition of the Americas to world geography, mapmakers now had many more coasts to chart from afar, none of which had ever been labeled by Europeans. As their

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 167

predecessors had recently done in sub-­Saharan Africa, where “Palms” and “Palm Grove(s)” first became ubiquitous coastal toponyms, the navigators and mappers of American shores often identified sites by prominent or unusual natural phenomena, including stands of vegetation they scarcely understood. In this manner, trees of various kinds and even “Palmares” began to show up regularly on sixteenth-­century maps as place names— or just placeholders—along the Caribbean and Atlantic shores of South America. Though palm images were uncommon in cartographic Brazil, palm labels along its coast were not. On the comparatively treeless shoreline south of the Río de la Plata, mapmakers made frequent recourse to names such as “Wide Beaches,” “Bay of Inundated Shallows,” “Beautiful Sierras,” and “Duck Island.”38 However, the labeling of places in the South Atlantic remained fluid well into the seventeenth century, as later cartographers invented new toponyms and moved existing ones around with only an approximate concern for accuracy. Sooner or later, right or wrong, trees would arrive there too. Herein lies at least a partial solution to our Argentine “Palmares” mystery. It is quite easy to see where Ortelius got this geographically paradoxical place name in 1570. He simply took it, along with many other details, from the landmark 1569 world map by his close associate Gerardus Mercator. There, in small print further obscured by Mercator’s larger cartographic achievement, the word “Palmares” appears beneath a fanciful row of mountains stretching just south of the Río de la Plata.39 The toponym was surely new to Ortelius, who made no note of it on his earlier global wall map of 1564. More intriguingly, he did not bother to put it on his 1570 map of the Americas, also made for Theatrum.40 We do not know if Mercator also omitted the “Palmares” label from his own 1569 Americas map, now lost; but it did reappear on his son Rumold’s 1587 world and his grandson Michael’s 1595 America, both issued in the patriarch’s posthumous Atlas (1595).41 Given the earlier date of his famous world map and this subsequent family lineage, Mercator was the likelier of the two great Flemish cartographers to propose the place name. But even if this explains how “Palmares” wound up on Ortelius, we are still left with essentially the same question: Where did Mercator pick up the strange notion of palms growing in the pampas south of the Argentine estuary? Although both men freely acknowledged their debts to earlier mapmakers, a review of the several hundred world and hemispheric maps with South American content created before 1569 reveals only a handful of “Palmares” predecessors. The place name turns up, curiously, on a 1554

168 · c h a p t e r

seven

work by the Italian publisher Michele Tramezzino. Once thought to have been made by Giacomo Gastaldi, a prolific sixteenth-­century Venetian cartographer whose oeuvre did influence Ortelius and Mercator, Tramezzino’s world map remains an enigma, “without any obvious source, or indeed, any imitators.”42 Gastaldi himself never used the toponym, so he could not have been its inspiration. Additional mid-­century examples of “Palmares” may exist, but their number surely pales beside the varied instances of another toponym common on small-­scale maps of the Río de la Plata at the time. World cartographers repeatedly marked a set of small islands off today’s Uruguayan coast with monikers such as “Paluares” (Giacomo Gastaldi 1546), “Pelar Nares” (Battista Agnese c. 1550), “Poraluares” (Gastaldi et al. 1561), “Peraluares” (Giovanni Francesco Camocio 1567), and so forth.43 Could it be that “Palmares” was yet another sloppy transcription of this uncertain place name by distant mapmakers? The words do bear a striking similarity, but that is all. Ortelius called the same islands “Pieraluares” on his 1564 world map and 1570 Americas map, and both he and Mercator clearly located their “Palmares” on the mainland.44 Intriguingly, the spot they chose was one that many seventeenth-­century maps labeled “Quirandies,” in reference to the indigenous Querandí peoples who sacked Buenos Aires in 1536 and long evaded Spanish rule.45 Coined by their more settled Guaraní neighbors, this word is virtually identical with Caranday or Carandaí, the common name of several Trithrinax and Copernica palm varieties native to northeastern Argentina. If, as Argentine scholars once suggested, the Guaraní associated the Querandí with palm forests, might “Palmares” have passed into the cartographic lexicon as a precarious European translation of their name?46 There is a certain romance in this hypothesis, but two facts militate against it. The simplest is that by the time mapmakers began to chart the Argentine coast, they had already applied many palm toponyms, including “Palmar” and “Palmares,” to tropical shores in Africa and the Americas. These names always referred literally to trees. A deeper problem is that none of the surviving accounts by early explorers in the Río de la Plata region ever employ “Palmares” as a name for the Querandí—or, for that matter, as a proper noun of any kind. Indeed, one searches fruitlessly for a written document from the sixteenth century that can corroborate, much less explain, the use of this toponym. The label seems to appear only on maps. If we push back further in time, we find two more examples of its cartographic usage before Mercator: a large 1544 wall map by Cabot, and a 1529 global sea chart by Girolamo da Verrazzano.47 Both are notable in that they

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 169

were made by explorer-­cartographers who spent considerable time in the Americas, including trips to the south Atlantic in the 1520s. Their personal experience with the Argentine landscape raises the tantalizing possibility that somehow they did encounter palms growing south of the Río de la Plata. In both cases, however, that seems highly unlikely. Even if Verrazzano and his more famous brother Giovanni traveled the length of the coast to the Strait of Magellan, something many scholars dispute, his palm references are even more unbelievable than those of Mercator and Ortelius.48 His 1529 map has several: “La Palmar” just below the estuary, “Palmara” at the southern extreme of the pampas, and “Palmar” near the end of the Patagonian mainland, at the entrance of the strait. Though palm cultivation is relatively easy at the northernmost of these points, and not impossible at the middle one, wild palms simply cannot grow in the coldest reaches of southern South America—a fact that calls all three labels into question. What Verrazzano probably saw, if anything, were stands of native willows (sauces criollos or Salix humboldtiana), which do grow in isolated pockets of inundated pampas along the Río de la Plata shoreline and down the Atlantic coast.49 Cabot is the more intriguing case. Not only did Ortelius list him, unlike Verrazzano, as a direct influence, but his 1544 map deploys the exact term “Palmares” in the north, below the same improbable mountain range that later appeared on Mercator. Cabot also surely saw many palm trees on his travels through the lower Paraná, including by a channel thirty miles above Buenos Aires, later called the Río de las Palmas. Still, he could not have encountered his “Palmares” in person. For all his riverine travels, Cabot never ventured south of the estuary. The names he placed there on his 1544 map came not from direct observation but from his cartographic work back in Europe.50 He had little to draw on: fewer than ten maps, all produced since the Ferdinand Magellan expedition of 1519–22, offered more than a handful of toponyms south of the Río Jordan, the original European name for the Río de la Plata.51 Cabot did not know every one of these productions, but he definitely knew the so-­called Turin-­Spanish Map of 1523, attributed to Giovanni Vespucci. That planisphere contains one crucial mistake: it labels not one but two South American rivers “Jordan,” adding a second well up the Brazilian coast. Four toponyms below that, still in palm-­ rich Brazil, we come upon “Arvoreda” (“Grove”) and then “Palmar.” When Cabot sat down to make his 1544 map, he compounded the error by moving this arboreal pair south of the true Jordan/de la Plata he knew from his travels. There the words reappear, still conjoined, as “Arvoledas” and—you guessed it—“Palmares.”52 170 · c h a p t e r

seven

map revolutions, palms persistence

That is how, cartographically speaking, tropical Brazilian palms first migrated to the temperate Argentine coast. Though environmentally out of place, they were plausible enough to flourish on small-­scale maps of the area for a generation, when the geographic influence of Ortelius and the Mercators was at its height. Ortelius himself preserved the “Palmares” toponym as he made new plates for later editions of Theatrum, and Petrus Plancius adopted it for one of his highly influential world maps in the 1590s.53 It also made cartographic cameos in Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589) and Theodor de Bry’s Grands Voyages (1592), two of the most famous travel books of the day. Beyond the world of printmaking, the unlikely place name appeared—twice—in the beautiful 1587 manuscript portolan atlas by Joan Martines.54 Meanwhile the prolific Jodocus Hondius, who purchased the plates from Mercator’s Atlas in 1604, proved to be a great “Palmares” agnostic, putting the label on some maps but not others—even in the same series or volume. Ultimately he and other leading seventeenth-­century Dutch mapmakers gave it up, though the pacesetters Willem and Joan Blaeu often placed a small stand of nondescript tree drawings right where Ortelius had once imagined palm groves. A brief, late echo of “Palmares” came in the 1670s, and then it vanished, never to be adopted by the survey-­minded French and English cartographers of the eighteenth century.55 Nonetheless, this was not the only time that European mapmakers, eager to characterize the New World by portraying its trees, would mistake Buenos Aires and parts south for palm-­covered places or otherwise struggle to fix the austral boundary of palm growth. Indeed, the problem lingered for centuries, beginning shortly after contact with the Americas and surviving numerous scientific and cartographic revolutions. The lavishly decorated Miller Atlas (1519), of Portuguese origin, nicely illustrates the palms conundrum and other common features of pictorial vegetation mapping during its sixteenth-­century heyday.56 While its map of mainland Europe and the Mediterranean is treeless, the rest of the world is adorned with regionally characteristic varieties, from pines in Scandinavia to oranges in Persia to many, many palms in Arabia, Ethiopia, north and central India, Malaya, and Siam. No palm trees appear in Brazil, which is covered instead by its namesake species—but unless my eyes deceive me, they do have a home in South America; one just has to travel below the Río de la Plata to find them! I would love to add that the kneeling native in their midst hails from the Querandí and so offers visual proof that his p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 171

people were indeed synonymous with “Palmares,” but that would be a stretch. It is nevertheless satisfying to find a cartographic suggestion of wild palm trees growing this far south well before Cabot’s toponymic gaffe, and it is fascinating to see how mapmakers were beginning to distinguish them visually from the date palms of the Middle East and the “nut” palms of India and Southeast Asia. Such species-­communicated geographic distinctions typified this era of high cartographic decoration, when tree pictures were still optional but were often drawn in multiple forms on the same map in order to convey regional particularities. Diogo Ribeiro made two notable planispheres in 1529, one with no trees at all, the other covered with many different varieties. On the latter, palms show up in North Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, Central Asia, and Indochina, but not in the New World.57 In fact, most of Ribeiro’s American trees are fantastical in appearance, like those on Cantino—a useful reminder that, with European knowledge of global plant geography still rudimentary, fidelity to nature was often overruled in the rush to convey exoticism by whatever vegetation available. To give another example, on his species-­rich 1550 world map Pierre Desceliers took the liberty of cartographically raising palms not only where they thrive—keenly adding Florida, the East Indies, and southeast Africa—but also in northeast China, opposite Japan and a label reading “Temperate Region.” Most likely he just misplaced “Zaiton” (today Quanzhou) and further confused it with “Zailon” (i.e., Ceylon, today Sri Lanka); but since much of the China known to Europeans did have palm trees, their depiction too far north was close enough to suspend judgment.58 When we consider both this graphic flexibility and the geographically improbable toponyms that Verrazzano, Cabot, Ortelius, and others placed in southern South America, it is hardly surprising that some early modern mapmakers pictured palm trees in the pampas—and even in deepest Patagonia, a thousand miles or more south of the Río de la Plata. The first materialized on the 1544 world map of Alonso de Santa Cruz, who also more reasonably put them in Brazil, Mexico, and many of the usual Old World sites.59 The pattern continued into the seventeenth century, most strikingly in the 1619 travelogue of the Dutch explorer Joris van Spilbergen, which contains a bird’s-­eye map of southern Patagonia topped by rolling hills of palms (fig. 7.2). According to one observer, these tropical trees must have been “fixed in the cartographer’s mind from hotter climes,” though other contemporary maps likely influenced the association, particularly Plancius’s 1594 world, with its allegorical border image of “Magallanica”—an

172 · c h a p t e r

seven

imagined Australian-­Antarctic continent below South America—as a palm landscape.60 Other examples of cartographic Patagonian palms from the era include the Southern Cone map in a 1646 history of Chile by Alonso de Ovalle (who as a native son really ought to have known better), the “Magellanica” in John Ogilby’s America (1671; fig. 7.3), Vicenzo Coronelli’s 1692 South America, and Pieter van der Aa’s 1706 Strait of Magellan. All use palm trees to adorn vignettes of daily life or otherwise hint that the region shared the tropical nature of other American realms.61 Beyond the palms drawn onto this cold New World frontier, many seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century cartographic treatments of the Americas, including those of the far south, had palm-­decorated cartouches and border illustrations. As cartographers learned more about distant continents and filled interiors with many place names and topographical features unknown to their sixteenth-­century predecessors, they often sacrificed or minimized pictorial trees (and animals) in favor of information that was more politically and commercially useful to the great powers back in Europe. Though palm vignettes survived after 1600 on maps of remote provinces, most memorably in the Brazilian plantation scenes of Joan Blaeu’s monumental Atlas Maior (1662–72), arboreal images flourished more readily at the edges of world and continental maps.62 Palms became plentiful on cartouches, where they symbolized foreign lands yielding to domination and the bountiful riches Europeans were bringing home as a result. They were especially common on maps of the Americas, including those of places such as New England or Patagonia, where the real trees could never prosper.63 Even the frequent positioning of palm-­bedecked cartouches along the lower border of South America maps implicitly suggested the tree’s presence far below the Río de la Plata. In addition to the van der Aa, Gerard Valk’s c. 1690 America (complete with camels!), Jacob Harrewyn’s 1692 America, and Giandomenico Coleti’s 1770 South America all give the impression of palms skirting the southernmost reaches of the hemisphere.64 Led by the Dutch, cartographers of the period also put the palm tree to work in various cosmological, allegorical, and ethnographic illustrations on the perimeters of their maps. These border pictures ranged from views of major cities to vignettes of distant peoples and customs to visions of the constellations in the night sky—and much in between, including personifications of the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) or the four major continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and America). Palms often appeared in these illustrations, in some cases identifying specific places around the world

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 173

Fig. 7.2 “Tijpus Freti Magellanici,” in Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum (Leiden: Nicolaum à Geelkercken, 1619). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

as exotic from a European perspective, and in others serving as ready symbols of the earth’s basic environmental and cultural divisions. On maps depicting the four elements, such as Henricus Hondius’s 1630 world, a “Terra” scene characteristically divides the globe into two zones: a primitive one with elephants, lions, or bulls positioned before several palms, and a pastoral one of sheep or birds framed by a row of deciduous trees and overseen by a woman holding an overflowing cornucopia (fig. 7.4).65 Mapmakers who allegorized the four continents also found palm trees helpful to indicate more specific differences between global regions. Though Plancius’s

174 · c h a p t e r

seven

take on “Magallanica” did not survive on other maps, many seventeenth-­ century cartographic allegories of America featured palm landscapes, suggesting a deep connection between the tree and the hemisphere. For instance, a corner image on the oft-­copied c. 1660 world map by Frederik de Wit identifies the Americas with a hammock lazily swaying between a palm and a hardwood.66 While world and continental maps of this era favored allegorical and decorative trees over those growing in the ground, the rise of large-­scale topographic cartography led by 1750 to new visualizations of woodlands, typically rendered by shading rather than figurative drawings. Tied to state concerns about the effective management of natural resources for eco-

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 175

Fig. 7.3 John Ogilby, “Tabula Magellanica, qua Tierrae del Fuego,” in America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London, 1671). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

nomic development, such maps dispensed with the traditional emphasis on characterizing distant regions through their flora. However, the emergence of thematic mapping in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought both living trees and some of that old focus back to small-­scale cartography. Thematic maps, which chart the geographic distribution of natural or social phenomena that cannot easily be seen with the naked eye, are well suited to picturing aspects of nature that occur over great distances or recur in multiple locations, including the native habitats of specific flora and fauna.67 German geographer E. A. W. Zimmermann produced the first world map of animal distribution in 1777; three decades later, his compatriot Carl Ritter launched modern vegetation mapping

176 · c h a p t e r

seven

Fig. 7.4 “Terra” allegory detail on bottom-­right border of Hendrik Hondius, Nova totius orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula (Amsterdam, 1630). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

by charting Europe’s wild and cultivated plants in Sechs Karten von Europa (1806). Danish botanist Joakim Frederik Schouw soon expanded this effort to the entire world, producing a twelve-­map Pflanzengeographischer Atlas (1823) that shows—by means of color and shading—the vast global ranges of numerous plant and tree families, among them beeches, pines, eucalyptus, magnolias, and—of course—palm trees.68 Given that it was made when field study of American palms was less than a generation old, Schouw’s atlas is remarkably accurate in marking their southeastern limit at the Río de la Plata. But strangely, even as palm science entered its golden age in subsequent decades, European mapmakers continued to botch that boundary in new ways. Although German naturalist Karl Friedrich Phillipp von Martius included richly executed hemispheric maps of palm geography in his monumental Historia Naturalis Palmarum (1850), the shading in South America is so subtle that the tree hardly seems to exist below northeastern Brazil.69 Perhaps seeking to avoid such confusion, pioneering thematic cartographer Heinrich Berghaus indicated the desired range with miniature palm icons on the global plant distribution map in his Physikalischer Atlas (multiple editions beginning 1838). That blunt instrument unambiguously stopped the natural range of palms at the Río de la Plata, but the erroneous placement of Buenos Aires north of the estuary reintroduced the traditional muddle (fig. 7.5). Meanwhile,

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 177

Fig. 7.5 Detail of South American plant distribution, from Heinrich Berghaus, “Umrisse der Pfanzergeographie,” Physikalischer Atlas, vol. 1 (Gotha, Germany: Justus Perthes, 1845–48). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

in his Berghaus-­derived Physical Atlas (1848, expanded 1856), Scottish geographer Alexander Keith Johnston found it easy to mark the limits of palm growth in the Northern Hemisphere, but below the equator he could only muster a “S. Polar Limit of Trees” near Antarctica. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, coinventor of evolution and author of the popular Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses (1853), carelessly extended the shading on his South American palm distribution map to the very spot where Cabot, Mercator, and Ortelius had once scrawled “Palmares.”70 178 · c h a p t e r

seven

conclusion

Alhough the men who opposed the planting of palm trees in the central plaza of Buenos Aires in 1883 probably knew next to nothing about the history of cartography, much less the history of representing palms and other trees on maps, those deep histories show that they had ample reason to be anxious that Europeans would mistakenly associate the temperate pampas with tropical plants and all that they implied. If centuries of world and South American maps are anything to go by, that confusion was both enduring and tenacious. The “Palmares” of yesteryear may have been long gone by the 1880s, but distant mapmakers continued to find new ways to see them where they wanted to in the Argentine landscape. Eventually, in the mid-­twentieth century, the precision of phytogeography and vegetation mapping advanced enough to determine that palm trees did thrive in the wild near Buenos Aires, if only along the nurturing waterways of the Paraná Delta to its north. But that degree of subtlety has never been a hallmark of mapping the entire globe or even whole continents—still less in ages past. In fact, while trees were often present in some guise on early world and hemispheric maps, they were rarely there because mapmakers were interested in their biology, behavior, or natural habitats. Nor were they present primarily to promote their commercial exploitation, though that was sometimes a complementary motive. Global cartographers were above all interested in what the appearance of trees—trees in general, but also particular species—might convey about the character of the region around them on the map. That is one reason why they rarely bothered to put them in the known world of Europe. Whether as legends, landmarks, or symbols of difference, cartographic trees flourished far from home. They were even allowed on small-­scale maps to wander a bit from their own homes. As the migratory “Palmares” and their palm successors in southern South America demonstrate, however, mapmakers long put trees where they believed them to exist and to represent something essential about the landscape. As far as they knew, palms were exotic, tropical, and surprisingly prevalent in the Americas. Who is to say that they did not belong, on maps at least, below the Río de la Plata?

p a l m s a n d o t h e r t r e e s o n m a p s  · 179

chap ter eight

beyond the map Landscape, History, and the Routes of Cortés

Raymond B. Craib

Historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-­à-­vis the present as it re-­presents the past. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

All landscapes are not created equal. Some places seem destined to signify only absence.1 “Nothing of interest here,” says the travel guide, effectively marking a nondestination.2 These are landscapes defined for the traveler by what they lack; they have “nothing ‘special’; nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story.”3 In contrast, other landscapes are defined by an abundance of presence. They acquire an imaginative and symbolic prominence that reaches far beyond their topographic profile, in no small measure because here the traveler can luxuriate in a condensed field of harvestable associations. The landscape of central Veracruz and Puebla, situated between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City, is one such place (fig. 8.1). It is a landscape created and recreated, in part through the imaginations, writings, mappings, and sketches of those who purported to follow—by default or by de-

180

sign—in the footsteps of Hernán Cortés. Cortés’s route is in one sense what gives this particular place a kind of coherence, despite its morphological, economic, human, and cultural diversity. More than just scenery, the landscape is a scene upon which one of history’s foundational dramas unfolded.4 This chapter is an exploration—open-­ended, episodic, impressionistic— of that landscape and route. But it is also, in a very specific way, about no route. Given the inconsistencies to be found in the conquistador narratives, it is unlikely that anyone has recovered precisely the route of Cortés. To be more blunt, such a recuperation is an impossibility. There was no single “route of Cortés,” self-­contained with a sharply defined beginning and end, there to be inscribed on a map.5 Why should we begin with the coast of Veracruz, and not Cuba or the Yucatan or Spain? For that matter, given that Cortés did not simply stay put, why end at Mexico City? Moreover, the path through the highlands of modern-­day Veracruz and Puebla created or followed by Cortés and his men was not a single one, a trajectory upon which they moved relentlessly in a unified forward motion. Like most explorers in unknown lands, they backtracked; some men went on ahead to scout the physical and human terrain; others digressed this way and that; destinations came and went. That Cortés and his men at one point were forced to flee the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, only to regroup for a new assault, means that we should at the minimum “consider the ‘route of Cortés’ as a movement in three stages (going—returning—going).”6 The fact is that the “route of Cortés” only came into being after the fact, on maps and in narratives. Until then, there was no discrete itinerary. It was a journey largely—but not entirely—without maps. Subsequent travelers would substitute the path for the journey, replacing the tenuous and contingent movements of Cortés with a fixed route. Offered as representations—a re-­presenting of Cortés’s passage—such iterative excursions were constitutive of the route itself, not only through the act of passage but through repeated references to history and geography: that is, through landscape. In a neat tautology, Cortés’s passages became inextricable from the environment in which they occurred, while at the same time that very environment gave his passages narrative, historical force. I approach the topic through the words, writings, and visions of four writers: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, the Scottish wife of Spain’s ambassador to Mexico in the 1830s; William H. Prescott, author of the famous History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843); the Mexican anthropologist Fernando Benítez; and the North American “wanderer” Harry Franck. This is obviously not a comprehensive list, nor do I wrestle with the entire oeuvre of

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 181

Fig. 8.1 The central corridor between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. From Vicente Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos (Barcelona: Espasa y Compañía, editores, 1887), I: 843. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

any particular one of these writers. I have chosen these four because they explicitly wrote works that took the route(s) of Cortés as a central premise. As such, they offer lenses through which to explore further the relationship between environment and history and between landscape and literature, and the making of place beyond the map. the curtain of time

Fanny Calderón de la Barca, approaching Havana in 1839, stood on the deck of the steamer Jason at dusk. Shortly after, she penned the following poignant advice to her friends and family: 182 · c h a p t e r

eight

It is well to read the History of Columbus at sea, but especially in these waters, where he wandered in suspense, high-­wrought expectation, and firm faith. . . . As the shades of evening close around, and the tropical sky glitters with the light of innumerable stars, imagination transports us back to that century which stands out in bold relief amidst other ages rolling by comparatively undistinguished, and we see as in a vision the Discovery of a World, standing on the deck of his caravel, as it bounded over the unknown and mysterious waste of waters, his vigilant eyes fixed on the west, like a Persian intently watching the rising of his god.7

Calderón de la Barca’s eyes were also fixed west. She was bound for Mexico City. Like most nineteenth-­century travelers from Europe and the eastern United States to Mexico—be they scientists, soldiers, or diplomats—she b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 183

would reach her destination by putting in to port at Veracruz, from where she would continue via carriage to Xalapa (or occasionally Orizaba), over the Sierra Madre Oriental, across the tableland of Puebla and on to Mexico City (plate 7). Once the port of Veracruz appeared on the western horizon, her journey’s plot line adapted to the approaching shoreline. In what would become a recurrent motif, she located the origins of Cortés’s route not in Cuba, from which he had set off after years of administrative service for the burgeoning empire, nor on the seas of the Gulf—she invoked Columbus while aboard ship, not Cortés—but on land, in Veracruz. In many respects, this should not surprise us. “Beaches are beginnings and endings,” as Greg Dening eloquently writes. “They are the frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt, but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange. . . .”8 Seas, in other words, are difficult places on which to ground acts of foundation.9 So in Calderón de la Barca’s narrative, as the Spanish captain yielded the wheel to a pilot from Cuba to guide the ship into port, the discoverer Columbus ceded to the conqueror Cortés. Unlike the green and fertile coast which gladdened the eyes of Columbus, the Spanish conqueror beheld a bleak and burning desert, whose cheerless aspect might well have deterred a feebler mind from going further in search of the paradise that existed behind.10

Aware of what awaited behind the horizon, Calderón de la Barca prepared herself for a self-­conscious retracing of Cortés’s route, a passage made all the more powerful given her marriage to the recently appointed Spanish ambassador to a Mexican nation less than two decades free of Spanish rule. Disembarking in the port of Veracruz, she would continue west to Xalapa, on to the high plateau of Puebla, past the volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl and into Mexico City. Along the way she found numerous opportunities for taking in the scenery, both natural and human, as well as time to reflect upon the more metaphysical aspects of her route: “Gradually, as in Dante’s Commedia, after leaving Purgatory, typified by Vera Cruz, we seemed to draw nearer to Paradise. The road is difficult, as the approach to Paradise ought to be, and the extraordinary jolts were sufficient to prevent us from being too much enraptured by the scenery, which increased in beauty as we advanced.”11 But increasingly it was the conquistador and not the poet who filled her vision. History and geography, a past and a 184 · c h a p t e r

eight

land, joined over the course of her journey. Her arrival on the outskirts of Mexico City evidences this combination: But at length we arrived at the heights looking down upon the great valley, celebrated in all parts of the world, with its framework of everlasting mountains, its snow-­crowned volcanoes, great lakes, and fertile plains, all surrounding the favoured city of Montezuma. . . . As we strained our eyes to look into the valley, it all appeared to me rather like a vision of the Past than the actual breathing Present. The curtain of Time seemed to roll back, and to discover to us the great panorama that burst upon the eye of Cortes [sic] when he first looked down upon the table-­land. . . .12

Calderón de la Barca, like so many prior and future travelers, situated her journey in the prominent passages of the past. Regardless of having never previously visited Veracruz, Mexico City, or Mexico itself, Calderón de la Barca was hardly traversing a terra incognita. Few places are truly terra incognita. Travelers invariably pro­ject their own “expectations, fears, desires, and meanings” upon the places they traverse, and thus no place is “transparently evident”; each place is, rather, a product of “a myriad of cultural filters.”13 But even then, this was more than just a new place. It was densely layered with historical associations and meanings, a space in which one of “Western” civilization’s supposedly most notable encounters had occurred. Indeed, for Calderón de la Barca, that history seemed impossible to avoid: “What pictures are called up by the recollection of the simple narrative of Cortes, and how forcibly they return to the mind now.”14 Just how forcibly they returned is suggested by the fact that in most other respects, Calderón de la Barca did not cast her journey as a “second conquest” of Mexico, as others of the time had done.15 Calderón de la Barca’s imaginative flights were precisely that: acts of imagination. In conjuring the conquest, travelers elided something that we should not: that the landscape and scenery they admired acquired its force as landscape in large part by being viewed through the lens of a specific historical process that had taken place in it. Despite the longue durée of geomorphology, the material reality encountered by Cortés and his men was not the landscape seen by those who succeeded them. This is not to suggest that they did not themselves arrive with an array of expectations and imaginings. They brought with them, among others, the visions of Marco Polo, the adventures described in Amadis of Gaul, and impressions from the Song of Roland.16 Cortés himself compared the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, with its floating gardens and traveled waterways, to Venice—a comparison b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 185

Calderón de la Barca herself made and another indication of her intense familiarity with Cortés’s own writings. Yet, in their own writings, as more than one commentator has noted, Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo are remarkably reticent about the landscape.17 It was the consequences, rather than the fact, of the Spaniard’s traversals that proved pivotal to the generation of a particular kind of imagined landscape, such that by the time Calderón de la Barca penned her letters, her vision could not help but be at least partially determined by an awareness of what had preceded her presence. As Paul Carter observes, in any such act “a cloud of historical consciousness must affect our vision [and we thus] attribut[e] to doubtful contours a permanent significance.”18 Those features of the land which figured only tangentially—which formed little more than “doubtful contours”—in the narratives of Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo took on a “permanent significance” for travelers that followed. The presence of Cortés and the narrative associated with him did not change the meaning of the landscape; it effectively called it into being. Through an array of historical associations and visual expectations—through “pictures . . . called up, . . . forcibly” entering the consciousness, as Calderón de la Barca wrote—travelers inherited a story and built a landscape. This is not to suggest that their journeys were somehow inauthentic, tainted, or false. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the experience was structured to an unusual degree by a set of associations, expectations, and imaginings. There is more than a little irony in this; in assuming, even obliquely, the position of protagonist in an anachronistic romance, travelers gutted those previous processes of their historicity. To even call Cortés’s journey a “conquest” was teleological, projecting onto a set of contingent passages the outcome which would only result from them. The open-­ended and uncertain movement of Cortés and his followers now became a fixed itinerary, imprinted on maps with the imprimatur of the cartographer-­historian, and subject to endless “ritual[s] of repetition.”19 It was precisely such patterns of repetition that generated metonymic landscapes. In a tautological relationship, the history of encounter and conquest became inextricable from the landscape upon which it occurred, while at the same time that very landscape acquired force as a stage upon which such a history could be situated, plotted, and dramatized. the restless march of destiny

William Hickling Prescott’s eyesight failed him early in life. He thus depended upon others to provide him with the sources and descriptions 186 · c h a p t e r

eight

needed for his History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), a romantic epic of Cortés’s march to Tenochtitlán and subsequent defeat of Moctezuma and one of the most popular and enduring historical and literary works in nineteenth-­century US letters. Prescott’s Spanish assistant, Pascual de Gayangos, provided him with numerous primary sources for his narrative, but to evoke a sense of place Prescott relied upon the eyes of two travelers to Mexico: Alexander von Humboldt and Fanny Calderón de la Barca. Prescott derived much from Humboldt’s writings and mappings. Convinced that Humboldt’s were “the only maps of New Spain which can lay claim to the credit even of tolerable accuracy,” Prescott included a version of Humboldt’s map of the central corridor between Veracruz and Mexico City in the first volume of his three-­volume history (fig. 8.2). That same map would be used with only minor modification by Vicente Riva Palacio in his 1880s collection México a través de los siglos (see fig. 8.1). Prescott’s familiarity with Humboldt is unsurprising, and in fact he corresponded with the baron. Humboldt occupied a position of prominence in nineteenth-­century travelers’ minds.20 His travels to and publications regarding Spain’s American colonies in the early nineteenth century captured the imaginations of the US and European reading public, including Prescott’s, and resonated with insurgent Creoles, eager to celebrate rather than denigrate American nature.21 The great Liberator himself, Simón Bolívar, assigned Humboldt a pivotal role in the process of aesthetic and political decolonization: Bolívar called him “a great man who with his eyes pulled America out of her ignorance and with his pen painted her as beautiful as her own nature.”22 In fact, Humboldt was hardly the first to celebrate American nature. As Ruedas de la Serna notes, Humboldt “was not the creator of the legend regarding the richness and beauty of America’s nature . . . but he did give that legend the necessary scientific authentication for which our romantics hoped.”23 Humboldt built his visions and his theories on the often unacknowledged work of Spanish and Creole scientists—José Celestino Mutis and Francisco José de Caldas, among others—who had long been studying and theorizing about the region.24 In the meantime, foreign travelers, already predisposed to see empty expanses and teeming tropics, found further confirmation in the Prussian naturalist. Humboldt’s secular trinity of volcano, plain, and jungle blessed (or cursed, as the case may be) the continent with particular representational force. This metonymic motif Humboldt built out of his years in South America, as well as a shorter stint in Mexico. As he journeyed to the port of Veracruz to depart for the United States, Humboldt observed how few regions of the “New Continent” could compare with central Veracruz, b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 187

Fig. 8.2 Iconic land. This map was included in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico. Note that, except for the language used to designate place names and features, it is identical to the map in fig. 8.1. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

where in a short distance the land could change from a snow-­capped zone to tropical lowlands and a coast of suffocating heat.25 It was the trope of nature’s infinite variety contained within such a finite space that in part explained his rapture. “In this marvelous country,” he wrote, “in the space of a few hours, the scientist can traverse the entire range of vegetation.”26 Despite the labors of Creole and Spanish scientists, it was through Humboldt’s writings that the central corridor became one of the most well known regions in all of Mexico. En route to Mexico City from Veracruz in 1822, Joel Poinsett, a supporter of North American expansionist and annexationist designs, noted the following after reading Humboldt’s work: “I am disposed to abandon my journal. He has seen more of the country, 188 · c h a p t e r

eight

and described it better, than any other can hope to do, and he has left almost nothing for the future traveller, but the narrative of his own adventures, and a record of his own feelings and impressions.”27 (A prescient lamentation on the anxiety of originality in travel and writing, as we shall see.) Regardless, across the stretch of the nineteenth century, it was through this very terrain that an increasing array of travelers entered into Mexico: English commercial explorers such as William Bullock, diplomats such as Poinsett and Brantz Mayer (secretary of the US legation), German scientists carrying on a now established Humboldtian tradition, European merchants, French and Italian colonists, invading armies from the United States and France, and of course the wife of a now long-­forgotten Spanish ambassador.28 Fanny Calderón de la Barca provided Prescott, with whom she sustained a lengthy correspondence in the early 1840s, with another set of eyes and b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 189

words.29 In her correspondence with him, as well as in the letters to her family that she forwarded to him and which were later published at his urging, Calderón de la Barca described in vivid detail the land through which she had passed en route to Mexico City. As Prescott informed her, Humboldt “impress[ed] on me the necessity of a journey to the land of the Aztecs. . . . But with such good friends as I have in Mexico, although it would add immeasurably to the pleasure, I have the less occasion for it, for Mexico comes to me.”30 Thus, while Prescott could get the geological picture from Humboldt, he needed something else from Calderón de la Barca: “an account of the appearance of things there,” as he put it in a letter to her in 1840. “And I wish you would tell me what kind of trees are found on the table land and in the valley. In describing the march of the Spaniards I am desirous to know what was the appearance of the country through which they passed, and although there may be some changes in the vegetable productions raised by men, the great features of nature and the forest scenery are no doubt much the same. . . . Is not the road bordered with flowers and the trees bent under a load of parasitical plants of every hue and odour? I should like to get a peep into this paradise.”31 To aid her with her task, Prescott sent Calderón de la Barca a daguerreotype.32 He was looking to do in his work what Cortés had not: to describe, as if in place and observing, the landscape through which he passed, and to do so with both a poetic and a scientific sensibility—to give detailed “life to the picture” and describe accurately “the scenes of operation” in his rendering of Cortés’s passage.33 Calderón de la Barca complied with a lengthy description of the topography and flora of the tierra caliente, the enchantments of Xalapa, and the views from the route taken—a “rich description” for which Prescott thanked her.34 Prescott was so taken with her letters that he encouraged her to publish them, and they appeared in print in 1842, one year after the publication of John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America (a copy of which Prescott sent Calderón de la Barca in gratitude) and one year prior to the publication of Prescott’s own History of the Conquest of Mexico.35 These three texts were responsible for a resurrection of Mexico and Central America as places of romantic fascination in the minds of North American and European readers in the 1840s.36 Of the three, Prescott’s history achieved the most spectacular success. Published in three volumes, History of the Conquest of Mexico became an immediate bestseller in the United States, with some four thousand copies sold in only the first month of its printing.37 Prescott’s work became a standard text for the nineteenth-­century traveler to Mexico, and a basic reference point and historical source of Mexican history for US and European readers.38 Various English luminar190 · c h a p t e r

eight

ies commented on the popularity of the text in England, including anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, novelist Charles Dickens, and geologist Charles Lyell.39 The book understandably encountered a more mixed reception in Mexico, where it appeared in translation in 1844. Intellectuals and statesmen such as José Fernando Ramírez and Lucas Alamán critiqued the book’s anti-­Catholicism, racial disdain, and negative representations of the Aztecs’ achievements.40 Even so, the book soon became a seminal text in the historiography of Mexico, not least of all due to Prescott’s extensive use of archival sources, praised by many of Mexico’s most eminent historians and geographers, including Ramírez, Joaquín García Icazbalceta, and Manuel Orozco y Berra.41 Meanwhile, Mexican cartographer Antonio García Cubas, for his Atlas geográfico e histórico de la República Mexicana, drew upon the imagery of Humboldt and Stephens for his cartouche, and upon the narrative of Prescott as a source for his work.42 Despite the ambivalent reception of his work, Prescott’s legacy in Mexican historiography is such that one Mexican historian recently commented that Mexico is “the country most ‘Prescott-­ized’ in Iberoamerica.”43 A decade that began with a literary reconquest of Mexico ended with US troops occupying Mexico City. Three years after its publication, on the cusp of the US Army’s invasion of Mexico through Veracruz, History of the Conquest of Mexico became standard issue for the naval fleet’s libraries, by order of the secretary of the Navy.44 Not surprisingly, invading US soldiers in 1846 and 1847 comfortably patterned their own passages on those of Cortés. Like Cortés and his men, they too had landed in Veracruz during Holy Week.45 In letters and journals, soldiers marveled at the landscape, sought out “antiquities,” and engaged in a second conquest of Mexico, pushing ever forward to the halls of Montezuma.46 As one soldier noted, “The entire route is full of interest, many points being the scenes of severe contests of Hernando Cortés.”47 Nor could the officer corps resist such associative longings. None other than General Winfield Scott sounded suspiciously like Fanny Calderón de la Barca when he caught sight of Mexico City: “Descending the long western slope, a magnificent basin, with, near its centre, the object of all our dreams and hopes—toils and dangers;—once the gorgeous seat of the Montezumas, now the capital of a great Republic—first broke upon our enchanted view. . . . Recovering from the sublime trance, probably, not a man in the column failed to say to his neighbor or himself: That splendid city soon shall be ours!”48 American journalist and soldier Corydon Donnavan, who spent seven months as a prisoner of war, assigned a certain historical repetition to the invasion, with the “Anglo-­ Saxon” marching toward manifest destiny by retracing the route “trod by b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 191

Fig. 8.3 March of restless destiny. Detail of John Disturnell’s 1847 map showing the road from Veracruz to Mexico City. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

the Spanish cavalier.”49 And John Disturnell’s well-­known Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico (1847), which would be appended to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo despite its numerous cartographic errors, included an inset of the central corridor between Veracruz and Mexico City so viewers could follow manifest destiny’s war path to the halls of Montezuma (fig. 8.3, and plate 9). Prescott’s text thus not only forged a set of “operating concepts for the interpretation of the Spanish conquest of Mexico,” as James Lockhart notes; it also generated an itinerary for contemporary and subsequent travelers, regardless of their designs.50 In particular, Prescott’s evocations of landscape helped establish the metonymic parameters within which to envision a place called Mexico. On the one hand, a world of abundance, of prodigious nature: a beautiful land . . . where the fruits and the flowers chase one another in unbroken circle through the year; where the gales are loaded with the perfumes till the sense aches at their sweetness; and the groves are filled with many-­colored birds, and insects whose enamelled wings glisten like

192 · c h a p t e r

eight

diamonds in the bright sun of the tropics. Such are the magical splendors of this paradise of the senses.51

And at the same time a land of sublime power, awe-­inspiring, as in this description of the view afforded from Xalapa: From this delicious spot, the Spaniards enjoyed one of the grandest prospects of nature. Before them was the steep ascent,—much steeper after this point,—which they were to climb. On the right rose the Sierra Madre, girt with its dark belt of pines, and its long lines of shadowy hills stretching away in the distance. To the south, in brilliant contrast, stood the mighty Orizaba, with his white robe of snow descending far down his sides, towering in solitary grandeur, the giant spectre of the Andes.52

These were descriptions based upon the observations or words not of the conquistadors themselves, but of travelers such as Calderón de la Barca, whose visions of the landscape were powerfully shaped by prevailing ideas and practices in landscape representation and aesthetics and, just as importantly, by the historical processes that had preceded them.53 In fact, the power of Prescott’s narrative derives not only from his detailed attention to landscape description, but from how that landscape itself interacted with the narrative. Landscape in Prescott’s narrative is not mere scenery within which to situate Cortés’s passage, nor does it appear as terrain to be rendered intelligible and legible to an invading force.54 Rather, the landscape is rendered in aesthetic and sensual terms, giving it a kind of moral force critical to the narrative itself.55 It stands in silent, vivid contrast with the violence of both the Aztecs and the Spanish; its beauty, at once picturesque and sublime, appeared in sharp relief when compared to visions of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and inquisitions, all of which filled Prescott’s repertoire. Here the landscape acquired shades of moral condemnation typical of the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty and avarice, from which neither Prescott’s nor Humboldt’s writings can be severed. It is the nature of the landscape itself—a landscape of progressive “terraces,” of steps, of ascendance—that helps push the history forward, with history and geography sharing the narrative burden.56 Scene and plot were mutually reinforcing.57 The three-­step progression from lowland to tableland to valley, the ascension paradigm of Dante employed by Calderón de la Barca, and the constant interplay between beautiful scenery and horrific scenes, the picturesque and the grotesque, all advance the narrative as much as Cortés’s own

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 193

movements. From Veracruz to Mexico City, here was a landscape of epic proportions, equal to the history it cultivated. ambivalent conquest

Throughout the nineteenth century, for foreign travelers and Mexican intellectuals alike, Cortés was a conundrum. Necessary yet reviled, he was a feudal figure and a Renaissance man, an alleged civilizing force with his own repugnant barbarities. Not so, perhaps, for Calderón de la Barca; for her Cortés was a “king-­loving, God-­fearing conqueror, his loyalty and religion so blended after the fashion of ancient Spain.” Indeed, when Prescott balked at the exorbitant cost of a portrait of Cortés, Calderón de la Barca assured him that “should you not want it, we shall take the Conqueror off your hands and hang him up in our Sala.”58 Others were less sanguine about the presence of Cortés. John Lloyd Stephens, for example, whose explorations and travels in southern Mexico and Central America captured the US and British reading public’s imagination in the early 1840s, worried about being associated with Cortés. Envisioning a reconquest of a supposedly untouched Indian city in the mountains of Chiapas, Stephens drafted a plan modeled on Cortés’s conquest of Mexico: to ally himself with neighboring native peoples in order to launch an assault.59 Yet the association with Cortés made him uncomfortable. “The invasion would be more justifiable than any made by the Spaniards,” he wrote, defensively, before opting to invoke the figure of Columbus in lieu of Cortés.60 Mexican intellectuals and officials felt such tension even more intensely. Prior to independence in 1821, the import of Cortés was self-­evident and the route from Veracruz to the seat of viceregal power offered a means to reconfirm the founding passage of Spanish colonial rule and reassert the legitimacy of Spanish power. 61 With liberation from Spanish rule came a liberation also from such controlled understandings of the past. The legacies of Cortés, the conquest, and colonialism were contested vigorously in official discourse and elite circles. Some, such as Lucas Alamán, traced Mexico’s origins to a defining moment of encounter and conquest. For others, that moment and the subsequent era of colonial rule signified oppression, regression, and despoliation. They sought the origins of the nation in the pre-­Hispanic past, in the legacies of the French Revolution of 1789, or in the early-­nineteenth-­century rebellions led by the parish priests Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos.62

194 · c h a p t e r

eight

Yet such a divide should not be overly drawn. The fact of the matter was that, as José María Luis Mora, one of Mexico’s most distinguished nineteenth-­century theorists, averred, “The name of Mexico is so intimately tied to the memory of Cortés that the latter can never perish so long as the country exists.”63 From mid-­century onward, Mexican intellectuals in the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, regardless of their ideological proclivities, sought to retrace Cortés’s route from Veracruz to Mexico City. Cortés’s contingent, tentative, and peripatetic movements— potential allegories for instability in independent Mexico—they sought to transform into a fixed itinerary of originary exactitude. Their efforts, however, were repeatedly frustrated, not least of all by their inability to pinpoint locations whose names had vanished from the map and the historical record—something that led some to argue that only the federal government should be permitted to change place names.64 As a result, hopes that the alleged route could be included on an SMGE national map were dashed. When the first Mexican-­produced and -­published national map, assembled by the cartographer Antonio García Cubas, appeared in 1858, readers and observers had to be content with iconic images taken from Humboldt and others of central Mexican landscapes. These were the topographical features with which much of the European and US reading public would have been familiar—features which had played a leading role in the topographical imaginary of what Mexico “looked like,” as conveyed in the works of Humboldt and Prescott which they carried with them.65 In some sense, no map was needed: the images themselves told the history. Mora was right; as long as Mexico existed, Cortés would not perish. But by the late nineteenth century—an era in Mexico known as the Porfiriato, derived from the thirty-­four-­year rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911)—his historical star appeared on the wane. The ascendance of Díaz and the consolidation of a liberal oligarchy saw the concomitant rise of a new historiography that refused to root the origins of the nation in the route of Cortés. A statue of Cuauhtémoc, an Aztec noble who led the resistance to the Spanish, soon rose on Mexico City’s central boulevard; writers collaborated on a multivolume history of Mexico that began long before the arrival of the Spanish; and García Cubas assembled his remarkable 1885 Atlas, which in fact did include a route of origins, though it was not that of Cortés. García Cubas mapped the Aztec migration route from the fabled region of Aztlán, in the far north (today’s US Southwest) to the central valley of Mexico (fig. 8.4).

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 195

Fig. 8.4 From Aztlán to the central valley: García Cubas, in his Carta Histórica y Arqueológica, highlighted in red the purported route taken by the ancestors of the Aztecs, from Aztlán (located somewhere off the map in the northwest quadrant) to the central valley of Mexico. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

nature ’ s motifs

Like any specter, Cortés refused to die. He remained an ephemeral but permanent presence in the Mexican landscape. In 1946, more than a century after the publication of Prescott’s romance of conquest, a national controversy erupted in Mexico over Cortés’s literal remains. In November of that year a skeleton believed to be that of the conquistador was dug up in the capital. Experts confirmed that it was indeed that of Cortés. Soon after, reports circulated that the location of the bones of Cuauhtémoc, the hero of Aztec resistance to Cortés, had been unearthed in the state of Guerrero. A commission of inquiry cast doubt upon the evidence, and a controversy— the “battle of the bones”—ensued.66 Out of the controversy, one incontro-

196 · c h a p t e r

eight

Fig. 8.5 The path to Mexico: title page from the first edition of Benítez’s La ruta de Hernán Cortés. Native iconography for a path (footprints) is layered over the red line of Cortés’s purported route. Photograph by the author.

vertible fact arose: In any consideration of Mexican national identity, Cortés refused to remain dead and buried. At some point in the aftermath of the controversy, the Mexican anthropologist and historian Fernando Benítez set out, like so many before and after him, to follow “the route of Cortés.” The result was a book of the same name, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, soon after translated into English as In the Footsteps of Cortés.67 In the map included on the title page of the first edition with Fondo de Cultura Económica, pre-­Colombian iconography in the form of footprints is patterned onto Cortés’s route, foreshadowing the analysis in the text which would stress the confrontation and patterning of the old worlds and the new, and the mestizo character of the nation itself (fig. 8.5). Apropos of the era in which it was written, the book was less a reconstruction of the conquest per se than a meditation on national identity. In the route of Cortés were to be found the roots of lo mexicano, of a Mexican national character. Explorations of lo mexicano were hardly new, but after the revolution they became central to nationalist efforts at unification.68 The resulting dis-

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 197

course of mestizaje—the mixing of Spanish and Indian lineages (little room was made for Afro-­Mexicans or Chinese settlers in this mestizophilia)— became in some sense the metanarrative of twentieth-­century postrevolutionary state building, combining as it did the particulars attributed to a Mexican experience and the universalism of a cosmic race in which Mexico led rather than followed.69 The mestizo—a new man neither European or Indian but a combination of the two—was thus the foundation for twentieth-­century Mexican nationhood. Institutions and ideas directly linked to indigenous peoples proliferated. As Alan Knight has noted, these were undertakings “from above”—generated by Mexican elites of the era, rather than by native peoples themselves.70 Postrevolutionary state builders sought to even the existing imbalance in social, political, and educational access that characterized the country. Moreover, postrevolutionary governments in the 1930s and the 1940s oversaw the creation of a number of institutions—the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología (1937), the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (1940), and the Escuela Nacional de Antropología (1942)—devoted to the indigenous past and present, while artifacts uncovered in excavations by Manuel Gamio at Teotihuacán, Monte Alban, and Tula soon found a home in the newly constructed national anthropological museum.71 But such undertakings were riddled with ambivalence. Even with the elevation of the Indian to a particular stature, mestizaje ultimately could be seen as a call for a form of de-­Indianization. Native peoples—for so long the antithesis to Europe’s thesis—were not to be understood on their own terms but rather were to become part of a new synthesis, neither European nor native. The idea was, as one prominent Mexican intellectual noted, “to dissolve the Indian element into the mestizo element.”72 The language of synthesis, elements, and mixing drew on forms of biological and racial thinking, and postrevolutionary thinkers frequently resorted, for example, to botanical metaphors to describe Mexican national character.73 Such debates unfolded on broader intellectual terrain which sought to understand the place of Mexico in a world characterized by industrialization, rapid urbanization, ideological polarization, the beginnings of large-­ scale outmigration to the United States under the auspices of the so-­called bracero program, changing theories regarding underdevelopment, and political change. Within such debates, nature figured prominently as a nationalist political trope. As José Luis Romero has acutely observed, writers and intellectuals across Latin America appropriated the discourse of “nature”— primordial and authentic—in part as a means to articulate a relation to a

198 · c h a p t e r

eight

changing political, cultural, and economic world. In instances nature provided a powerful structure within which to situate, and critique fiercely, the extractive economies and exploitative enterprises of the United States and Europe. Pablo Neruda, in his Canto general, published the same year as Benítez’s study and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, pondered on a continental scale nature in mystical, exuberant, liturgical language: Before the wig and the dress coat There were rivers, arterial rivers: There were cordilleras, jagged waves where The condor and the snow seemed immutable: There was the dampness and dense growth, the thunder As yet unnamed, the planetary pampas.

As much as it was a celebration of nature, Neruda’s imagery was intended to critique the exploitation inherent in unequal exchange, and to return nature to the realm of use.74 The prodigious and fecund nature celebrated in the early nineteenth century by the likes of Andrés Bello and Humboldt now stood as a mute witness to a history of stolen promise, of a political economy of sustained inequality. For Neruda the roots of dependency, of lands rent by plunder, are found in the arrival of Spain, England, France, and eventually the United States. Inverting the direction of the common nineteenth-­century colonial apologia, Cortés (he who “has no country”) is the narrative beginning not of progress but of its antithesis: And he advances driving in daggers, pounding the lowlands, the prancing cordilleras of perfumes, halting his army among orchids and coronations of pines, trampling the jasmine, up to the gates of Tlaxcala75

It is within such an intellectual and political context that Benítez wrote La ruta de Hernán Cortés. The book is a combination of historical narrative, contemporary reportage, and philosophical meditation on Mexican history, society, and identity. What is of interest here is the way in which Benítez thinks through the landscape in relation to the social themes of

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 199

Fig. 8.6 A mestizo landscape? Drawing by Alberto Beltrán, from Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 184–85. Photograph by the author.

his text. The first third of the text is primarily a narrative of the journeys of Columbus, the first wave of conquistador-­explorers, and the arrival of Cortés on the coast of what is now Veracruz. At that point Benítez interrupts the narrative of missed opportunities, mis-­encounters, and political intrigue to ponder at length the geography of the region between Veracruz and the high plateau upon which sits the valley of Mexico. For him this is a geography that resonates with the questions that captivated thinkers of the period. In and around Xalapa he sees a landscape of sharp contrasts between an unruly tropical lowland and an aristocratic plateau, a landscape “essentially baroque in the contradictions that shape it,” a landscape of “irreconcilable elements.”76 The image Alberto Beltrán creates for Benítez’s description of the environs around Xalapa is stark in its contrasts between the “aristocratic tableland” and the disorderly littoral, a veritable chasm dividing the one from the other (fig. 8.6). This is not, it is worth stressing, a mestizo landscape. Rather, it is one that, in Benítez’s words, reveals how 200 · c h a p t e r

eight

the “country’s life would always oscillate between New Spain and Mexico, because it participated of the natures of both in equal measure.”77 “Oscillate between” . . . “both in equal measure”—this is mestizaje not as synthesis but as persistent, shared difference. Perhaps it is not mestizaje at all. A fierce advocate for Mexico’s native peoples, Benítez was all too aware of the disjuncture between rhetoric and practice when it came to their place in Mexican society. As he would comment some years later, “We adorn ourselves with their jewels, excavate the earth to turn up their ancient artifacts, but we stubbornly ignore their rags, protect the men who steal their lands, fail to punish their exploiters. . . . We have one attitude toward the dead Indians, a very different one toward the living. The dead Indians excite our admiration, stimulate a stream of tourists; the living Indians make us blush with shame, give a hollow ring to our fine words of progress and democracy.”78 Mestizaje was not an existing synthesis but an unfulfilled potentiality, an ongoing aspiration, a Penelope’s Web (as he would title the book’s final chapter). In one of the final paragraphs, Benítez writes: “The symbolic web will be completed the day on which these opposed worlds, at last, became only one.”79 For Benítez, at least, that day appeared not to have come. By the time Benítez wrote, the trajectory of arrival and departure in Mexico had shifted. The completion in 1885 of the railway line connecting the northern border town of El Paso to Mexico City, the violence of the revolution of 1910–20, highways and automobiles, the rise of agribusiness in the US West and Southwest, and the flows of emigration to the United States (with the repeated forced repatriations during times of recession) meant that, in terms of sheer numbers, the north had long since superseded the gulf coast as the space of entry and exit. The longitudinal axis of the Inter-­American highway had replaced the latitudinal route of the central corridor. Yet still, the nation could be condensed down into the space between gulf and capital—between the port of Veracruz that “is and will always be the mirror of the nation,” and the figures of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, “without which one could not even imagine the Mexican landscape” (fig. 8.7).80 If that particular landscape was a visual aperture through which to ground themes of difference, autonomy, and authenticity in the face of modernity’s simultaneous dislocating flux and homogenizing impulse, it was also continuing fertile ground for the production and reproduction of Mexican national identity.81 But for that very reason, it was also a generative space for questioning and critiquing hegemonic discourses of the postrevolutionary state. As Benítez himself would note: “In Mexico, like nowhere else, Nature knows how to give power to her motifs.”82 b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 201

Fig. 8.7 Nationalist currency: a bill issued by the revolutionary government of Venustiana Carranza in 1915, with the volcanos of the central valley as the centerpiece. Photograph by the author.

ghost writers and the anxiety of banality

Cortés’s trajectory has become tradition. It is now on the map. A quick search through the Internet reveals an endless array of “route of Cortés” possibilities: academic excursions, bicycle and motorcycle tours, bus and train trips, among others. A few years ago as I sat in a dentist’s waiting room, I picked up a December issue of Men’s Journal. Included, along with a piece on following the trail of Lewis and Clark, was a list of the top historical routes readers of the journal would like to retrace. Cortés’s route from the coast to what would become Mexico City was right up there near the top. The route is as much a product of Prescott as it is of Cortés. Matthew Bruccoli, in his Reconquest of Mexico, admits to being inspired by and relying upon Prescott’s text for his journey. The historian Lesley Byrd Simpson recalled that the writer Hart Crane wished to write a poem about the conquest, deriving nearly the entirety of his ideas from Prescott’s text.83 Indeed, the route has become so heaped with meaning, so reified, that it is hard to discern what is being followed: Cortés? The US military of Scott? Prescott? Such confluences and confusions speak to the accretive reality of writing.84 They also speak to the persistence of the colonial. Unlike their nineteenth-­century predecessors, postrevolutionary retracings were largely by choice, in that by the 1930s the port of Veracruz had slowly been replaced by other ports of entry into Mexico, and the 202 · c h a p t e r

eight

sea had slowly ceded ground to the air. When travelers followed in the footsteps of Cortés now, they did so purposefully. So Archibald MacLeish, struggling in his efforts to write Conquistador—an account of the conquest from the perspective of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, for which he would win the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1932—hit the trail in 1929 in order to see the countryside about which he was writing, for both inspiration and literary realism. As he remarks in his prefatory note, “My account of the topography of the march from the sea-­coast to the Valley of Mexico is based upon my own experience of the route and the country by foot and mule-­back in the winter of 1929 and differs from that of the historians.”85 For others, following Cortés’s route was not a means to an end but an end in itself. “We had taken the way vouched for by Gómora, Orozco y Berra, and Maudslay’s map,” wrote Harry Franck in 1932, traveling with his wife Rachel. “Take your choice. Between us we had certainly traveled at least very close to the trail of Cortez. He came, he saw, and he certainly conquered, so who cares especially just how he came? After all, it was the joy of trying to follow the trail, not the proving of anything in particular, that made our Mexican journey a thing to look back upon in our old age.”86 Yet the pervasive tone of sacrifice, adventure, and fealty to the route throughout the book belies such dismissive statements. Franck “impersonated” Diego de Ordaz on his climb of Popocatépetl, even eschewing ropes, alpenstocks, and shovels—the minimum of necessities, according to the Mexico City Explorer’s Club.87 At great lengths, he justifies the taking of buses at certain points, of riding horseback rather than walking, and other such apparent corruptions. From the outset in the port of Veracruz, contemporary technology threatened to overwhelm his historical imaginings, his reveries of reconquest, and his efforts to move forward to the past: “A queer form of exploring, following a railroad track! But this was the way the conquerors must have come, and incongruity could not be allowed to interfere with our ‘mission.’”88 Or, outside of Amecameca, approaching the valley of Mexico: “We were still trailing Cortez, and while it would have been much more sensible of him to have made his way to Tenochtitlán by the modern highway, we had to follow wherever he led.”89 A sense of anxiety pervades Franck’s narrative: the route had to be traced, regardless of the occasional incongruities or inconveniences.90 This is an anxiety that influenced not only the content of the narrative but its structuring principle: to follow in the footsteps of Cortés. It is an anxiety quite unlike the ones found in the writings of nineteenth-­century travelers, or Mexican intellectuals such as Benítez. If foreign travelers previously held an ambivalent attitude toward Cortés, a kind of anxiety of association b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 203

like that experienced by Stephens, here what one finds is an anxiety over a lack of association. The impression is of a route invoked in order to curtail the feeling that, without such underpinnings, one’s passage would be little more than a mere passing by: a movement without meaning, and certainly not fodder for a publisher. Rather than in the metaleptic cycles examined by D. Graham Burnett (in which an explorer such as Schomburgk sought to ground his passages and his own authority in the footsteps of Ralegh while at the same time surpassing them), or the ones examined by Mary Louise Pratt (in which Bolívar follows in the footsteps of Humboldt in his ascent of Chimborazo, only to then leave them behind), in these instances travelers attempted to meaningfully ground what would otherwise be their all too common passages.91 Their anxiety had little to do with needing to surpass the travelers in whose wake they followed. It was not, then, an anxiety of influence, but an anxiety of no influence, of being unmoored and adrift from any precedent, haunted by the very lack of a ghostly presence such as Cortés’s. It was an anxiety of banality. Unlike Carpentier’s narrator in Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps), who is “burdened by the memory of the repeated attempts to discover or found the newness of the New World,” travelers are relieved by such attempts inasmuch as they give their own passages meaning beyond the anecdotal.92 With a dramatic precedent set, their journeys could be more than the sum of their parts. Cortés provides a way into Mexico for such travelers. His presence permeates the journey, dutifully coded as a retracing, a reconquest, an imperial romance redux. Cortés and Prescott become, in effect, kinds of ghostwriters.93 To be fair, it is all too easy to see such travelers as yet another set of imperial eyes, as colonizing agents engaging in imperial activities by sheer virtue of traveling and looking. There is a sloppy ease with which such travels can be cast away. Charles Nichols, a writer who, in a study of Ralegh’s quest for El Dorado, traveled Ralegh’s purported route, writes compellingly on precisely this point and is worth quoting at length: I am certainly not comparing my own journey to Ralegh’s. The scale of difficulty, of expectation, of the unknown, is quite different. I see it more as an ambulant gloss on that earlier journey, made in the belief that history should be learned by foot—or in this case, mostly, by boat—as much as by studying books and documents. One sees a landscape in parts unchanged from what those early travellers saw; one meets people who pass their days and decades in it; one hears certain stories or indeed legends

204 · c h a p t e r

eight

Plate 1 Ayer Map of Teotihuacan, 1560, ink on amate. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 2 Detail, Nicolas de Fer, L’Amerique (Paris, 1704). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 3 “Radeau de la Rivière de Guayaquil,” in Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland, première partie, Relation historique. Atlas Pittorsque (Paris, 1810), plate 63. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 4 Detail showing “palm” tree on Vercelli mappamundi, c. 1200. Spectral image courtesy of the Lazarus Project and the Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare, Vercelli, Italy.

Plate 5 Spain and North Africa detail from Petrus Roselli’s 1456 chart of the Mediterranean world, showing green Sierra Nevada and other characteristic portolan illustrations. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 6 Details of North Africa and Brazil from Sebastião Lopes (attributed), portolan atlas, c. 1565. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 7 High-­wrought expectation. The view from the Gulf of Mexico, approaching the port of Veracruz and looking west with the peak of Orizaba to the left and the Cofre de Perote to the right. Detail from Johann Rugendas, Vista de Veracruz desde el mar (1831), reproduced in Daniel Sánchez Scott, Veracruz y sus viajeros, 55.

Plate 8 Wayne Healy and David Botello, Columbus Lands On Las Indias. ©1992 by East Los Streetscapers, Wayne Healy and David Botello, 96 × 121 in., acrylic on canvas.

Plate 9 John Disturnell, Map of the Republic of Mexico (1847). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Plate 10 Department of the Interior map series, areas in red designated by the secretary of the interior as “nonirrigable,” 1916. Map created by author, georeferenced and clipped using ArcGIS 10.2, and edited by Rhonda Houser. Projection: NAD 1927 Contiguous USA Albers. ESRI Online Dataset, © 2010 ESRI, Sources: ESRI, USGS, NOAA. Maps used with permission of the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee and ESRI.

Plate 11 General Land Office map, United States Including Territories and Insular Possessions, Showing Extent of Public Surveys, Indian, Military, and Forest Reservations, Railroads, Canals, National Parks and Other Details, 1913. David Rumsey Collection.

Plate 12 Filibert Roth and Bernhard E. Fernow, Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin. Washington: US Department of Agriculture, 1897. National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD.

Plate 13 “White River Plateau Timber Reserve, Showing Distribution of Commercial Timber, Burned Areas, etc.” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report, part 5, plate 158 Washington: US Geological Survey, 1898. University of Wyoming.

Plate 14a “Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Wooded, Burned, and Restocked Areas, and the Density of Merchantable Timber, in Feet B.M.” US Geological Survey Nineteenth Annual Report, part 5, plate 74. Washington: US Geological Survey, 1897. University of Wyoming.

Plate 14b “Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Distribution of Timber Species.” US Geological Survey Nineteenth Annual Report, part 5, plate 75. Washington: US Geological Survey, 1897. University of Wyoming.

Plate 15a John G. Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Density of Forests,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report, part 5, plate 8. Plate 15b John G, Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Range of Principal Timber Trees, Irrespective of Burned Areas,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report, part 5, plate 9. Plate 15c John G. Jack, “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Burned Areas,” US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report, part 5, plate 10.

Plate 16 Bernhard E. Fernow, “Forest Distribution in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Sheet,” in Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation Canada, 1912). Image courtesy of the MacLean Collection.

that are different from the evidence of the documents: this is evidence you have felt on the surface of your skin.94

Nichols’s emphasis on some kind of experience—the “ambulatory gloss”— even if centuries removed, is an important one and well worth stressing, particularly in an effort at historical reconstruction. Clearly the notion of experience itself is not immune to critique, and Nichols’s own experience was not somehow unmediated, a fact he well understood.95 And of course the landscapes he encountered were themselves in some ways the result of specific expectations and dynamic human interventions. But that hardly means one should prefer a potential traveler to instead stay home. There is little doubt that Nichols’s historical interpretation is all the better for the pains he took to immerse himself in the environs through which Ralegh passed. But in other cases—those that seem less epistemologically self-­ reflective—it is hard to avoid a sense of unease about such reinscriptions, particularly when they are framed in the language of conquest or possession. As John Noyes has noted, there is clearly a relationship between “inscriptive activities and descriptive writings.”96 One traveler, having attempted to follow the route of Cortés and having published a book entitled Reconquest of Mexico, noted the following upon his arrival in Mexico City: “I take nothing away from Mexico City when I say that my Mexico—my Tenochtitlán—is in the sierra, in the dusty villages, in the lush and fragrant jungle.”97 So easily does a kind of breezy possessive insinuate itself. Mexico: a place of nature, not cities, still possessed by and through Cortés.98 This is not a denunciation per se of “following” the alleged routes of Cortés. These authors are not conquerors of Mexico, nor are they responsible for the “conquest” of Mexico. But there is value in asking what it might mean to attempt to map and retrace an only retrospective route in the context of lingering yet persistent imperial realities. Is it innocuous to wrap such a cloak of projections—with a predictable fetishization of tropics and rural idylls—around Mexico? Is there not something awry in the deployment of the possessive through, of all things, the trope of Cortés? One would be hard-­pressed to find a better narrative space in which the romance of exploration is wedded to the structures of imperial expansion than on the alleged route of Cortés. The anthropologist Michel Rolph-­Trouillot captures the stakes in typically succinct prose: “Historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-­à-­vis the present as it re-­presents the

b e y o n d t h e m a p  · 205

past.”99 “The Conquest” was never a singular event, and to argue that “it” is somehow over misses the point, something made eloquently clear in Wayne Healy’s remarkable painting Columbus Lands on Las Indias (plate 8). The seemingly anachronistic elements—gunships, machine guns, and, importantly, a (laminated?) fold-­out map—emphasize precisely that processes of conquest are ongoing. Are there not moral as well as historical incongruities to be considered in the retracing of a route charged with such historical, political, and moral valences? To put it another way: Clearly, as Robert Pogue Harrison eloquently argues in a different context, none of us is self-­authored. We all “follow in the footsteps of the dead.”100 But to follow in the footsteps of Cortés—what then is being authored? In 1968 Mexico prepared to host the Olympics. It was the first Latin American nation granted that onerous honor. Athletes in search of gold flew into Mexico City. The Olympic torch did not. In a year in which the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring, French wildcat strikes, student protests, and the Rodney Riots drew attention yet again to the immediate and attenuated legacies of colonial rule, Olympic torchbearers would make their way across the Atlantic Ocean, following the route of Columbus to San Salvador and on to the port of Veracruz, where they would run the “route of Cortés.”101 The runners would complete that route in a Mexico City reeling from a state-­sanctioned massacre of demonstrators protesting in the Plaza of Three Cultures, so named for the coincident presence of a pre-­ Colombian pyramid, a colonial church, and a modern skyscraper.

206 · c h a p t e r

eight

chap ter nine

nature knows no bounds Mapping Challenges at the US-­Mexico Border

Mary E. Mendoza

On June 30, 1893, Captain Frank C. Jones of the Texas Rangers, backed by five other men, invaded Mexican territory in pursuit of Jesus Holguin. An alleged criminal, Holguin had crossed the US-­Mexico border to take refuge at his brother’s home in the small town of Tres Jacales, Chihuahua. As Jones struggled to capture Holguin, a fight broke out. In the event, Holguin and his son, who had been in the Tres Jacales house, were wounded. Captain Jones lost his life. Just over one month later, M. Romero of the Mexican legation wrote to W. Q. Gresham in the US Department of State to issue “a formal remonstrance both concerning the invasion of Mexican territory, and the pursuit which took place on it.”1 After months of investigation, Gresham replied to Romero that the so-­ called invasion had occurred on historically contested ground, noting, “The boundary line between the United States and Mexico has never been so settled as to be known except by citizens of long residence on the border.”2 Captain Jones, it turned out, had just arrived in the area and knew little about the complex history of the border there. Moreover, during the chaotic chase, Jones had not seen any markers indicating that he had crossed the US-­Mexico divide. 209

On the ground, the line that separated the United States from Mexico was not visible to Jones in the way that it was clearly delineated on maps. In fact, as Gresham reported it, the US investigation revealed that the road on which Jones chased Holguin crossed and recrossed the border several times. Gresham reported, “At one time [the road] is 50 yards within Mexican territory and again as many yards within Texas territory.”3 Given that the singular road crisscrossed the boundary line, Gresham reasoned that the “officers of the law naturally followed in pursuit,” arguing that, if the road simply went on unmarked, it was perfectly normal for the officers to follow Holguin. How were they supposed to know that they had crossed an international divide and thus lost all jurisdiction over Holguin? The 1893 chase revealed the difficulties of enforcing unnatural, human-­ drawn political boundaries. Along the western land boundary, unmarked except for a few distant obelisks, the US-­Mexico border was hardly discernible in many places. However, in the area where Captain Jones allegedly invaded Mexican territory, the river itself was supposed to be an important and visible geographic feature. So how did Jones not know that he was crisscrossing the border in pursuit of Holguin if the river itself supposedly marked the borderline? The simple and complex answer is that in the years leading up to the incident, the border moved, complicating notions of national and territorial sovereignty between Mexico and the United States. From 1852 and well into the twentieth century, floods along the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo) shifted the course of the river, which, according to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, marked the dividing line between the two nations. Thus, when the river’s course shifted, the location of the border itself became questionable: Did it move along with the river, as outlined in the treaty, or did it retain its original location? Confusion over the location of the US-­Mexico border was not unique to this moment. Disputes over the location of the boundary line dated back to 1846, when Texans and Mexicans argued about whether the Nueces River in South Texas or the Rio Grande marked the international divide. Disagreement over this question ultimately contributed to the start of the US-­ Mexican War, during which US troops defeated the Mexican army, seized nearly one half of Mexico’s territory, and moved the length of the entire borderline. The newly drawn boundary would “commence in the Gulf of Mexico” opposite the Rio Grande and “from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes New Mexico; 210 · c h a p t e r

nine

thence, westwardly, along the whole southern boundary of New Mexico, until it intersects with the first branch of the Gila; . . . thence down the middle of said branch and of said river, until it empties into the Rio Colorado; thence across the Rio Colorado, following the division line between Upper and Lower California, to the Pacific Ocean.” 4

Seemingly specific, these parameters lacked clarity. In the following decades, quarrels over the exact location of the border consumed significant resources of both the US and Mexican governments. Tracing the history of boundary marking and enforcement along the US-­Mexico border from 1848 well into the twentieth century reveals that the lines that represented the border on maps rarely replicated the reality on the ground. Both human and nonhuman nature obfuscated efforts to mark space within the physical landscape. At the US-­Mexico border, lines on maps only provided illusions of mastery and control over environments. Neatly binding representations of socially constructed space such as national territory, states, or towns, boundary lines drawn on paper appeared solid, definitive, and absolute. On the ground, however, the humans tasked with enforcing the lines on maps faced numerous obstacles. Cartographic borders were completely invisible along the international divide. If natural features that marked those borders moved, the boundary line itself migrated, defying all assertions of human control over the landscape. Building upon the work of other scholars, this chapter exposes the failure of the state to control dynamic nature. In working to make the border legible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—in effect, to engage in what James Scott calls “statecraft”—the US and Mexican governments actually laid bare the impossibility of ever truly bounding space.5 Other scholars have written about the challenges of delineating the US-­ Mexico border, but few have explored the ways in which fixing the borderline pitted dynamic socioecological systems against the inertia of cartography in this period.6 Following the ratification of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the new US-­Mexico border was fairly elusive. As a condition of the treaty, the United States and Mexico outlined that “the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and surveyor, who . . . shall meet at the Port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte.”7 Once marked, the boundary was to be “rigorously respected by each of the two republics,” but the marking would prove difficult, particularly along the western land boundary. With nothing but a map to guide them, boundary commissioners John n a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 211

Russell Bartlett of the United States and Pedro García Conde of Mexico, along with their respective surveyors Andrew Belcher (A. B.) Gray and José Salazar Ylarregui, confronted the difficulties of finding a line that, until that moment, had only existed on the paper they carried. In the treaty, the two governments agreed that the guiding map for the International Boundary Commission (IBC) would be the “Map of the United Mexican States, as organized and defined by various acts of the Congress of said republic, and constructed according to the best authorities” (plate 9). The map, made by John Disturnell in New York in 1847, bore “the signatures and seals” of all of the dignitaries involved in the agreement. The treaty identified the city of “Paso” as a starting point for the western boundary. It also listed other landmarks that the commissioners should use as they marked the line, stipulating that “in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the ground the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that said limit shall consist of a straight line drawn from the middle of the Rio Gila, where it united with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific Ocean . . . .”8 For the most westward points, the dignitaries agreed to follow a 1782 map by the Spaniard Don Juan Pantoja, published in Madrid in 1802. Using these supposedly authoritative maps, the Boundary Commission set out to “designate the boundary line with due precision.”9 But, as other scholars have noted, the Disturnell and Pantoja maps did not pro­ject the border landscape as accurately as those who signed the treaty initially believed. The Pantoja map had outdated information. Dated 1802, it did not include lines of latitude or longitude. Instead, it included topographical features as projected by Pantoja’s inaccurate interpretation of the landscape, and some of those features had changed in the years since 1802.10 The 1847 version of the Disturnell map also proved problematic. Based on information in previous maps dating back to the early nineteenth century, the Disturnell map, too, had not been updated to reflect the realities on the ground. Disturnell, as Paula Rebert points out, “was not a cartographer himself, but rather a businessman who published directories, guidebooks, and maps,” and he had only published this map because of heightened interest in the region during the US-­Mexican War.11 Once the boundary crew was on the ground, A. B. Gray observed that the town of Paso was actually 34 miles south and 130 miles west of Disturnell’s projection, further muddling efforts to delineate national territory on the actual land. Thus, from the beginning, as the historian Rachel St. John has argued, “rather than establishing the border, [the commissioners] seemed to be searching for it.”12 212 · c h a p t e r

nine

These unanticipated, often contentious origins precipitated a decade-­ long struggle to find and then agree upon the placement of the border. A series of commissioners on both sides argued passionately about its precise location. And as they fought each other, they also fought to survive the harsh desert landscape. Over the course of the initial survey, commissioners died or became ill from exposure.13 Mules died from dehydration, horses fell ill from exhaustion, and Commissioner Gacía Conde died after an entire group spent two weeks traveling through particularly rough terrain.14 As a result, the makeup of the commission changed regularly, undermining the parties’ ability to compromise. Describing the difficulties of boundary marking in his 1857 report, the American Commissioner William H. Emory wrote, “The controversies between the members were so acrimonious, as to make the task both complicated and unpleasant.”15 With these intense disagreements, severe weather, harsh terrain, and the inaccuracies of the Disturnell map, the undertaking was taxing, to say the least. In his report on the work of the commission, Emory expressed intense frustration with the maps from which he worked. He argued that the commission had all but gone on a wild goose chase, since the map had been so unacceptably wrong in its representation of space. The grueling task of marking the line with his colleagues left Emory increasingly critical of Disturnell and those who had preceded the mapmaker. Emory resented the accolades famous printers and geographers like Disturnell or Alexander von Humboldt received because he felt he spent his much of his life correcting their mistakes. For Emory, those who performed the technical work on the ground mattered the most. Emory accused previous mapmakers of practicing “hypothetical geography,” and on more than one occasion attributed the gross errors of cartographers to Humboldt, who, he lamented, “from a few excursions into Mexico, attempted to figure out the whole North American continent.” According to Emory, it was Humboldt’s “party of persons travelling on muleback, at the top of their speed,” that generated an appalling misunderstanding of the landscape and the drawing of a line in the “most impracticable of all the routes.” It was from Humboldt’s excursions and “unsubstantial information,” he argued, that “maps of the whole continent have been produced and engraved in the highest style of art, and sent forth to receive the patronage of Congress, and the applause of geographical societies at home and abroad, while the substantial contributors to accurate geography have seen their works pilfered and distorted, and themselves overlooked and forgotten.”16 Emory went on to complain that the “system of borrowing”—of copyn a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 213

ing and reprinting new maps based on outdated information—had created many of the commission’s problems. It was that system, he argued, that “tended very much to obscure and distort the history of explorations and surveys of the western portion on the American continent.”17 He wrote, “The inaccuracy of the map upon which the treaty was made, and which thereby became a part of the treaty, is notorious . . . the boundaries have never been defined on the land and are unknown.”18 In other words, clumsily documented excursions on the North American continent had led to a series of poorly drawn maps by mapmakers who simply borrowed information from other maps without confirming its accuracy. These maps, including the 1847 Disturnell map attached to the treaty, made the process of delineation frustrating and difficult for the commission. Since the maps were faulty, every mile of the boundary line required discussion and often prompted disagreement between the US and Mexican factions of the binational commission. One of the biggest disagreements involved the placement of the town of Paso in relation to the Rio Grande on the Disturnell map. As noted above, not only had Disturnell misplaced the city of Paso on his map, but the commissioners discovered that the Rio Grande was two degrees west of its cartographic location. Initially at least, the first US and Mexican commissioners to assess the situation, Bartlett and Conde, reached a reasonable compromise in which they agreed to place the line north of the town of Paso. In 1855, however, A. B. Gray wrote an extensive report criticizing both his US and his Mexican colleagues for their decisions. Gray believed that using Paso as a starting point for the line was critical because the treaty mentioned the city specifically. According to him, Bartlett and Conde had used “an imaginary position of the parallels of latitude” to find a starting point, one that he argued would result in the acquisition of “six thousand square miles of territory” for Mexico.19 In an extensive and passionate report, Gray accused Bartlett and Conde of using the “Map of Chihuahua”— a map “never sanctioned by the central authority,” which was “entirely inconsistent.”20 Thus, according to him, the line should be moved farther south in order to give the United States more territory and to more accurately draw the western land boundary along the historic southern boundary of the New Mexican Territory, using Paso as an important point of reference. In the end, the line ended up somewhere between the A. B. Gray line and the Bartlett-Conde line. But the intense, years-­long disagreement between the commissioners about the border’s location with respect to the Rio Gande and Paso reveals stark differences between the locations drawn 214 · c h a p t e r

nine

on the Disturnell map and the realities on the ground. These differences not only affected international relations and national policy, but also exposed the thorny relationships that can exist between maps and the spaces they represent. The disagreement over the western land boundary was only one of many that occurred between 1849 and 1857, when the initial boundary survey took place. Once the International Boundary Commission established the line on the ground, however, it was not entirely certain that it would remain fixed. Completed in 1857, that initial survey officially delineated a new shared boundary between the United States with Mexico. To mark the line, the commission built and placed fifty-­four monuments along the 1,951-­mile international divide. The commissioners scattered most of the original monuments along the western land boundary because the natural, visible feature of the Rio Grande appeared to clearly mark the remaining border between Texas and Mexico.21 Within a few decades, however, the population on both sides of the border grew exponentially, leading to several civil disputes about the line’s location. From 1892 to 1894, the Boundary Commission sent new surveyors to the border once again to reassess the line and clearly mark it with 258 monuments both along the western boundary and along the Rio Grande.22 Officials from both sides of the border hoped that a more clearly marked line would render the border as legible to those who lived in the region as it appeared on the officials’ maps.23 In the same decades between both boundary surveys, US officials became increasingly concerned about who and what crossed the border. As the borderlands population ballooned, investors from across the United States poured capital into regional mining and railroad ventures, pushing the US and Mexican governments into “new regulatory arenas.”24 In the 1850s, both nations began to enforce tariffs, immediately creating symbiotic systems: an official one of inspections, and an illegal and often more powerful one of smuggling guns, drugs, and other goods across the border.25 In the 1860s, concerns about cattle ticks spreading disease across the northern grazing lands in the United States led to an all-­out eradication campaign that ultimately prohibited cattle from crossing the border until quarantined.26 A “wave of anti-­Chinese politics” in the 1870s led to the 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first in a series of immigration laws culminating in the National Origins Act of 1924. The statutes initially prohibited the entrance of Chinese and later Japanese migrants into the United States, but later ones limited the entrance of all immigrants outside of the Western Hemisphere.27 In short, regulation increased at multiple levels. Cattle trading regulation in the US West, agricultural develn a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 215

opment in the Southwest, federal immigration restriction to the United States, and the regulation of various drugs and other goods birthed border control apparatus designed to police goods, drugs, bugs, animals, and people that crossed the border.28 Although different branches of the US government pushed these seemingly disparate initiatives, the border itself became a place where efforts at control converged. This control, however, proved tenuous, in large part because the dynamic socio-­ecological systems ballooning in the region could not be bound. Resources for the various agencies were scarce, and the border itself stretched nearly two thousand miles, making it especially hard to stop anything or anyone from moving across the expansive line. As the historian Richard White has rightfully pointed out, “The world is in motion . . . all natural features move,” which made the attempt to stop movement of anything across the border landscape a completely unnatural and very complex act.29 Regardless of this fact, marking and controlling the US–­Mexico divide became a state fixation, and officials on both sides believed that with careful demarcation and patrol, they could keep movement across the line in order, in spite of their meager budgets. Thus, reports that entire tracts of land moved from one side of the border to the other surprised officials from both nations. The Rio Grande, which had marked the boundary between the United States and Mexico since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, presented a number of problems in the decades that followed. Dividing the landscape as it rushed and trickled through the desert of west Texas and into the more brushy land through the east, the meandering river was prone to changing course in drought and flood. Dry spells meant shallow, slow-­moving streams that cattle or smugglers could easily cross, and floods often resulted in inundated riverbanks and the creation of new channels that moved the border to new locations from year to year. Nature, in other words, was more dynamic and unpredictable than those working to mark and control the boundary might have hoped. Treaty writers in 1848 did not anticipate the power of these natural forces when they outlined that the border would lie in the middle of the deepest channel of the Rio Grande.30 While departments of commerce and agriculture in both nations worked to control the movement of drugs, bugs, animals, and humans across the dividing line, the International Boundary Commission was stymied by the migration of the border itself. Some of these changes were so extensive that the Mexican and US governments needed to write a new treaty in 1884 and then revise it in 1889, all to address the fickle Rio Grande’s shifting course. The new treaties outlined that 216 · c h a p t e r

nine

any changes in the flow of the Rio Grande or the Colorado River, which also made up a small portion of the boundary line, should be “submitted for examination and decision to an International Boundary Commission which shall have exclusive jurisdiction in the case of said differences or questions.”31 And because the river migrated frequently, the commission spent much of its time settling land disputes between both governments as well as between landowners along the rivers. After spending years working to locate the border, the commissioners found themselves chasing it. Between 1852, when the river experienced a minor change in its course, until 1932, the river moved several times, forming what the commissioners referred to as “bancos,” or small areas of land that formed between the old river bed and the new one.32 The number of shifts in the river’s course varied depending on location, since some places were more prone to flooding than others. But in this period alone, the river’s course changed significantly eight times near the San Lorenzo banco, located just outside El Paso—an area of the border that had proven problematic since the boundary line’s creation. The Boundary Commission made decisions about contested land based on how quickly the river had moved. In other words, was the change slow or sudden? Had it shifted as a process of “accretion or avulsion?”33 If the river moved slowly—by accretion—then, more often than not, the IBC agreed that the border moved with it and the land itself would “segregate” from its country of origin.34 If the change occurred suddenly— by avulsion—the line would remain in its original location. The size of the tract of land also played a critical role in whether or not the banco would be classified as a migrant of sorts. According to Article 2 of the 1889 treaty, if the land was more than 250 hectares in size, or had a population of more than “200 souls,” then it would require special consideration. The rules and regulations for determining whether a tract of land had actually crossed the border were, however, murky at best. Sometimes it was not clear whether the move had happened quickly or slowly and, because there were so many cases, the commission could not always address changes in the river immediately. Occasionally the backlog in cases was so extensive that by the time the commission addressed the case, the river had moved a second or third time. At other stretches, the amount of land that had moved was unclear because the river swallowed the land whole as the channel widened. Investigations often lasted for years, and in the intervening period the populations changed. Complicating matters further, those who lived on the land that had crossed the border could “remain thereon” and, if they chose to do so, could “preserve the title and rights of citizenship of the country to which the said banco formerly belonged, or acquire n a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 217

the nationality of the country to which they will belong in the future.”35 In other words, they could choose to remain Mexican or US citizens, even if their land, which their individual families might have owned for generations, had experienced a “transfer of sovereignty.”36 All of these issues meant that the rivers, which had seemed clear and “natural” lines of demarcation during the years of the initial boundary survey, proved even more complicated than finding and marking an invisible line on the ground. The changes were both constant and impermanent, making the borderline hard to pin down. In 1908, for example, the mayor of the town of Guadalupe, Chihuahua, filed a claim with the IBC that in 1875, town land near the Rio Grande had separated from Mexico, but that the citizens of the town had still been paying taxes to the Mexican government on it. According to a survey of the area in the same year, Boundary Commissioners Follett and Zayas did find an old river channel, but noted that the current location of the riverbed actually matched the mapped channel from the boundary survey of 1853.37 After several investigative measures, consultations with maps from various years, and collection of testimony from local citizens, the commissioners identified three possible hypotheses, all of which assumed that in one way or another the river had moved back and forth from north to south, by both avulsion and accretion, between 1853 and 1908. Even with this uncertainty, the IBC ruled that Mexico had wrongfully lost a tract of land. Given that the river was wont to change even with the slightest flood along this portion of the boundary, deciding where to draw a permanent line was nearly impossible. The river was a migrant itself—a living body of water that, like other living things, moved through space regularly. In another case, the Rio Grande cut off the “Banco San Lorenzo,” located just east of El Paso, from Mexico. The Community of San Lorenzo, Chihuahua, argued that the land still belonged to Mexico despite the binational ruling to the contrary in July of 1898. The residents of Chihuahua made their claim in October of the same year, and the investigation lasted until 1930. In the intervening years, the river changed course several times while the population of the banco grew. In 1898, for example, there were no documented inhabitants. By 1930, more than three hundred people lived on the 175.8-­hectare tract of land. According to a 1930 report written by consulting engineers C. M. Ainsworth and Armando Santacruz, the denizens who lived near the banco told conflicting stories about the changes in the river, making it difficult to discern exactly where the original boundary line was and how far it had moved from that line as a result of the various droughts and floods. In 1898, the Mexicans who made claim to the land 218 · c h a p t e r

nine

argued that the river had moved as a result of an “avulsive” change, which meant that the land should never had been cut from Mexico, because the change had been rapid. On the other side of the original borderline, Americans claimed that the land “had always been American territory but had been cut to the Mexican side in 1897 and had been cut back to the United States side in 1898.” In 1898, the Americans argued, the river had simply moved back to its original location after having moved earlier because of a “prior avulsion.”38 In 1907, the consulting engineers Fishburn and Santacruz conducted a study in which they agreed that the San Lorenzo banco was “undoubtedly a banco cut from Mexico,” meaning that it certainly belonged to the United States.39 But Mexican residents continued to protest that ruling, forcing the commissioners to dig deeper. Ultimately, the commission opted to rule based on historical environmental evidence. In 1907, they reported, “after consulting all evidence on hand, we are bound to conclude that the movement of the river . . . , from 1852 to 1898, was caused by erosion and silt deposit.”40 This report concluded that the testimony of both sides was inaccurate because the move appeared to have taken place more slowly. After the release of this statement, the commission opted to suspend the proceedings. Here, the state ultimately disregarded local knowledge in its relentless effort to map, delineate, and control national perimeters.41 After another survey of the area in 1924 and a detailed commission study in February of 1930, the joint commission reopened the proceedings. It compiled a “Map of River Movements near San Lorenzo” by superimposing several river channels onto one map. It used eight different studies and maps, starting with the original boundary survey in 1852 and ending with its own 1928 map (see, for example, fig. 9.1). The commissioners also included maps made by county engineers and the US Geological Survey. In 1930, hoping to settle the case, the commission posted public notices in towns on both sides of the border in the El Paso–­Juarez Valley calling for citizens to submit oral and written testimony to provide “assistance in developing facts relative to river changes in the vicinity of a tact of land known as San Lorenzo.”42 Over the course of seven different dates, the commission heard testimony from landowners, attorneys, and other local residents. It also received affidavits from a number of interested parties. Thirty-­two years after the initial claim to the land, the commission finally ruled that the 178.5-­hectare parcel would be cut from Mexico, confirming the earlier decision in 1907. The contested San Lorenzo tract began as a claim for public property, owned by the state of Chihuahua, that transformed into a plot of land with n a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 219

Fig. 9.1 “Extract from the Treaty Map of Disturnell, 1847, Referred to in Col. Graham’s Report,” in Report of the Secretary of War (Sen. ex. doc. 121, 32nd Congress, 1st Session; SS 627), showing the disputed territory between the Gray and Bartlett-Conde lines near El Paso. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

many residents, both American and Mexican. At times, however, private rights to the land that crossed the border dominated conversation about contested bancos from the start. In 1902, for example, a parcel of land owned by the Mexican citizen Josefa Jáquez de Bermúdez separated from Mexico. Two years later, she was “threatened with expulsion by American citizens” who claimed that they had rights to the land.43 According to the Americans, the only reason Bermúdez could claim the land was that a reverse change to the river in 1897 had pushed the land into Mexico. In 1902, they argued, the land had simply moved back to its original location.44 The dispute over the land, which also lasted until 1930, ultimately transferred Bermúdez’s 92.5-­hectare tract of land from Mexico to the United States; but it is unclear which individuals retained the property rights to this land in the end. The archives contain case after case of migrating land in the El Paso–­ Juarez Valley alone. Between 1875 and 1930, fifteen tracts of land totaling some 1,255 hectares (approximately 3,100 acres) crossed the border from Mexico to the United States, while four bancos totaling 169 hectares 220 · c h a p t e r

nine

(roughly 418 acres) moved from the United States to Mexico.45 Sometimes, even after commissioners redrew the boundary to reflect the new reality, the river would move again, making their job seem both impossible and interminable. The dynamism of nature, it seemed, could not be harnessed. Problems presented by boundary waters persisted. Although they seemed to occur more often along the Rio Grande, they were not isolated to this part of the international divide. In 1908 Commissioners Follett and Zayas, of the United States and Mexico respectively, needed to travel to the Arizona-­California-­Mexico border to determine whether a series of floods of the Colorado River in 1905 demanded a remarking of the border there. The river had apparently flooded so badly that a new channel had formed which crossed the boundary between the old border monument and the town of Calexico, California, “destroying, in its path, a good share of the town of Mexicali” in Baja California.46 Following their evaluation, however, Zayas and Follett decided to leave the line in its original location. To alleviate some of these problems, the commission facilitated the deepening of the central channels of the river and the damming of other parts by irrigation companies, so that in the future, excess water from floods could be channeled to reservoirs. The construction projects would not only help the commission to control water flow and more permanently fix the boundary line in the newly constructed channels, but would also provide water to residents on both sides of the border, allowing them to grow crops and increase the value of the once-­contested land.47 Commissioners also oversaw some construction projects along the river intended specifically to control the river’s vacillating flows In 1935, for instance, another large swath of land known as Cordova Island crossed the border from Mexico to the United States near El Paso, and the joint commission built a “rectified channel” to stabilize the path of the waterway once and for all. Along the new channel, the commission added monuments to mark where its members agreed upon a new, permanently fixed boundary line between the two nations.48 The many changes in the rivers caused chaos and tension both for those who lived in their vicinity and for the commissioners who spent their careers trying to account for those changes. And, unlike the first commissioners who had chased the border as it moved, the commissioners settling river disputes did so amicably, even if their efforts did not always result in immediate agreement. In almost every instance, the commission was able to settle land disputes. In 1910, however, after a long period of riparian encroachment, the Chamizal, a 243-­hectare tract of land near El Paso that had historically belonged to Mexico, emerged within the borders of the United States. Like n a t u r e k n o w s n o b o u n d s  · 221

many other tracts, it became contested ground. In this case, commissioners from the IBC debated heavily about the pace at which the course of the river had changed. The US commissioner argued that the river had moved slowly, but the Mexican commissioner noted that most of the Chamizal had ended up on the river’s north bank only after a series of heavy floods in the preceding years. Both perspectives were true enough, leaving this particular situation a matter of both avulsion (rapid movement) and accretion (slow movement). Given the heavy debate, the Chamizal case went to arbitration mediated by a Canadian judge in 1911, but it was not finally resolved until 1963, when John F. Kennedy ended the dispute by agreeing with Canadian judge’s ruling in 1911 to return 162 of the 243 hectares to Mexico.49 In the years following the 1911 arbitration, the IBC began extensive efforts to fortify and reinforce the river banks by deepening the channel and lining the banks with concrete. Cordova Island was among these projects. Irrigation projects, too, increased human artifice along the waterway.50 In the meantime, the Chamizal case formed a backdrop against which the ongoing struggle over movement across the border unfolded. The story of the Rio Grande serves as a reminder that the dynamic and disordered nonhuman world would not respect lines on a map or other human efforts to rationalize the environment. Soon after they set out to map the boundary line, commissioners found that “statecrafting,” or the effort to delineate national spaces, was not so easily done. When commission officials found their original maps to be faulty due to misinformation and the movement of natural features over time, they set out to fix and then map the international boundary as dictated by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But even as they mapped the boundary, it shifted, making it nearly impossible for their maps to keep up with the realities on the ground. The IBC then turned to concrete channelization, technology, and infrastructure to control cross-­border movement between the nations, which would continue over the course of the twentieth century.

222 · c h a p t e r

nine

chap ter ten

visualizing the enl arged homestead act Mapping Power and Place in Early Twentieth-­Century US Land Policy

Sara M. Gregg

The transformative years of the Progressive Era brought seismic shifts in US resource management policies, as the Department of the Interior sought to internalize the economic and political costs of existing land policies. Political leaders and government scientists acknowledged that change was afoot across the country, and the US Geological Survey’s chief reported in 1913: “With advancing years a wise nation, like a prudent man, learns to husband its resources. Land values are now recognized, the purpose in both legislation and administration has changed, and highest development alone is sought.”1 As nation-­states throughout the Americas aspired to mastery over land and raw materials, politicians from across the political spectrum reconsidered the responsibilities of government for managing natural resources. This project led scientists and surveyors to gather data about the natural advantages and disadvantages of formerly uncharted areas of the continent.2 In 1909 the US Congress institutionalized land classification with the Enlarged Homestead Act, which embedded in its reform of federal land policy the mandate that the secretary of the interior locate environmental information within the West. This reconceptualization of the Ameri223

can landscape allied the expertise of government scientists with politicians’ ambitions to fill the West with productive settlement, and created a new cartographic frontier, leaving a visual record of a moment of transition in resource management policy in the United States. The result was a series of maps that distilled fifty years of resource surveys in the trans-­Missouri West. These plats merged hydrological and political boundaries in thirteen states, the “Lands designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts.” The maps delineate areas of the public lands available for homesteading in 320-­acre parcels, and represent a rare snapshot of the process of land classification at a regional scale in the trans-­Missouri West, visualizing the extent of state power and geographic knowledge for a public audience (fig. 10.1).3 assessing the west

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Geological Survey had surveyed the vast mineral, forest, and other natural resources of the United States. Agency officials argued with increasing vehemence that environmental knowledge remained an untapped resource for the nation-­state, and yet many of their recommendations for scientific management were overridden by Westerners in Congress who maintained a developmentalist approach to the region’s resources. Local boosters and their elected officials prioritized economic growth over matching the needs of the people with the capacity of the land. Advocates for enlarged homestead legislation in Congress had argued that better oversight over natural resources would result in a more stable and predictable distribution of the nation’s remaining public domain, and they embraced cartography as a tool for generating support for development. As J. B. Harley observed about state power, “The more pervasive its territorial and social ambitions—then the greater its appetite for maps.”4 This move toward scientific mapping responded to Western political ambitions and reflected the federal government’s turn toward conservation, and provides an analog for the growing administrative complexity of the nation-­state. Beginning in the early 1860s, Congress had experimented with new strategies for supporting Euro-­American settlement: land grants to the states and railroads, a land distribution program through the Homestead Act, and financial support for mineral and hydrological surveys. These initiatives brought an uneven peopling of the West, and generated a rapidly expanding base of knowledge about the landscapes beyond the Missouri

224 · c h a p t e r

ten

Fig. 10.1 Department of the Interior, “State of Arizona: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” edition of June 30, 1916. Compiled and drawn by Daniel O’Hare. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee Libraries.

River. The United States confronted a growing array of challenges in governing an expansive and diverse continent. At the heart of the dilemma were twinned questions: how to identify natural resources most effectively, and how to select who should benefit from the nation’s vast public domain. More than a decade after the Pacific Railroad Survey of 1853–55, and in the midst of political battles over Reconstruction, in March 1867 Congress authorized several expeditions to survey Western geology and natural resources, initiating a new era of national investment in developing the region.5 During these pivotal years, surveying emerged as a primary tool of state formation, and as the national government began to assess natural resources more systematically, it accumulated an immense repository of data on the character of the remaining public domain. Federal resource surveys operated as instruments both political and economic, serving as what Jeremy Vetter has described as a “tool of statecraft . . . extending political authority over geographical space for capitalist economic development.”6 The ambition to catalog the natural resources of the West was ultimately embedded in federal policy through the creation of the US Geological Survey in 1879.7 Congress charged the new agency with “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain,” directing it to oversee the surveying, mapping, and geological investigations of the continent.8 In the process, scientists gathered a massive collection of agricultural, hydrological, and land cover data, classified as the “by-­products of mineral-­land classification.”9 These data, “based upon first-­hand acquaintance with the particular land,” provided a basis for later resource assessments and represented an intelligence-­gathering exercise within the Department of the Interior that produced scientific knowledge with far-­reaching impacts on the development of the West.10 This project of geographical knowledge production represents a radical shift in government, because beginning with the Land Ordinance of 1784, lawmakers had drafted land policy in an environmental vacuum. Not until the late nineteenth century did federal officials imagine that land character should influence the course of policymaking. At this moment of growing faith in scientific expertise, Congress endeavored to rationalize the management of the nation’s land resources in the remaining public domain, imagining that development would proceed sensibly and in consideration of known ecological conditions.11 This ambition was a logical by-­product of distilling the information that had been gathered over the preceding decades, and which up to that moment had been used primarily to identify 226 · c h a p t e r

ten

mineral deposits and identify potential forest reserves and irrigation districts. The Department of the Interior’s appraisal of the territory opened up to homesteading illustrates the environmental implications of growing state power, a phenomenon that has until now been understood primarily as a demographic process or a policy initiative.12 Early-­twentieth-­century cartographic projects responded not only to resource availability on the public domain, but also to the growing acknowledgement of natural limits in the arid and semiarid regions. Scarce resources had long discouraged the settlement of areas not suited to easy cultivation, and yet Western boosters were keen to encourage further migration to their districts. As a result, proposals to secure new settlers and investments emerged ever more frequently in the halls of Congress, introduced by legislators voicing perpetual optimism about the prospects for human mastery west of the hundredth meridian. These politicians embraced technology and innovation, envisioning a sustained economic boom that would boost their own districts alongside the interests of land-­hungry settlers. Euro-­American migrants moved west in increasing numbers to capitalize on the recently depopulated lands that were opened to resettlement by a series of laws beginning with the 1862 Homestead Act, which offered 160 acres of the surveyed public domain in compensation for five years of residence. A variety of modifications to the principle of land in exchange for improvements followed: the 1873 Timber Culture Act, the 1877 Desert Land Act, and the 1904 Kincaid Act. The 1909 revision, the Enlarged Homestead Act, doubled the acreage available to prospective settlers by offering 320 acres of “nonmineral, nonirrigable . . . surveyed public lands which do not contain merchantable timber.”13 Western legislators representing the Great Plains, the Great Basin, and the Southwest agreed that once easily cultivated lands had been taken, 320 acres were necessary to support a mixture of ranching and dry farming in areas without reliable precipitation or access to perennial streams. The rationale was simple: farming would be more difficult, but the land was desirable in larger tracts, and members of Congress acknowledged that environmental limits were the foremost feature of these arid and semiarid districts. Embedded within the Enlarged Homestead Act was the premise that information gathered by decades of scientific surveys could ultimately improve the outcomes for potential homesteaders. The 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act marked a shift in federal policymaking, drawing together geographical knowledge and a developmentalist imperative in order to alter the public land laws. In order to properly evaluate v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 227

the implications of the adjustments to federal land policy embedded within this legislation, we must pay close attention to the larger processes of state simplification taking place within the federal government during the second decade of the twentieth century. Resource management agencies had gathered critical scientific knowledge about the nation’s landscapes, and Congress signaled its approval of a growing managerial state, directing new forms of mapmaking within the Department of the Interior. The terms of this legislation required the secretary of the interior to mark hydrological features on a regional scale, making this information legible both to the nation-­state and to the American people.14 Visualizing the larger environmental context of the Enlarged Homestead Act requires rescaling the state maps to the regional level, a process made possible through the use of geographic information systems (GIS). Individually, each plat pre­sents a locally compelling portrayal of the landscape, and one that draws the eye to lands available as enlarged homestead claims. When the thirteen states are stitched together, the resulting image places the implications of the law into perspective, opening the region at large to a reimagining through the lens of access to water.15 These maps place into sharp relief the physical patterns enforced by landforms, hydrological systems, and cultural features, integrating the designation of irrigability into the built environment of the West (plate 10). Georeferencing and overlaying state maps onto one master sheet highlights patterns of nonirrigability obscured at the state level, principally illustrating patterns of water availability between the Pacific Ocean to the Missouri River and from Canada to Mexico. From this vantage point the landscape details on the maps blur, and they convey a very different message. Red areas denoting enlarged homestead districts remain the most arresting and interesting feature; yet at the regional scale, the maps emphasize that red zones denote landscapes of limitation rather than opportunity.16 The enlarged homestead maps make what Susan Schulten has described as the “vast and unintelligible” landscapes of the US West “discrete and coherent,” recording the culmination of the process of knowledge production.17 Alluringly accessible, the plats entice the viewer to explore the possibilities contained within the region. A close reading of the maps suggests how the illusion of mastery over nature was central to nation building in the US West, and emphasizes how symbology plays a critical role in mediating the transmission of complex cartographic information. These maps offer an interpretative challenge, appearing at first glance to advertise opportunity, delineating areas available for larger homestead claims in bright

228 · c h a p t e r

ten

red. Yet upon closer examination they convey not only the intricate detail contained within the Geological Survey’s catalog of Western resources, but also the natural disadvantages inhering in large parts of the region. The Department of the Interior mapped enlarged homestead districts using scientific information about the vast portions of the trans-­Missouri West in which opportunities were restricted by poor soils, scarce surface water, and limited forest cover. If analyzed with an eye to the climatological and topographic conditions of these territories—details which were omitted from the thematic maps—the plats would have broadcast the wide range of challenges confronting prospective settlers in large parts of the West. Instead, Geological Survey cartographers drafted the plats to illustrate the limits of water availability in the region, emphasizing hydrology as the primary determinant of enlarged homestead acreages. As a result, these maps highlight only one aspect of the possibilities for agriculture in the West, obscuring other details that would have been relevant to prospective farmers. The viewer must take the time to critically assess other indications of land character in order to discern this subtle illustration of limits. the significance of water in western history

With the 1902 Reclamation Act, Congress sought to reverse decades of failure among private and state-­funded irrigation ventures, unleashing a reservoir of federal funding for dozens of new irrigation projects. The addition of subsidized and abundant water, paid for with the proceeds from the public lands, meant that areas of the West once perceived to be unviable for agriculture appeared poised to produce banner profits. By 1909 the fledgling US Reclamation Service was in the midst of the first phase of its massive campaign to reengineer of the hydrology of the West. Full of confidence that the physical challenges of arid landscapes could be overcome through innovation and investment, the federal government launched vigorously into developing dams and irrigation districts.18 Theodore Roosevelt captured the era’s optimism about the prospects for “reclaiming the waste areas of the arid West,” voicing confidence that Americans could harness water for agricultural improvement. Roosevelt later celebrated how “the Reclamation Act . . . and the results flowing from it have helped powerfully to prove to the Nation that it can handle its own resources and exercise direct and business-­like control over them.”19 At the time of the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act the Geological Survey’s Reclamation Service was reordering the landscapes of the Snake River of

v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 229

Idaho, the Milk River of Montana, and the Salt River of Arizona, among a score of other projects.20 The agency embodied the nation’s confidence about the possibilities for taming the surface waters of the West; yet even as agency staff appraised possible irrigation projects, other branches of the Geological Survey were examining the prospects for areas not likely to be developed through irrigation. Acknowledging that some areas of the West had no access to water and thus demanded a contrasting approach to development, Congress envisioned that the enlarged homestead law could be used to incentivize settlement beyond the bounds of irrigability.21 Congressman Frank Mondell (D-­WY) and Senator Reed Smoot (R-­UT) led the charge for 320-­acre homesteads. Mondell had served as the commissioner of the General Land Office from 1897 to 1899 before being reelected to Congress, and he embraced land reform throughout his career. By 1908 he chaired the Committee on the Public Lands and drafted the first committee report on the enlarged homestead bill, which opined that in order to “successfully battle with the adverse conditions surrounding the dry lands of the West,” homesteaders needed at least a half section of semiarid land.22 Smoot, an ardent conservationist who was equally committed to increasing the population of his semiarid state, led in advocating for this resource-­informed system of land distribution in the Senate.23 With the enlarged homestead law, Congress acknowledged tacitly that hydrological and climatological realities would prove formidable challenges to homesteaders in the arid and semiarid West.24 Even though nonirrigability was just one of the features intended to define enlarged homestead claims, a central element of the Enlarged Homestead Act was the requirement that the secretary of the interior identify and map nonirrigable lands. The law directed the designation of areas not “susceptible of successful irrigation at a reasonable cost from any known source of water supply,” prioritizing water availability as the chief feature of enlarged homestead lands. The agency complied, and over the course of several months in 1909 and 1910, the secretary directed the Geological Survey to consult its surveys of hydrological resources and classify nonirrigable land as open for enlarged homesteads.25 These designations drew on the massive compendium of environmental data gathered over the course of decades, and the Geological Survey was able to quickly draft maps of the thirteen relevant states.26 Demonstrating the ability of government cartographers to respond quickly to congressional demands, the Geological Survey synthesized its knowledge of resource availability by overlaying its assessment of nonirrigability upon existing topographic surveys. The resulting maps marked a 230 · c h a p t e r

ten

new cartographic frontier, merging detailed representations of geographic, hydrological, and political features at the regional level. In the process, they remained silent about other information that would have been crucial for informing prospective farmers about important agricultural context: soils, elevation, climate, and land cover.27 Nevertheless, the product was impressive. The scale used for these sheets (1:1,520,640, or 1 inch = 24 miles) allowed the integration of towns, roads, railroads, and a range of hydrological features, and thus visualized the diversity and complexity of the region. Consequently, the maps allowed the viewer to identify the correlations between hydrology and historical settlement patterns, making legible how resource availability had been the primary determinant for existing infrastructure. The prevalence of water in shaping the development of the West became even more evident through the representation of nonirrigable lands. Areas in red were acknowledged to be more challenging, and therefore better distributed in larger parcels, than those with easy access to water. At close range, the maps illustrated that areas with access to rivers and streams— those not eligible for enlarged homesteads—had already been populated with towns, roads, and other features of the built environment. By contrast, areas with sparse surface water, demarcated in bright red, were delineated primarily by a largely abstracted grid of township lines and little evidence of permanent settlement.28 The result was a visually arresting portrait that abstracted the natural advantages of Western landscapes, beckoning viewers to enter the landscapes and take a closer look, even as they were being provided with evidence of the natural limits of the red zones. The new maps distilled the regional network of watersheds and arid lands, broadcasting to the American public information that had been formerly sequestered within the files of the Department of the Interior in Washington. The enlarged homestead maps platted areas available as 320-­ acre claims within the context of recognizable natural features of the Western states.29 By representing nonirrigability as the primary characteristic on these maps, the Geological Survey narrowed the viewer’s focus to what James Scott identifed as “certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality.” Thus, the agency’s capacity to pre­sent a more comprehensive assessment of available resources was limited by the congressional mandate to emphasize water availability. As in Scott’s fiscal forests, “nearly everything [else] was missing from the state’s narrow frame of reference.” The Geological Survey’s plats represent the entire region of the arid and semiarid West through a single optic: nonirrigability.30

v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 231

seeing red

The map series “Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts” was designed to emphasize the impact of natural limits within the trans-­Missouri West. In areas of limited rainfall, the absence of perennial streams meant an unreliable supply of water, and therefore uncertain prospects. As a result, the symbology of these plats is striking. This new type of thematic map, designating districts of limited resources, required experimentation with new symbology, and the results are striking and potentially misleading. At the turn of the twentieth century, red was an uncommon feature on maps; and when it was used, it represented alternately the location of cultivated land or of “mines, quarries, or wells,” according to the 1918 edition of Topographic Instructions of the U.S. Geological Survey.31 The Geological Survey opted to delimit nonirrigability in red—a striking choice, given the diverse and often competing associations with this color. Alternatives such as blue or green were precluded by their symbological associations with watercourses and plant cover; but brown, often used to convey land or soil, would have been a logical alternative, and it is noteworthy that the cartographers opted not to use it.32 By contrast, the use of red evokes a subjective reaction that invariably draws the viewer’s attention to the designated zones.33 Intentionally or not, the Geological Survey map series suggested the possibilities still remaining on the public domain. Red could be easily interpreted as promoting a land of opportunity, areas where any hardworking homesteader could claim a larger portion of the public lands. Given the use of red in contemporary advertising and the infrequency of its use in mapping, the use of red to denote nonirrigability may have conveyed this message to an underinformed public.34 The fluidity of color during this period of cartographic experimentation within the federal government was analogous with the evolving role of the nation-­state in governing American life around the turn of the twentieth century. Department of the Interior cartographic studios were inconsistent in their use of red, as a 1916 General Land Office map used red to represent the obverse: demarcating the reservoirs and districts under development by the US Reclamation Service, government-­sanctioned irrigation projects, using a muted shade of red (plate 11).35 The varied uses of red presented an ambiguous message that was easily subject to misinterpretation in the absence of standard cartographic practices. These first editions of the enlarged homestead maps reflect a preliminary appraisal of the character of lands clearly eligible for 320-­acre claims under 232 · c h a p t e r

ten

the terms of the new law. Platting nonirrigability drew upon the work of several divisions of the Geological Survey; agency cartographers worked to correlate hydrological data with thirty-­five years of topographic mapping and “available data on rainfall, run-­off, and stream flow,” and to then supplement those resources by consulting with the hydrological experts on the ground, namely Reclamation Service staff and state officials.36 After an initial classification of the most easily mapped areas, roughly 157 million nonirrigable acres, during the three months following the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act, the Geological Survey moved on to synthesize other hydrological data. Agency staff were later directed by requests from Washington to update the maps, responding to the will of Congress as it voted to distribute Indigenous reservation lands to homestead settlement and open additional states to enlarged homesteads in the following years. Other classifications were spurred by petitions from residents of Western states who sought to have new areas added to the enlarged homestead districts. By the end of 1916, the secretary of the interior had overseen the classification of a total of 262,612,817 acres of land as eligible for entry as 320-­acre claims.37 The enlarged homestead maps display the culmination of the effort to systematize land classification that had been underway in the resource agencies of the federal government for decades. They merged a vast array of detail on the built environment with delineations of water availability, and as the Geological Survey published updated editions of these maps, this combination of features made them evoke far more than a simple cartographic representation of opportunities to homestead. Changes to these state plats between 1909 and 1920 simultaneously recorded the rapid pace of change in federal land management practices, reflecting the surge in Indigenous dispossession that was coupled with the redistribution of Western lands, the power of citizen activism, and regional political exigencies (figs. 10.2 and 10.3). Most notable among the changes on the state-­level maps are the cumulative effects of political developments in Indian Country over a compressed period of nation building. As Congress carved reservation boundaries the Geological Survey produced updated editions of its maps. In Montana, where the secretary of the interior designated the largest total proportion of land as eligible for enlarged homesteads (48,502,807 acres, 51 percent of the state’s 94,109,440 acres by 1916), the effects of these political processes becomes especially evident.38 The 1910 plat depicts a large area in the northeastern corner of the state as unavailable for settlement: the 2,094,003 acres of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, land reserved in 1887 for the v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 233

Fig. 10.2 Department of the Interior, “State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” edition of November 1, 1910. Compiled and drawn by Daniel O’Hare. From Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana.

Assiniboine and Dakota to use in perpetuity. In 1908, however, Congress had passed an act forcing allotment of much of the reservation and its conversion to private Euro-­American ownership. As had transpired repeatedly after passage of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, the Fort Peck Allotment Act mandated the distribution of individual plots of land to enrolled members of the Assiniboine and Dakota nations in defiance of the community’s preference to maintain their land in common ownership. After the forced allotment of land to individuals, the remaining treaty-­demarcated reservation acreage—a devastating 64 percent of the reservation’s 1887 boundaries—was opened to homestead settlement.39 The Bureau of Indian Affairs completed tribal allotments at Fort Peck in 1913, and 1,348,408 acres of reservation lands deemed “surplus” to the Assiniboine and Dakota nations were thereafter opened for non-­Native homestead entry.40 The General Land Office held a land lottery on September 1, 1913, marking the official

234 · c h a p t e r

ten

Fig. 10.3 Department of the Interior, “State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” edition of July 1, 1916. Compiled and drawn by Daniel O’Hare. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee Libraries.

conveyance of the land to Euro-­American farmers, who swarmed onto the reservation and capitalized on new agricultural opportunities.41 The growth of enlarged homestead acreage over these years was also a response to individual, community, and congressional petitions for the designation of specific parcels of land as nonirrigable. Individual petitions were mailed and telegrammed to the Reclamation Service, the Department of the Interior, the General Land Office, and members of Congress, and they contributed materially to expanding the enlarged homestead districts. The impact of citizen action cannot be overstated; in the twelve months leading up to July 1916, Westerners filed 14,055 petitions to request enlarged homestead districts, and members of Congress joined local communities in encouraging the designation of additional zones as eligible for 320-­acre tracts.42 The Geological Survey examined and reclassified land on the basis of these petitions and the political suasion of members of Con-

v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 235

gress, ultimately adding hundreds of thousands of acres in enlarged homestead lands throughout the semiarid and arid West.43 Throughout this period, the drafting and management of new protocols for mapping enlarged homestead designations represented a significant logistical challenge for the agencies within the Department of the Interior charged with overseeing US land policy. Although the agencies of the Department of the Interior were headquartered in one massive building in northwest Washington, the department exhibited limited administrative coordination. High-­level Interior officials directed their staff to share information freely and without regard for other assigned tasks, but this type of coordination was challenging in the early days of a data-­driven administrative state. Moreover, the limited synthesis of datasets was exacerbated by manpower and materials shortages, especially acute in an era of paltry appropriations from a wary Congress.44 In one wing of the Interior building, the General Land Office (GLO) fulfilled its responsibility for managing homestead claims, overseeing the process of land distribution from original entry until final title, and coordinating these tasks with regional land office districts that handled individual claims at the township level. The land distribution agency operated separately from the Geological Survey, whose mandate was to oversee land classification, which required agency staff to synthesize a range of scientific sources, frequently under pressure from members of Congress who sought to support constituent demands. Department of the Interior officials and individual legislators expected the Geological Survey to collaborate with the Land Office to map lands already within the latter agency’s jurisdiction, and this presented a thorny challenge to these perennially underfunded and understaffed agencies. the evocative cartographic landscapes of the enlarged homestead act

The downside of the enlarged homestead maps was that they distilled some rather unpromising news for hopeful land seekers during the waning years of the homestead era. The areas in red illustrate water scarcity in the region, and these limits are especially revealing at the state level, jumping out in winding white lines as narrow hydrological networks—the most arresting non-­red feature of the maps. Any savvy land prospector examining these maps would have been overwhelmed by a sense of limitations. Moreover, many of the areas not demarcated in red were already among the 175,940,351 acres set aside as national forest reserves; or had been previously designated as national parks, Native American reservations, or irri236 · c h a p t e r

ten

gation districts; or had already been distributed to the states or to subsidize railway construction.45 These maps force the viewer to confront the reality that the red zones delineate not the potential for improvement, but rather the virtual impossibility of economic development. In spite of the rhetoric that animated congressional proponents of the enlarged homestead legislation, these were not economically viable farm or ranch lands. One cannot grow crops or run more than a few head of cattle on 320 arid or semiarid acres without a year-­ round water supply. The maps emphasize that the red zones had virtually no economic value as 320-­acre claims.46 Consequently, the most meaningful impact of these maps is that they illustrate the environmental limits inhering within vast swaths of the West. The enlarged homestead maps reflect the importance of mapping as a tool of state power and information transfer, and represent the culmination of data gathering by geologists, cartographers, and hydrologists in the decades following the Civil War. They also synthesize knowledge accumulated within the US Department of the Interior, illuminating the significance of the physical environment in reshaping public policy and the development of the West during the Progressive Era. The impetus behind the mapping project reflects a transformative moment in federal policy, capturing early-­twentieth-­century ambitions for resource management and the distribution of the public domain. The sheets attempt to make the landscapes of homesteading legible to the general public, and in the process they illustrate the challenges of the land, and of accurately portraying the latest scientific understandings of the opportunities inhering in the West. Ultimately, the very existence of this map series, and its complex visualization of a mix of land data, was a product of a remarkable series of developments in the land agencies of government during the early twentieth century, and a triumph of the administrative state. The enlarged homestead maps can best be understood as providing a portrait of the changing landscape of space, political will, and information during a crucial phase in the growth of the nation-­state. These plats both clarify the role of the federal government in developing the US West during the early twentieth century, and illustrate how cartographic representations have the power to convey a diverse and often unconscious set of expectations about the environment and the natural resources contained therein. By highlighting the importance of symbology in simplifying and representing complex landscapes, as well as in perpetuating an illusion of mastery over nature that was central to the nation-­building process in the region, the maps provide an evocative snapshot of a nation at a v i s u a l i z i n g t h e e n l a r g e d h o m e s t e a d a c t  · 237

transitional moment of knowledge production. Prospective homesteaders may have been misled, or may never have engaged in close examination of these maps, but the plats leave a visually compelling record of the process of transformation taking place in the nation’s resource agencies during the early twentieth century.

238 · c h a p t e r

ten

chap ter ele ven

mapping canadian nature and the nature of canadian mapping Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn

What a field to face the imagination, what a number of ideas rushes in at once, all for the means to investigate a Country so interesting, Hudson Bay Company employee Edward Smith to the London Committee of the Company, 18251

Canada is big. It is also northern, and for the most part very sparsely peopled, because climatic, geological, and hydrological conditions render much of its area inhospitable to humans. Other countries share some of these characteristics. The United States, India, Australia, Brazil, China, Russia are all expansive spaces. The dry interior of Australia and the cold northern realms of Russia and China are marginal for most forms of human occupation. Topographic and climatic challenges mark much of the US mountain West, and substantial parts of that territory remain relatively thinly settled.2 In each of these areas, and others, indigenous peoples had developed their own extensive spatial knowledge and valuable directional understanding before their territories were brought within the orbits of European “discovery” and Western Enlightenment science.3 Everywhere, newcomers relied on the local knowledge of Indigenous guides, and upon the 239

spatial awareness those people held in mind, to make sense of the places they entered into. Occasionally Indigenous people set down their knowledge for “explorers,” as ephemeral tracings in the sand or slightly more permanent sketches on tree bark, animal skin, or notebook, to be incorporated subsequently into “Western” maps and passed down to posterity.4 None of this is unfamiliar in stories of European encounters with new worlds overseas since the fifteenth century. Much has been written of late about Indigenous world views, and about the abstracting and imperious power of Cartesian cartography in advancing and entrenching imperialism and colonialism as explorers and cartographers set out to rule the world.5 Scholars now contend that, besides erasing Indigenous names and territorial boundaries, colonial mapmaking also subjugated entire spatial epistemologies that could not be reconciled with European conventions. The Blackfoot chief Ackomokki inadvertently helped to evidence this point when he provided sketches of the Upper Missouri River to the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader Peter Fidler around 1801. The sketches allowed HBC cartographers to assemble a larger composite view of the Western Interior, yet expeditions would later complain that the portion of the map derived from Ackomokki’s information was useless in navigating the upper Missouri. Only recently has new scholarship revealed that the supposed failings of Ackomokki’s map vanish when it is resituated in the environment it portrayed. Interpreted from the Blackfoot worldview, and read from the place in which they were drawn, Ackomokki’s original sketches convey a remarkable spatiosocial view of a landscape unseen by the fur traders.6 Many other Europeans found that their native guides either offered too much information or simply provided types of knowledge that could not be recorded meaningfully using ink and parchment, because it eschewed linear time frames and rendered information outside the two-­dimensional rectangular parameters of Western convention. 7 The Ackomokki-­Fidler exchange revealed a point accepted by Indigenous peoples but treated as a problem by Western explorers: that the environment produces a surfeit of information, much of which is contingent, evolving, and hard to parse, and thus difficult to store with available technology. This particular problem has long weighed on the minds of Canadian surveyors and cartographers. Working in a vast environment occupied by a small population, they have worried that nature would always have the upper hand in the struggle to know the country. In this chapter we contend that Canadian cartography is substantially defined by its practitioners’ quest for ever faster and more efficient means to map a big country and bridge the divide between nature and technology. 240 · c h a p t e r

eleven

We would also contend that, by comparison with many other parts of the globe subject to European incursion and influence since the fifteenth century, the story of Canadian mapping remains but partially understood. Although its chroniclers include surveyors, cartographers, civil servants, historians, geographers and others, none has effectively transcended the limits—the special emphases and particular perspectives—of their specific interests, training, and experience to write this story large and bold.8 Such attempts as there have been—to write, for example, the history of Canada in ten maps—have hailed their sources for the “stories of adventure, discovery, and exploration, . . . conquest, empire, power, and violence” that they tell, but they have often failed, in one way or another, to deliver probing analysis of the cartographic act.9 Although there has been some important work on Indigenous mapping in the northern reaches of the North American continent, no Canadian scholar has so fully and convincingly documented “the power of maps to condition consciousness” and shape the geographical imagination as Susan Schulten has done for the United States.10 No Canadian scholar has produced an equivalent to Matthew Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843, or emulated Giselle Byrnes’s Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and Colonization in New Zealand.11 There has been no inspired reimagining of the European encounter with Canada’s northern realm to equal that offered for Australia by Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay; nor has “the complex reciprocity involved in the making of science within the [Canadian] colonial context” been subject to the sort of critical analysis Kapil Raj has brought to bear on the geographical survey of India.12 We confront these lacunae, conscious of the leads provided by the aforementioned scholars and others, and convinced that Canada’s size, relatively inhospitable geography, and sparse population across much of its expanse posed particular problems for those who would render it visible cartographically. In what follows, we concentrate on efforts to bring the country to cartographic order (and to bring cartographic order to the country) in the last 250 years and especially the last 150. We begin by examining some of the challenges entailed in mapping Canada, and considering efforts made to address them, before suggesting in conclusion that the particular circumstances of the country combined serendipitously with technological developments and individual acumen to both resolve the problem of mapping Canadian nature and remake the nature of mapping. Half a millennium ago, when Europeans first encountered the Atlantic edges of northern North America, their challenge lay in knowing what m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 241

they had happened upon.13 The challenges faced by explorers, geographers, and cartographers, as they sought to order and make intelligible the spaces and places revealed by their journeys, were manifest in a long string of accounts. These ranged from Cabot’s first descriptions of the cod-­rich banks of the northwest Atlantic, the detailed assessments of humans and nature around the gulf and lower parts of the St. Lawrence River provided by Jacques Cartier’s three voyages (1534–42), and the remarkable explorations of Samuel de Champlain in the first third of the seventeenth century to the production of Jesuit Louis Nicolas’s Codex Canadensis (ca. 1700).14 The sheer size and forbidding qualities of the place we now call Canada made it difficult to know, and to map. This problem persisted well into the twentieth century, for those who sought to codify the expansion of geographical knowledge about this vast area. The civil servant, historian, and map enthusiast Lawrence Burpee confronted the challenges of harmonizing the chronological order of exploration with the expanse of the country when he experimented in the 1930s with an “Animated Map utilizing in very simple form the mechanism of Mickey Mouse” (by which he meant the display, in quick succession, of slightly different images to produce a sense of motion). Dissatisfied with the results, he reverted to a simple series of sketches outlining what was known to successive explorers.15 Sixty years on, Richard Ruggles, a distinguished scholar of the HBC mapping of northern and western Canada between 1670 and 1870 and a wonderful guide to the imaginative world of exploration, captured the essence of this story with a set of four maps showing the gradual retreat of a terra incognita that stretched, for Europeans at least, north and west from the Great Lakes visited by Champlain, and which was not figuratively illuminated until the late nineteenth century (fig. 11.1).16 But marking territory as “essentially known” was one thing; satisfying a growing concern for order, efficiency, accurate information, and useful knowledge was another. Under the instructions of Governor James Murray, surveyors embarked on a major topographical survey of New France in 1761, immediately following the conquest of Quebec.17 After official possession of the colony two years later, the British lost their will to gather extensive information about the interior of the continent. Early colonial administrators worried about the cost, and questioned the need to map and survey beyond the coasts. Hence, much of British North America remained outside the precise cartographic view of the state.18 Meanwhile, successive generations of explorers and travelers reported on and mapped, as best they

242 · c h a p t e r

eleven

could, the topography, hydrology, vegetation—the nature—of this vast expanse.19 Once the newly established Dominion of Canada (1867) acquired control, in 1870, of the HBC territory draining into Hudson’s Bay, and of British Columbia (1871), Prince Edward Island (1873), and the High Arctic islands (1880), the challenge of administering, understanding, and developing an increasingly vast and substantially remote national territory loomed large. Through the next century or so, government officials, employees in several branches of a broadly conceived civil service, and innovators in a variety of firms and fields would wrestle with the implications, seeking to reconcile evolving technologies and traditional practices, opportunities and needs, costs and efficiencies, and perceptions and prejudices as they mapped Canadian nature. From the middle years of the nineteenth century, geologists working under the auspices of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) fanned out across the land to read the rocks in hope of revealing their mineral wealth.20 After Confederation in 1867, impressive surveys by the likes of legendary surveyors Robert Bell and George Dawson laid the Northwest “bare to inspection and open to exploitation” and provided, as Brian Harley described the general case, discursive tools that told spatial stories about ownership, as they reflected “the territorial imperatives of a particular political system.”21 But these surveys joined a chorus of competing and often conflicting cartographic voices. As a surveyor and sometime (1901–6) director of the GSC, Bell often complained that various government departments— Railways and Canals, Post Office, Telegraphic Service, Marine, Agriculture, Dominion Lands, Geological Survey, and Indian Affairs—each had their own mapping branches, and that they used different names, colors, scales, and projections in making their maps.22 The collection of topographical data was equally complicated. By 1908, the GSC, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Militia and Defence all had surveying di‑ visions working independently from one another.23 When cartographers sought to synthesize what different branches of government knew by stitching together the patchwork coverage of different survey branches to produce maps of large areas, errors and mistakes magnified. Asked in 1904 to comment on the state of Canadian mapping, one British topographic specialist succinctly declared it “grossly erroneous.”24 Such concerns spurred two responses: the government began a new series of topographic maps at 1:63360; and the Royal Society of Canada established an investigative commission which reported, as Bell well knew, that “the same ground is being surveyed over and over again, by

m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 243

Fig. 11.1 The receding frontier of terra incognita in northern North America, 1670–1870. From Richard I. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670–1870 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1991).

the land surveyor, the geologist, the railway or canal engineer, the hydrographer,” and that the diverse purposes of these specialists resulted in inefficiencies: “For every new object a new survey has to be made.”25 Discussions returned time and again to the challenges of mapping so vast a country and the need for efficiency in doing so. Considering themselves desperately understaffed for the task at hand, government mapmaking units debated how to be more cost-­effective in the use of labor, the production of maps, and the expenditures on surveys. The question was less about making the process more efficient from the standpoint of the mapmaker than it was about the waste involved in duplicating effort and producing scarcely compatible maps. Amid this hubbub, the most important Canadian conversations over geographical representation took place at the meetings of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors (ADLS) between 1884 and 1893. According to members of this group, it mattered little who made a map at what scale if it rested upon incorrect information. Accuracy was their central concern. Tapping into a long-­standing debate among surveyors that pitted the potential for human observational error against the value of properly calibrated recording instruments,26 they filled their journals and circulars with instructions for collecting field measurements, advice about plotting mathematical angles, and disquisitions on the care and transport of delicate devices such as alidades and tripod-­mounted theodolites. Theodolites, trigonometric survey, micrometers, and measuring chains had become the stock-­in-­trade of surveyors by the 1880s, but cartographers still depended heavily upon information accumulated before 1859 by explorers equipped with little more than magnetic compasses and sextants with which to determine their geographical position. Using their bodies as instruments, explorers often estimated distances by translating their physical exertions into measures of space. More systematic efforts to chart terrain using durable instruments carefully calibrated in Ottawa to offset the frailties of humans in harsh, remote environments still sometimes proved less than precise.27 The most notorious example of this was the surveyors’ principal tool for calculating distances, the sixty-­six-­foot Gunter’s chain made up of one hundred steel links. Held above ground to adjust for uneven terrain, the chain’s length varied as it bowed and stretched under its own weight. Even with experienced chainmen ensuring that the instrument was taut, variations in temperature made the metal chain stretch or contract. While these deviations could be adjusted for mathematically, the imprecision of the measurement was obvious to everyone involved. The renowned prai246 · c h a p t e r

eleven

rie surveyor William Ogilvie calculated that over “a mile of country as rough as it well can be without being precipitous, with green chainmen, we might anticipate as much as 8 links of error” (approximately five feet, or 1.6 meters).28 Moreover, most such small-­scale surveys assumed a plane surface, which rendered efforts to link them one to another unreliable. This was unsatisfactory and it stemmed from the fact, lamented by Otto Klotz in his 1885 Presidential Address to the ADLS, that Canada was still without a geodetic survey that accounted for the curvature of the earth across the vast country. Without this, Klotz proclaimed, any significant investment in mapping was tantamount to “building a mansion upon quicksand.”29 Through the last years of the nineteenth century, the ADLS was adamant that Canada had to be remapped using new approaches and new technologies to guarantee accuracy and achieve efficiency by reducing the need for resurveying. As ever, the size of the country weighed upon the minds of those involved, and seemed to make progress impossible. Canada’s chief inspector of surveys, William King, reduced the problem to an epistemological paradox: as technology improved, it eliminated human error caused by the “imperfection of our senses” in attending to small fractions of distance. But progress held a catch. As the magnifying and refracting power of microscopes and theodolites improved, such inaccuracies as remained became doubly disturbing. As King explained, though a surveyor might perceive two standard measuring rods as equal, their examination under a microscope might reveal otherwise. From this, King drew the conclusion that the “increased power of observation by no means does away with the theoretical inaccuracy of measurement.” Canada’s vast distances seemed to compound this problem infinitely. Other than calculating errors using the “method of least squares,” the best hope for an accurate survey was to make as few measurements as possible. For one commentator, at least, the only satisfactory course of action was to dispose of all the maps compiled up to the turn of the century and “begin at the beginning . . . without the cumbrous apparatus and consequent cost of old methods.”30 As the use of instruments and calibration replaced earlier more descriptive, historical, and sensory modes of knowing nature—typified by the shift from personal assessments of the weather recorded in diaries to the collection of meteorological observations in the grammar schools of Upper Canada, and the development of a network of meteorological observatories later in the nineteenth century—so surveyors and others mapping Canada came to rely upon technology rather than human observation and local knowledge.31 In this vein, the first phototopographical survey crews began their camerawork high in the Canadian Rockies late in the nineteenth century m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 247

Fig. 11.2 Phototopographic mapping. From F. H. Peters, “Surveying and Mapping in Canada,” Empire Survey Review 1, no. 2 (October, 1931): facing 78.

(fig. 11.2). The irregular landscape of the cordillera had long been an obstacle to conventional ground survey methods perfected on the prairies, but the refinement of photographic approaches recast relief as an advantage. From elevated camera stations on mountain slopes and peaks, surveyors made sets of photographic images from which to calculate distances and elevations on the landscape below. This promised improvement in both the speed and the quality of mapping (fig. 11.3). Still, the often irregular topography of the cordillera made it impossible to create long baselines to which individual phototopographical surveys could be oriented; and in much of the rest of the country where long baselines could be established in relatively flat terrain, the lack of elevation rendered the camera marginal for mapmaking. For many surveyors in the 1890s, the diversity of the country seemed to confound use of a standard set of techniques or tools. Despite the theoretical efficiencies of phototopographical surveying, the photograph and the map remained largely separate. Large-­scale phototopographical surveying came into its own after World War I when Great Britain provided surplus aircraft and camera equipment to Commonwealth countries. Observers across the Atlantic thought this would be of particular assistance to Canada, because “being a large coun248 · c h a p t e r

eleven

try, it is difficult to describe anything in connection with it without producing a map.”32 When the Canadian Air Board began experimenting with aerial photography, however, experts soon clashed over the question of whether aerial images could be treated as perspective maps from which distances and elevation could be extrapolated, or whether they were simply a new element in the long tradition of landscape depiction (by sketch, painting, or handheld camera). A partial answer came from R. B. McKay’s so-­ called Canadian method.33 This depended on the use of “high oblique” images that also included the horizon and therefore the vanishing point of the earth. Knowing the angle at which the oblique aerial photograph was taken, a plotter could overlay the image with a perspective grid. Projected onto a linear plane, this grid offered a quick and general measurement of the landscape. Canadians devoted great effort to both photogrammetry and photomosaic mapmaking in the 1920s, but after ten years of such endeavors, observers were asking why “the maps that were to have been made so easily by sailing over the country have not materialized in any number.”34 In a discussion of Canadian surveying efforts published in 1926, E. M. Jack observed, “The point that strikes one most . . . is the very great difficulties that Canada has to overcome, apart from the enormous extent of the country; physical difficulties and those of a rapidly developing country, and those also that must arise—they cannot help it, even with the best will in the world—from having a number of survey departments more or less independent.”35 In sum, the deficiencies of Canadian mapping could be explained in two main ways, both related to the size of the country. The first explanation referred to the problem of efficiency. The mapping effort remained divided among various provincial mapping branches, the GSC, the National Topographic Survey, and a host of other departments. The challenges identified by the ADLS in the late nineteenth century were only magnified in the twentieth. It seemed both inefficient and absurd that small survey departments engaged in such an immense task should duplicate the mapping of territory. The second explanation pointed to Canadian nature, in the form of the country’s variable land cover, and repeated the old concern that mapping was less accurate than modern standards demanded. According to F. H. Peters, the chief of the Topographical Survey of Canada in 1936, methods that were “in vogue in thickly populated countries” could only be utilized in a small part of Canada, where the vastness of the prairies and northern forests meant that new means for mapping that were “economical and effective” would need to be developed.36 Writing apologetically in the Empire Survey Review in 1936, Peters exm a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 249

Fig. 11.3 Photographic surveying of irregular terrain using a transit and camera. Camera stations A and B in the bottom right of the diagram (opposite) correspond to the two images. The lines (a´ and aa) show the transit angle of the camera and the horizon respectively. By using an instrument to calculate elevation, rectifying the scale difference between the two images, and applying a perspective grid, the surveyor can calculate angles and plot locations on the ground to form the basis of a topographic map. From M. P. Bridgland, “Photographic Surveying in Canada,” Geographical Review 2, no. 1 (1916): 19–26.

plained that Canada is “so large and still so undeveloped that it has only a small portion of its area so far covered by the loops of its primary triangulation net.” Work on this “net”—the Canadian Geodetic Survey—began early in the twentieth century before being formalized by an order-­in-­ council in 1909.37 Led initially by Chief Astronomer William F. King, the survey would eventually encompass the country with a three-­dimensional grid (latitude, longitude, and height) on which the position of any object or feature could be located precisely. In 1936, however—twenty years after King’s retirement and fifteen years after the first aerial reconnaissance for geodetic triangulation had been flown in the lower Fraser River valley of British Columbia—less than 15 percent of Canada was “accurately” mapped. Airplanes were not widely used for geodetic surveys until 1929, ground-­level work remained essential, and adjustments (for example, to 250 · c h a p t e r

eleven

the triangulation and level networks in 1927 and afterward) consumed time, and confined the net to a relatively narrow east-­west band of territory near the American border.38 Surveyors, foresters, geographers, and other mapmakers who worried that maps made with images taken from the air might sacrifice accuracy for the descriptive qualities of the photograph eventually embraced aerial photogrammetry. Canadian Air Surveys director J. A. Fletcher laid the groundwork for this on his first photographic reconnaissance flight in the early 1920s, when he described the landscape as a “living map.”39 Peters, from the Topographical Survey, left no doubt about the value of these new methods of mapping nature when he offered an example from the Lake St. Joseph area, on the border between Manitoba and Ontario, in his 1931 article in the first issue of the Empire Survey Review (fig. 11.4). Side-­by-­side m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 251

Fig. 11.4 Before and after aerial mapping. From F. H. Peters, “Surveying and Mapping in Canada,” Empire Survey Review 1, no. 2 (October 1931): facing 79.

images of maps produced by traditional mapping (people on the ground, traveling along waterways) and from oblique aerial photographs show “an interesting comparison of the amounts of topographic detail available.” By the 1930s, airborne mapping had to grapple with its own version of King’s epistemological paradox. As planes became more stable, cameras were improved, and surveyors became more proficient in air mapping. Accuracy increased, but errors multiplied. Frustrated after two years of hard work devoted to a detailed aerial survey of 530,000 acres of British Columbia forests, G. S. Andrews and L. G Trorey stated flatly: “The method is inexact, requires a base map of high accuracy and detail, skilled observers, and is subject to omissions.”40 Canadian mapping struggled over the choice of method to map the vast interior: by detailed yet time-­consuming and expensive ground surveys, or by uncertain yet expedient and cost-­effective airborne approaches. But the resolution fell to technology. A. M. Narraway, the chief surveys controller of Canada’s Department of the Interior, attested that aerial photographs were in the process of transforming the “geographical imagination” of Canadians: “We look at a map of Canada and quite subconsciously we read distances in terms of canoe or other ground means of travel, not realizing that our access to the air has completely revolutionized our position. We have not yet adjusted our thoughts adequately to the havoc which modern science is making of our old conceptions.”41 The aerial photograph—a mechanically produced object, easily made, easily stored, readily moved, and replete with detail—opened astonishing new vistas. Already in 1933, the National Air Photographic Library 252 · c h a p t e r

eleven

in Ottawa housed 600,000 images. These were the keys to visualizing a new Canadian geography. Just as the empty white expanses on the old map of Lake St. Joseph were suddenly turned into an intricate six-­thousand-­ square-­mile tapestry of rivers, lakes, streams, and swamps, so the nature of vast areas of northern Canada stood to be revealed as far-­from-­empty barrens. Air photographs were disclosing to Canadians “the intimate secrets of our resources,” and it seemed “increasingly evident that the ether has no more national or other frontiers. There are no strategic barriers.”42 If aerial photography seemed to banish many of the practical difficulties of mapping Canada’s extensive nature, other obstacles proved less tractable. The National Topographic System initiated in 1927 remained poorly articulated. There was little coordination in the scaling of maps or the integration of effort among federal departments responsible for mapping through the 1930s and 1940s; they worked variously at scales of one, two, four, and eight-­miles to the inch. Although charge of federal mapping services was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Mines and Resources in 1936, cartographic officers were beset by widely differing demands. As the editors of a set of essays on remote sensing in Canada after World War II observed: “Geodesists . . . had to devise ways of positioning oil wells offshore, . . . photogrammetrists were asked to produce medium-­scale federal maps for exploration and planning pipeline routes, and the air survey industry undertook aerial photography and airborne geophysical surveys.”43 Reflecting on this earlier period from the vantage point of the 1990s, Canada’s chief geographer, Iain Taylor, observed how the lack of cartographic agreement meant Canada could not be “officially” located on a map until the 1940s. Ultimately the Department of Defence’s mapping conventions were adopted. Having already prevailed over the Department of the Interior in 1922 and the Geological Survey in 1936, the military’s system was modified to become the government standard during World War II. The wartime need for Allied collaboration and strategic planning set forth in the Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940, which established the Permanent Joint Board on Defence with the United States and outlined a joint plan for the defense of Canada in the event of British defeat, mandated that all government cartography align with the US survey systems. Taylor surmises that overcoming departmental rivalries and bureaucratic friction had constituted only a part of the pre-­1940 problem. Standardizing the colors, fonts, scales, and symbols used to draft maps was one thing, but Canadian cartography was more deeply riven by an epistemological debate between two mapping paradigms: one “rooted in the post-­Darwinian revolution in m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 253

geological thought as refined, sketched, and drawn for the US Geological Survey,” and the other taking its lead from British Ordnance Surveys, “with stress on visible material objects and lines of communication that would have significance to an army operation in the field.”44 The postwar era was marked by continued efforts to streamline and systematize the exchange of spatial information. The most important was probably the establishment in 1947 of the Geographical Bureau in the Department of Mines and Resources (DMR). Renamed in 1950 the Geographical Branch, it was intended to incorporate more geographical knowledge into the government’s mapping and survey programs, and to address the problem of competing departmental priorities. The branch’s mandate was to “collect, organize, and make readily available for the use of all branches of the government, geographical data about Canada and foreign areas of importance to Canada and to prepare studies on specific aspects of the geography of Canada for the use of those engaged in government, defence, business, and scientific research.”45 These developments led the McGill University geographer F. Kenneth Hare to call his colleagues to arms in the first issue of The Canadian Geographer, published in 1950. “Canadian geographers are still struggling,” he wrote, “not merely for greater professional and academic respectability, but for a clear-­cut mission in the national life.”46 Hare argued that employment as school teachers and university professors, with here and there a “foothold, at least,” in government, was all very well, but Canadian geographers now had the opportunity to play a central role in a great mission of national importance. The “re-­exploration of Canada” was their destiny. Meeting it, they would finally reveal the nature of Canada, filling the blank spaces on the map and opening the remote regions of the country to modern development. Building on recent advances in aerial photogrammetry, Hare’s “mapping” of the national territory would identify resources, plan the best transportation routes, and assess the factors limiting and enabling human settlement. By the mid-­1950s, the ninety-­four members of the branch were hard at work across the country, doing their part to fulfill the DMR’s plan to enroll new technology such as the tellurometer and its airborne counterpart the aerodist—both radar-­based distance-­measuring and position-­determining devices—to map all of Canada at a scale of 1:250,000 before the centenary of Confederation in 1967. However, members of the Geographical Branch seemed less convinced than the opportunistic Ken Hare that air photo interpretation was the geographer’s metier. No one doubted that photo mapping and interpretation had improved the cartographer’s capacity to map 254 · c h a p t e r

eleven

extensive areas, but aircraft-­mounted cameras that read the ground as a two-­dimensional surface seemed to tell only part of the story to the growing cadre of geographers working in Canada. The professionalization of the field and the growth of the discipline after the 1935 appointment of Griffith Taylor as foundation professor of geography in the University of Toronto had spawned new interest in social, political, and economic information about space.47 Heavily focused on fieldwork and the collection of new data in a “geographical” register, members of the Geographical Branch distinguished their quest for information pertaining to the human use and value of landscape from “technical” surveys in the service of geodetic and topographic mapping carried out by the much larger Surveys and Mapping Branch of the DMR. Spending much of their first ten years compiling an Atlas of Canada to replace the one produced by the Department of the Interior in 1915, Geographical Branch members combed government records, books, and private libraries for information about Canada, and quickly built a map library that was soon among the largest in North America, with more than 115, 000 sheets.48 The branch also sent out about ten research parties into the field each summer to map such things as vegetation, minerals, and port access in different parts of Canada. Branch members also analyzed surface landforms and water features and recorded ice distribution, as they compiled what they described as landscape profiles. Much of this work was driven by federal government interest in the north as an economic frontier, a potential area for settlement, and a place for strategic defense. It generally involved the mapping of physical features to identify distinct geomorphological regions and analyze their potential for human use. Supplementing winter toil on the interpretation of air photo surveys with summer fieldwork, members of the branch produced detailed reports on Alert, Eureka, Mould Bay, Resolute, Mackenzie Delta, Darnley Bay, Coppermine, Bathurst Inlet, Boothia Isthmus, Wager Bay, Southampton Island, Ungava Territory, and the rail line between Winnipeg and Churchill, Manitoba. Most of the reports included information on the human and historical use of the areas. On the basis of such research, “land use” patterns came to be regarded as significant markers of geographical differentiation that integrated and made manifest various social, cultural, economic, political, and physical influences upon the face of the earth. In all of this, Geographical Branch members reflected current debates within geography about the nature of the field. In very simple terms, different groups favored particular foci: on the effects of biogeophysical conditions on people (environmental dem a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 255

terminism), on the reciprocal consequences of human-­environment interactions (human ecology), and on the study of spatial patterns and differences from place to place on the surface of the earth (regional description).49 For the most part, work from the Geographical Branch fell more firmly within the second and third of these spheres than it did the first. Human ecological approaches combined the tenets of evolution with a muted environmentalism, and sought to place current patterns in proper relation to their antecedents and successors. In this vein, early in the 1950s Norman L. Nicholson described the mid-­twentieth-­century rural landscape of the Cumberland-­Pictou Lowlands of Nova Scotia in meticulous detail, reviewed six epochs of earlier settlement, and averred that population movement due to farm enlargement and the adjustment of land use to soil type and topography would “continue to produce changes in the pattern of the rural geography of the region.” Others, including Nicholson’s predecessor as director of the Geographical Branch, J. Wreford Watson, worked similarly at local scales to integrate human activity with an understanding of the physical landscape to understand land-­use patterns and shape their development.50 Ultimately, however, as the shortcomings of the organic analogy at the heart of the human ecology approach became apparent, academic geographers turned their field to focus on spatial distributions and the different patterns these produced, and the Geographical Branch adopted a regional paradigm to interpret the country. To promote this point of view they made a filmstrip for Canadians detailing the eleven physical regions of the country, and in an internal memorandum Nicholson explained: “(1) Geographers think regionally. On broad principles a regional approach is the soundest from a professional point of view. (2) There is an increasing demand for regional, or areal investigations.”51 These commitments solidified just as a small but rapidly growing group of academic geographers in the United States turned away from the regional paradigm, to redefine the subject as a positivist “science of spatial relations and interrelations,” with geometry its language. In this view, regional geography failed to explain anything of value about the world; it employed naive forms of classification to pre­sent “overwhelming and boring litanies of ‘facts.’” Geographers, critics insisted, should adopt nomothetic (law-­seeking) approaches and quantitative methods to develop spatial or morphological theories.52 In Canada, however, economic and political circumstances focused the attention of parliamentarians and civil servants on more immediate and quotidian geographical concerns. After the recession and severe drought of 256 · c h a p t e r

eleven

the 1930s and the wartime disruptions that followed, technological innovations, radical shifts in the scale and location of manufacturing production, and rapid urbanization were transforming the face of the country. Western Canadian wheat farmers selling into complex Cold War markets benefited from subsidies and stabilization agreements, but across large areas of eastern Canada and in parts of the western prairie, landscapes were marked by abandoned farms, declining villages, eroding hillslopes, and silting rivers and streams. The “Resources for Tomorrow” conference, held in 1961, as well as the work of a special federal Senate committee on land use, urged the need for better information and more systematic assessment of land capability—of nature—across the country.53 The issue here was the growing administrative conviction that viable farms now had to be “located on reasonably productive land that was suited to mechanized operations, . . . had to have access to sufficient capital for underwriting investments in machinery and other necessary farm inputs, [and] . . . had to contain sufficient acreage to spread the costs of labour and machinery [to] . . . keep unit costs of these factors at competitive levels.” 54 In reflection of these concerns, “An Act to provide for the Rehabilitation of Agricultural Lands and the Development of Rural Areas in Canada” sought to expedite the identification of marginal and submarginal agricultural lands and facilitate their conversion to alternative uses for which they were better suited. It took the better part of two years to put necessary agreements and structures in place, but the federal government granted approval for a comprehensive inventory of a million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers) in early October 1963. Focusing on settled areas of the country, and involving federal and provincial agencies, the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) set out to map present uses of the land, assess the socioeconomic factors shaping them, and classify them according to their capability for agriculture, forestry, wildlife, and recreation.55 Each of these major categories was further subdivided. Existing land uses were assigned to one of ten subcategories: urban and associated nonagricultural uses; horticulture; orchards and vineyards; cropland; improved pasture and forage crops; unimproved pasture and range land; woodland; swamp, marsh, or bog; and unproductive land. Soils were assessed for their agricultural capability on a seven-­point scale, and similarly-­grained grids were used, at least initially, for recreation, wildlife, and forestry. All this effort to inventory the nature of Canada was to facilitate land planning rather than management, which even proponents of the inventory recognized required information at considerably higher levels of resolution than it could achieve. The ultimate aim of the CLI was to boost rem a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 257

Fig. 11.5 The Canada Land Inventory classification for soils. Soil capability classifications combine climate and soil characteristics to define seven major classes. Thirteen different types of limitations (salinity, stoniness, topography, inundation, etc.) are identified by subscripts. Agricultural land capability surveys also identify seven classes: Class 1 indicates land with climate and soil that allow cultivation of the widest range of crops; class 7 land has no potential for soil-­ bound agriculture. The intermediate classes may be inappropriate for some agricultural uses while being highly suitable for others. From Canada Department of the Environment, The Canada Land Inventory Report no. 2, 1965: Soil Classification for Agriculture (1972), 6. htttp://www.alc.gov.bc.ca/alc /content/alr-­maps/agricultural land.

gional economies by ensuring the efficient use of natural resources. To this end, the results of the inventory were to be published in maps, at a scale of 1:250,000. These would necessarily rest upon more detailed maps, at the preferred scale of 1:50,000, upon which great volumes of information distilled into alphanumeric codes would be recorded (fig. 11.5). By way of further example, the forest capability inventory classified particular sites according to their “inherent physical limitations to the growth of commercial forests” and on their capacity “to produce a mean annual increment of a minimum volume of a stated species.” So the symbol

4

W D

wS

258 · c h a p t e r

eleven

would indicate a site of modest to inferior capability (four on a seven-­ point scale), where growth was “limited by excessive moisture (W) and a dense soil or layers within the surface soil which limit rooting depth (D).” Beyond this, the symbol reveals that productivity of white spruce at this location would be “from 51 to 70 cubic feet per acre per year to rotation age in gross merchantable volume, exclusive of thinnings, bark, and branch wood.” Similar strategies were applied to the assessment of landscapes for tourist development (fig. 11.6). In principle, these kinds of assessment and coding were to be done at intervals of one hundred feet throughout the million square miles under review, either by direct observation or air photo interpretation. This was challenge enough. But there was a looming problem. How to analyze, compare, synthesize, and make sensible use of the vast array of information inscribed on the vast number of maps that would result? The task seemed overwhelming, rendering Geographical Branch staffers figurative Lilliputians set on developing “great perfection” in the shadow of a rising Brobdingnagian mountain of data. The challenge was best and beautifully illustrated in a retrospective National Film Board of Canada documentary titled Data for Decision, released in 1968.56 It finds its analytic center in the Ottawa offices of the Canada Land Inventory, and begins in the map library, an enormous space filled with seemingly endless lines of storage cabinets, each with about twenty-­ five drawers, arranged vertically. From these, busy staffers, all female, extract map sheets and walk to another part of the floor where other staffers, also predominantly women, sit row upon row at their desks, poring over maps. Tracing this journey, the film carries the viewer along one of the cabinet corridors, its soundtrack dominated by footsteps echoing off the furniture for fully fifteen seconds. Reinforcing the point, the narrator intones: “We need information. Data on resources has been piling up for years. . . . The problem is how to store it, measure it, and analyze it. Just to look at it, using conventional methods would take years and years. . . . To make decisions we need facts. But we have facts. . . . The problem is not making the surveys. . . . It is trying to read and summarize the results. . . . The amount of work involved in handling this data is enormous. Even the simplest operations take hundreds of people.” The whole process was tediously and expensively slow. It was difficult enough to utilize census data; the problem was “even worse” when maps were involved. “And so much of our land information comes only in maps.” Maps could only be compared effectively using transparent overlays. Too often, maps showing different attributes were at different scales. They m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 259

Fig. 11.6a Contoured map of the Peyto Lake area, from Canada Land Inventory of potential for tourism, assessment of the Peyto Lake area in Banff National Park, Alberta. From Canada Department of Regional Economic Expansion, The Canada Land Inventory Report no. 6, 1969: Land Classification for Outdoor Recreation (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1970), 84. The land inventory concluded that the Peyto Lake area has glacier views, road access, and land suitable for development of a viewpoint; but it also posted “subordinate” negative characteristics. The water was not sufficiently emerald in color, and there were few moose, elk, and goats.

Fig. 11.6b Aerial photo of the Peyto Lake area.

Fig. 11.6c Photograph of the view toward Peyto Lake, from the area marked 2U VG in the right portion of the contoured map in fig. 11.6a.

had to be rescaled, redrawn on transparent film, checked, retouched, and positioned before analysis could begin. Measuring the extent of overlap between two factors depended on the dot grid, “a method that hasn’t changed since the days of ancient Egypt” (cut to picture of frowning, exasperated analyst counting “occurrences” square by square). And precision was the watchword in all of this. Tellingly, an unoccupied desk among the several score such work stations shown in Data for Decision displays a large card bearing a single word in large capital letters: ACCURACY. How could this 262 · c h a p t e r

eleven

be achieved? “To compare two factors over one hundred square miles will take one man a whole working day. To compare only six basic factors for all of Canada would take 556 people eight hours a day for three years. It would cost eight million dollars. But we don’t have the staff. We don’t have the time. More resource data comes in every year, every month, every day.” To revert to cliché, here was a “wicked problem” or “perfect storm” even before those terms became common. As the high modernist impulse to order and control and rationalize and plan the world reached its crescendo, those charged with implementing this agenda confronted chaos and dismay. The immense project of mapping and managing the Canadian ecumene seemed (cliché again) to be caught in a northern Strait of Messina. This difficult metaphorical channel was defined on one side by the vastness of Canada, and on the other by the maelstrom of competing demands for efficiency and accuracy. It was further complicated by the long-­standing debate over whether Canada should be conceived of as a Euclidian geographical space in need of precise measurement (as geodetic mappers and practitioners of photogrammetry believed), or as a series of landforms and patterns raising questions about human-­nature relationships to be explored and elucidated using geographical techniques (a view favored by the Geographical Branch). By common account, safe passage through this tight spot came by chance—and technology—when Lee Platt, the newly appointed head of the Canada Land Inventory, met Roger Tomlinson, an employee of Spartan Air Services, an aerial photogrammetry-­cartography company, on a commercial airplane in 1962. In the ensuing conversation the two found common ground. A few years earlier, Spartan Air Services and Tomlinson had been charged to find the best location for the development of forest plantations to supply a paper mill the Canadian government was building in Kenya as part of an aid program. The contract was executed in much the same way as the Canada Land Inventory was proceeding: by using aerial photographs and ground surveys to generate transparent overlays showing soil capability, vegetation cover, and human settlement patterns, which were then laid on top of one another to shape decision choices.57 This was a simpler problem than the one confronting the CLI, because the Kenyan project was both smaller and more tightly defined. But the challenges involved had encouraged Tomlinson to think about ways of using emergent computer technology to improve upon “sieve” or overlay map analysis. Platt realized that he and Tomlinson faced similar professional problems and, by Tomlinson’s account, he encouraged Tomlinson to speak to a National Land Capability Inventory seminar held in Ottawa, on the topic of m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 263

“Computer Mapping: An Introduction to the Use of Electronic Computers in the Storage, Compilation and Assessment of Natural and Economic Data for the Evaluation of Marginal Lands.” Spartan Air Services subsequently received a contract from the Canadian Department of Agriculture to prepare a “Feasibility Report of Computer Mapping System” for the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Administration (ARDA).58 In retrospect, in the film Data for Decision, Tomlinson summarized his pitch as follows: At the moment, the government is rather like a farmer who’s just inherited his farm. He doesn’t really know how big the farm is, perhaps doesn’t know much about the soil. He hasn’t got too much idea about the climate, and he’s not really sure whether there’s usable water. And yet he has to make decisions that will let him plant the right seed and grow enough food to support his family. And if you think that would be a problem on an ordinary-­sized farm, think what it would be like with a million square miles.

Like a good farmer, the Canada Land Inventory was embarked on the task of figuring out the nature of its holdings and undertaking crop and forest assessments, soil surveys, forestry surveys, timber pest counts, wildlife surveys, sampling analysis, and so on. But human beings alone were unable to handle the vast amounts of information being accumulated. It was time to “harness the computer and use it to extend our abilities.” In this telling—as outlined in Data for Decision, the last fifteen minutes of which characterize the computer as an instant library in which information is stored as numbers, and which laud the capacity of drum scanners to turn maps into digital information, using photographs of these and other machines, whirring and beeping and buzzing away mysteriously and industriously—the Canada Geographic Information System was established to compensate for the shortcomings of humankind. By 1966, the forestry coordinator for the Canada Land Inventory saw only promise ahead. Through contracts, he wrote: ARDA is developing a computer system in which map lines will be recorded on magnetic tape in a numerical form by means of an automatic scanning device. All pertinent information for any land unit, including capabilities, present use, economic factors and population characteristics can then be placed on the tape along with the land unit. When perfected this will allow rapid area calculation, rapid multiple comparisons and the 264 · c h a p t e r

eleven

maps may be printed out at any required scale. With projected improvement in computer techniques it is quite possible that before the Inventory is complete, corrections, additions or deletions can be effected with direct map projections from the tape.59

Much has been made of this history. Standard accounts of modern mapping find the origins of GIS—and the subsequent transformation of cartography and spatial data analysis, and all that flows from it—in these events, though they cast them rather differently. For Terry Coppock and David Rhind, authors of a chapter titled “The History of GIS” in a pair of landmark volumes on geographical information systems, technological progress was the nub of the story.60 Computers capable of storing and processing digital information predated the 1960s, but it was IBM’s invention of the drum scanner that rescued ARDA’s Canada Land Inventory from drowning beneath waves of unmanageable nformation by allowing the digitization of mapped data. Environment Canada employees Crain and Macdonald trace a longer genesis. In their positivist progressive account, the Canada Geographic Information System was but a first step toward more sophisticated systems, the “initial phase of an information system” intended to “assemble, organize and determine the extent of existence of data on a particular subject.”61 Such “inventory” work was necessary but not sufficient for the subsequent tasks of data analysis and management. It was accomplished by using 1,500 polygon maps to cover and assemble data for the entire land area of Canada. When this was completed in 1968, the CGIS was reframed as the Canada Land Data System, with its analytical capacities made available to planners, farmers, park administrators, and others after 1971. Tomlinson was associated with this project until the CLDS was brought online. Thereafter, he pursued his doctorate through the University of London, started a private consulting firm, and wrote a number of widely used textbooks on GIS technology.62 Well before he died at the age of eighty in 2014, he was frequently described as “the father of GIS.”63 An avowed geographer, Tomlinson almost certainly coined the term “geographic information system” to characterize the blend of mapping and computer databases that he developed for the Canada Land Inventory.64 But even taken together, these accounts of the development of GIS—the technological, the positivist, and the heroic—remain incomplete and unsatisfactory. Assigning spatial coordinates to locations or activities on the surface of the earth is by no means new. Latitude and longitude have provided the means to do this for decades. What is unique to GIS is the ability of computers to store and recall information associated (that is, linked) m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 265

with any particular spatial coordinate at speeds and in quantities far beyond the capability of any human being or earlier technology. Similarly, the move from analog to digital storage of spatial information, and the capacity to make use of it, began well before the development of GIS. Cameras used in aerial photogrammetry were fitted with encoding systems capable of recording coordinates and heights of land onto punch cards during the mid-­1950s, while the same data systems were being tested to plot shipping lanes and cruise missile trajectories. As Tomlinson reflected on these developments toward the end of his career, he noted that he sought “to ask questions of maps, to be able to read them, to measure, combine, compare, and analyze the data they contained or could be related to them, and to produce useful information from them.” Thousands had done this before him, but he changed the cartographic game by pursuing the “fundamental idea . . . of using computers” to quicken and enhance human analytical capacity.65 In this way, Tomlinson helped move cartography from the traditional storage of specific information on particular analog maps that, when rendered on transparent sheets, could be laid over base layer maps from aerial photographs for purposes of comparison and analysis, to the modern storage of digital information on computers able to quickly retrieve, correlate, and display any chosen combinations of data. In doing this, geographic information systems overcame the limited space of the map. The question of scale became utterly irrelevant, as did the question of how much generalization or reduction was required in order to communicate information through the map. In some sense, therefore, the problem of accurately mapping a country as vast as Canada was solved by entirely transforming the nature of the map, converting it into an ephemeral output like those early traces in the sand or etchings on birch bark.66 Rendering mapping more malleable also seemed to promise the modernization and decentralization of the state, and a greater awareness of nature’s role in human affairs. Writing in the popular Canadian Geographic in 1968, D. F. Symington, who worked on the Canada Land Inventory project, hoped that the capabilities of GIS would spur an age of technocratic leadership, “which holds no dogmas, enshrines no sacred cows, and which is willing and able to understand the environment to understand people.”67 He also looked forward to the development of “sound policy and programs . . . for individuals, communities and regions,” based on the ready availability of digital economic, social, and environmental data and the promise of customized mapping. Just as the approaches then being developed in

266 · c h a p t e r

eleven

mathematical ecology promised to reveal nature’s secrets, those associated with GIS would turn new knowledge to the benefit of humankind.68 A quarter century on, however, several geographers and others challenged the desirability of such technocratic leadership and called the value of GIS into question, disparaging it as a mere information management system “concerned with facts but incapable of meaningful analyses.”69 The criticisms were driven in part by a growing challenge, most forcefully articulated by those engaged in the new field of cultural studies, to the hegemony and objectivity of science that played out through the 1990s in the so-­called science wars. Despite an enormous proliferation of studies in Canada and elsewhere utilizing GIS to facilitate the identification, management, protection, and exploitation of nature in its many guises, even defenders of “automated geography” acknowledged that “GIS does not address social issues, especially those that occur in a decision space somewhat independent of Euclidean space.”70 Others criticized what they took to be the excessive reliance of GIS practitioners on secondary data sets (information from field surveys, air photos, trigonometric surveys, etc., converted to digital form), or worried over a deeper question: “whether the logic of GIS, as a result of design decisions . . . privileges certain views of the world over others” likely to extend “a cybernetic ‘grid of control’” across the planet.71 There is now little serious debate over the latter question. All technologies are biased, and it is widely acknowledged that the ways in which information is collected, catalogued, and mapped influences political decision making and policy development.72 So too have other critiques of GIS waned in the last decade, as developments and refinements of the technology moved it from a highly specialized spatial database and mapping tool to a powerful medium for the communication of geographical information accessible to a wide range of users.73 Practitioners have found new and productive ways to bring GIS-­based spatial analysis to bear in feminist and social-­geographical, as well as environmental and anticolonial, studies—and much has been done to increase public understanding of and participation in GIS research.74 On the other hand—and perhaps ironically, given the local, community, and field orientation of early Geographical Branch commitments that shaped and spawned the CLI—many researchers have lost direct contact with the subjects of their inquiry as the increased availability of digital data has shifted investigations from field and forest to office and computer screen. As a corollary, there is some danger that the continuing limitations of GIS technology, requiring modeling to follow

m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 267

Fig. 11.7 Canada. Department of Energy, Mines and Technical Surveys. Surveys and Mapping Branch. Catalogue of Published Maps. Ottawa, 1978.

specified rules or imposing clear-­cut distinctions on fuzzy reality, might shape the ways in which problems are defined and analyzed—but the acid test here would seem to be whether the results improve our understanding of nature and lead to better stewardship of the environment.75 So GIS faces the very question asked of the technologies that preceded it: How will it improve comprehension of the country’s social, political, and ecological landscapes? Digital cartography and remote sensing have accelerated the production and presentation of information; they have also opened new questions about accuracy, omissions, and truth.76 They must grapple (albeit in a different register) with the selfsame problematic that Otto Klotz identified a century ago: Without the seamless integration of methods, technology, culture, and nature, efforts to map Canada will be tantamount to building a mansion upon quicksand. The task of mapping Canada has been long and fraught, and remains incomplete. How successive technologies will function in radically different physical conditions, 268 · c h a p t e r

eleven

or fit the unique needs of different regions, has been a constant concern. Each new survey system has had to be justified against the time, money, and effort invested in it. The volume of survey charts, photographs, or (in recent terminology), “data” to be processed, stored, managed, and used by branches of government and industry has also posed a sizable problem. Vastness, and the changing technological, ecological, and social terrains of the country, have meant that iteration after iteration of Canadian mapmaking has remained incomplete. As late as 1981, the geographers Norman Nicholson and Louis Sebert traced a “wilderness line” between those areas of the country mapped at a 1:50,000 scale by 1967, and the implied terra incognita beyond (fig. 11.7). This is a very Canadian map: a cartographic account of how the project of re-­exploring the country is proceeding, using a single line to banish earlier mapping efforts—once modern and progressive, but now dreadfully incomplete and outdated—to the dark spaces of terra nullius, while celebrating the results of more recent efforts to calibrate space. In tracing the long history of efforts to map Canadian nature, as we have done here, it is impossible to avoid consideration of both changing values and the changing nature of mapping in Canada and elsewhere. In the end, it is clear that the vastness of Canada played a significant part in both of these stories: the sheer size of the country confounded attempts to know and document it, and the accelerating accumulation of data pertaining to this massive territory drove the development of new methods of mapping and data management (and also drove analysts to distraction). Yet this is only one small part of these intertwined stories. Character and circumstance, self-­interest and institutional rivalries, doubt and debate, serendipity, and especially technological developments have shaped the ways in which the nature of Canada has been mapped and understood over decades. This will surely continue, and the most pressing question, as we contemplate a future dominated by the digital encoding, manipulation, and communication of information will be, as ever, whether we, unwittingly or otherwise, subordinate our interests to the limitations and proclivities of new technologies, or use their potential to assist us in mapping, managing, and understanding nature to ensure its appropriate stewardship.

m a p p i n g c a n a d i a n n a t u r e  · 269

chap ter t welve

seeing forests as systems Maps of North American Forest Conditions and the Emergence of Visual-­Ecological Thinking

Peter Nekola

Beginning in the 1890s, a number of intricate maps appeared which stood out from earlier maps of forested areas in significant ways. These maps, drawn by a wide range of actors, from local forestry workers to researchers in fields from dendrology to entomology, often accompanied public reports on “forest conditions” around North America. They constituted, I argue, an early chapter of a new era for cartography and for human understanding of forests. Historically, they marked a shift away from forest maps created largely or solely to support extractive industries, to assert territorial claims, or to aid navigation. These maps did not just map trees or tree types; nor did they chart the value of marketable timber, as their predecessors had. Commissioned by public institutions or drawn independently by researchers responding to deforestation and degradation of the landscape, their goal was to study how natural systems worked. Philosophically, these cartographers did not claim to find distinct units or objects in nature and map them. They experimented with new ways of representing field data, and of employing data in ways that allowed for the identification and correlation of patterns and conditions in the landscape. As such, these maps made possible systematic forest study across the continent: the study of conditions 270

that sustained forests, and which could potentially sustain them in the long term. Published before the field of ecology became firmly established on the continent, and while systematic forest conservation was in its infancy, such cartographic correlation of patterns and conditions on the land posed questions central to the emerging field, and laid the groundwork for some of its first published studies. what does it mean to see a forest?

It has become fairly common for popular historical accounts, especially in North America, to characterize the early years of conservation and preservation first and foremost as a social, political, cultural, even a literary and artistic movement—a sense that is built into the mainstream use of terms like environmentalism. It is indeed tempting to think of earlier ideas of conservation and preservation as arising from the individual genius of figures who inspired the public at various times, such as the writer and activist John Muir and his predecessor Henry David Thoreau, or the civic-­minded charisma of US President and park and public land advocate Theodore Roosevelt, or even Roosevelt’s comparatively sober forest chief, Gifford Pinchot, a public figure in his own right.1 Similarly, visual imagery of sublime, wild landscapes, from paintings of the Hudson River School to the photographs of Ansel Adams, stimulated public perception in ways that scientific studies did not, building public support for the preservation of places thought to be particularly spectacular, many of which became national parks.2 This is the case with many of the most widely read types of historical accounts, particularly history textbooks, which tend to be devoted to political and legislative history, with science, economics, and conservation as footnotes to legislative actions and executive foresight.3 This has also been largely the case in conventional philosophical accounts, particularly in the subfield of environmental ethics, which often emphasizes abstract discussions of “wilderness” or “species,” emphasizing more succinct objects or symbols rather than the more slippery notion of “conditions,” embraced by early ecologists.4 These stories need not be understated, but to focus on them alone to explain the history of visualizing natural landscapes in North America, particularly with regard to preserving or conserving those landscapes, is to miss an important story from the same period. This is a story of representing and reasoning that has come to underlie many of the more scientific arguments made for sustaining these areas as systems, or ecosystems, in the present day. While much-­celebrated national park systems played a unique role in s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 271

North American public imagination, much active forest administration and study in both the United States and Canada in early years was undertaken not by park services but by agricultural agencies on the federal, state, dominion, and provincial levels. This might invite historical assessments to assume that forests were seen and treated as one crop among many, a “timber” crop that could be more efficiently planted and cut in monoculture— and conserved in monoculture. This was a fairly progressive idea in its time, as many lumber companies practiced “cut and run” in the nineteenth century, leaving locals and the larger public with clear-­cut or burned-­over “lands nobody wanted,” often simply abandoned or lost to tax forfeiture.5 Even so, forest monocultures, or “plantations,” also proved unsustainable, if more subtly so, for some of the same reasons. These reasons came to be illustrated in maps of conditions, which came to show the importance not just of stemming erosion but of maintaining a broad set of conditions necessary to allow forests to regrow, reproduce, and to evade mass dieout as a result of plant diseases, insect invasions, fluctuations in temperature, or other possible occurrences.6 The transition from seeing forests as simple stands of various species of timber to understanding them as complex systems, inextricably intertwined with water, soil, weather, and climate conditions as well as a wide variety of other plant and animal species, involved correlating distribution patterns of all these phenomena on maps. It was a transition in thinking made possible by developments in visualization. Such maps did not reduce forest phenomena into distinct, easily classifiable, or economically evaluable objects. In working to represent the “condition” of forests, those maps’ makers had also to represent conditions that made particular forest areas with particular characteristics possible in the first place. Philosophically they had to think not in terms of how things initially may have appeared to them, but in terms of conditions of possibility: what made what they had appeared to observe possible to observe in the first place, and how that knowledge changed the very character of their observations. This allowed them to begin thinking about not just where forests were, and what forests were, but about how forests were, how forests worked, and how damaged or endangered forests could be restored and sustained. It was similarly a transition in cartography, which had been dominated for at least a century by territorial and “locational” concerns—mapping apparently distinct or discrete objects, rather than working to self-­reflexively interpret more malleable “conditions.”7 The study of conditions undertaken in the hundreds of maps that accompanied several decades of reports on forest conditions around the continent 272 · c h a p t e r

twelve

relied on what geographers, botanists, and others engaged in field study had often called “map work.”8 To understand how a particular area worked, all discernable systems—water, soil, weather and climate, land slope, relief, and topography, just to begin with—needed to be understood in terms of distribution patterns across, under, or above the earth’s surface. Maps could show these patterns, but not usefully all at once—a situation that prompted mapmakers to experiment with a variety of layering techniques. Such techniques explored the possibility of understanding the forest—its lands, waters, plants, and animals—as a system, or as layers of interrelated systems; and they suggested that those systems could be most fruitfully studied not through reasoning that proved cause and effect between discrete objects, but through correlation of discernible and reasonably representable conditions. Map work involved documenting as much descriptive information as possible concerning moisture conditions, soil conditions, or weather conditions, for example, and then mapping these so as to allow the reader to draw correlations between each in order to get a broader sense of what could grow, self-­seed, reseed, or survive, where, and how. Map work itself constituted a complex but extremely useful reasoning process. No one engaging in it was likely to understand a map naively, as an objective representation of “nature” or a picture of a section of earth’s surface that made any claim to completeness or totalizing notions of accuracy. Nor could it reasonably be considered a projection or expression of subjective ideas or ideologies. Local conditions were observed, interpreted, and documented by particular people at particular places in particular times with particular skills and experience, themselves working under particular sets of conditions. While this could be considered imprecise by laboratory-­ scientific standards, in this case it offered a rough early template for the kind of reasoning that helped move the field sciences from the taxonomic practices known as “natural history” to the correlative and conditional reasoning that would form the philosophical core of ecological science. The language and practice of studying the process commonly described as “nature” by correlating maps of local “conditions” can be traced as far back as the work of Alexander von Humboldt, who had sought to understand how weather patterns made possible different types of plants at high elevations in the Andes Mountains.9 It is no accident that some of the most influential early promotors of this sort of study in North America, German-­born Bernhard E. Fernow in particular, who worked for and in some cases created several public agencies and university departments in both the United States and Canada, had trained in Humboldtian natural philosophy.10 The practice of using maps not to represent apparent entities s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 273

but to study and interpret conditions helped liberate environmental study from older taxonomic approaches and classificatory schemes that were of limited use in understanding forests as systems. If this practice appeared imprecise to those expecting a discrete and definitive account of explicit causes and effects, it was because the world itself was the laboratory, in all its complexity. Its maps, its language, and its advocacy can be regarded, in a word, as extremely careful. Yet the maps and studies that demonstrated such care were at the same time inextricably tied to policy. When the newly formed Ecological Society of America began to make public recommendations in the 1920s, those recommendations often took the form of arguments for the preservation of “natural conditions.” Instead of seeking to preserve distinct objects, the society sought to maintain the immediately perceived—as well as the potential and possibly yet unimagined—future value of natural systems and areas.11 This employment of map work and conditions informed not just what should be preserved or conserved, but how it could be preserved or conserved, used and lived with while also being renewed and sustained. The Weeks Act, signed into law by US President William Howard Taft in 1911, specifically ordered the preservation of complex forest systems to maintain the health of local watersheds. This articulated reasoning would not have been comprehensible without such maps, nor would the resulting law’s enforcement have been possible.12 The form, content, and design of these maps, and the content and language of the reports they accompanied, altogether demonstrated a willingness of those employed within public agencies to consider forests as systems. As such, it constituted an important early chapter in coordinated efforts to study forests with their general health in mind. forest conditions in the northwoods

In 1897, a new sort of map appeared in a bulletin published by the Forestry Division of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) titled “Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin.” An area stretching from the Menominee River west to the St. Louis and Upper St. Croix Rivers, north to Lake Superior and south to around the forty-­fifth parallel, where forests gave way to farms, appears on the map in swaths of green and pink, overlaying townships marked by symbols denoting areas where previously forested land had been “nearly or entirely cut over” or otherwise “largely cut or damaged by fires” (plate 12). The map, according to its compilers, Forestry Division special agent Fili-

274 · c h a p t e r

twelve

bert Roth, and the division’s chief at the time, Fernow, was “made to show the present forest conditions as well as to give some notion of the former extent and character of these woods.” The difference between present and former, as Roth and Fernow understood it, was stark. They wrote: At present these forests are materially changed. . . . During forty years of lumbering nearly the entire territory has been logged over. The pine has disappeared from most of the mixed forests and the greater portion of pineries proper have been cut. There is to-­day scarcely a township in this large area where no logging has been done. In addition to this, the fires following logging operations or starting in the new clearings of the settler have done much to change these woods. Nearly half this territory has been burned over at least once; about three million acres are without any forest cover whatever, and several million acres more are but partly covered by the dead and dying remnants of the former forest.13

While the sheer scale of forest clearing, through transient logging operations and the slash fires that nearly always followed, was indeed massive, covering much of the area on the map, still deeper issues concerned Roth and Fernow, and were the reasons for their authoring of the report and drawing its map. The issue was not that the forests had once been cut or burned, but that they, among the most studious of foresters in their day, were not sure how, whether, or under what circumstances these forests might regrow at all. Indeed, Roth and Fernow, given what they knew about soils, moisture, shade, topography, and other local “conditions,” had to entertain the possibility that temporary removal of forests entirely from these lands might change the conditions that had previously allowed the forests to reproduce on their own. If conditions had changed sufficiently on the ground, there was a perceived danger that the forests might not come back. The present “conditions” of which Roth and Fernow wrote not only were what would later be called ecological, but were also historical, economic, and political. They involved a choice between remaining stands, marked by “plus” signs on the map, being “protected” in ways that could increase the likelihood that forests would regrow, or be left to “be largely crippled or entirely killed by fires, or else cut into cordwood for shook purposes,” as they surely would be if “present conditions” were allowed to persist. Roth and Fernow had observed that when clear-­cut and burned-­over areas did regrow in this region, they did so generally in aspen, which appeared to be

s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 275

better adapted to drier, more exposed postfire conditions. These foresters held out the possibility that, among fully grown aspen groves, which accumulated a degree of soil and moisture over time, pines and other species might eventually return. But this was a guess, and possibly an optimistic one given the extent of their experience. They wrote: “While the ability of white pine to reproduce itself is amply demonstrated in every county in North Wisconsin, the fact still remains that the great bodies of cut-­over pine lands have not and do not at present re-­cover themselves with young pine. It is also true that more than 80 per cent of the bare-­burned cut-­over lands are practically devoid of any valuable forest growth whatever.”14 It is clear that what had constituted “valuable” forest growth to USDA officials in the late nineteenth century most certainly had an economic dimension. White pine or Pinus strobus lumber had come to be of great importance to the North American economy. It had been harvested quickly and, in the words of historian Agnes Larson, “wastefully.” And as Fernow and his contemporaries noted in 1899, it was difficult to restore that tree after it had been clear-­cut, an observation Fernow drew from his experiences studying its conditions in the Adirondack Mountains, an area he had successfully lobbied to become a state-­protected forest reserve in 1885.15 Though in 1897 Roth and Fernow were both in the employ of an agency dedicated to promoting and sustaining economic development, it becomes evident that they were in the process of learning and articulating something else. That something else grew from an increasing understanding that, if there were conditions under which forests could naturally reproduce, then altering those conditions could result in some species disappearing entirely. A thick red line on the map, arcing south from the Chequamegon Peninsula on Lake Superior roughly to the vicinity of Green Bay on Lake Michigan, illustrates the “limit of hemlock,” the southern limit of where that tree (Tsuga canadensis) grew in substantive proportions. Roth and Fernow note: Wherever the forest is partly cleared, where considerable pine is removed, the hard woods cut out, clearings and roads opened, and also where fire has run, the Hemlock, with its shallow system of roots, at once shows its great sensitivities to any interference in soil moisture, and generally all, or at least most, of the trees succumb. In this way a large proportion of the Hemlock on the lighter gravelly loams of Price, Sawyer, Chippewa and other counties, and also much of the timber on heavier lands in the vicinity of pine slashings, etc., has died and now furnishes great quantities of dead and down material for future fires, which in turn will decrease 276 · c h a p t e r

twelve

the supply of this material, the value of which is greatly underestimated. . . . Large quantities have been killed by fire and exposure to wind and sun . . . and market conditions . . . have prevented a proper appreciation of this product.16

Hemlock—along with spruce, fir, and other trees that, together with pine, formed part of the fabric of the northern forest—was often left to die in the wake of extraction of more valuable white pine. As Roth and Fernow observed, hemlock was not a tree that easily survived outside of its relationships with other tree species, which ensured the moisture and shade conditions in which it grew. Its disappearance from the forest might have unanticipated consequences. They continued: The forest cover being a condition of the earth’s surface which influences surrounding climatic conditions, especially the water drainage in certain situations, it becomes necessary to be informed on the topographical and geographical distribution of the forest areas with reference to water courses, so that the state may protect the communal interest by measures for the preservation of favorable water conditions. Baneful influence of denudation upon water conditions having been brought out in this report, a closer investigation of the changes and of the areas specifically concerned is indicated, so as to insure special attention in the forest policy of the state to these areas.17

The overall conditions, or health in this case, of the forests was not the same thing as what had made them seem “economically important” in the moment as “forest supplies as factors in the wealth of the state” or as investment “capital” for private “woodworking establishments.” Yet even if one did prioritize the expense of extraction and production, market conditions, tax receipts, and thus valued forests in terms of “the amounts of standing timber available,” such accounting was at some point bound to pose the question, “How long can these supplies be relied upon?” Economic planning, state and private, needed an understanding of forest health and sustainability, or “continuance of supplies [and] reproduction of forest growth,” informed by “the changes which go on in the forest cover through lumbering operations and clearing or which are due to fire and storm and the conditions of the young growth.” Care had to be taken to prevent cutover lands from being “turned into desert.” While some forest lands were owned “by settlers who are . . . apt to improve or care for forest growth,” and others were held by “corporations which are continuous” and likely s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 277

held “broad-­minded views” in support of the long-­term health of their resources and communities, the unfortunate experience of much of the forest lands of the Northeast and Great Lakes was to have been used and then cast aside by “speculators who [had] no permanent interest in the lands,” leaving the public and its agencies to work to repair the damage.18 According to Roth and Fernow, such care would require knowledge of such a nature “that it can not be ascertained by the methods of a mere enumerator. . . . It requires the employment of an unusually well-­fitted expert who is . . . thoroughly familiar with forest botany and forest growth in all its stages of development . . . [and] who possesses a broad view of all the problems and conditions entering into consideration, and can give them proper value and proportionate attention.” Such conditions are not just economic but climatic, and involve the relation of water as well as the “character of the soil,” all conditions which are “alone insufficient” but best understood together. A broad evaluation of these conditions together, ultimately as a system, must inform forest lands policy. Forests “grow as a rule in mixture,” and include “species which either have no [specific economic] use or only inferior value,” making it “necessary to know the composition of the forest growth in the proportion in which the different timber trees participate in it, if we wish to have any conception of its economic value and promise for the future.”19 Maps such as “Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin,” printed and reprinted in 1897, 1898, and 1899, and Horace Beemer Ayres’s “Timber Conditions in the Pine Region of Minnesota,” printed in 1899, showed just how much pine had been thoroughly cut in the Northwoods of the Lake Superior country, leaving the vast majority of the area’s forests with an “appearance . . . of a pine slashing” in Wisconsin, and with lands “90 percent burned over” in Minnesota.20 Fernow wrote, “At present nothing is done wither to protect or restock the denuded cut-­over lands, of which fully 80 percent are not and will likely remain for a long time unproductive waste land.” Not only does this result in “gradually but surely driving from the State the industries which have been most conspicuous in its development, depriving a cold country of a valuable factor in its climatic conditions and affecting detrimentally the character of the main drainage channels of the state.”21 Successive maps of all relevant phenomena, or “conditions,” in forest areas, would be desirable if sufficient resources could be allocated to produce them. Correlating the patterns of data they displayed, successively, could allow for greater understanding of interrelationships between natural phenomena in forest lands, and give some direction to the complexity of restoration, preservation, and sustainability efforts by helping in278 · c h a p t e r

twelve

volved parties understand forest regions as systems of healthy interrelation, in good condition or poor condition, when those relationships—which would come to be called “ecological”—ceased to function. While Fernow’s understanding of the interrelationships of such phenomena was limited by today’s standards, it reflected some of the broadest and most integrated protoecological ideas of his day. In 1897, Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago was in the process of formulating his pioneering theory of ecological succession in the dune landscape south of Lake Michigan, and William Gardner Smith of the University of Leeds was just beginning the fieldwork for his Botanical Survey of Scotland, which would prove essential to Cambridge University botanist Arthur George Tansley’s development of the ecosystem concept in the decades to follow. Tansley would rely on colorful overlapping patterns of conditions on these surveys, which allowed the reader to draw correlations that, he argued, suggested interrelationships that were sufficiently coherent to merit the adoption of a new term to describe them: “ecosystems.”22 Fernow had admitted that his understanding of such conditions, systems, and interrelationships was “imperfect” and incomplete at best, but still of practical value, or “sufficient to show how wantonly our forest wealth has been and is being squandered and to demonstrate the necessity of concerted and systematic action by the Government and the people to arrest this waste in view of its threatened effects upon the future.”23 Yet informing such action by framing studies not as surveys of “timber value” but as maps of “forest conditions” was a significant philosophical shift in itself, perhaps more than Fernow himself realized. It pushed aside taxonomic and economistic objectifications of nature, and opened the door to a careful study of patterns and distributions which, when visualized on maps, allowed for the level of correlation that made it possible to see and far more easily understand how forests functioned as systems. By employing this language, Fernow sought to emphasize the degree by which conditions could vary, change, or show complexity and also show the interpretive dimensions of forest study.24 In this he implied that the practice of studying individual phenomena in isolation by class or species, of claiming to establish causation between such phenomenon, or of directly, comprehensively, or exactly representing forests as such, was untenable. Conditions could be observed, experienced, and also mapped. While maps were indeed necessary for forest study—especially as they allowed for increasingly complex correlations involving water, soil, topography, weather, and climate; burned or harvested status; and other conditions—representing such phenomena as distinct objects implied that they s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 279

could be identified and studied as distinct objects, and that distinct causation by one upon another could be established through minimal field study or even speculation. Maps that purported to represent surface phenomena exactly, as opposed to conditionally, constituted a kind of philosophical overreach. Understanding such maps to represent conditions was, for Fernow, consistent with using tools to study and experience changing conditions in the field, and with working to understand forests in ways simultaneously interpretive and correlative. As such, forests could be studied in their complexity, and patterns and coherence in data could continue to take shape over time—given, of course, the sufficient effort and expense this demanded philosophically, institutionally, and in the field. None was an easy route. lessons from the great lakes forests

The area around the upper Great Lakes, dominated by pine and fir forests since the retreat of its glaciers, had been mapped in a number of ways in the previous century, but never quite like this. The area in Roth and Fernow’s map had certainly been mapped before 1897, but the vast majority of those maps included little or no forest information. Indigenous maps, and the fur trade–­era maps based on them or drawn independently, had largely illustrated transportation corridors along waterways and portages, the backbone of local trading economies for centuries before the industrial era. As early as the 1880s, public agencies in North America made a concerted effort to document the extent not only of forest density and type, but of distinct tree species, according to their Linnaean names. In 1883 the census of the US Department of the Interior published sixteen such maps, drawn by Charles Sprague Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, showing the continental distribution of several economically important tree species, from oaks to Douglas firs, insofar as information was available. Sargent himself would advocate for wilderness preservation in a manner similar to that of John Muir; at this time he was working with Fernow to advocate for the preservation of the Adirondack forests, and, in the 1890s, federal forest reserves across the United States. But the primary tool of his maps was classification, reflecting the natural history conventions of the time.25 In the United States, the land survey for extending the gridded township-­ and-­range system westward in the nineteenth century had tended to skip over forested areas such as the Northwoods of the Great Lakes region. It made much of its initial progress mapping out more potentially hospitable 280 · c h a p t e r

twelve

farmland, particularly along westward rail corridors. Near midcentury, for example, the US Congress allocated funding for the surveys to extend the township-­and-­range system through the thickly forested Upper Peninsula of Michigan only when its members concluded that competing copper claims demanded that the federal government impose some order. Surveyors noted both geology and forest composition, to the extent that these were understood. Yet that knowledge itself was, at the time, largely limited to what was useful for extractive industries. An 1846 survey book kept by William Austin Burt, an official land-­ office surveyor, bears this out. Each page noted details concerning rocks and trees he had encountered that he had deemed of potential extractive value. Burt also made astute observations concerning geological processes as he worked to make sense of where mineral seams were located in light of speculations concerning the formation and distribution of surface rocks. Despite this, his notes give little sense that he understood forests in a similarly processual way. He seems to have paid attention to soil, moisture, or underbrush vegetation only as it impeded the progress of his survey, which it appears to have done. Yet Burt’s final report did include the prescient language of conditions “sustaining” and “supporting” timber growth, suggesting the plausibility of basic ecological concepts to one who had spent extended time in the woods.26 One crew member of Burt’s 1846 township-­and-­range survey expedition, Charles Brotherton, later worked as a private surveyor for local logging and mining interests in the lands around Lake Superior, passing the skills he had acquired in public survey to several generations of Brothertons, among them his son Frank. Like many others at the time, the Brothertons had migrated to the region in search of work, and had found it in the woods. Frank Brotherton, in a plat book entry dated March 7, 1878 (fig. 12.1), drew what would come to be known as a “timber cruiser’s chart,” documenting an area of “timber” (section 36 township 40 range 17 in northern Wisconsin) in terms of its market value. Frank used a gridded value estimation system, which takes up the bottom third of the page. At the time, pine was in greatest demand because it provided large, straight boards that were easy to work and light to transport—the preferred wood for framing smaller domestic and commercial buildings in towns springing up across the West.27 This chart showed a dominance of birch, hemlock, spruce, and fir in the marshy area west of what is labeled Loon Lake (renamed Keyes Lake in the twentieth century). While hemlock was used for lath, spruce and fir for poles, birch for handles, and cedar for posts, it seems likely that initial waves of logging interests passed this area by in search of s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 281

Fig. 12.1 Frank Brotherton, Section 36, township 40-­17, March 7, 1878. Manuscript: Wisconsin, 1878. Brotherton Manuscript Map Collection. Courtesy of the MacLean Collection.

more profitable ventures. The same area appeared on Roth and Fernow’s 1897 map as mixed forest, with whatever pine it had “nearly or entirely cut over.”28 There was no need to print charts drawn purely for extraction, like these timber charts that scoured the landscape for what could be cut and sold. While some data might find its way to public agencies, most forest information, when it was mapped, had this singular, extractive purpose, and remained in the realm of what Craig Kinnear has called “privatized information.”29 Timber cruisers’ charts exist, for this reason, exclusively in manuscript form. The Brothertons and their contemporaries worked on commission, following compass readings in freezing temperatures or swarmed by biting insects, almost always over rough, trailless terrain. Cruisers’ shorthand and cartographic styles varied widely, and often was only legible to a handful of readers. But, suiting their purpose, all contained a few necessary elements. They determined location within the relatively new township and range system, and described the location of potentially 282 · c h a p t e r

twelve

valuable timber according to its location in the grid: SE of NW, E 1/2 of SW, etc. And they contained either descriptions, valuation, or estimations of extractable timber. The timber charts helped to ensure that within a few years most of the vast stands of old-­growth pine around the upper Great Lakes would be gone, and logging companies would chart lesser-­valued trees and regrowth for cordwood (for fuel) and pulpwood (for paper). Many smaller forest towns, rail sidings, and “camps,” along with their rail lines, soon disappeared from maps, their unsettled populations moving elsewhere in search of new work. In larger forest towns such as Fort William, Ontario (now part of Thunder Bay), and Wausau, Wisconsin, paper mills, more easily sustained by regrowth that would be unprofitable as timber, came to replace lumber mills. The initial wave of cutting in many North American forests took place so quickly, the economic boom so quickly a bust, that even federal authorities not otherwise interested in forest restoration came to recognize the need for adopting practices that would be more economically sustainable in the long term. It was this experience that Fernow, Roth, and subsequent cartographers producing similar maps would reflect upon. The experience of the Great Lakes offered an example of what not to do in other forest areas. While Roth and Fernow’s 1897 map and accompanying report is clearly a critique of wasteful and economically unsustainable logging practices, it was also an early chapter of a more complicated study of the nature of forests and the consequences of clear-­cutting, slash logging, and the large and devastatingly intense fires that regularly followed. Roth, Fernow, Ayres, and many others had observed the connection between logging practices and these sorts of fires, which in previous years had cost thousands of human lives and decimated logging towns like Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and Hinckley, Minnesota. Roth and Fernow speculated further that such fires had changed local conditions to the extent that forests had difficulty recovering. If part of the answer to the first problem lay with more economically efficient logging practices, the second question demanded thinking that was effectively ecological. To begin to understand why cut-­ and-­burned forests did not appear to regenerate like other forests that had experienced natural fires meant understanding that a forest was not simply a timber stand, quantifiable in board feet, post, pole, or cord measures, but part of a larger system: what ecologists would begin to call a plant community or ecosystem. Fernow and his successors would recognize that the lessons of the upper Great Lakes were relevant anywhere forestry was practiced: across the cons e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 283

tinent from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, from the arid Southwest to the Pacific Northwest, and from the southeastern Appalachians to the forests of Quebec and the Maritime Provinces. The resulting maps and reports came at a time when state, federal, provincial, and dominion governments were confronting the landscapes and costs—human, economic, and ecological—of the unregulated logging of the nineteenth century. They offered blueprints for forest management on the ground; sketches for state, provincial, federal, and dominion conservation policy; and building blocks for the early development of scientific forestry and ecological study. All of this was based on the observation that understanding what it meant to “reserve” forests, in the language of the time, or preserve or sustain forests, was understanding what Roth, Fernow, Ayres, and Humboldt before them had called the forests’ “condition.” Implicit also in this language was a commitment to the idea that these forests existed in a “conditional” sense, in which their destruction or their flourishing was only possible in particular locations for particular reasons. It suggested that their ultimate vulnerability was their dependence on what conditions sustained them: their place in a system or community, which subsequent mapping efforts would work to make clear. west, northwest, southwest, and crown land

Fernow was involved in these subsequent mapping efforts, both in the mapping itself and in requesting and securing public funds for maps and studies that documented forest conditions around the United States and Canada. He had been writing reports recommending greater public supervision of forest lands through the establishment of a division of forestry within the USDA since the 1880s, and by the turn of the century he was advocating for the establishment of an even more robust forest service in the United States, which would eventually come to fruition in 1905 with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt.30 Acknowledging the role public institutions could play (or should play, according to Fernow) in the restoration of cutover lands, the US Forest Reserve Act of 1891, signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison, allowed US presidents to designate public forests as regulated, conserved “forest reserves,” following the model of New York State’s Adirondack Reserve. Harrison himself set aside several forest reserves in the far West, among them reserves in the Cascade, Gila, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, though no consensus had been achieved concerning the details of their practical management or protection. In 1897, President Grover Cleveland followed 284 · c h a p t e r

twelve

suit, establishing reserves in the Olympic and Rocky Mountains. In Canada at roughly the same time, several forest reserves were established on the provincial level and, after 1900, dominion-­wide, due in part to the efforts of the Ottawa-­based Canadian Forestry Association (CFA), of which Fernow was a member. The CFA explicitly advocated for “the preservation of forests for their influence on climate, fertility, and water supply” in addition to the value of their timber.31 In all cases, the first step involved surveying and mapping, but on far more (and far more complex) levels than simple timber surveys could offer. Independent of Fernow’s advocacy from within the USDA, a committee appointed by the US National Academy of Sciences and chaired by Sargent at Harvard echoed some of Fernow’s points in 1897 in a parallel argument to the US Department of the Interior. “The influence of forests upon climate, soil, and the flow of water in streams has attracted much attention during the last century,” they wrote, “but while the general consensus of opinion among experts is that this influence is potent and beneficial, the absence of exact data extending over long periods of time and the complex nature of the phenomena involved, render it necessary to base this conclusion rather upon general considerations than upon statistics.”32 Such general considerations, at least insofar as they were articulated in the report, consisted of a series of anecdotal observations, largely from the cited experience of European land and water managers. While the report suggested that “accurate survey and careful mapping” of forest lands might shed some light on this complexity, it gave no indication of how this might work—but only that the US Geological Survey (USGS), also part of the Department of the Interior, was the “only” organization “equipped for this work.”33 The question of how, in this case, maps could be developed to offer a reasonably empirical alternative to “general considerations,” even if lacking the exactitude of statistics, was thus left to Fernow, who explored the possibility in his exhaustive Report upon the Forestry Investigations of the US Department of Agriculture, 1877–1898, published after he had left the USDA for a post at Cornell University. While several maps and many images and graphs appear in the report, the 1897 Wisconsin map he had made with Roth, with its experiments overlaying different types of data representing patterns and conditions, is offered as exemplar of the direction future maps might take.34 This was followed by a series of graphs of relevant conditions taken from an earlier paper cowritten by Fernow on “forest influences,” from which one can draw correlations among displayed patterns of air and soil temperature, precipitation and evaporation, and other such conditions as they relate to one another and to points and times on, above, and below the earth’s surs e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 285

face.35 In this case, graphic correlation allowed for recognizable patterns to emerge in ways too complex to attribute to clear causation—but, as Fernow suggested, too consistent to not be considered reliably predictive. Not long after Fernow left the USDA for academics, the National Academy’s suggestion for proceeding with a mapping program was taken up by the USGS, and he, Sargent, and others advised its chief geographer, Henry Gannett, to employ a diverse set of field cartographers to produce more detailed maps of forest reserves following the model of Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin, of which Gannett kept a copy. These included Ayres of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, who would later become a mineral prospector in that state’s iron range; the Quebec-­ born dendrologist (and Sargent’s protégé at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum) John George Jack; the self-­trained Swedish-­born botanist John B. Leiberg; Fred Gordon Plummer, who had trained and worked previously as a hydrologist and irrigation engineer; the Wisconsin-­born USDA dendrologist George Bishop Sudworth; and a host of other, mostly local actors with widely varied backgrounds.36 Their maps would serve multiple functions. Initially they could show the variety, density, and species of trees, and offer estimates of the value of local timber stands, in some cases per board foot. Increasingly, they had to account for changes in tree stands due to fires. And finally, they worked to document the conditions under which different species grew or could grow or regrow, which entailed accounting for a wide variety of interrelated conditions demanding experimentation in cartographic overlays. Gannett and the USGS were able to integrate this work into their already established conventions for topographic quadrangles, bringing botanic and geological study into visual conversation. Among the earliest of the new forest reserves to be mapped was the White River Plateau Timberland Reserve on the western slope of the Rocky Mountain Front Range in Colorado, the second such reserve to be set aside by President Harrison following the Reserve Act’s passage in 1891 (plate 13). Roth and Fernow’s visual and data-­layering precedent is clear in Sudworth’s design of this complicated map. While the titular language suggested a simple “distribution of commercial timber,” likely in order to justify the expense of the mapping expedition to the USDA, the map itself was anything but simple. As Sudworth wrote, “Wooded areas were examined in detail” so that their “features and relationships (could be) understood.”37 Both the map and report contended with complex mixed forests made up of large amounts of spruce and fir trees, a characteristic of the wetter western slopes of the Front Range, where eastward-­moving weather systems 286 · c h a p t e r

twelve

are captured by the topography. Echoing Fernow’s observations, Sudworth noted that burned areas of pine, spruce, and fir tended to initially regrow in aspen. Much of the report documented conditions for species reseeding, and the complex ground conditions that allowed for the same sorts of trees to reproduce in areas where they had been present. Sudworth’s data is not alone in spilling over the boundaries of the reserve; patterns and conditions of forest growth knew their own boundaries, which humans were only beginning to understand. If the vast amounts of overlaid data included in Sudworth’s single-­page maps of conditions in forest reserves such as the White River Plateau proved difficult to read, and even more difficult for correlating patterns and conditions, other cartographers experimented with ways to make such reading and analysis clearer. Ayres and his crew sought to separate data onto distinct topographic sheets of the same section of the Cascade Mountains at their crest near Lake Chelan, also in 1898 (plate 14). The strategy here was to simplify the data on the map, thus making patterns clearer and allowing for their easier identification and correlation. Among the clearest of contrasting patterns visible were the distribution and density of forests as they corresponded to topography and climate. The moist western slope, with its “mosses and lichens sometimes knee deep,”38 appeared almost entirely covered in dense fir, hemlock, and cedar, with subspecies corresponding to elevation. The more arid eastern slope is largely covered in sparser species of pine with little underbrush (allowing for easier travel, as the authors noted), with subspecies also corresponding to elevation. Density follows moisture, even on the eastern slope. Subsequent reports on the “Forest Conditions in the Cascade Range” by Plummer, Leiberg, and others in the years to follow would characterize this correspondence as conditioning, and it illustrated Fernow’s points well: Topography conditioned weather, particularly precipitation and moisture, which in turn conditioned the soil that allowed for different sorts of species to grow together in different ways, in turn retaining moisture as they grew, and further conditioning the soil as they decayed.39 In these maps Ayres’s designation of “zones” for different communities of plant species anticipated the emerging reasoning of ecologists such as Cowles and, in particular, Frederic E. Clements, who would go on to study the functioning of such communities in similar high elevations on the Front Range. In his 1900 study of forest conditions in the Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Jack studied and mapped the very areas and made similar initial observations years before Clements arrived on the Front Range (plate 15). Adopting a strategy similar to that of Ayres, Jack s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 287

spread his data across three topographic sheets of the same area, the famous Pikes Peak at bottom right, each sheet with patterns overflowing its linear reserve boundaries. While Jack’s data is less detailed than Sudworth’s concerning tree types, it acknowledges that mixed forests, not single-­species timber stands, are normal in many parts of these Western forests. Jack’s language reflected this conclusion, as in his study the term “forests” has in most cases replaced “timber.” Passages like the following helped illustrate what sorts of forests he was mapping at these elevations, and what he and his fellow field cartographers meant by conditions and conditioning: . . . In cracks and crevices of these rocks and boulders the seeds of trees and shrubs have sometimes lodged, and, germinating, have survived droughts and storms, although often dwarfed and growing very slowly under these trying conditions.40

Correlatable patterns evident in Jack’s maps illustrate another glaring issue. By the turn of the century, the vast majority of forests in this area had been burned over, offering a case study in conditions for regeneration of various forest types. Jack noted that many examples of rapid regeneration were visible in areas burned by smaller, local fires in non-­cutover lands. Yet in cutover lands, where the severity of fires was exacerbated by slash, the forests appeared to have greater difficulty regenerating, ultimately lending support to Fernow’s arguments concerning the need for public protection of non-­cutover areas, and the government-­supported restoration of pre-­ cutover conditions in those areas.41 Fernow’s own consulting would take him to many of places on the continent that he hoped could be studied in the twentieth century, from the Great Lakes and the Western mountains to native oak and pine forests in Mexico, where a public forest service had been established in the first decade of the century.42 In 1907 he relocated to the University of Toronto, where he characteristically advocated for maps, studies, and a greater public role in forest conservation across Canada. Of perhaps greatest interest to Fernow at this time were the prospects of what were in Canada known as Crown lands, which had been often identified as “barrens” or rocky lands not deemed of sufficient value to be granted for settlement. Forests in such lands had been dominated by trees thought to be of low economic value, such as black spruce and balsam fir. While Crown land forestry had exerted considerable influence on the Laurentian or “Canadian” Shield lands north of the Great Lakes in Ontario and Quebec, Crown lands in far eastern Nova Scotia, particularly those on remote Cape Breton Island, had seen little 288 · c h a p t e r

twelve

formal study. Fernow sought to make an argument for the organized and informed conservation of such understudied forests and the conditions that sustained them, in areas outside designated forest reserves. Fernow’s interest in the spruce-­fir forests of Nova Scotia, and in Cape Breton Island in particular, where they were dominant, had more in common with an emerging group of researchers who had begun to call what they studied “ecology,” than with economistic foresters fixated on individual tree species as high-­value crops. For these new “ecologists,” studying the correlation of patterns and conditions meant studying the local development and adaption of diverse communities of species. This mirrored Fernow’s interests, though these ecologists would eventually develop new terminology to describe such phenomena. Fernow’s correspondents concerning the Cape Breton forests included the young botanist George Elwood Nichols, who, decades later, would preside over the Ecological Society of America.43 Fernow’s last and most cartographically ambitious mapping project, his 1912 Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia, while not itself an articulated work of ecology, indeed may have played a role similar to that which Arthur Tansley credited to William Gardner Smith and his Botanical Survey of Scotland; but its aim was scientifically, if not politically, more modest. Above all, Fernow sought to inform reforestation practices and make them as natural as possible, appropriate to local conditions. In terms of scale, Fernow concluded that his Nova Scotia maps (plate 16) were “probably the most detailed description of land conditions in existence for such a large territory . . . on this continent, at least.”44 Yet they suffered from a much smaller budget than their US equivalents, which had been produced jointly with the well-­supported USGS. Canada’s topographical survey had not yet reached Nova Scotia, so Fernow’s maps lacked visualization of conditions of topography, elevation, and slope, yet so had much of Smith’s work. But while Smith’s maps of the Scottish Lowlands represented a landscape that had been stripped of much of its ancient forest many centuries earlier, on Cape Breton Island Fernow was charting a forest that could still be preserved, or lived with and conserved, if humans could understand the conditions that had sustained it across those same centuries well enough to maintain them into the future. conclusion

The study of forests, increasingly employing cartography to understand the complex web of forest conditions, has never been a monolithic endeavor. Ideologically charged arguments presupposing an abstract “state” that s e e i n g f o r e s t s a s s y s t e m s  · 289

“sees” forests monolithically through territorial maps have either considered too narrow a selection of materials or overread ideological preconceptions onto those materials.45 Territorial maps imposing ephemeral claims on the earth’s surface have, throughout their rather limited history, stood in the way of serious attempts to study that surface. They have sought to objectify what cannot responsibly be objectified. Maps employed in studies of forest conditions arose to address an entirely different set of demands: long-­term sustainability not just of forest stands but of forest systems. Implicit in the study of conditions is the recognition of systems. In these maps, forests or trees ceased to be simple objects. Their study, involving correlation and recognition of patterns between maps of different conditions, involved an interpretive dimension. Mapping nature at this point was no longer a taxonomic process of locating symbols for various objects meriting inclusion on a two-­dimensional map, just as scientific knowledge itself was no longer a top-­down matter of identifying and cataloguing objects, plants and animals, in the fashion of the old natural history museum. Many maps that paid varying degrees of lip service to timber valuation were engaged in far more elaborate philosophical work, as well as hard work in the field. To understand this transition, it was necessary to become literate not just in words but in patterns. Maps of conditions helped promote an understanding of nature as a system, with many local systems, such as forests in particular locations, existing under specific sets of weather, soil, climate, geochemical conditions, and—by the nineteenth century—economic and policy conditions as well. By studying the environment, policymakers could learn how it might be sustained, as new public organizations that pursued such knowledge would, through fits and starts and steps forward and backward, throughout the twentieth century. Maps of forest patterns and conditions, which allowed the reader to visualize forests not as objects but as systems, had become among the most effective tools for doing this.

290 · c h a p t e r

twelve

epilogue

the view from across the pond Catherine T. Dunlop

The word “map” first came into usage in the medieval period, at a time when Europeans believed the world consisted of only three regions: Europe, Africa, and Asia. During this era, world maps called mappaemundi, or “cloths of the world,” pictured geography through a religious lens and used Jerusalem, the spiritual capital of Christendom, as their center of orientation. European contact with land masses located on the other side of the globe, far from the Mediterranean Basin, would radically alter this medieval-­era vision of the world. From the fifteenth century onward, Europeans rapidly expanded their geographic knowledge of the Americas, filling in the sprawling terra incognita with new place names, labels, and boundaries. In so doing, European explorers intentionally and unintentionally expressed their mentalities toward nature in the Americas. More than just symbols of conquest, their maps offer a vast corpus of historically valuable views of New World landscapes, biodiversity, ecosystems, and natural resources. This rewarding book has gathered together some of the most fascinating maps of nature from the Age of Discovery, in addition to significant maps from the colonial and settlement periods that followed. As this book’s introduction pointed out, the synthesis of environmen291

tal history and the history of cartography is in many ways a natural one. Mapmakers were arguably the first environmental humanists; they were the first professionals tasked with researching and communicating the relationship between man and nature to a broader public. Like environmental historians, mapmakers think in geographic and spatial terms. Both face the challenge of representing a dynamic, lively, three-­dimensional physical world within the confines of a flat, two-­dimensional paper surface. And just like environmental historians, mapmakers face the hard task of synthesizing a wide range of ecological, social, and economic forces into a single coherent argument. In spite of these striking similarities, however, there are meaningful points of difference between historians who study maps and historians who study environments. Historians of cartography are generally far more proficient in visual analysis than in the scientific workings of nature—the soils, winds, and trees freeze-­framed in paper images are noted for their aesthetic qualities rather than their dynamic materiality. Most environmental historians, in contrast, are badly trained in visual analysis.1 On the other hand, they are nimbler than most historians in handling scientific sources of evidence like tree rings and historic weather data. In emphasizing the physicality of the past, some environmental historians—particularly those associated with the neomaterialist wing of the field—have argued that cultural representations of nature are overly anthropocentric and can obscure or overshadow material truths.2 Aware of the divergent histories of their fields, and cognizant of their different analytical preferences, the environmental historian Kathleen Brosnan and the historian of cartography James Akerman organized a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar to explore the possibilities for a mixed-­method approach to the topic of mapping nature. Their seminar meetings, in which I was kindly invited to participate, took on a workshoplike setting centered around the Newberry Library’s outstanding collection of maps. Many of the seminars were led by the nation’s leading experts in environmental history, geography, and cartographic history. This book is the result of the exciting, open-­ended, interdisciplinary conversations and interactions from the 2014 workshop. Besides the fact that it grew out of an Americas-­focused seminar, I would argue that it is fitting for the first book to synthesize environmental history and the history of cartography to focus its geographic lens on the Americas. The territory that Europeans once called the New World is made up of an incredibly diverse group of ecosystems ranging from arid deserts to looming mountain peaks to swampy wetlands. Gathering knowledge about this 292 · e p i l o g u e

lively and dynamic natural world—and then figuring out how to depict it on maps—was a complex and biased process that historians are just beginning to piece together. Indeed, the cartographic archive of the Americas is uniquely positioned to offer fresh avenues for the study of imperial contact zones, indigenous epistemologies, global capitalism, natural resource identification and extraction, and scientific taxonomies of nature. That said, as a Europeanist I found the methodological models offered in this book to be broadly applicable to the topic of mapping nature in a range of global geographic contexts. What have the authors in this book taught us about the larger possibilities for an environmental humanities approach to cartographic archives? We can begin with some appeals for caution. According to some authors, historic maps should be interpreted as windows into the geographic imaginations of human beings, rather than as reliable sources of evidence about the physical landscapes of the past. Ernesto Capello, for example, demonstrates in chapter 5 that eighteenth-­century French explorers often conflated their views of Ecuador’s Andes Mountains with the mountains found in France’s Haute Savoie and Auvergne regions. In the French geographical imagination, both Old World and New World mountain ranges were wild and uncontrollable spaces that demanded similar forms of graphic representation in spite of the actual differences in their geology and ecology. Brian Bockelman, meanwhile, argues in chapter 7 that maps of Latin American nature were often distorted to lure Europeans to invest in places that appeared ripe for economic exploitation. Despite the fact that Argentina was generally too temperate for palm trees, for example, images of palm groves abounded on European maps of the country, promoting a false impression that it was a tropical place. His analysis thus challenges the positivist view that European maps of the Americas grew more accurate with advances in surveying technology. Amid the lies and exaggerations that maps told, however, they revealed some truths as well. Several contributors to this book argue convincingly that a careful analysis of maps can illuminate traces of resistance and indigenous voices. Kelly Hopkins, for example, demonstrates in chapter 2 that John Mitchell’s well-­known maps of the Great Lakes region incorporated Native American knowledge and therefore offer valuable evidence of certain tribes’ land cultivation practices. In chapter 1 Jennifer Saracino, for her part, calls indigenous maps of pre-­Colombian Mexico “tools for negotiation” with Spanish settlers over natural and cultural resources. In both cases, authors argue that European maps can be “read against the grain” for information on indigenous land management amid the throes of imperial t h e v i e w f r o m a c r o s s t h e p o n d  · 293

conquest. Craig Colten, in a similar vein, argues in chapter 3 that Native American history is subtly documented in the toponyms, or place names, found in river nomenclature in the American South. The persistence of river names like “Mississippi,” he argues, shows that Europeans conceded the value of Native American environmental knowledge to their expansion across the Americas. In highlighting this bidirectional flow of geographic knowledge, Colten, Saracino, and Hopkins offer helpful models for how to use maps of conquest as tools for uncovering the history of indigenous knowledge and land use in the Americas. Other authors of this book offer valuable lessons in using written documents to help decipher the meaning of colonial-­era maps. Expanding our analysis of maps to include other types of historical documents helps us to trace what Martin Brückner calls the “social life of maps”:3 their value, messaging, and uses. This is particularly true for the study of route maps, a genre of cartography that scholars of the Americas are particularly well-­ positioned to analyze. In chapter 6 of this book, for example, Adriana Méndez Rodenas analyzes Alexander von Humboldt’s multifaceted oeuvre as an early example of what we might now call cross-­disciplinary knowledge of place. For Humboldt, cartographic images were just one part of a rich travel narrative—mostly intended for European audiences—that combined art, science, text, and image into a single comprehensive account. Similarly, in chapter 8, Raymond B. Craib demonstrates how the geographic route of the famous Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés takes on different meanings in the travel narratives of four different nineteenth-­ century writers. For these individuals, Cortés’s centuries-­old route held new significance and relevance at a time when the Mexican nation was coming into being. Together, Craib and Méndez Rodenas show how the meaning of maps can shift dramatically, depending on their audience—­ indigenous people, nationalists, or Europeans reading atlases at home. We must, they argue, always interpret a map’s meaning as historically contingent and shifting. While explorers and travelers focused on mapping their movements through North and South American landscapes, state officials and governments were, as several authors demonstrate, more interested in wielding maps as tools for stabilizing and bounding territories. In chapter 9, Mary E. Mendoza discusses the struggle to translate the US-­Mexico borderline drawn across paper maps onto the actual physical landscape of the Rio Grande. As written accounts from border surveyors reveal, the river refused to be stable; it moved this way and that across the landscape “like a migrant.” In the end, Mendoza argues, the borderline drawn on the 294 · e p i l o g u e

map was aspirational; in the real world, it stubbornly refused to be pinned down. In chapter 4, Michelle Zacks makes a similar point in her discussion of the boundary line between North and South in the antebellum period. Though the US Coastal Service created a map with a clear boundary line between the slave-­holding South and the free North, the reality on the ground was far more fluid and complex. In her study, she demonstrates how oyster fishermen frequently crossed the border and created “covert landscapes” that accommodated aspirations for autonomy, security, and community among African-­Americans living in the antebellum South. To use a metaphor that James C. Scott made famous, both authors demonstrate that the state could not “see” through nature as well as it thought.4 One point that all the authors have made clear is the usefulness of maps for exploring different scales of history in the past, a topic that has drawn significant interest in recent years.5 In this book we have learned how cartographic sources can illuminate the past on a range of geographic scales. Some historic maps depicted territories on a sprawling geographic scale in the form of images of the globe, or representations of vast overseas empires with no clear boundaries. Other maps adopted a national scale. In chapter 11, Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn demonstrate how the Canadian government’s use of photo mapping in the nation’s vast interior transformed Canadians’ view of themselves as a frontier society. Other authors note the significance of small-­scale maps for understanding large-­scale historical processes on a local level. In chapter 10, Sara Gregg, for example, illustrates the critical role that small-­scale plat maps played in settlement patterns and natural resource development in the American West. In chapter 12, Peter Nekola similarly shows how small-­scale forest maps produced by the US Department of Agriculture helped scientists discover the impact of local weather conditions on forest health. Maps, in other words, are uniquely suited for helping historians to understand the interplay between the “big picture” and the “little picture.” This is something that other types of visual sources like paintings, etchings, and sculptures are unable to do with the same ease and sophistication. A topic that the contributors to this volume do not specifically discuss, but which is nonetheless worth addressing, is how maps of nature might effectively be used for teaching environmental history. As Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry recently put it, “Rather than being something to know, environmental history, like all good history, makes the past come alive because it provides a focused approach for engagement.”6 Many historians make casual use of maps in the classroom—bringing them in as reference tools for lessons about geography, wars, or peace treaties—but few t h e v i e w f r o m a c r o s s t h e p o n d  · 295

historians have thought deeply of the many ways in which maps can teach core historical methods. As documents that invite inquiry and comparison, maps are ideal tools for classroom teaching.7 How might the chapters in this book serve as a springboard for lesson plans on a variety of subjects pertaining to the history of the environment? As part of an environmental history curriculum, a university or college professor might offer a map history lab in which students are invited to explore maps for evidence about changing attitudes to nature and natural resources. Mining maps, forest maps, and road maps are just a few examples of cartographic documents that make for great workshopping. In planning such a workshop, faculty might consider asking their college or university library about the primary source collections available on campus. Land grant universities, for example, often hang onto their states’ agricultural maps dating back to the nineteenth century. Other universities house particular collections, depending the types of donations they have received. Whatever the primary source collection, I have found that the experience of seeing maps firsthand and up close gives students a much better sense of the maps’ materiality—their scale, color, and quality—than seeing them online. For a greater diversity of maps, of course, faculty can also make use of websites such as the Newberry Library’s digital resources portal and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. In preparation for a mapping nature lab, a history professor should first familiarize students with the basic visual language of maps, including fundamental terms such as scale, cartouche, orientation, key, and toponym. A fun way to engage the students in learning the terms is to assign small groups two or three terms that they are responsible for teaching to the entire class using the whiteboard or even improvisation. For history majors who are often more familiar with text-­based sources, developing proficiency in visual terminology is a radically new experience. “Is this really a history class?” students have asked me. Once students have gotten the hang of talking about maps, they are ready to engage with their own nature maps during an in-­class map workshop. Leading questions might include: What does your map tell us about people’s beliefs, perceptions, and interactions with the environment? What can your map tell us about the environment itself ? How did your map influence people’s beliefs, perceptions, and interactions with the environment? Faculty who wish to take the exercise a step further might consider a follow-­up assignment like a DIY historical atlas project. What is becoming increasingly clear in the Age of the Anthropocene is that maps of disappearing coastlines, biodiversity loss, and global climate 296 · e p i l o g u e

fluctuations are becoming part of our daily reality. Now more than ever, the ability to navigate and critique representations of the environment is a crucial skill. Analyzing maps as primary sources pushes students to wrestle with the persuasive religious, political, and economic messages which have all appeared on “innocent” cartographic depictions of the natural environment. The study of historical maps, moreover, invites students to examine how cartographic images move across society—from the mapmaker to the printer to the public—and how such objects take on their own social lives. Maps have a special “summing up” quality that makes them the ultimate metadocument crystallizing the natural world and human society into a single, condensed image. The maps of the future will soon tell us about the fate of both.

t h e v i e w f r o m a c r o s s t h e p o n d  · 297

acknowled gment s

This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. In 2014 we had the opportunity to codirect Mapping Nature across the Americas, a NEH-­sponsored summer institute for college and university professors at the Newberry Library. NEH officers Barbara Ashbrook and Julia Nguyen were particularly generous with their time, and were wise in their recommendations for our application and the implementation of our curriculum. The summer institute drew participants from a diverse range of humanities fields, including environmental history, history of cartography, geography, Native American history, Latin American studies, history of science, art history, literature, Romance languages, and photography. The institute proved to be what one individual described as “truly an eye-­opening experience! Very enriching and rewarding.” And much of this success was attributable to our participants’ challenging research projects, insightful observations, and amazing camaraderie. While many of them have joined us in this book, we want to acknowledge and thank the other participants: Tony Abbott, Damon Akins, Sophie Brockmann, Leif Fredrickson, Nenette Luarca-­Shoaf, Giovanna Montenegro, Amanda Murphyao, Jo Ortel, Janet 299

Pritchard, and Susan Sterrett. We also benefited from the contributions of our other faculty members, including Craig Colten and Raymond Craib, who have contributed essays, as well as Ann Knowles, Neil Safier, and Richard White. Field trips allowed institute participants to explore the spatial and environmental history of the Chicago region, and we are indebted to our brilliant guides: Michael Conzen, Ann Durkin Keating, and Peter Nekola. At the Newberry Library, institute participants enjoyed the intellectual support of a world-­renowned independent research library with its extraordinary collection of maps and other sources on the Americas. In particular, we want to thank Patrick Morris, the map-­cataloguing librarian who aided us in reviewing the applications and remained on call throughout the institute to assist the participants in their research. Jim’s program assistants, Anne E. Cullen and Maisie O’Malley, were integral to our efforts, from advertising the institute to compiling readings and managing communications and logistics. The staff of the Newberry’s reading room was magnanimous in its efforts, responding to every inquiry, tracking down obscure documents, and paging and preparing maps and books for daily presentations—always doing so with patience and a smile, despite the burden of the busy summer season. John Buchkoski, Matt Corpolongo, Alex Finkelstein, Curt Foxley, and Joe Schiller, all PhD students at the University of Oklahoma, offered insightful comments on manuscript revisions, along with Jake Blackwell, who also contributed to our original planning for the institute. Kathy remains grateful for the ongoing support of her OU colleagues, especially department chair James Hart. Jim continues to marvel at the support and ingenuity of his Newberry colleagues, who continue to make these programs happen and the library a welcoming home away from home for humanities scholars. We also thank Daniel Greene for bringing us together for this project. Rachel Kelly Unger and Michaela Rae Luckey at the University of Chicago Press did a superb job shepherding this book through peer review and publication. We thank them for their enthusiasm, expertise, and patience. And of course, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful critiques and suggestions. Being part of Mapping Nature across the Americas, both the NEH summer institute and this book, was a rare intellectual gift and a rewarding personal experience for all involved. We are indebted to everyone who made it possible. Funding for the summer institute that contributed to the research repre300 · a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

sented in this volume was received in part from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s  · 301

appendix

critical map reading for the environment James R. Akerman and Kathleen A. Brosnan

This appendix offers a useful guide for analyzing maps, particularly from the perspective of environmental history. Scholars can employ it in their research to better analyze the ways cartography promulgated knowledge about, and contests over, natural resources and the meanings of nature. Teachers can integrate this guide into their classroom discussions, helping students to read maps with the same critical eye they bring to other historically contingent documents. The guide compels us to recognize and interrogate the perspectives of the mapmakers and their audiences, grappling with the contexts in which maps were created, received and reinterpreted over time.1

303

context

• What is the geographical subject (area and topic) of the map? • Who made the map and for whom? How do you know this? • What is the apparent purpose of the map? How do you know this? general visual elements

• What media (materials or formats) are used? • What are the size (dimensions) and format of the map? • What colors are used, and to what effect? basic signs

• What is included on the map? • How are spatial features symbolized (as points, lines, areas, or volumes)? • How are spatial relationships construed? difference

• What was excluded that might reasonably have been included? • What features are represented differently or variably across the map? • Which features are apparently more important? frame

• How is the map oriented or aligned relative to compass points or other specified positions? • How are the boundaries or margins of the map established? text, textual location, and imagery

• What does the text on the map tell us about the map? • What additional meaning can we glean from the situation of the map in a text or book? • Are other types of images (such as drawings, photographs, and charts) incorporated in the document? To what effect?

304 · a p p e n d i x

materiality

• What do we know about or learn from the material conditions in which this map/object was used? Consider size, format, shape, durability, ephemerality, and materials used to create the object. • More broadly, what do we know or learn from the material processes that contributed to the creation and use of this map/object? allegorical meaning

• What are the allegorical components of the map (pictures and symbols that can be interpreted to reveal sometimes hidden messages)? • What iconological meanings are embedded in these allegorical components of the map? environmental information

• What does the map reveal about the natural environment of the geographical subject? • What natural features and natural resources are depicted? • Do certain natural features and natural resources receive greater emphasis? If so, how and why are they emphasized? • Whose environmental knowledge provided a foundation for the representations of nature in the map? How do you know this? • What cultural, political, or economic assumptions are inherent in these cartographic depictions of nature? How do you know this? • What natural elements or natural resources are excluded? Why? • How does the chosen scale affect what the map reveals about the environment? • Does the map reflect the dynamism of nature, and if so, how? • Does the map capture ephemeral aspects of nature, and if so, how? assessment

• How does the map enlighten your understanding of the historical, cultural, geographical, environmental, and other contexts in which it was made? • What does the map tell you about current or past geographical patterns?

c r i t i c a l m a p r e a d i n g  · 305

• What does the map reveal about human interactions with nature in the past or in the present? next steps

• What other sources might you pursue to contextualize the circumstances surrounding the production of the map? • What additional sources might explain how the map was interpreted over time, or how it shaped human cognition or behavior with respect to nature? • What sources may reveal more information on the environment depicted in the map? • If you are able to visit the location depicted in the map, what similarities and differences can you observe between the contents of the map and its current environment? How do your observations reflect historical changes as well as your own environmental ethos?

306 · a p p e n d i x

contributor s

James R. Akerman is the curator of maps and director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, Chicago. He is the editor of Decolonizing the Map (2017), The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (2009), and Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (2006), and coeditor of Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (2007) and Maps: The Measure of Everything (2007), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Akerman has curated exhibits at the Newberry Library, the Field Museum (Chicago), and the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore). Brian Bockelman is an associate professor of history and chair of the history department at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He writes about Argentine cultural and intellectual history, with an emphasis on landscape. He has published articles in the American Historical Review, Modernism/Modernity, and the Journal of Latin American Geography, among others. Bockelman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Newberry Library. Kathleen A. Brosnan is the Travis Chair of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma and past president of the American Society for Environmental History. The author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range (2002), she edited the Encyclopedia of American Environmental History (2010), and coedited City 307

Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West (2011); Energy Capitals: Global Influence, Local Impact (2014); and City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History (2020). Another book, The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories, is forthcoming in 2021. Ernesto Capello is professor of Latin American history at Macalester College. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and is the author of City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (2011), as well as more than twenty articles and book chapters. He is also the author of Mapping Mountains: A Review (2020), and coeditor of Cartography and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-­Century Americas (2020). He is currently completing a history of geodesy and visual culture in the equatorial Andes, and beginning a new project on US goodwill tours. Craig E. Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. He is the author of multiple articles and books, including An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (2005), Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana (2009), and Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance (2014). He is the coeditor of North American Odyssey: Historical Geographies for the Twenty-­First Century (2014). Raymond Craib is professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (2004) and The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (2016) as well as a number of essays including, most recently, “Cartography and Decolonization,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, edited by James Akerman (2017). Catherine T. Dunlop is associate professor of modern European history at Montana State University, Bozeman. She received her PhD in history from Yale University in 2010. Her work explores the connections among visual culture, geography, and environmental history in modern France. Dunlop’s book, Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-­ German Borderland, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Her scholarship has been supported by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Camargo Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Georges Lurcy Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

308 · c o n t r i b u t o r s

Matt Dyce is associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg, where he teaches regional and cultural geography. His research areas are in the history of geographic science and education in Canada, critical studies of geomatics and geovisualization, and the relationship between photographic archives and environmental knowledge. His many publications include articles in Canadian History and Environment, the Journal of Historical Geography, and Cultural Geographies. Matt received the Canadian Geographers Association’s Starkey-­Robinson Award for his dissertation, “A Spatial History of Canada: Archives, Knowledge, and Geography,” at the University of British Columbia. Sara M. Gregg is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. She received her PhD from Columbia University. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: Native Landscapes and the Myth of Free Land on the Great Plains, examines the state formation process from Native dispossession through several Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (2010), and coeditor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (2011). Kelly Hopkins is an assistant professor and the associate director of the graduate program in the history department at the University of Houston. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Davis. She is completing a manuscript tentatively titled “Recreating Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Settlement Patterns, Subsistence Strategies, and Environmental Use, 1630–1783.” Adriana Méndez Rodenas is professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Missouri, and director of the Afro-­Romance Institute. An expert in travel writing, she published Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014), and edited Review: Literature and the Arts of the Americas (2012). She received an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers and the Fulbright Distinguished Professorship in American Studies at Uppsala University. Her essays on Latin American literature have appeared in Hispanic Issues on Line, the Afro-­Hispanic Review, and various interdisciplinary anthologies including Contesting Environmental Imaginaries: Nature and Counternature in a Time of Global Change (2017). She received sup-

c o n t r i b u t o r s  · 309

port from the Huntington Library and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for her current project, From Paradise to Diaspora: Natural History in the Americas, a study of Caribbean ecologies. Mary E. Mendoza is an assistant professor of history and Latino/a Studies at Penn State University. She is completing a book, tentatively titled Unnatural Border: Race and Environment across the U.S.-­Mexico Divide, based on her award-­winning dissertation. Mendoza has published articles in the Washington Post, the Pacific Historical Review, and Environmental History, as well as in the edited volumes Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.-­Mexico Frontera (2018) and Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-­ Crip Theory (2017). She has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Clement Center for Southwest Studies, the Huntington Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rachel Carson Center, and the Ford Foundation. Peter Nekola recently became associate editor of Imago Mundi. He previously served as assistant director of the Newberry Library’s Her­mon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and held a dual appointment in history and philosophy at Pratt Institute, where he also taught environmental studies. He holds a dual PhD in history and philosophy from the New School for Social Research, and is author of the forthcoming Mapping the Northwoods: Cartography and Geographical Knowledge in the Lake Superior Country, from Industry to Conservation, as well as associate editor of The History of Cartography, Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century. Jennifer Saracino is an assistant professor of art history at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. She received her joint PhD in art history and Latin American studies from Tulane University. Her research focuses on indigenous mapmaking traditions of Central Mexico, cross-­cultural encounters and collaborations between mendicant friars and the indigenous populations, and the impact of these exchanges on early colonial visual culture. Her dissertation focused specifically on the Mapa Uppsala of Mexico-­ Tenochtitlan. She has published in Artl@s Bulletin, and her scholarship has been supported with fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the Newberry Library, and John Carter Brown Library. Graeme Wynn, FRSC, is professor emeritus of geography at the University of British Columbia. Much of his research has focused on the environmental history and geography of Canada; it ranges through time, from 310 · c o n t r i b u t o r s

the retreat of Wisconsinan ice sheets to the problems of the Anthropocene, across space, at scales from the micro (a small urban wetland) to the subcontinental, and across topics from agriculture to urbanization. Other writing reflects his broad interests in the development of settler colonies (especially New Zealand), and the history of geographical practice. From 2017 to 2019 he served as president of the American Society for Environmental History. Michelle Zacks earned her PhD in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is associate director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in New Haven. Her research interests involve marine environmental history, the racialized and class politics of conservation, and the environmental dimensions of resistance to state violence.

c o n t r i b u t o r s  · 311

note s

introduction

1. For example, see J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretive Guide (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Elizabeth A. Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2. Robert W. Karrow, Jr., introduction to James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr., eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5. 3. J. H. Andrews, introduction to J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 14. 4. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 37. 5. Denis Wood and John Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xv. In this regard, scholars integrate the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw “maps as technologies that depend for their effectiveness on specific institutions, discourses, and practices; and that these specific conditions are important in constructing what we understand to the world around us, the real.” John Pickles, foreword to Wood and Fels, The Nature of Maps, ix. 6. Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 290. 7. William Cronon, “Foreword to the Paperback Edition,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 20. 8. A comprehensive discussion of the evolution of environmental history and its interdisciplinarity can be found in Andrew Isenberg, “Introduction: A New Environmental History,” in Isenberg, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–14. 9. One exception, for example, is Mart Stewart, “William Gerard de Brahm’s 1757 Map

313

of South Carolina and Georgia,” Environmental History 16 ( July 2011): 523–35. Other environmental historians “pay more attention to the language of spatiality than the spatial experience” or, alternatively, to the presentation of nature in historical maps. Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” Stanford University Spatial History Lab working paper (February 1, 2010), 3, at http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory /cgi-­bin/site/pub.php?id=29, accessed July 19, 2018. Also see Matthew W. Klingle, “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History,” History & Theory 42, no. 4 (De‑ cember 2003): 94–110. 10. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 34. There also are notable and consistent exceptions with respect to environmental historians’ use of visual evidence, such as Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and the “Gallery” section that appears in every issue of the leading journal in the field, Environmental History. 11. Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 82. 12. For a comprehensive critique of the traditional cartographic historiography and attempts to reform it, see Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 13. Karrow, introduction, 7. 14. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 34. Also see Jeremy W. Crampton, “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communications and Visualization,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 235–52. 15. Wood and Fels, The Natures of Maps, xvi. 16. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 37. 17. Ibid., 45, 48. 18. Karrow, introduction, 7. 19. Donald Worster, “The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History,” in The Ends of the Earth, 3. 20. Diane Dillon, “Consuming Maps,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, 291. 21. J. R. McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-­Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 155. 22. McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web, 178–79; Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age, 1–5. 23. Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age, 5. 24. Black, Maps and History, 82. 25. Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 19. 26. Jenni Heim, “The Map as Historical Narrative,” at the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, Newberry Library, at https://publications.newberry .org/smith/exhibits/mapsnations/exhibit1998.html, accessed July 19, 2018. Also see Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words,” in Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 50–76. 27. Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 7–12, 69–77. 28. Stewart’s description of conditionality in another colonial map is equally applicable here. Stewart, “William Gerard de Brahm’s 1757 Map,” 532. Also see Louis De Vor­ sey Jr., “William Gerard De Brahm: Eccentric Genius of Southeastern Geography,” Southeastern Geographer 10, no. 1 (April 1970): 21–29. 29. Susan Schulten, “Alexander von Humboldt: Master of Infographics,” Mapping the Nation (website), at http://www.mappingthenation.com/blog/alexander-­von-­hum boldt-­master-­of-­infographics/, accessed July 18, 2018.

314 · n o t e s

to the introduction

30. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Vintage, 2016), 107. While many scholars have critiqued Humboldt’s “complicity in the colonial structure,” others have recently worked to restore more viable interpretations of his cartography and ecology, while fully recognizing the context in which he conducted his research and writing. Also see Aaron Sachs, “The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-­Colonialism and Alexander Von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature,” History & Theory 42, no. 4 (December 2003): 111–35. 31. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2–4; and Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7. 32. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Studies 8 (December 2006), 387 (quotation). See also James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and “Settler Colonialism,” Global Social Theory website at https://globalsocialtheory.org/concepts/settler-­colonialism/. 33. Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from the Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (March 2004): 174; and Lo­renzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 53. 34. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61–65; and Scott, Seeing Like a State, 50–52. 35. Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (New York: Penguin, 2010), 138. chapter 1



1. “Aztec” is the term most commonly used to refer to the indigenous population that lived in the central Valley of Mexico at the time of Spanish conquest, but it is imprecise. The ethnic group that controlled the so-­called Aztec empire at the time of conquest were known as the Mexica; they spoke the indigenous language Nahuatl. For more, see Christina Bueno, The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico, Diálogos Series (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 72. 2. Elizabeth H. Boone, “Venerable Place of Beginnings: The Aztec Understanding of Teotihuacan,” Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage (2000): 372–74. 3. Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, “Teotihuacan: Ciudadela.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http:// www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/teot3/hd_teot3.htm (October 2001). 4. López Luján and Oudijk argue for an eighteenth-­century date, while Kubler argues that the Mazapan map is from the nineteenth century. Leonardo López Luján and Michel Oudijk, “Los Mapas de San Francisco Mazapan,” in press, 1–6; George Kubler, “The Mazapan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” Indiana 7 (1982): 43. 5. Kubler, “The Mazapan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560”; López Luján and Oudijk, “Los Mapas de San Francisco Mazapan.” 6. Barbara E. Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 183.

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r o n e  · 315

7. I am following a typology established in an authoritative survey of Mesoamerican mapping traditions by Mundy in “Mesoamerican Cartography,” 187. Because of length limitations, I will not provide a discussion of all of the various categories of indigenous maps in central Mexico. Instead, I offer a brief review of indigenous cartographic conventions. Important categories of indigenous maps not discussed in this chapter include cosmographical maps, like the one on the first page of the Codex Fejervary-­Mayer, which pre­sents a schematic diagram of the world’s four cardinal directions set within a calendrical band of time. This chapter also does not address cartographic histories, maps which generally explain how a group traveled to and established their territory, and which thus often depict the migration of a group of people across a landscape. Locations are plotted not for geographical accuracy, but to fit the narrative history of the mapmaker’s account. For more on the Codex Fejer­vary-­Mayer map, see Codex Fejérvary-­Mayer: An Old Mexican Picture Manuscript in the Liverpool Free Public Museums (12014/M), ed. Eduard Seler et al. (Berlin and London: Printed by T. and A. Constable . . . at the Edinburgh University Press [for] the Duke of Loubat, 1901), 5–31; Karl Anton Nowotny, Tlacuilolli: Style and Contents of the Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts with a Catalog of the Borgia Group (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); and Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 114–17. For a brief overview of various indigenous maps and their treatment of landscape, see “Cartography and Landscape,” in Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 179–89. For an analysis of the structure and content of extant cartographic histories of central Mexico, see “Stories of Migration, Conquest, and Consolidation in the Central Valleys,” in Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 162–96. 8. Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,” 225. 9. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 278. 10. Gibson, 262–63. 11. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 183–84. 12. For more on these maps, see Serge Gruzinski, “Colonial Indian Maps in Sixteenth-­ Century Mexico: An Essay in Mixed Cartography,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (1987): 46–61. 13. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500– 2010, Mesoamerican Worlds (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010), 34. 14. Ruiz Medrano, 44. 15. Ruiz Medrano, 44–45. 16. Ruiz Medrano, 45. 17. Ruiz Medrano, 45. 18. Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Writing and Recording Knowledge,” Writing without Words, n.d., 17. 19. Boone, 18–19. 20. The term “planimetric” can be defined in cartography as “having no indications of relief.” “Planimetric,” Merriam-­Webster.com, http://www.merriam-­webster.com/dic tionary/planimetric. Accessed November 25, 2015. 21. Whether the Nahua possessed a fully developed writing system is a subject of great debate with a long history. For my discussion of place name glyphs, I follow Alfonso Laca­dena’s argument that the “signary contained logograms and phonograms,” in which logograms are “signs which correspond to words of the language and have

316 · n o t e s

to chapter one

meaning” and phonograms are “signs which correspond to phonemes of the language and lack meaning.” To differentiate the two in writing, Lacadena capitalizes logographs and places phonetic complements in lowercase letters, a practice I follow in this essay. The translation is my own. Daniel Schávelzon, “Las imágenes de la ciudad prehispánica: La cartografía de Teotihuacan,” in Arquitectura y urbanismo: pasado y presente de los espacios en Teotihuacan memoria de la tercera mesa redonda de Teotihuacan, ed. María Elena Ruiz Gallut, Jesús Torres Peralta, and Mesa Redonda de Teotihuacan (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2005), 680. 22. Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 49. 23. For the sake of coherence and continuity, I will use the same numbers that José Arreola did when he identified and translated the Nahuatl glosses in his 1922 study. José M. Arreola, “Códices coloniales de Teotihuacán.” Manuel Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacán, el medio en que se ha desarrollado: Su evolución étnica y social; Iniciativas para procurar su mejoramiento, Poblaciones Regionales de la República Mexicana (México: Dirección de Tall. Gráf., Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922), 554–56. 24. Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 53. 25. Kubler, “The Mazapan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” 49. 26. Schávelzon, 680. The translation is my own. 27. Schávelzon, 678–82. 28. For further information, see Elizabeth Boone’s article for a discussion of the Teotihuacan maps, “Venerable Place of Beginnings: The Aztec Understanding of Teotihuacan,” in Lindsay Jones, David Carrascco, and Scott Sessions, ed., Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs. Boulder: University Press of Coloorado, 2000), 371–95. 29. Patricia Anawalt compared the early colonial sources in order to determine the visual and symbolic continuities and transformations of indigenous dress after the Conquest. The early colonial sources include Codex Azcatitlan, Codex Borbonicus, Codex Xolotl, Codex Ixtlilxochitl, Codex Magliabechiano, Codex Mendoza, Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, Codex Vaticanus A, Florentine Codex, the Matrícula de Tributos, and Primeros Memoriales. These served as the primary sources for Anawalt’s seminal work Indian Clothing before Cortés: Mesoamerican Costumes from the Codices (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981). 30. In the Codex Kingsborough, a litigious document drawn up circa 1555–56, indigenous inhabitants are also shown wearing the tilmatli and maxtlatl. The Spanish encomenderos, however, can be observed wearing the tunic that begins to typify indigenous dress several decades after the Conquest, indicating that somewhere around the mid–­sixteenth century, the indigenous population began to adapt Spanish-­style dress. Perla Valle, Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaóztoc ó Códice Kingsborough: A cuatrocientos cuarenta años, vol. 263 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1992). 31. Stansbury Hagar was the first to note that these maps most likely served as land titles. Hagar, The Celestial Plan of Teotihuacán. 32. Stephanie Wood, “The Techialoyan Codices,’” in James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stepha­nie Gail Wood, ed., Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory: Provisional Version ([ University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 14. 33. Kathleen Brosnan, personal communication, May 26, 2016. 34. Kubler, “The Mazapan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” 46. 35. Luján and Oudijk, “Los mapas de San Francisco Mazapan,” 5. 36. In his foundational art historical text, Donald Robertson speculated as to why native artists might have returned to older styles. Although we may never know why all

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r o n e  · 317

artists copied pre-­Hispanic styles in colonial works, it was important that Robertson recognized the “Aztec Revival” style as a frequent stylistic occurrence in early colonial manuscript painting. His work serves as the foundation of my own analysis. Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, 56, 96, 175–76, 178, 193. 37. López Luján and Oudijk, “Los mapas de San Francisco Mazapan,” 1; Kubler, “The Maza­pan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” 47. 38. Donald Robertson, “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings, with a Catalog,” Handbook of Middle American Indians 14, no. 3 (1975): 253; For more recent scholarship on the Techialoyan codices, see Stephanie Gale Wood, “The Techialoyan Codices,” 1–22. 39. Robertson, “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings,” 257. 40. A typical Techialoyan document attests to a single community’s rights to its lands, whereas the Teotihuacan maps are about conflicting claims by individuals over lands. My interpretation and description of the Techialoyan manuscripts is based principally on the work of Robertson in ibid., 253–80, and Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, 190–95. 41. Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 23. 42. Robertson, “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings,” 254. 43. Stephanie Wood, “The Techialoyan Codices,”, 1. 44. According to Kubler, who follows Arreola’s interpretation. George Kubler, “The Maza­pan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” Indiana 7 (1982): 48. 45. Jose Arreola, “Capítulo 8: Codices y documentos en Mexicano,; Gamio, acán, 554. 46. Jose Arreola, “Capítulo 8: Códices y documentos en mexicano”; Gamio, 558. 47. Robertson, “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings,” 264. 48. Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 33. 49. As Charles Gibson has aptly noted, these administrative units in New Spain were largely dependent on the preexisting indigenous organization of these communities. Cabeceras were often selected because of the residence of an imperial tribute collector. The Spaniards largely co-­opted the native tribute and taxation system, but substituted the former pre-­Hispanic emperor with the Spanish Crown as the main collector of this wealth. Gibson, 33. 50. López Luján and Oudijk, “Los mapas de San Francisco Mazapan,” 2–3. 51. Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 72. 52. Gibson, 55. 53. Wood, “The Techialoyan Codices,’” 3. 54. Matthew H. Edney, “Cartography without Progress: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking,” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 30, no. 2–3 (1993): 332, 334. 55. Edney, 334. 56. Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 97–98. 57. Boone, “Aztec Pictorial Histories,” 71. 58. Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 98. 59. Christina Bueno, The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 72. 60. Bueno, 41. 61. Bueno, 46. 62. Bueno, 14. 63. This case is recounted by Bueno, who cites Archivo General de la Nación, Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, caja 171, exp. 2, fol. 1. Bueno, 193–95. 64. Schávelzon, “Las Imágenes de la ciudad prehispánica: La cartografía de Teotihuacan,” 682.

318 · n o t e s

to chapter one

65. Schávelzon, 685. 66. More details regarding this history can be found in Kubler, “The Mazapan Maps of Teotihuacan in 1560,” 46. 67. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain; Dana Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (1995): 265–81; Gruzinski, “Colonial Indian Maps in Sixteenth-­Century Mexico.” chapter 2

1. Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North-­America, 2 vols. (London, 1703; reprint, Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1905), vol. 2: 13–14. 2. The Iroquois Confederacy was composed of, from east to west, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The Tuscaroras migrated north from their Virginia–­North Carolina Tidewater homeland following a series of military conflicts between 1711 and 1713. After their official admittance in the early 1720s, the confederacy became the “Six Nations.” Iroquois speakers and Europeans, however, employed multiple names to describe confederacy members. The Dutch and English, for example, referred to the “Five” and later “Six” Nations indiscriminately, or used the names “Mohawk” or “Seneca” to encompass all groups, while the French often used the term “Iroquois.” Member nations of the confederacy routinely emphasized their communal settlement patterns and referred to themselves as the people of the “Longhouse”—or the Haudenosaunee, in the Seneca language. Gor­don M. Day, “Iroquois: An Etymology,” Ethnohistory 15, no. 4 (1968): 389–402; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 1; “Transactions with the Six Nations, September 1753,” in James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: State University of New York, 1921–63; hereafter Johnson Papers), vol. 9: 110–20, 117 (quotes). 3. Lawrence H. Leder, ed., The Livingston Indian Records, 1666–1723 (Stanfordville, NY: Earl M. Coleman, 1979), 8–9, 172–73; “Drafft of this Countrey,” [alby 2 march 1696/97], Gilder Lerhman Collection 3107, Livingston Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. See also G. Malcolm Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region in Intercultural Contexts: A Historical Review,” Michigan Historical Review 30, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 1–34; Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables, eds., American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1980), ix–­x. 4. Dean R. Snow, Mohawk Valley Archaeology: The Sites (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1995); Charles F. Wray and Harry L. Schoff, “A Preliminary Report on the Seneca Sequence in Western New York, 1550–1687,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 23, no. 2 ( July 1953): 53–63. 5. Leder, ed., Livingston Indian Records, 9–10. 6. Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region,” 1–34; G. Malcolm Lewis, “Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian ‘Maps’ on Euro-­American Maps of North America: Some General Principles Arising from a Study of La Verendrye’s Composite Map, 1728–29,” Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9–34; G. Mal­colm Lewis, “Intracultural Mapmaking by First Nations Peoples in the Great Lakes Region: A Historical Review,” Michigan Historical Review 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–17; Mark Warhus, Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w o  · 319











7. William N. Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” in William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978): 296–321, 300; James W. Bradley, Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 1500–1655 (Syracuse, NY: Syra­cuse University Press, 1987), 120; James A. Tuck, Onondaga Iroquois Prehistory: A Study in Settlement Archaeology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 44, 70, 89, 118, 135, 146; Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), hereafter JR, vol. 42: 71–73, 97; vol. 43: 147, 151–53, 183, 257–61; vol. 47: 75. 8. Clark M. Sykes, “Swidden Horticulture and Iroquoian Settlement,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 8 (1980): 45–52, 45; Arthur C. Parker, “Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants,” in William N. Fenton, Parker on the Iroquois (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 17, 21–24, 92; Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” 299–301; Snow, Mohawk Valley Archaeology; Wray and Schoff, “A Preliminary Report on the Seneca Sequence in Western New York,” 53–63; Michael Recht, “The Role of Fishing in the Iroquois Economy, 1600–1792,” New York History 76, no. 1 (1995): 5–30; Victor Konrad, “An Iroquois Frontier: The North Shore of Lake Ontario During the Late Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography 7, no. 2 (1981): 129–44. 9. Peter P. Pratt, “A Perspective on Oneida Archeology,” in Robert E. Funk and Charles F. Hayes III, eds., Current Perspectives in Northeastern Archeology: Essays in Honor of William A. Ritchie (Albany: New York State Archaeological Association, 1977), 51–69, 55; Parker, “Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants,” 17, 21–24, 92; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 43–44; Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Iroquois (Rochester, NY: Sage and Brothers, 1851), 183, 194, 198, 206; Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” 299–300. 10. “Journal of Lieut. Erkuries Beatty,” in Frederick Cook, ed. Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Glendale, NY: Benchmark Publishing, 1970; reprint), 27; “Memorial on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi,” December 1, 1718, in Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1853–87), hereafter NYCD, vol. 9, 885; Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 183, 194, 198, 206; M. K. Bennett, “The Food Economy of New England Indians, 1600–1675,” Journal of Political Economy 63, no. 5 (October 1955): 369–97; Peter Thomas, “Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for Understanding Indian-­White Relations in New England,” Ethnohistory 23, no. 1 (1976): 1–18; Agricultural Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Handbook 456, Nutritive Value of American Foods in Common Units (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1975), 67. 11. Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” 298, 300–301; Jack Campisi, “Ethnic Identity and Boundary Maintenance in Three Oneida Communities,” PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Albany, 1974, 27, 37–38; Bradley, Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois, 119; Tuck, Onondaga Iroquois Prehistory, 44, 70, 89, 118, 135, 146; JR, vol. 42: 87, 211; Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, “A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635,” in Dean R. Snow, Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 4–5; Pratt, “A Perspective on Oneida Archeology,” 55; Allen Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century

320 · n o t e s

to chapter two

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 17. The ethnohistorian William Fenton estimated that each nation consumed at least two thousand deer annually. He claims this estimate is very small compared to the annual harvest of eighty thousand deer in New York state during the 1970s. 12. William Martin Beauchamp, Aboriginal Place Names of New York (Albany: New York State Education Department, 1907), 168, 171; Recht, “The Role of Fishing in the Iro­quois Economy, 1600–1792,” 8–9, 13–15; Pratt, “A Perspective on Oneida Archeology,” 55; Campisi, “Ethnic Identity and Boundary Maintenance,” 28–29, 37–38; Tuck, Onondaga Iroquois Prehistory, 44, 70, 89, 118, 135, 146; JR, vol. 42: 97. 13. JR, vol. 42: 71–73. 14. Lahontan, New Voyages to North America, vol. 1: 322–23; Recht, “The Role of Fishing in the Iroquois Economy,” 8–9, 13–15; JR, vol. 42:​97; vol. 43: 147, 151, 153, 261. 15. Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” 298–99; John Bartram, Travels in Pensilvania and Canada (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 39–40; Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, November 28, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4: 787. 16. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 18–29; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 53, 186, 188, 209; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 122–26; Joseph Kittredge, Forest Influences: The Effects of Woody Vegetation on Climate, Water, and Soil (New York: McGraw Hill, 1948); Richard Lee, Forest Hydrology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 17. Snow, Gehring, and Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country; Marquis de Nonville to Marquis de Seignelay, August 25, 1687, NYCD, vol. 9: 338–39; “Captain Duplessis’ Plan for the Defense of Canada,” February 15, 1690, NYCD, vol. 9: 447. 18. Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region,” 2; Konrad, “An Iroquois Frontier: The North Shore of Lake Ontario During the Late Seventeenth Century,” 129–44. 19. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 10 vols. (London: George Bishop, Ralfe Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1600), vol. 3: 235. 20. Samuel de Champlain, “Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France” (1612), Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 21. Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region,” 7; Lewis, “Indications of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps”; Conrad E. Heidenreich, “The Great Lakes Basin, 1600–1653,” in Historical Atlas of Canada, ed. R. Cole Harris, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), vol. 1: plate 35; Champlain, “Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France” (1612); Samuel de Champlain, “Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France” (1632), Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. Champlain also changed the name of Lake Ontario from “Lac Contenant” to “Lac St. Louis” in the 1616 map. The name “Lac St. Louis” carried over to the 1632 map. 22. John L. Allen, “The Indrawing Sea: Imagination and Experience in the Search for the Northwest Passage, 1497–1632,” in Emerson W. Baker, Edwin A. Churchill, Richard D’Abate, Kristine L. Jones, Victor A. Konrad, and Harald E. L. Prins, eds., American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 7–35. 23. Lewis, “Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps,” 8, 22, 24–25; Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region,” 33–34; Pierre J. De Smet, Letters and Sketches with a Narrative of a Year’s Residence among the Indian Tribes of the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1843). See also Vincenzo Maria

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w o  · 321

Coronelli, Parti Occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1685); Non-­Chi-­ Ning-­Ga (Iowa Indian, 1837), untitled map of tribal migrations in the upper Mississippi and Missouri drainage basins, National Archives, Washington, Cartographic Branch, RG 75, map 821, tube 520; Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville, Le Nouveau Mexique, et La Floride (1656); “First Figurative Map” attributed to Adriaen Block, 1614 (untitled map of northeast North America), Algemeen Rijkarchief, the Hague, Netherlands. 24. George Nelson, My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802–1804, ed. Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), 121; Lewis, “Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps,” 15–16, 23, 27. 25. JR, vol. 17: 223; Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600–1650 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 97–98; Dean R. Snow, “The Ethnohistoric Baseline of the Eastern Abenaki,” Ethnohistory 23, no. 3 (1976): 291–306; Ted J. Brasser, “Early Indian-­European Contacts,” in Northeast, 78–88; Snow, Mohawk Valley Archaeology, 4, 279–359; William A. Starna, “Mohawk Iroquois Populations: A Revision,” Ethnohistory 27, no. 4 (1980): 371–82; Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1983): 528–59; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 32–38. 26. George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940); Jack Campisi, “Oneida,” in Northeast, 481–90, 482; Richter, “War and Culture,” 528–59; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–49. 27. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois; Van den Bogaert, “A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country”; Snow, Mohawk Valley Archaeology; Campisi, “Ethnic Identity and Boundary Maintenance in Three Oneida Communities”; Pratt, “A Perspective on Oneida Archeology.” 28. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 180, 205–6. Peter Wraxall outlined the strategy in an August 1740 conference between the Six Nations and Lieutenant Governor Clarke. At the conference, the Six Nations sought to prevent the French and British from constructing competing trade posts at Irondequoit. The Iroquois worried that “trading houses too near [one another] generally Quarrel about Trade . . . [and would] breed Mischief.” See Peter Wraxall, An Abridgement of the Indian Affairs Contained in Four Folio Volumes, Transacted in the Colony of New York, from the Year 1678 to the Year 1751, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 219n. 29. “Conference of the Earl of Bellomont with the Indians,” August 26–­September 4, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4: 727–46, “Conference between Governor de Callières and the Iroquois,” September 3, 1700, NYCD, vol. 9: 715–20; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 206–80; White, The Middle Ground, 142–85. 30. Lahontan, New Voyages to North America, vol. 1: 82–83. 31. “Instructions to Colonel Romer,” September 3, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4: 750–51; Governor Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, November 28, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4: 783; “A Mappe of Colonel Römers Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations” Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library; Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 133–43. See also Guillaume de l’Isle, “Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France” (1703), “Carte du Mexique et de la Floride” (1703), and “Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi” (1718); Baron de Lahontan, “A Map of ye Long River” (1703); and Herman Moll, “Map of North America According to ye Newest and most Exact observations” (1720) for other significant early-­1700s maps.

322 · n o t e s

to chapter two

32. “A Mappe of Colonel Römers Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations.” Europeans often referred to Iroquois villages as “castles” because many included defensive palisades. 33. “A Mappe of Colonel Römers Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations.” 34. “A Mappe of Colonel Römers Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations”; Stephanie Pratt, “From the Margins: The Native American Personage in the Cartouche and Decorative Borders of Maps,” Word and Image 12, no. 4 (1996): 349–65; G. N. G. Clarke, “Taking Possession: The Cartouche as a Cultural Text in Eighteenth-­Century American Maps,” Word and Image 4, no. 2 (1988): 455–74; Mart A. Stewart, “William Gerard de Brahm’s 1757 Map of South Carolina and Georgia,” Environmental History 16, no. 3 (2011): 524–35. 35. “Instructions to Colonel Romer,” September 3, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4: 750–51; Governor Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, November 28, 1700, NYCD, vol. 4:783– 84; “Colonel Romer’s Account of His Visit to Onondaga,” 5 October 1700, NYCD, vol. 4:798–801; “Journal of Messrs. Hendrick Hansen and Peter van Brugh’s Visit to Onondaga, September–­October, 1700,” NYCD, vol. 4:802–7; Robert Livingston to the Lords of Trade, May 13, 1701, NYCD, vol. 4:873. 36. Thomas E. Burke Jr., Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661–1710 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), xii, 19–21, 23, 28, 30–31; “Intelligence of a French Fort at Niagara,” July 6, 1719, NYCD, vol. 5: 528–29; Colonel Schuyler to Lords of Trade, April 27, 1720, NYCD, vol. 5:537–38; “Journal of Lawrence Clausen’s Visit to Niagara,” May 22, 1720, NYCD, vol. 5: 550–51; Governor Burnet to the Lords of Trade, June 18, 1721, NYCD, vol. 5: 585; “Mr. Durant’s Memorial Relative to French Post at Niagara,” July 1, 1721, NYCD, vol. 5: 588–91; “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” September-­October 1721, NYCD, vol. 5: 630–42; “Conference between Commissioners of Indian Affairs and Some Western Tribes,” May 1723, NYCD, vol. 5: 693–97; Governor Burnet to the Lords of Trade, August 9, 1724, NYCD, vol. 5: 709–10; “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” September 1724, NYCD, vol. 5: 715–21; “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” September 1726, NYCD, vol. 5: 786–88. 37. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 236–80. 38. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 22. 39. The Haudenosaunee first opened their territory to New England’s Indian refugees escaping colonial expansion in the 1670s. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Algonquian-­speaking refugees relocated about twenty miles northeast of Albany at Schaghticoke, on the Hoosic River. They lived together in ethnically mixed communities, and became known collectively as the River Indians. Although the River Indians arrived with Mohawk approval, their relocation served colonial interests because they protected New York’s isolated and exposed frontier settlements from French and Indian attacks. See Laurence M. Hauptman, “The Dispersal of the River Indians: Frontier Expansion and Indian Dispossession in the Hudson Valley,” in Laurence Hauptman and Jack Campisi, eds., Neighbors and Intruders: An Ethnohistorical Exploration of the Indians of Hudson’s River (National Museums of Canada, 1978), 242–57; Neal Salisbury, “Toward the Covenant Chain: Iroquois and Southern New England Algonquians, 1637–1684,” in Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 61–73; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 136–37; Laurence M. Hauptman, “Refugee Havens: The Iroquois Villages of the Eighteenth Century,” in Vecsey and Venables, American Indian Environments, 128–39.

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w o  · 323

40. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell: The Man Who Made the Map (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 175–89, 190–213; Mat­thew Edney, “John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Imago Mundi 60, no. 1 (2008): 63–85; Lawrence Martin, “John Mitchell,” in Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), vol. 13: 50–51; http://www.oshermaps.org/special-­map-­exhibits/mitchell-­map (first quotation); Schwartz, The Mapping of America, 159 (second quotation); John Mitchell, “A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America with the Roads, Distances, Limits, and Extent of the Settlements” (1755), Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 41. Edney, “John Mitchell’s Map,” 76–77; Jason Martin, “Contested Terrain, Contested Meaning: John Mitchell’s Map of 1755 and the Rhetorical Possession of the Ohio Region,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1999, 19–20; Clarke, “Taking Possession: The Cartouche as Cultural Text,” 455–74, 464–66; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crown, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 128–29, 132–33; Thomas Hallock, “Between Accommodation and Usurpation: Lewis Evans, Geography, and the Iroquois-­British Frontier, 1743–1784,” American Studies 44, no. 3 (2003): 121–46, 121–23. 42. John Mitchell, “A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America with the Roads, Distances, Limits, and Extent of the Settlements” (1755), Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 43. Mitchell, “A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America.” 44. Dolores Elliott, “Otsiningo, An Example of an Eighteenth Century Settlement Pattern,” in Funk and Hayes, Current Perspectives in Northeastern Archeology, 93–105, 101. chapter 3

1. Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1973), 16. See also Karl Butzer, “Retrieving American Indian Landscapes,” in The Making of the American Landscape, 2nd, edited by Michael P. Conzen (New York: Routledge, 2010), 32–57; see 53–54. 2. Saul B. Cohen and Nurit Kliot, “Place-­Names in Israel’s Ideological Struggle over the Administered Territories,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 4 (1992): 653–80; R. D. K. Herman, “The Aloha State: Place Names and the Anti-­ Conquest of Hawai’i,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (1999): 76–102; and Stuart Horsman, “The Politics of Toponyms in the Pamir Mountains,” Area 38, no. 3 (2006): 279–91. A review of this literature is Ruben Rose-­Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu, “Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-­Name Studies,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 4 (2010): 453–70. 3. See Craig E. Colten, Southern Waters the Limits to Abundance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 19–23. 4. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18, 43–44, 67, 142–43. She also discusses the importance of using geographical coordinates to fix Portuguese claims, which do not factor into this discussion. LaSalle claimed lands draining into the Mississippi River for France in 1682. M. Cavalier de LaSalle, “Official account of M. de la Salle’s Exploration of the Mississippi (Colbert) River to its Mouth, 1682,” in Historical Collections of Louisiana, Embracing Translations of Many Rare and Valuable Documents

324 · n o t e s

to chapter two











Relating to the Natural, Civil and Political History of that State, V. 1, edited by Benjamin Franklin French (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 24–25. 5. Brian J. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 522–42; quote at 529. 6. Matthew H. Edney, “The Irony of the Imperial Map,” in The Imperial Map: Cartography and Mastery of Empire, edited by James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–10, 13. 7. Cohen and Kliot, “Place-­Names in Israel’s Ideological Struggle,” 653. 8. Cohen and Kliot, “Place-­Names in Israel’s Ideological Struggle,” 678. 9. Horsman, “The Politics of Toponyms in the Pamir Mountains.” 10. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” 530–31. 11. T. T. Waterman, “The Geographical Names Used by the Indians of the Pacific Coast,” Geographical Review 12, no. 2 (1922): 175–94; Herman, “The Aloha State”; and Bronwen Douglas, “Naming Places: Voyagers, Toponyms, and Local Presence in the Fifth Part of the World,” Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014): 12–24. 12. A 1544 Spanish map of the Gulf Coast and the southern Atlantic Seaboard displays this tendency. Alonso de Santa Cruz, Golfo y costa de la Neuve Espana desde el Rio de Panuco hasta el Cabo de Santa Elena (Seville: 1544), Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov /resource/g3860.ct001033/. 13. Virginia/discovered and described by Captayn John Smith, 1606; graven by William Hole (London: 1624); Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/resource/g3880.ct0 00377/. 14. Louis DeVorsey, “Amerindian Contributions to the Mapping of North America: A Preliminary View,” Imago Mundi 30 (1978): 71–78, see 72; G. Malcolm Lewis, Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Gregory Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast: Archaeological Implications and Prospects,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, edited by G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 205–21. Also, Smith explicitly states that river names are shared with the “nations” or “families” who live along them. Thus, any long river might have multiple names. Captain John Smith, “The Description of Virginia,” in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, part 1, edited by A. G. Brad­ ley (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), 47–84; see 50. A discussion of the issues with using indigenous words in place names appears in US Geographic Board, Sixth Report (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1933), 15–16. 15. Buckingham Smith, trans., Narrative of the Career of Hernando de Soto (New York: Allerton Books, 1922). Also, Karen M. Booker, Charles M. Hudson, and Robert L. Rankin, “Place Name Identification,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 4 (1992): 399–451. 16. Jacques Marquette, “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 dans l’Amerique Septentrionale,” 1681, http://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct001908/. 17. Barbara Belyea, “Amerindian Maps: The Explorer as Translator,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 3 (1991): 267–77; see 269–72. See also Patricia Galloway, “Debriefing Explorers: Amerindian Information in the Delisles’ Mapping of the Southeast,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, edited by G. Malcolm Lewis, 223–240 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 223–40. 18. Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 11–27. 19. Angela P. Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Mak­ ing of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t h r e e  · 325









Thomas F. Thornton, “Anthropological Studies of Native American Place Naming.” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1997): 209–28. Also see Thomas F. Thornton, introduction to Haa Leelk’w Has Aani Saaxu: Our Grandparents’ Names on the Land, edited by Thomas F. Thornton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), xi–­ xxiii. 20. Smith, Virginia, 1624, www.loc.gov/item/99446115/. 21. John Smith, “A Map of Virginia with Descriptions of the Country, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion,” in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, edited by A. G. Bradley (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910; orig. 1612), 39–84; quote at 50. 22. DeVorsey, “Amerindian Contributions,” 72–74. 23. April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 9. 24. P. Burwell Rogers, “Indian Names in Tidewater Virginia,” Names 4 (1956): 155–59, see 157–58; and Maurice A. Mook, “The Aboriginal Population of Tidewater Virginia,” American Anthropologist 46, no. 2 (1944): 193–208. 25. Jean Ribault, The Whole and True Discouerye of Terra Florida (Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1927, orig. 1563), 70–95. 26. Gozalo Solis de Meras, Pedro Menendez de Aviles: Memorial, translated by Jeannette T. Con­ner (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964), ch. 10. 27. Joseph Francisco Badaraco and Juan Linares, “Plano. I descripcion de la costa, desde el Cavo Canaveral, hasta cerca de la boca le Virginia . . . , 1756,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/g3872c.ct000339/. See also Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Decline in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983). 28. Robert Weddle, “Coastal Exploration and Mapping,” in The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest, edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 107–31; and Carl O. Sauer, Seventeenth-­Century North America (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Press, 1980), 24–26. 29. Guillaume de l’Isle and Francois le Marie, “Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi, 1717,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/gm71002183/. 30. Melschsedec Thevenot, “Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot . . . Cartet de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 dans l’Amerique Septentrionale,” Library of Congress, http:// www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct001908/ 31. LaSalle’s declaration of possession proclaimed, “I . . . do now take in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits; and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers comprised in the extent of Louisiana, from the mouth of the great River St. Louis on the eastern side, otherwise called Ohio, Alighinsipou [Allegheny], or Chickagoua, and this with the consent of the Chouanons [Shawanoes], Chicachas [Chickasaws], and other people dwelling therein, with whom we have made alliance; as also along the River Colbert or Mississippi, and rivers which discharge themselves therein, from its. . . .” M. Cavalier de LaSalle, “Official Account of M. de la Salle’s Exploration of the Mississippi (Colbert) River to Its Mouth, 1682,” in Historical Collections of Louisiana, Embracing Translations of Many Rare and Valuable Documents Relating to the Natural, Civil and Political History of that State, V. 1, edited by Benjamin Franklin French (New York: Wiley and Put­nam, 1846), 24–25. 32. De l’Isle, “Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi.” 33. Richebourg McWilliams and Tennant S. McWilliams, eds., Iberville’s Gulf Journals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 49.

326 · n o t e s

to chapter three

34. McWilliams and McWilliams, Iberville’s Gulf Journals, 65 and 82. See also Alfred E. Lem­mon, John T. Magill, and Jason R. Weise, eds., Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003). 35. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Carte de la Louisiana par Sr. d’Anville,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/75692506/. 36. Jean Baptiste Dourguignon d’Anville, “Map of Louisiana from d’Anville’s Atlas,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item746990502. 37. Thomas Hutchins, An Historical Narrative and Topographical Description of Louisiana and West Florida (Philadephia: Robert Aiken, 1784; reprint edition, Gainesville: University off Florida Press, 1968), 40–52. 38. Barthelemy Lafon and Charles Piquet, “Carte generale du Territoire d’Orleans Comprenant aussi la Floride Occidentale et une portion do territoire du Mississipi,” 1806, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2003623380. 39. Mathew Carey, Louisiana, 1814, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2002624 016; William A. Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana . . with an Account of the Character and Manners of the Inhabitants: Being an Accompaniment to the Map of Louisiana (Philadelphia: John Melish, 1816); and John Melish, “Map of Louisiana,” 1820, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2013593202. Also see Fred Kniffen, Hiram F. Gregory, and George A Stokes, The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana: From 1542 to the Present (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987). 40. Report and Accompanying Documents of the Virginia Commissioners Appointed to Ascertain the Boundary Line between Maryland and Virginia (Richmond: R. F. Walker, 1873), 8. 41. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, R. T. Rawle, 1801), 9; and Henry Gannett, A Gazetteer of Virginia, US Geological Survey Bulletin 232, 1904. 42. “Definite Act of Cession of Louisiana by the King of France to the King of Spain [1762],” in Historical Memoirs of Louisiana: From the First Settlement of the Colony to the Departure of Governor O’Reilly in 1770, edited by Benjamin F. French (New York: Lampart, Blakeman, and Law, 1853), 236–37. 43. US Senate, “The Treaty of Paris, 7th Article,” The Miscellaneous Documents, 45th Congress, 3rd session, 1879, 409–10. 44. Thomas Hutchins, An Historical Narrative and Topographical Description of Louisiana and West Florida (Philadephia: Robert Aiken, 1784; reprint edition, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968), 43, 62–89. 45. William A. Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana, with an Account of the Character and Manners of the Inhabitants: Being an Accompaniment to the Map of Louisiana (Philadelphia: John Melish, 1816), 131. 46. William Darby, Memoir on the Geography, and Natural and Civil History of Florida (Philadelphia: T. H. Palmer, 1821), 15. 47. US Army Topographical Engineers, “Map of the Seat of War in Florida,” 1839, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resourceg3931e.ct000138. 48. US Coast and Geodetic Service, “Sketch F Showing the Progress of the Survey in Section 6 with a General Reconnaissance of the Coast of Florida, Sketch of Tortugas Island, Florida; Annual Report; 1855,” http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/historicals /search#searchInput. 49. J. Clarence Simpson, A Provisional Gazetteer of Florida Place Names of Indian Derivation, Special Publication 1 (Tallahassee: Florida Geological Survey, 1956), 37–38. 50. Henry Schenck Tanner, A New Universal Atlas (Philadelphia: S. Augustus Mitchell, 1849). 51. US General Land Office, “Map of the State of Florida, Showing the Progress of Surveys Accompanying the Annual Report of the Commission General Land Office,”

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t h r e e  · 327

US Congress, Ex. Doc 1, 36th Congress, 2nd session, 1866; General Land Office, US Deptartment of the Interior, Annual Report of the General Land Office, Map of Louisiana (Washington: 1866). 52. George F. Swain, introduction to W. P. Trowbridge, Reports on the Water-­Power of the United States, Part 1 (Washington: Census Office, Department of the Interior, 1885), xi. 53. Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board 1890–1932 (Washington: 1933), 50; and see Executive Order no. 27-­A, 1890, v. See also Meredith Burrill, “Reorganization of the United States Board on Geographical Names,” Geographical Review 35 (1945): 647–52. 54. Mary Topping, Approved Place Names in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), 99. 55. Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board 1890–1932, 76–834. 56. Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board 1890–1932, 6 and 19. 57. Robert Beverely, The History of Virginia in Four Parts, edited by Charles Campell (1706; Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1855), 93; and Gannett, Gazetteer of Virginia. chapter 4

1. James H. Woodhouse, Autobiography of James H. Woodhouse (New Haven: W. H. Hale, Typewriter and Mimeographer, 1897), 147–51; accessed in the Whitney Library of the New Haven Museum. 2. “The Perils of the Coast,” New York Times, February 9, 1857, 1. “Oysters Almost Exhausted,” New York Times, February 2, 1857, 8. 3. US Coast Survey, Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey, 1857 (Washington: Treasury Department, 1857), 60. 4. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Report on the History and Progress of the American Coast Survey up to the Year 1858, by the Committee of Twenty Appointed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Montreal Meeting, August, 1857 (n.p., 1858), 85–86. 5. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939); Louis Bernard Schmidt, “Internal Commerce and the Development of the National Economy before 1860,” Journal of Political Economy 47, no. 6 (December 1939): 798–822; Calvin Schermerhorn, “The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 209–23. 6. Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MS#0475, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, 1748–1931, box 72: American Anti-­Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, page 3 of “Addenda.” Accessed through Columbia University Libraries’ Online Exhibition, Sydney Howard Gay’s “Record of Fugitives,” http://exhibitions.cul.col umbia.edu/exhibits/show/fugitives; Don Papson and Tom Calarco, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City: Sydney Howard Gay, Louis Napoleon and the “Record of Fugitives” ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015). 7. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 8. See David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Anita Rupprecht, “Black Atlantic Maritime Networks, Resistance, and the American ‘Domestic’ Slave Trade,” Global Networks 19 (2019): 458–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12209; Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-­American Currents in the Age of Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018).

328 · n o t e s

to chapter three

9. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, especially chapters 6 and 7. See Shallops, Sloops, and Sharpies: A Maritime History of New Haven (New Haven: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1976): 34–44, 56–61; George Roger Taylor, The Transportation Revolution 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951). 10. Woodhouse, Autobiography, 102–6. 11. Cindy R. Lobel, Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Ernest Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries: The Oyster-­Industry (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1881). 12. Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 203–33. 13. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 123–25; Lobel, Urban Appetites, 177–78; W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 110–11; David S. Shields, “Thomas Downing 1791–1866, New York,” in The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 67–71. 14. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution; Albion, The Rise of New York Port; Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 15. Albion, The Rise of New York Port; Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 16. Todd Shallat, “Water and Bureaucracy: Origins of the Federal Responsibility for Water Resources, 1787–1838,” Natural Resources Journal 32 (1992), 5–25; 9. 17. Jason W. Smith, To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018): 31, 15. 18. Joseph Henry, The Coast Survey: An Article from the Princeton Review (Princeton, NJ: John T. Robinson, 1845). John Cloud, “The 200th Anniversary of the Survey of the Coast,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 39, no. 1 (Spring 2007). Accessed July 26, 2018, at https://www.archives.gov/publications/pro logue/2007/spring/coast-­survey.html. 19. “Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Communicating a Report of the Superintendent of the Survey of the Coast, Showing the Progress of the Work during the Year Ending November, 1844.” Senate doc. 16, 28th Congress, 2nd session (December 23, 1844), 1–22; 16. 20. Henry L. Whiting, “Appendix no. 20. Reports on Topographical Contour, Hydrographic Details, and Reduction, on Photography, and on the Scale of Shades Suitable for Complete Maps,” in Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey Showing the Progress of the Survey During the Year 1860 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1861), 216–27: 219. John Cloud, “The U.S. Coast Survey in the Civil War,” Civil War Collection, Office of Coast Survey Historical Map and Chart Collection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Accessed July 26, 2018, at https://histo ricalcharts.noaa.gov/CivilWar/. 21. Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth Century Amer­ ica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8; Bolster, Mortal Sea; and Smith, To Master the Boundless Sea. 22. Hugh Richard Slotten, “The Dilemmas of Science in the United States: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey,” Isis 84, no. 1 (March 1993): 26–49; 39. n o t e s t o c h a p t e r f o u r  · 329

See also Charles Spencer, Edisto Island 1663 to 1860: Wild Eden to Cotton Aristocracy (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008). 23. “Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, Communicating a Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Work under his Charge during the Year Ending November, 1845.” Senate doc. 13, 29th Congress, 1st session (December 16, 1845), 1–44, 26. 24. “Appendix 14, Correspondence of the Citizens of Mobile with the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, in Regard to the Survey of Mobile Bay,” in “Letter from the Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Communicating the Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of That Work,” Senate exec. doc. 6, 30th Congress, 1st session (December 15, 1847), 77–80; James B. Totten, “Appendix 18: Extracts from the Report of Lieut. James Totten, U.S. Army, Assistant in the Coast Survey, in Regard to the Climate, Soil, and Character of the Florida Keys,” in Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey During the Year 1853 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1854), 50–51; F. H. Gerdes, “Appendix 19: Report on the Preliminary Survey of the Entrance to Barataria Bay, Coast of Louisiana,” in Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey During the Year 1853 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1854), 51–52. 25. These observations are based on extensive examination of the original field notebooks of the US Coast Survey personnel who surveyed the Chesapeake Bay in the 1840s and 1850s. These records are held by Record Group 23, Records of the Coast and Geodetic Survey [CGS], National Records and Archives Administration, 1807– 1965. My deepest thanks go to the cartographic historian John Cloud, who introduced me to the organization and background of these archives. See also Nathan Rein­gold, “Research Possibilities in the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Records,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 11, no. 45 (October-­December 1958): 337–46. 26. F. H. Gerdes sketch of Wade’s Point signal, section III. Entry 128, scientific records, descriptions of stations, box 43, record group 23; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Significance statement from Maryland Historical Trust State Historical Sites inventory form T-­123, page 3: Wades Point Farm, Claiborne, Talbot County, Maryland. 27. Slotten, “Dilemmas of Science,” 39, 40; Boutelle letter to Bache, May 2, 1849, 40. Axel Jansen, Alexander Dallas Bache: Building the American Nation through Science and Education in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Campus Verlag, 2011). 28. For Townshend’s father’s description of the “wreckage and debris,” see Charles Her­ vey Townshend, A Pictorial History of “Raynham” and Its Vicinity (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1900), 27. On Townshend’s role in the oyster industry, see Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 72–77. 29. Regarding Townshend’s oyster culture work, also see Lieutenant P. De Broca, “On the Oyster Industries of the United States,” United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner for 1873–4 and 1874–5, appendix A. section XVI (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1876), 271–319; and Christine Keiner, The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 66–68. 30. Townshend, A Pictorial History of “Raynham,” 28. The variant spellings of the surname are not in error; deeply involved in genealogical research, Charles added the “h” at the insistence of English relatives who said it was the correct spelling. See finding aid for “MSS 114: Townshend Family Collection, 1482–1952,” New Haven Museum Library. Accessed July 30, 2018, at http://www.newhavenmuseum.org/library/re search-­guides/alphabetical-­index-­of-­manuscript-­collections/. 330 · n o t e s

to chapter four

31. “The Fair Haven Oyster Trade,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 28, 1867, 4; Edward E. Atwater, ed. History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time (New York, W. W. Munsell & Co, 1887). 32. For the central city of New Haven, the agency relied on “Map of the City of New Haven from Actual Survey by D. W. Buckingham, County Surveyor” ( Jocelyn, Darling & Co., 1830). 33. Shallops, Sloops, and Sharpies, 17; Katherine J. Harris, “William Lanson: Businessman, Contractor, and Activist,” in African American Connecticut Explored, ed. Eliza­beth J. Normen (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 93–102; and Peter P. Hinks, “The Successes and Struggles of New Haven Entrepreneur William Lanson,” Connecticut Humanities Council blog, n.d. Accessed July 30, 2018, at http:// connecticuthistory.org/successes-­and-­struggles-­of-­new-­haven- ­entrepreneur-­wil liam-­lanson/. 34. “Oyster Trade at Fairhaven,” New York Tribune, January 6, 1857; and Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries. 35. Curtis C. Bushnell and J. T. Hathaway, Historical Sketch of Old Fair Haven, with Additional Notes (New Haven: J. T. Hathaway, 1916), 5–9. 36. Eneas Smith, Map of Fair Haven, New Haven Co., Conn., surveyed and drawn by H. E. Van Zandt C. E., 1859, held by the Whitney Library, New Haven Museum. 37. Gordon Sweet, “Oyster Conservation in Connecticut: Past and Present,” Geographical Review 31, no .4 (1941): 591–608; De Broca, “On the Oyster Industries.” 38. Atwater, ed. History of the City of New Haven, 614. 39. De Broca, “On the Oyster Industries.” Virginia M. Galpin, New Haven’s Oyster Industry, 1638–1987 (New Haven: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1989). 40. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 61; Shallops, Sloops, and Sharpies. 41. Multiple dates have been given for this occurrence. The date given here, along with the names of the oyster dealers and of the vessel involved, was reported in “The Fair Haven Oyster Trade,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 28, 1867, 4. It seems convincing, given a subsequent contract detailing the Rowe family’s chartering of a vessel from New Haven to the Chesapeake, described below. 42. Doris B. Townshend, Fair Haven: A Journey through Time (New Haven: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1976), 25. Ingersoll estimated that by 1857–58, one to two million bushels were delivered annually to Fair Haven from the Chesapeake; see Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 61. DeBow’s Commercial Review reported, “Four million bushels are carried annually from [  Virginia] to Fair Haven.” DeBow’s Commercial Review 24 (March 1858): 259–60. 43. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1907 [1865]), 76–97; “Items” column, Barnstable Patriot, March 30, 1831, 2. 44. See “Marine List” columns in the New York Shipping and Commercial List, December 16, 19, 27, and 30, 1817; and January 20, 1818. Accessed at the G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum. 45. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 112. 46. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 114. 47. Minna C. Wilkins, “Sandy Ground: A Tiny Racial Island, Part 1,” Staten Island Historian 6, no. 1 ( January-­March 1943), 1, 3, 7; Joseph Mitchell, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” New Yorker, September 22, 1956: 50–95; Robert L. Schuyler, “Sandy Ground: Archaeology of a 19th Century Oystering Village,” in Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America: Afro-­American and Asian American Culture History, Robert L. Schuyler, ed. n o t e s t o c h a p t e r f o u r  · 331

(Farmingdale, NY: Baywood, 1980), 48–59; Sheila Rule, “Historic S. I. Community Fights to Preserve Past,” New York Times, November 30, 1982, accessed July 20, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/30/nyregion/historic-­si- ­community-­fights -­to-­preserve-­past.html; Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006), 125–27; and New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, “565 and 569 Bloomingdale Road Cottages, Staten Island,” designation list 438, LP-­2415, February 1, 2011. 48. For labor markets constituting communication networks, see Gavin Wright, “The Economic Revolution in the American South,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 1, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 161–78. 49. Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 25, 63, 123; and John M. Kochiss, Oystering from New York to Boston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974). Tonnage is a unit of cargo volume; it does not refer to the weight of the vessel. 50. “The Mayor Permits Oysters,” New York Daily Times, May 1, 1857; “Oyster Pirates Captured,” New York Daily Times, January 1, 1853, 3; “Desperate Doings at Patuxent River,” New York Daily Times, December 30, 1856, 1; “News of the Morning,” New York Daily Times, March 11, 1853, 4. For dredging during the 1840s in Delaware Bay, see Ingersoll, The History and Present Condition of the Fisheries, 144. For earlier dredging, see Charles H. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland,” Bulletin of the U.S. Fish Commission 12 (1894): 205–96; 220. 51. Bayly Ellen Marks, “Rakes, Nippers, and Tongs: Oystermen in Antebellum St. Mary’s County,” Maryland Historical Magazine 90, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 313–33; and Harold An­der­son, “Slavery, Freedom and the Chesapeake,” Maryland Marine Notes: A Maryland Sea Grant Publication (March-­April 1998): 4–7. 52. See description by De Broca, “On the Oyster Industries,” 293. 53. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland,” 208. 54. Cited in Bushnell and Hathway, Historical Sketch of Old Fair Haven, 19. White writers in the late nineteenth United States often employed the term “native American” in reference to US-­born people of European descent. 55. Manuscript collection, log 405, unidentified (Schooner) journal, 1837–838, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum. 56. Oystering collection (coll. 121), box 1, folder 9 (correspondence 1832–1950), G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum; Edwin Thompson, October 20, 1824, contract with Captain Daniel Griffins; Ruel Rowe letter to Edwin Thompson, November 4, 1834; Edwin Thompson contracts with schooner captains, November 10, 1837 and December 22, 1837. 57. Alice Jane Lippson and Robert L. Lippson, Life in the Chesapeake Bay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 6, 167. 58. “Oyster Trade at Fairhaven,” New York Tribune, January 6, 1857. 59. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland,” 210. 60. Kirk Mariner, Once upon an Island: The History of Chincoteague (New Church, VA: Miona Publications, 1996), 41; and Martha A. Burns, Voices of the Chincoteague: Memories of Greenbackville and Franklin City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007). 61. Keiner, The Oyster Question. 62. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland,” 266; John Wennersten, The Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay (Centreville, MD: Tidewater, 1981), 13–14; Marks, “Rakes, Nip­pers, and Tongs”; F. A. Richardson and W. A. Bennett, “Thomas Kensett,” in Baltimore: Past and Present, with Biographical Sketches of Its Representative Men (Baltimore: Rich­ard­son & Bennett, 1871): 339–42; Ruth Levitt, “Tin Cans and Patents,” Prologue: Quarterly Journal of the National Archives (Fall/Winter 2013): 61–65. 332 · n o t e s

to chapter four

63. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland,” 205–96; 208–9. See also Elias Jones, History of Dorchester County, Maryland (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1902), 243– 44. 64. See Maryland General Assembly session laws 1806, vol. 608, p. 34; session laws 1820, vol. 625, p. 14; and session laws 1836, vol. 537, p. 144. Accessed July 30, 2018, at http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/html/laws 3.html. 65. Michael D. Thompson, Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015). 66. Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 56. 67. Loren Schweninger, ed., Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series I, Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1777–1867 (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1999), 262, 238. 68. Loren Schweninger, “The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-­Hire, and Quasi-­Freedom in Virginia, 1780–1865,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies 12 (September 1991): 1–22; “outside oystermen,” 4. 69. Schweninger, ed. Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series I: “universal emancipation,” 278; selling to northern dealers: 286, 303. Samuel P. Hanes, “Governor Henry Wise’s Antebellum Oyster Quest to Make Virginia Great Again,” Southeastern Geographer 58 (Winter 2018): 365–78. 70. For William Dix’s objections, see “Notice,” St. Mary’s Beacon, March 11, 1858, 2. For the anonymous objection to dredging, see “Letter to the Editor,” St. Mary’s Beacon, February 4, 1858, 2. 71. “Out of Debt,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 7, 1854, 2. Regarding Southern perceptions of trade imbalance, see Joseph Rainer, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 27–44. 72. Tom Crew, “‘Soon, the Grievance Will Cease to Exist’: Chief Inspector of Vessels Reports,” Out of the Box: Notes from the Archives @ the Library of Virginia (blog), May 16, 2018. Accessed July 30, 2018, at http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs /out_of_the_box/2018/05/16/soon-­the-­grievance-­will- ­cease-­to- ­exist- ­chief-­insp ector-­of-­vessels-­reports/. 73. Hanes, “Governor Henry Wise’s Antebellum Oyster Quest”; Anonymous letter to the editor, St. Mary’s Beacon, March 1, 1858, 2. 74. “Gov. Wise and the Virginia Coal and Oyster Beds,” Barnstable Patriot, January 17, 1860, 1; “Taxation on Virginia Oysters: Governor Wise’s Scheme for Providing a Revenue,” New York Times, March 27, 1856; Clemont Eaton, “Henry A. Wise: A Liberal of the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 7, no. 4 (November 1941): 482–94; and Craig M. Simpson, A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 75. Stevenson, “The Oyster Industry of Maryland.” 76. Minna C. Wilkins, “Sandy Ground: A Tiny Racial Island, Part 2,” Staten Island Historian 6, no. 4 (October-­December 1943): 25–26, 31–32. 77. Papson and Calarco, Secret Lives, 57. 78. W. H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit; or, Fifteen Years in Slavery (Eau Claire, WI: James H. Tifft, 1913), 11–14. 79. William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc. (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872): 74–77, 98, 242–46, 292, 481–82, 528–30, 560; Mary Ellen Snodgrass, The Underground Railroad: An Encyclopedia of People, Places, n o t e s t o c h a p t e r f o u r  · 333

and Operations (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Milt Diggins, “Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Application for the National Park Service National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom,” accessed July 30, 2018, at https://delmarvahistory .wordpress.com/2015/02/24/c-­d- ­canal-­perryville-­railroad-­site-­and-­hays-­heighe -­house-­added-­to-­nps-­underground-­railroad-­network/. 80. Daniel Drayton, Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton: For Four Years and Four Months a Prisoner ( for Charity’s Sake) in Washington Jail: Including a Narrative of the Voyage and Capture of the Schooner Pearl (Boston: Bela Marsh, and New York: American and Foreign Anti-­ Slavery Society, 1853). 81. Joseph A. Borome, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 3 ( July 1968): 320–51. 82. See for example, Shields, The Culinarians. “Thomas Downing” and “George Downing,” in Encyclopedia of African American History, ed. Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker (Santa Barbara: ABC-­CLIO, 2010): 392–95. 83. Hinks, “The Successes and Struggles of New Haven Entrepreneur William Lanson.” 84. Albert Fishlow, “Antebellum Regional Trade Reconsidered,” American Economic Review 54, no. 3 (May 1964): 352–64; 362. 85. “Cornelius Michael Cruser,” in William Henry Stewart, ed., History of Norfolk County, Virginia and Representative Citizens (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Company, 1902), 643–44; 1850 US Federal Census and Slave Schedule, Gloucester County, VA; 1860 US Federal Census and Slave Schedule, Elizabeth River Parish, Norfolk, VA. 86. Still, The Underground Railroad, 292. 87. James M. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1921), 98. 88. Wilkins, “Sandy Ground . . . Part 2.” 89. Kurlansky, The Big Oyster, 125–27. National Park Service. National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, Louis Napoleon House Site Application, July 2011. Accessed May 15, 2019, at https://www.academia.edu/3088830/NPS_UGRR_Louis _Napoleon_House_Site_Application. 90. Thomas Tartaron, Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 124. 91. Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 119–56; Cloud, “The U.S. Coast Survey in the Civil War”; Albert E. Theberge Jr., “The Coast Survey in the Civil War, 1861–1865” in The Coast Survey 1807–1867 (NOAA Central Library, 2009). Accessed July 31, 2018, at ftp://ftp.library.noaa.gov/docs.lib/htdocs/rescue/coastandgeodeticsurvey/TheCoast Survey_Theberge.pdf. 92. Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market,” 206. chapter 5



1. “Poetry in Translation” at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Juve nalSatires10.htm. 2. Charles Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi, a l’equateur, servant d’introduction historique a la mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1751). 3. Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 4. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)

334 · n o t e s

to chapter four

and Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 5. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, “Introduction: High Places” in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, eds., High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice, and Science (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2009), 1–18; especially 3–6. 6. This debate has been covered by several historians, notably J. B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and John L. Greenberg, The Problem of the Earth’s Shape from Newton to Clairaut: The Rise of Mathematical Science in Eighteenth-­Century Paris and the Fall of “Normal” Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Safier, Measuring the New World. 7. Charles Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur del’Amérique méridionale (Paris: Veuve Pissot, 1745), followed by his Lettre a Madame *** sur l’emeute populaire excitée en la ville de Cuenca au Perou, le 29. d’août 1739 (Paris: Veuve Pissot, 1746). 8. See Shank, Newton Wars, 259–60, on La Condamine’s friendship with Voltaire and the Paris lottery. 9. Pierre Bouguer, La Figure de la terre: Messieurs Bouguer, & de La Condamine, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, envoyés par ordre du roy au Pérou, pour observer aux environs de l’Equateur. Avec une relation abregée de ce voyage, qui contient la description du pays dans lequel les opérations ont été faites (Paris: Jombert, 1749). 10. On Bouguer and La Condamine’s rivalry, see Ferreiro, 249–57. 11. La Condamine, Journal du voyage, 14. “. . . Bordé de precipices creusés par des torrens de neige fondue, qui tombent à grand bruit du haut de cette fameule chaîne de montagnes, connue sous le nom de Cordelière des Andes.” 12. Bouguer, La figure de la terre, xxviii–­xxxi. 13. La Condamine, Journal du voyage, 47–48. 14. “Une longue suite de montagnes dont une infinité de points se perdent dans les nues.” Bouguer, La figure de la terre, xxix. 15. Bouguer, La figure de la terre, xl. 16. La Condamine, Journal du voyage, 47. 17. On Bouguer’s experiments, see Jean Goguel, “Bouguer au Chimborazo, et l’acceptation de la théorie newtonienne de l’attraction,” in Travaux du Comité Français d’Histoire de la Gèologie—T. 2 (1984), and Bouguer, La figure de la terre, 327–90. 18. Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2015), 13–16. 19. Debarbieux and Rudaz, The Mountain, 13. 20. Nicolas Sanson, Nouvelle introduction a la géographie pour l’usage de Monseigneur le Dauphin (Paris: Hubert Jaillot, 1695). 21. Eduard Imhof, Cartographic Relief Presentation, trans. Harry Steward (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1982), 2. 22. Nicolas Sanson, Introduction a la Geographie (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1693). 23. C. Danckerts, “Le Theatre de la Guerre Dans les Sevennes avec les Montagne et les Plaines des environs de Languedoc,” Amsterdam c. 1703. On the Danckerts Atlas, see Gyuri Danku and Zoltán Sümeghy, “The Danckerts Atlas: The Production and Chronology of Its Maps,” in Imago Mundi 59, no. 1 (2007): 43–77, esp. 67–68. 24. Pierre Charles Le Monnier, “Observations d’histoire naturelle, faites dans les provinces Meridionales de la France,” in César-­François Cassini, La méridienne de l’Observa-

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r f i v e  · 335

toire royal de Paris, vérifiée dans toute l’éntendue du royaume par de nouvelles observations (Paris: Chez Hippolyte-­Louis Guerin & Jacques Guerin, 1744), cxxxii. 25. La Condamine, Journal du voyage, 50. Original reads: Les deux chaînes de montagnes qui bordent le vallon de Quito, s’étendent à peu près du nord au sud. Cette situation étoit favorable pour la mesure de la méridienne, & nous offroit alternativement sur l’une & l’autre chaîne, des points d’appui pour terminer nos triangles. La plus grande difficulté consistoit à choisir les endroits les plus favorables pour y placer des signaux. Les pointes les plus élevées étoient les unes ensevelies sous la neige, les autres le plus souvent plongées dans les nuages, qui nous en déroboient la vûe. Placés dans les lieux plus bas, les signaux se projectoient sur le terrein, & devenoient par-­là très-­difficiles à apercevoir de loin. D’ailleurs, non seulement il n’y avoit point de chemin frayé qui conduisît d’un signal à l’autre; mais il fallout souvent traverser, en prenant de longs détours, des ravines formées par les torrens de pluie & de neige fondue, creusées quelquefois de 60 & 80 toises de profondeur, desquelles j’aurai souvent occasion de parler. 26. Charles Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral, tiree des observations de Mrs de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, Envoyés par le Roi sous l’Équateur (Paris: Imprimerie Royal, 1751.) 27. Safier, Measuring the New World, chapter 4. 28. Safier has documented the specific changes that La Condamnine made, as well as his extended correspondence laying joint authorial claim to Maldonado’s work. See Safier, Measuring the New World, 157–62. 29. Wolter, for instance, credits La Condamine with this innovation. See John A. Wolter, “The heights of mountains and the lengths of rivers,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 29, no. 3 ( July 1972): 190. 30. To my knowledge, only Sylvie Romanowski has highlighted La Condamine as a precursor to Humboldt in a similar manner, noting La Condamine’s engagement with multiple points of view in the geodesic triangulation map and the profile of the Yaruquí valley discussed here. See Sylvie Romanowski, “Humboldt’s Pictorial Science: An Analysis of the Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins,” in Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, ed. Stephen T. Jackson, trans. Syl­ vie Romanowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 175–77. chapter 6



1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the “Re-­thinking Environmental Consciousness” conference held at Mid-­Sweden University, December 5–8, 2014, sponsored by the EcoHumanities Hub at Mid-­Sweden University and the NIES X Research Symposium. I thank the organizers—Steven Hartman, Anders Olsson, and Chris­tian Hummelsund Voie—for their generous invitation. 2. Anne Marie Gillis, “Humboldt in the New World,” https://www.neh.gov/humani ties/2012/novemberdecember/feature/humboldt-­in-­the-­new-­world. Accessed June 5, 2019. 3. Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists—La Condamine, Humboldt, Darwin, Spruce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 112, 114. 4. Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 80. While I have learned much from Safier’s illuminating reading of La Condamine as emblematic text of European exploration,

336 · n o t e s

to chapter five

I take a slightly different approach to the textual labyrinth implied in the genre of scientific travel writing. 5. Alexander von Humboldt, planche XVI. “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, de Casiquiare et du Rio Negro, offrant la bifurcation de l’Orénoque et sa communication avec la rivière l’Amazone.” Atlas géographique et physique du nouveau continent (Paris: Librairie Gide, 1814–54). 6. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804. vols. 1–6, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818–1819, 1826; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966), vol. 5, 4. 7. Laura Dassow Walls, Steven T. Jackson, Mark W. Person, “Introduction: Reclaiming Consilience,” in Alexander Von Humboldt, Views of Nature (2014), ed. Stephen T. Jack­son and Laura Dassow Walls; trans. Mark W. Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 12. 8. Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1984), 349. Staf­ ford defines the scientific gaze as a process based on intense apprehension of the natural object by means of visual inquiry (34–40). 9. Aaron Sachs, “The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-­Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature.” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 119. I capitalize “Nature” to convey the larger-­than-­life concept of the natural world shared by the Romantics, as evidenced in Humboldt’s continued sense of heightened amazement. Pablo E. Penchaszadeh and Miguel de Ansúa address this quality in El deslumbramiento: Aimé Bonpland y Alexander von Humboldt en Suramérica (Buenos Aires: Aikian Gráfica Editora, 2010). 10. Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804 (Paris: Schoell, 1814). 11. For a discussion of Humboldt’s views of Nature, see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-­Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking Press, Penguin Books, 2006), 49–52. 12. Alexander von Humboldt, planche XVI. “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, de Casiquiare et du Rio Negro, offrant la bifurcation de l’Orénoque et sa communication avec la rivière de l’Amazone.” Atlas géographique et physique du nouveau continent (Paris: Librairie Gide, 1814–54). 13. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 64. 14. “Humboldt was drawn by the legend of the marvelous Casiauiare, an impossible river that flowed two ways, joining the great and independent systems of the Orinoco and the Amazon.” Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 63. 15. Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 55. 16. Massey, For Space, 64. 17. Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 15–16, 23, 25. 18. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, vol. 3, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966), 35–36. The original reads: “Lorsqu’un voyageur, récemment arrivé d’Europe, pénètre, pour la première fois, dans les forêts de l’Amérique méridionale., la nature se présente à lui sous un aspect inattendu. . . . Il sent, à chaque pas qu’il se trouve . . . sur un vaste continent, où tout est gigantesque, les

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r s i x  · 337

montagnes, les rivières et la masse des végétaux.” Alexander von Humboldt, Rélation historique du Voyage aux Régions Équinoctiales du Nouveau Continent [. . .], vol. 1, ed. Hanno Beck (Stuttgart: F. A. Brockhaus, 1970), 370; quoted in Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996), 303; Jason H. Lindquist, “‘Under the Influence of an Exotic Nature . . . National Remembrances Are Insensibly Effaced:: Threats to the European Subject in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent,” CUNY conference on Humboldt, spring 2004, 3; and Pablo E. Penchaszadeh and Miguel de Ansúa, El deslumbramiento: Aimé Bonpland y Alexander von Humboldt en Suramérica (Buenos Aires: Aikian Gráfica Editora, 2010), 15. 19. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 37. 20. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 17. 21. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 3, 16; Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 1, 360–61; Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 36–37. 22. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown: 1821; reprint New York; Ames Press, 1966), 52; “Les formes de végétaux déterminent la physionomie de la nature, et cette physionomie influe sur les dispositions morales des peuples.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 317. 23. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 3, 19–20. “Une immense forêt s’étendoit à nos pies jusqu’au rivage de l’Océan: les cimes des arbres, entrelacées des lianes, . . . formoient un vaste tapis de verdure, dont la teinte sombre relevoit l’éclat de la lumière aérienne.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 1, 362; 370–71. 24. Jean-­Baptiste Debret, Forêt Vierge, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 1, 2017, at http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-­7773-­a3d9-­e040-­e00a1 8064a99; Jean-­Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil; ou, Séjour d’un artiste francais au Brésil, depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot Freres, 1834– 39). 25. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 19, 37. 26. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 399. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 213. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 19. 27. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 214. “Dans ce régions sauvages on se rappelle involontairement l’assertion de Linné, que la région des palmiers est la première patrie de notre espèce, que l’homme est essentiellement palmivore.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 400 (my emphasis). 28. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 109. 29. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 30. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 4, 421; Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 213; Lindquist, “Threats to the European Subject,” 222; 228–30. 31. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 46–47. “Dans tous ses rapports harmonieux de formes, de couleurs et de forces intérieures.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 314. 32. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 315; Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 49. 33. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 3, 36–37. Quoted in Lindquist, “Threats to the European Subject,” 4. “. . . La terre, surchargée de plantes, ne leur offre pas assez d’espace pour se développer. Partout le tronc des arbres est caché sous un tapis épais de verdure. . . . Les mêmes lianes qui rampent sur le sol, atteignent la cimes des arbres, et passent de l’un à l’autre, à plus de cent pieds de hauteur. C’est ainsi que, par un entrelacement continuel de plantes parasites, le botaniste est souvent exposé à confondre les fleurs, les fruits et le feuillage qui appartient à des espèces différentes.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 1, 370–71. 338 · n o t e s

to chapter six

34. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 4, 212–17. “Rien ne paroît isolé; des principes chimiques que l’on croyoit propres aux animaux se retrouvent dans les plantes. Un lien commun enchaîne toute la nature organique.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 106–9. 35. Jorge Marcone, “Humboldt in the Orinoco and the Environmental Humanities,” Hispanic Issues On-­Line 12 (2013): 84; accessed at http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets /doc/04_MARCONE.pdf. 36. Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 52. 37. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 57. “On confond généralement . . . sous les noms vagues de cataractes, cascades, chutes et rapides (Saltos, Chorros, Pongos, Cachoeiras et Rau­dales), des mouvements tumultueux de l’eau . . . .” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 319. 38. “Such is the majestic fall of the Rio Tequendama, which I have represented in my Views of the Cordilleras. . . .” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 57. “Telle est la superbe chute du Rio Tequendama, que j’ai figurée dans mes Vues des Cordillères. . . .” Rélation historique, vol. 2, 319. 39. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 317–23. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 53–64. 40. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 2. “Lorsqu’on se trouve placé de manière à embrasser d’un coup d’oeil cette suite continues des cataracts, cette nappe immense d’écume et de vapeurs, . . . on croit voir le fleuve entière suspend au-­dessus de son lit.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 291. 41. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 55. “L’Orénoque est comme partagé en une multitude de bras ou torrens qui cherchent chacun à se frayer un passage à travers les rochers. On est frappé du peu d’eau qu’on voit dans le lit du fleuve, de la frequénce des chutes souterraines, du fracas d’eaux qui se brisent en écumant sur les rochers.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 318. 42. “Beyond the Great Cataracts an unknown land begins.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 5. “Une terre inconnue commence au-­delà des Grandes Cataractes.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 293. 43. Marcone, “Humboldt in the Orinoco,” 84. 44. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 4, 421. “On se voit en contact avec un monde nouveau, avec une nature sauvage et indomptée.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 213. 45. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 166–67. “Dès que l’on a passé les Grandes Cataractes, on est comme dans un monde nouveau; on croit avoir franchi la barrière que la nature semble avoir élevée entre les pays civilisés de la côte, et les contrées sauvages et inconnues de l’intérieur.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 377. 46. Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Abridged Narrative of Travels through the Interior of South America. In A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, ed. and trans.John Pinkerton, vol. 14 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1813), 220–21. “Arrivé a Borja, je me trouvais dans un nouveau monde, éloigné de tout commerce humain, sur une mer d’eau douce, au milieu d’un labyrinthe de lacs, de rivières & de canaux, qui pénètrent en tout sens une forêt immense. . . . Je rencontrois de nouevelles plantes, de nouveau animaux, de nouveaux hommes.” Charles-­Marie de La Condamine, Rélation abrégé d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale (Paris: Veuve Pissot, 1745), 47. 47. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 57. “Le plus élevé, le plus formidable de ces Pon­ gos . . . , celui de Mayasi, n’a cependant que trois pieds de hauteur.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 319. 48. Lindquist, “Threats to the European Subject,” 15. n o t e s t o c h a p t e r s i x  · 339

49. “Entering a country so little frequented, . . . I have several motives for adhering to the journal form in my narrative.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 7. “En entrant dans un pays si peu visité, . . . j’ai plusieurs motifs pour conserver à mon récit la forme d’un journal.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 294. Humboldt thus “turns self-­ consciously to the raw and visceral journal he elsewhere suppresses.” Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 44. 50. Dassaw Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 85–86. 51. “Because tropical excess affects the way that Humboldt ‘pictures’ South America, it also influences the final written form of the Personal Narrative. . . . Tropical profusion has power to destabilize the text.” Lindquist, “Threats to the European Subject,” 230–33. 52. Ileana Rodríguez. Transatlantic Topographies: Islands, Highlands, Jungles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004), 168–69. 53. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 60; Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 325; Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 68. 54. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 4, 505. “Dès qu’on prête une oreille attentive aux sons les plus foibles, trasmis par l’air, on entend un frémissement sourd, un murmure continuel, . . . qui remplissent . . . toutes les couches inférieures de l’air.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 255. 55. Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 43. 56. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 197. “Un bras de l’Orénoque, le Cassiquiare, dirigé de nord au sud, se jette dans le . . . Rio Negro, lequel . . . s’unit au Maragnon ou rivière des Amazones.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 392. 57. Von Hagen, South America Called Them, 112, 114. 58. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 59. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 297. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 441; and J. B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” in Paul Laxton, ed., The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 95. 60. “This rivalry has contributed to the imperfection of geographical knowledge, which we have hitherto obtained respecting the tributary rivers of the Amazon.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 308. “Ces rivalités ont influé sur l’imperfection des connoissances géographiques que nous avons obtenues jusqu’ici sur les fleuves tributaires de l’Amazone.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 446. 61. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 88–89. 62. Humboldt, Relation historique, vol. 2, 293; Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 4. 63. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 293–94. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 6–7. 64. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 106. 65. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 293. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5. 66. “The Indians of the plains differ from the Indians of the forest.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 15. “L’Indien des plaines diffère de l’Indien des forêts. . . .” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 297. Emphasis in the original. 67. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 101. 68. Angela Pérez Mejía, “Humboldt: The Silences and Complicities of Cartography.” A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 64. 69. Massey, For Space, 28; Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 103. 70. “The voyage of Acuña gave rise to hypotheses, which have been propagated down to our own days, and which Mssrs. De la Condamine and d’Anville have multiplied beyond measure.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 323. “Le voyage d’Acuña a donné lieu à des hypothèses qui se sont propagées jusqu’à nos jours, et que MM. de 340 · n o t e s

to chapter six

La Con­da­mine et D’Anville ont multipliées outré mesure.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 453. 71. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 323. “Il reste douteaux si les Indiens qu’Acuña interrogeoit ont voulu lui désigner la communication de l’Orénoque avec le Rio Negro par le Cassiquiare, canal naturel que j’ai remonté de San Carlos à l’Esmeralda, ou s’ils ne lui ont donné qu’une idée vague de ces portages qu’il y a entre les sources du Rio Branco et du Rio Essequibo.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 453. 72. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 453. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 323. 73. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 84. 74. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 448–49. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 311–12. 75. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 531. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 327. 76. Safier, Measuring the New World, 76–79. “Cette carte a guidé l’académicien françois dans sa navigation. . . . ,” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 531. “This map guided the French academician in his navigation . . . . ,” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 483–84. Reproduction of Father Samuel Fritz’s Map of the Great River Marañon published at Quito by Father Juan de Narvaes, 1707; reproduced and printed for the Hakluyt Society by Donal Macbeth, 1921. 77. “On peut être étonné que le père Fritz, malgré un long séjour sur les rives de l’Amazone . . . n’ait pas acquis quelque notion du Cassiquiare.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 531. “It seems surprising that Father Fritz, notwithstanding his long residence on the banks of the Amazon, . . . had not acquired any notion of the Cassiquiare.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 484. 78. I am indebted to James Akerman, director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, for this insight. 79. “C’est système imaginaire est représenté dans la première édition de la belle carte d’Amérique par D’Anville. . . . Cette partie ancienne de la géographie, qu’on pourroit appeler spéculative, pour ne pas dire divinatoire, se trouve circonscrite dans des limites plus étroites.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, chapter 456. “This imaginary system is represented in the first edition of the fine map of America by d’Anville. . . . That ancient part of geography, which might be called speculative, not to say conjectural, is circumscribed within narrower limits.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 330. 80. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 2, 536–37. 81. Plate 17, “Mer du Nord (Pérou, Brésil),” included in M. D’Anville, Cartes géographiques (1786). 82. Safier, Measuring the New World, 58. 83. “La Condamine presented his mapping of the river as the highest priority of the expedition.” Safier, Measuring the New World, 80. 84. Safier, Measuring the New World, 59. 85. For a discussion of La Condamine’s graphic and textual strategies, see Safier, Measuring the New World, 76–81, 89–90. 86. Safier, Measuring the New World, 89–90. 87. Seifer, Measuring the New World, 60. “Le voyage de M. de La Condamine . . . a embrouillé tout ce qui tient aux cours du Caqueta, de l ‘Orénoque et du Rio Negro.’” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 456. “The voyage of M. de la Condamine . . . has embroiled all that is connected with the courses of the Caqueta, the Oroonoko [sic], and the Rio Negro.” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 328. While Humboldt grants La Condamine a certain degree of accuracy, he claims that “ce savant illustre” [“this illustrous traveller”] merely follows Sanson’s errors. Safier quotes this passage with a slightly different translation; Measuring the New World, 60. n o t e s t o c h a p t e r s i x  · 341

88. Graham D. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed. Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 38–39, 47. 89. Safier, Measuring the New World, 80. 90. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 38. 91. Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 64. 92. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 105. 93. Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 64–66. She adds: “Guides from various ethnic groups are stripped of their scientific knowledge.” Pérez Mejia, 68. 94. “Les indigènes, je le répète, sont excellens géographes.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 447. “The Indians, I repeat, are excellent geographers . . . .” Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5, 309. 95. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 333. “D’après le récit des indigènes. . . .” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 458. 96. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 99. 97. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 310–11. “Les grands affluens de l’Amazone sont désignés, même chez les missionnaires de race européenne, par d’autres noms dans leurs cours supérieurs et inférieurs. . . . Les recherches faites dans les missions des Andaquies, sur la véritable origine du Rio Negro, ont été d’autant plus infructueuses que l’on ignoroit le nom indien du fleuve.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 447–48. 98. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 448–49. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 312–14. For a discussion of how El Dorado figures in La Condamine’s text, see Safier, Measuring the New World, 84–86. 99. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 309. “Nos cartes sont chargées des noms arbitrairement raccourcis ou défigurés.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 447. 100. Humboldt, “Concerning the Waterfalls of the Orinoco,” Views of Nature, 136. 101. Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 68. 102. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 487–88. “M. de La Condamine, pendant sa mémorable navigation sur la rivière des Amazones, en 1743, avoit recueilli aven soin un grand nombre de preuves de cette communication des rivières. . . . La plus décisive de ces preuves lui paroissoit alors le témoignage non suspect d’une Indienne Cauriacani à laquelle il avoit parlé, et qui, des bords de l’Orenoque . . . êtoit venue en canot au Grand-­Parà.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 533. 103. Safier, Measuring the New World, 87–88. 104. This map appeared in the second edition of D’Anville Amerique méridionale. 105. “Humboldt was the editor who possessed the necessary instruments to transform it into a geographic text, a palimpsest map in which indigenous American oral geographic knowledge is overlaid with European science to construct the perfect metaphor of the Orinoco.” Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 64. 106. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 314. “La nature a suivi un plan beaucoup moins compliqué qu’on ne l’a cru, en se laissant guider . . . par le goût du merveilleux.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 449 (my emphasis). 107. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 272. “Les peuples du Haut-­Orénoque . . . n’ont . . . d’autre culte que celui des forces de la nature.” Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 429. 108. Dassow Walls, introduction, Views of Nature, 14. 109. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 18. 110. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 539–40. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 500–501. For further discussion, see Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 81–84. 111. Humboldt, Rélation historique, vol. 2, 438; Humboldt, Personal Narrative, vol. 5, 291. 112. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 1; Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 46. 342 · n o t e s

to chapter six

113. “Una naturaleza viva y extraordinaria, gigante y salvaje, un espectáculo capaz de confundir y agobiar la percepción y el conocimiento humano, pero también una ‘naturalización’ de la región que es también su deshistorización o un empujón de regreso a los ‘orígenes.’” (“A vital and extraordinary nature, wild and gigantic, a spectacle capable of impressing and overwhelming human perception and knowledge, but, at the same time, a ‘naturalization’ of the region that dehistoricizes it or drives it back towards its ‘origins.’”) Jorge Marcone, “Nuevo descubrimiento del gran ‘Río de las Amazonas’: La ‘novela de la selva’ y la crítica al imaginario de la Amazonía.” Estudios 8, no. 16 ( July-­ December 2000): 134 (my emphasis and translation). 114. “The European travelers brought an idea of history that would allow Latin American nature to provide the basis for an autonomous and distinct Latin American being.” González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 106. Marcone, “Humboldt in the Orinoco . . . ,” 76, 88–89. chapter 7



1. Historic Jamestowne is part of the federally owned and operated Colonial National Historical Park. I am grateful to Ranger William Warder for helping me identify the image in question as a section from the third and final version Ortelius made of his world map in 1587. The toponym “Palmares” there differs little from the 1570 original shown here. On a stylistic note, while some of the toponyms discussed in this chapter were originally written in lower case, I have capitalized them all for the sake of consistency. Finally, I would like to thank Fabrício Prado of the College of William & Mary and the other participants in the annual Río de la Plata Workshop for inspiring this project. 2. Eugenio José Pingitore, “Rare Palms in Argentina,” Principes 26, no. 1 (1982): 12; Angél Lulio Cabrera, “Esquema fitogeográfico de la República Argentina,” Revista del Museo de la Ciudad Eva Perón, vol. 8 (Sección Botánica), 104–9, 114–18. On the Quilombo de Palmares, see Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550– 1888 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 138–40. 3. See Seymour I. Schwartz, The Mismapping of America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003); R. A. Skelton, Looking at an Early Map (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1965); and J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 42–43. 4. Otto E. Recke, speech before the Buenos Aires city council, October 22, 1883, in Concejo Deliberante, Actas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta El Comercio, c. 1883), 339. The mayor whose administration authorized the palm planting was Torcuato de Alvear, arguably the most zealous urban reformer in the history of Buenos Aires. 5. On the “positivist” or “progressive” approach to cartographic history and its critics, see Matthew H. Edney, “Reflection Essay: Progress and the Nature of ‘Cartography,’” in Martin Dodge, ed., Classics in Cartography: Reflections on Influential Articles from Cartographica (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 331–42. 6. Imago Mundi (1935–­present); J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vols. 1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–2007). 7. Mlle. [Myriem] Foncin, “La Représentation de la végétation sur les cartes anciennes,” in Méthodes de la cartographie de la végétation (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1961), 147–55. Perhaps stirred into action by Foncin, A. W. Küchler—then the leading proponent of mapping the original distribution of plant species—did include a short, rather dismissive chapter on “Five Centuries of Vegetation Cartography” in his Vegetation Mapping (New York: Ronald Press, 1967), 3–16. 8. Wilma George, Animals and Maps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). n o t e s t o c h a p t e r s e v e n  · 343

Compare with the scattered bibliography of the “Botanical Map” entry in Helen M. Wallis and Arthur G. Robinson, eds., Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 (Tring, UK: Map Collector Press and International Cartographic Association, 1987), 139–41. Though better balanced, the emphasis on fauna over flora can still be seen in the relevant sections of Denis Wood and John Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), particularly chapters 7 and 8. 9. To be clear, our focus here is on small-­scale maps made in Europe between approximately 950 and 1850, including world maps (entire period), portolan charts and atlases (1300 to 1700), hemispheric or continental maps showing South America (1500 to 1850), and subcontinental maps of the Southern Cone (1600 to 1750). I have generally excluded regional maps such as Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina (1539), estate maps, and other large-­scale maps, because their portrayal of trees often involves issues of identity and/or industry not explored in this study. I should also state that my argument here about early cartographic trees does not apply to all plants, notably those coveted by Europeans for spices or dyes. But even their appearance on old maps was never entirely commercial in intent. 10. George, Animals and Maps, 25. However, to make her point George was too quick to assert that, unlike animals, cartographic “plants do not show clear cut localisation in the world.” On the tendency of beasts and “monstrous races” to cluster at the outer periphery of medieval maps, see John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1981. 11. Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 19. 12. Benjamin Schmidt, “Collecting Global Icons: The Case of the Exotic Parasol,” in Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, eds., Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 34–35. See also Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 251. 13. On the differences between “Italian-­style” and “Catalan-­style” portolan charts (and why these terms are preferred to strictly national labels), see Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 392–95. High-­resolution images of most portolan charts and atlases up to 1470 can be found on the CD-­ROM published with Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes: La representació medieval d’una mar solcada (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2007). The Carte Pisane is image C1. It is also available digitally at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52503226n. 14. See, for instance, Ptolemy, Cosmographia: Bologna 1477, ed. R. A. Skelton (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1963). 15. The 1507 Waldseemüller can be examined closely at www.loc.gov/resource/g3200 .ct000725C. 16. The phrase comes from Edward Lynam, The Mapmaker’s Art: Essays on the History of Maps (London: Batchworth Press, 1953), 38. One expert suggests that the Beatus vegetation could be sorghum or another crop, though I wonder why summits would be the best place to portray agriculture. See Sandra Sáenz-­López Pérez, The Beatus Maps: The Revelation of the World in the Middle Ages (Burgos, Spain: Siloé, 2014), 174–77. This engaging book also contains many excellent illustrations of the Beatus maps and mappaemundi mentioned here. 17. For the difficult-­to-­access Viladesters, see Youssouf Kamal, Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegypti, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Johann Wolfgang Goethe-­Universität, 344 · n o t e s

to chapter seven

1987), 1452–53. The 1478 Rome Ptolemaic map is in Ptolemy, Cosmographia: Roma, 1478, ed. R. A. Skelton (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1966). 18. This according to the medieval romances of his eastern travels. See Roger Telfryn Pritchard, The History of Alexander’s Battles (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), 103–5. For the maps, consult the following. Vercelli: Carlo F. Capello, Il mappamondo medioevale di Vercelli (1191–1218?) (Turin: Fanton, 1976); Psalter: www .bl.uk/collection-­items/psalter-­world-­map; Ebstorf: Hartmut Kugler, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, 2 vols. (Berlin: Academie Verlag, 2007) and www2.leuphana.de/ebskart; Hereford: Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001). 19. For a searching discussion of the Dry Tree’s mythic origins and variants, see Paul Pel­ liot, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1963), 627–37. 20. Capello, Il mappamondo medioevale di Vercelli, 85; Kugler, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, vol. 1, 50. 21. I am indebted to Gregory Heyworth and Helen Davies of the Lazarus Project for providing me with multispectral images of Vercelli ahead of their complete digital reconstruction of this highly deteriorated map. For more on their efforts, see www .lazarusprojectimaging.com. 22. Capello, Il mappamondo medioevale di Vercelli, 94; Westrem, The Hereford Map, 180–82. The Ebstorf map also fails to illustrate a “palmlike tree” reported near Cadíz. Kugler, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, vol. 1, 146. 23. To make matters more perplexing, on another map of Palestine, near “La Masecír” (Mansoura, Egypt), Paris drew a decidedly leafy tree next to his telling of the biblical legend (from Pseudo-­Matthew 20:1) in which, at the urging of Jesus, a palm leaned over so Mary could pick its fruit. Compare the three images in P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land (London: British Library, 2012), 62 (bottom left), 79 (top right), and 84 (bottom left). 24. Richard J. A. Talbert, Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84. A digital supplement with interactive maps can be found at peutinger.atlantides.org. No medieval mapmaker ever depicted the date palm as faithfully as the creator of the Madaba mosaic map (c. 550), a regional portrait of the Holy Land painted on the floor of a Byzantine church in Jordan. See F. Nigel Hepper and Joan E. Taylor, “Date Palms and Opobalsam in the Madaba Mosaic Map,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 136, no. 1 (2004): 35–44. 25. Pujades, Les cartes portolanes, image C3. 26. For a contemporary explanation of these flag symbols, including their references to North African trees, see Nancy F. Marino, ed., El Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reinos (The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms) (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 56–57. 27. Pujades, Les cartes portolanes, image C19. See also gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55 002481n; and, for the legends, Georges Grosjean, Mappamundi: The Catalan Atlas of the Year 1375 (Dietikon, Switzerland: Urs Graf, 1978). 28. R. A. Skelton, “A Contract for World Maps at Barcelona, 1399–1400,” Imago Mundi 22 (1968): 109; Pujades, Les cartes portolanes, 500–501. 29. Foncin, “La Représentation de la végétation sur les cartes anciennes,” 148. 30. Pujades, Les cartes portolanes, image C36. 31. For the legends on these maps, see Heinrich Winter, “Petrus Roselli,” Imago Mundi 9 (1952): 1–11. For the palm illustrations, consult Pujades, Les cartes portolanes, image C36; and gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b5906261w. Foncin dated the latter “Roselli” to 1483. See “La Représentation de la végétation sur les cartes anciennes,” 151. 32. Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout Hisn o t e s t o c h a p t e r s e v e n  · 345

tory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 156. The tradition continued at least until the 1630s. Among many examples, see the charts made in 1505 by Jehuda Aben­zara (brbl-­dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3520571), in 1516 by Vesconte Mag­g iolo (vm136.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/digitalscriptorium/huntington/HM427 .html), in 1595 by Joan Oliva (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7200835b), and in 1631 by Placidus Caloiro et Oliva (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b5906251h). 33. On the “token” representation of trees by the makers of early printed world maps, as well as some characteristic diagrams they used, see Catherine Delano-­Smith, “Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470–­ca. 1640,” in Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 3, 551–53. 34. Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 424–25. The CD-­ROM that accompanies this volume allows detailed digital examination of this incredible map. 35. A digital version is available at vm136.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/digitalscriptorium /huntington/HM29.html. 36. Further south, by the Gulf of Guinea, the Portuguese fort Castel da Mina (Elmina Castle) was another popular place for Lopes and other sixteenth-­century chartmakers to portray by palm vignette. For other African scenes, see the 1546 portolan atlas by João Freire (vm136.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/digitalscriptorium/huntington /HM35.html), the 1573 planisphere by Domingos Teixeira (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148 /btv1b525032167), and the c. 1600 portolan chart by Luís Teixeira (vm136.lib.berke ley.edu/BANC/digitalscriptorium/huntington/HM1549.html). 37. For Cantino, see Marjo T. Nurminen, The Mapmakers’ World: A Cultural History of the European World Map (Oxford: Pool of London Press, 2015), 154–57. A high-­resolution copy of Canerio (aka Caveri) can be found at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b5500 70757. For another fine sixteenth-­century Brazilwood vignette, see Jean Rotz, Boke of Idrography (c. 1540), 28r (www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Royal_MS _20_e_ix). 38. For a revealing study of sixteenth-­century maps of this south Atlantic shoreline, with a useful emphasis on toponyms, see Roberto Levillier, América la bien llamada, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Kraft, 1948), 3–270. 39. Compare the images of the Americas on the Mercator 1569 and Ortelius 1570 world maps, reproduced in Rodney Shirley, “The World Maps in the Theatrum,” in Marcel van den Broecke et al., Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas (Utrecht: HES Publishers, 1998), 176–77. Mercator’s map was the first to employ a cylindrical conformal projection allowing constant course navigation on a two-­dimensional representation of (almost) the entire earth. 40. Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472–1700 (London: Holland Press, 1987), 109, entry 97, plate 83; Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp: Agied. Coppenium Diesth, 1570), plate 2. Shirley’s carto-­ bibliography provides descriptions and small reproductions of all the printed world maps discussed below, many of which exist in multiple library copies. 41. Gerardus Mercator, Atlas sive Cosmographicæ Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (Duisburg, Germany: 1595), 31v–­32r, 39v–­40r. 42. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 109, entry 97, plate 83. 43. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 96–97, entry 85, plate 72; Battista Agnese (attributed), c. 1550 manuscript portolan atlas of the world, Newberry Library, VAULT Ayer Ms map 12; Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 122–23, entry 107, plate 92; also 135–37, entry 117, plate 101. 44. The islets are likely the Islas de Torres, a small archipelago off the Cabo Polonia, about a hundred miles north up the Atlantic coast. Originally dubbed the Islas de Rodrígo 346 · n o t e s

to chapter seven

Álvares, after the pilot traveling with Cabot who first sighted them, cartographers later corrupted their name and moved them to the mouth of the Río de la Plata. See Alonso de Santa Cruz, Islario general de todas las islas del mundo (c. 1550), 347r–­48r, in Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid), RES/38; José Toribio Medina, Los viajes de Diego García de Moguer al Río de la Plata (Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1908), 107– 8n9; and Rolando A. Laguarda Trías, “Pilotos portugueses en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVI,” Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 34 (1988): 67–68. 45. Notable examples are the 1648 world by Joan Blaeu (norman.hrc.utexas.edu/kraus maps/details.cfm?mapId=11) and the 1650 America by Nicolas Sanson ( jcb.luna imaging.com/luna/servlet/s/w4549n). 46. Examples of this old association can be found in Manuel Ricardo Trelles, “Memoria sobre el orígen de los indios querandis y etnografia de la comarca occidental del Plata al tiempo de la conquista,” Revista de Buenos Aires 25 (1871): 11; and Estanislao S. Zeballos, “Geografía Antigua,” in Boletín del Instituto Geográfico 1 (1881): 20. 47. Close-­ups of the Argentine coastline and lists of toponyms for both of these maps are found in Levillier, América la bien llamada, vol. 2, 115–25, 138–39. The best large reproduction of Cabot remains Mappemonde de Sébastien Cabot (Paris: Editions les Yeux Ouverts, 1968). For Verrazzano, see Edward Luther Stevenson, Maps Illustrating Early Discovery and Exploration in America 1502–1530 (New Brunswick, 1903), facsimile 12. 48. Lawrence C. Wroth not only doubts that the Verrazzanos ever traveled south of Brazil, but also suggests that a third of their toponyms between the Río de la Plata and the Strait of Magellan, including one “Palmar,” “were borrowed from the North American section of the 1529 map simply to give the map the appearance of careful observation.” Wroth, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524–1528 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 233. 49. In this regard, it bears mentioning that some later maps have the toponym “Sauce” or “Sauces” near where Ortelius put “Palmares”—and in the nineteenth century, “(Laguna del) Sauce y Quilmes” was an electoral district in the area. See Guillermo Furlong Cardiff, Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1936), plate 16; César A. García Belsunce, La contribución de la cartografía a la historia de la población Magdalena (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1998), 15–17, 26–27; and Registro oficial 2, no. 24 (1822): 305. 50. Though his famous wall map did not appear until 1544, there is good evidence Cabot began to make and distribute world maps shortly after his return to Spain. See Robert Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 107–9. Levillier further suggests that word of his travels was already influencing European maps in the late 1520s. See América la bien llamada, vol. 2, 115–16. Intriguingly, Shirley sees some similarities between Cabot and Tramezzino, particularly in the Río de la Plata area. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 109. 51. In the interim it was called the Río Solís, after Spanish explorer Juan de Solís, the first European to explore it. 52. Levillier, América la bien llamada, vol. 2, 87–94, 122–23, 138–39. For a facsimile of the Turin-­Spanish map, see Corradino Astengo, ed., Geocarta nautica universale (Torino: Priuli & Verlucca, 2010). 53. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 144–45, entry 122, plate 104; also 175, entry 153, plate 8; 181, entry 158, plate 130; and 194–95, entry 177, plate 144. A nice adaptation from Plancius also containing “Palmares” is Johannes Baptista Vrients’s 1596 world map: Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 213, entry 192, plate 157. 54. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 187, entry 167, plate 137; Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America, 2 vols. (Herts, UK: Raleigh Publications, 1996–2007), I:102, entry 80, plate 80; bdh-­rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000050694, plates 1 and 9. n o t e s t o c h a p t e r s e v e n  · 347

55. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 247–49, entry 233, plate 185; also 249, entry 234, plate 186; Burden, The Mapping of North America I, 175–76: 145: 145. See also Hondius’s 1606 version of Mercator’s atlas (http://objects.library.uu.nl/reader/index.php?obj= 1874-­291046), esp. the world map after page 33, the America after 41, the America after 344, and the South America after 351. For examples of the Blaeu trees, see Burden, The Mapping of North America, I:231–33, entry 189, plate 189; and Joan Blaeu, Atlas major, sive Cosmographia Blaviana, vol. 11 (Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1662), esp. the America after page 1 and the Paraguay after 201. The last instance of “Palmares” I have been able to find appears on Danker Danckerts, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula Auctore D.D. (c. 1675), which is misidentified in Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 493, entry 477, plate 350. 56. For high-­resolution images of the Miller Atlas, see expositions.bnf.fr/marine/albums /miller/index.htm. The most thorough illustrated study is Mónica Miró et al., Atlas Miller (Barcelona: M. Moleiro Editor, 2006). 57. A digital copy of an earlier facsimile can be found at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b 53023022k. 58. Chet A. Van Duzer, The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 (London: British Library, 2015), 104–5, 169. This book contains a facsimile and close-­ups of every section of Desceliers’s map. 59. E. W. Dahlgren, ed., Map of the World by Alonzo de Santa Cruz (1542) (Stockholm: Royal Printing Office, 1892). 60. Sergio Marras, ed., Cosmografías del sur del mundo (Santiago: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2004), 28–29; Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 206–7, entry 187, plate 152. Plancius is an interesting example of palm contiguity, as his “Magallanica” stretches from just below Tierra del Fuego all the way to New Guinea. Which part the image is meant to show is unclear. 61. Tabula geográphica del Reyno de Chile, in Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile (Rome: Francisco Caballo, 1646), end; John Ogilby, America (London: 1671), after page 472; Vicenzo Coronelli, America Meridionale (1692), available at https://gal lica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b5905797x; Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Eerste zee-­ togt van Alonso D’Ojeda (Leiden, Netherlands: Pieter van der Aa, 1706), after page 5. 62. Blaeu, Atlas major, vol. 11, after pages 243 and 245. 63. On New England, see Schmidt, “Collecting Global Icons,” 31–32. 64. Burden, The Mapping of North America II:371–72, entry 675, plate 675; Cartografía y relacciones históricas de ultramar, vol. 7 (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 1992), plate 24; Furlong Cardiff, Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata, plate 34. 65. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 359–61, entry 336, plate 256. Other instances include the c. 1650 world by Hugo Allard and the 1660 world by Frederik de Wit. Shir­ ley, The Mapping of the World, 399–400, entry 378, plate 283; also 442–46, entry 421, plate 311. Jean-­Baptiste-­Louis Clouet similarly topped his 1776 world with an image of the Tower of Babel straddled by a palm on one side and a pine on the other. Carte generale de la terre ou mappemonde (Paris: L. Mondhare, 1776). Newberry Library (Chicago), Novacco 4F 42. 66. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 446, entry 422, plate 313. 67. Arthur G. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 68–108. On early vegetation mapping specifically, see David J. de Laubenfels, Mapping the World’s Vegetation: Regionalizations of Formations and Flora (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 3–35. 68. Carl Ritter, Sechs Karten von Europa (Schnepfenthal, Germany: Buchhandlung der Erziehungsanstalt, 1806), plates 1 and 2; Joakim Frederik Schouw, Pflanzengeographischer Atlas (Berlin: Reimer, 1823). See plate 6 for palms. 348 · n o t e s

to chapter seven

69. Karl Friedrich Phillipp von Martius, Historia Naturalis Palmarum, 3 vols. (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1850). The many illustrations in Martius, including the palm distribution maps, have been recently reproduced as The Book of Palms, ed. H. Walter Lack (Cologne: Taschen, 2010). 70. Alexander Keith Johnston, The Physical Atlas of Natural Phenomena (Edinburgh: W. & A. K. Johnston, 1856), plate 25; Alfred Russel Wallace, Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses (London: John Van Voorst, 1853), frontispiece. chapter 8



1. This essay has been kicking around in my laptop for far too long. My thanks to Jim Akerman and Kathleen Brosnan for the invitation to pre­sent this work at their NEH seminar at the Newberry Library and for their comments and suggestions. For comments on earlier versions I am indebted to Barbara Mundy, Brett de Bary, Magali Carrera, Roger Kittleson, Mauricio Tenorio, Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Karin Rosemblatt, Mary Roldán, Margaret Washington, Aaron Sachs, Michael Kammen, Bruce Erickson, Jon Solomon, Jodi Blanco, Anne-­Marie Hallal, Chris Boyer, Laura Hostetler, and the participants at various gatherings where versions of this essay have been presented: the Workshop on Transnational Circulation of Landscape Narratives at the University of Texas; the colloquium at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University; the Cornell University Comparative History Colloquium; the Telluride House Faculty Lecture Series, Cornell University; the New York State Latin American History Workshop; the History Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and the conference Rethinking Space in Latin America at Yale University. 2. Carlos Fuentes, in his collection of interlinked stories revolving around movement and the Mexico-­US border, La Frontera de Cristal, wryly comments on such renderings in the very first sentence of the first story. The young protagonist, traveling from Mexico City, over the arid high plain of northwestern Mexico, to the fictional border town of Campazas, peers from the window of her plane. She opens her guidebook (named Guide Bleu, perhaps in homage to Roland Barthes’s essay in Mythologies) to the corresponding page to find the following: “There is absolutely nothing of interest for the visitor in Campazas.” Fuentes, La Frontera de Cristal (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1995), 11. Fuentes also explored such imaginings, and their linkages to international flows of tourists and trade, in his frenetic and sardonic Christopher Unborn, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1987]). 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 106. 4. In a way one could suggest then that the “event” under consideration here is not “the conquest” or the “encounter” or some similar thing, but in fact the very place itself. For helpful meditations on such themes, see Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 27–28 and 138–42. In his study of Cortés’s second letter, Ricardo Padrón astutely notes: “When ‘space’ is understood not as a surface but as a distance, the opposition between spatiality and temporality . . . begins to dissolve. The itinerary interweaves time and topography as two kinds of intervals: ‘space’ becomes inseparable from the action of moving through it. It is at once discourse and course.” Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 97. Geographer J. K. Wright argued for an understanding of geography vis-­à-­vis the “aesthetic imaginings” and geographical ideas, regardless of their veracity, that people had about places in the past—an enterprise he termed “geosophy.” Wright, “Terra Incognita: The Place of the Imagination in Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37 (1947): n o t e s t o c h a p t e r e i g h t  · 349

1–15. See also Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 5. García Martínez, “Las rutas de Cortés,” Arqueología Mexicana 9, no. 49 (2001): 32–35. 6. García Martínez, “Las rutas de Cortés,” Arqueología Mexicana 9, no. 49 (2001): 32–35, quote on 35. More generally on such issues of foundational routes and roots, see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 7. Fanny Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico during a Residence of Two Years in That Country (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1931 [1842]), 4. 8. Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land (Marquesas, 1774–1880) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 33–34. 9. Although such “terra-­centrism” is certainly not hegemonic. See, for a beautiful meditation, the collected essays of Epeli Hauofa, ‘ We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). 10. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 29–30. 11. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 34. 12. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 48–49. 13. “Expectations . . .” from Richard White, cited from Henrika Kucklick and Robert E. Kohler, “Introduction,” Osiris (1996), 6; “transparently . . .” and “a myriad” from Robert B. Campbell, In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire along the Inside Passage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6. 14. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 49. 15. Nigel Leask notes, for example, that Calderón de la Barca, in contrast to Ward and Bullock, does not frame her travels as a second discovery or conquest, despite framing the book itself with her journey to and from Mexico City. Leask, “The Ghost of Chapultepec: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott, and Nineteenth Century Mexican Travel Accounts,” in Jás Elsner and Joan-­Pau Rubiés, eds., Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion, 1999), 188. 16. James Lockhart, introduction to William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001); J. H. Elliott, “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, no. 17 (1967): 41–58; and Fernando Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés (Mexico City: FCE, 1950), chapter 1. 17. See Lockhart, introduction, xxvii; Padrón, The Spacious Word, 99; and Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 18. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, xiii. See also Schama, Landscape and Memory, 6–7, who notes: “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” 19. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, xxi; see also Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 173–74. On narrative and historicity, see Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 20. For an appraisal of Humboldt’s nineteenth-­century status, see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006). 21. See Leopoldo Zea, “Humboldt y la Independencia de América,” in Ensayos sobre Humboldt (Mexico: UNAM, 1962), 104–17; Luis González, “Humboldt y la Revolución de la Independencia,” in Ensayos sobre Humboldt (Mexico City: UNAM, 1962), 201–14; Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, “Nation and Nature: Natural History and the Fashioning of Creole National Identity in Late Colonial Spanish America,” paper presented at the 350 · n o t e s

to chapter eight

Latin American Studies Association, 1997; Jorge Cañizares-­Eguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Narratives in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities,” in Cañizares-­Esguerra, Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 112–28; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 136. 22. Quoted from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 112. 23. Jorge Antonio Ruedas de la Serna, Los origenes de la visión paradisiaca de la naturaliza mexicana (Mexico City: UNAM, 1985), 95. See also Pratt, Imperial Eyes, esp. chapters 6–8; and Cañizares-­Esguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt?” 24. José Luis Romero, Latinoamérica: Las ciudades y las ideas; Cañizares-­Esguerra, “Landscapes and National Identity: Mexico, 1850–1900,” in Cañizares Esguerra, Nature, Empire and Nation, 129–67; and Lina del Castillo, Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). To this day, works continue to idolize Humboldt at the expense of the labors and ideas of scientists and naturalists of the Americas. See, for example, Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Vintage, 2016). That Wulf ’s work has garnered so many accolades serves as a reminder of the tenacity of Eurocentrism in the writing (and marketing) of history. 25. Lourdes Celis Salgado, Veracruz: El Territorio Mexicano. Tomo II: Los estados (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social, 1982), 647–81; see esp. 661. 26. Quoted from Bernardo García Díaz, “Viajeros extranjeros en el Veracruz del siglo XIX,” in Bernardo García Díaz y Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Veracruz y sus viajeros (Mexico City: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 2001), 51. See also Jorge Cañizares-­ Esguerra on “How Derivative Was Humboldt?” 27. Cited from Drewey Ray Gunn, American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556–1973 (Aus­ tin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 15. 28. For overviews, see Alfred Siemens, Between the Summit and the Sea: Central Veracruz in the Nineteenth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990); and García Díaz, “Viajeros extranjeros en el Veracruz del siglo XIX.” 29. Donald Ringe, “The Function of Landscape in Prescott’s ‘The Conquest of Mexico,’” New England Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 1983): 570. 30. Prescott to Calderón de la Barca, December 5, 1840, in The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, trans. and ed. Roger Wolcott (Boston: Riverside Press, 1925), 187. 31. Prescott to Calderón de la Barca, August 15, 1840, in The Correspondence, 150. 32. Prescott to Angel Calderón de la Barca, April 2, 1840, in The Correspondence, 116–17. 33. Prescott as quoted in Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth Century Mexcio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 100. 34. Prescott to Calderón de la Barca, December 5, 1840, in The Correspondence, 186. 35. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 529. 36. This is not to suggest that until then there had been little or no interest. Both William Gilmore Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird had, in the 1820s and the 1830s, published fictionalized romantic works on the conquest. See Gunn, American and British Writers in Mexico, 18. 37. R. Tripp Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820– 1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 75. 38. Siemens, Between the Summit and the Sea; Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 150. Deborah Poole notes that Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru had a similar power, becoming the “reigning paradigm for Andean history.” See Poole, “Landn o t e s t o c h a p t e r e i g h t  · 351

scape and the Imperial Subject; U.S. Images of the Andes, 1859–1930,” in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-­L atin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 112–13. One of the best studies of Prescott’s powerful perspective is Richard Kagan’s “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 423–46. 39. Tylor, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1861), 40; Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central Amer­ ica in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 52. 40. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 633–34; Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 219– 20; Aguirre, Informal Empire, 57–58. 41. Alicia Mayer, “William H. Prescott,” in Juan A. Ortega y Medina and Rosa Camelo, coords., Historiografía Mexicana, Vol. III: El Surgimiento de la Historiografía Nacional (Mexico: UNAM, 1997), 447–68, esp. 452. 42. Orozco y Berra, Apuntes para la Historia de la Geografía en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Francisco Díaz de León, 1881), 423–24. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico; Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), chap. 1. 43. J. A. Ortega y Medina, cited in Mayer, “William H. Prescott,” 452. 44. See Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 150. 45. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 155. 46. Evans, Romancing the Maya, 85. 47. Quoted from Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 155. 48. Winfield Scott, Memoirs, 2 vols. (New York: Sheldon & Company Publishers, 1864), vol. 2, 467. 49. Quoted from Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico, 104. 50. Lockhart, introduction, xxxiii. 51. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 284. This is Prescott’s image of the central Veracruz lowlands. 52. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 285. 53. For an excellent discussion of visual culture in Mexico and the circulation of landscape aesthetics, see Magali Carrera, From New Spain to Mexico. Prescott was not alone in seeking more contemporary observations for his evocation of landscapes. As Robert Aguirre has pointed out, the English traveler William Bullock suddenly left the eyewitness remembrances of Díaz del Castillo when narrating the arrival in Mexico City. He instead chose to draw his description from William Robertson, whose History of America was published in 1777 and who had never even visited Mexico himself. Aguirre, Informal Empire, 46. 54. On Cortés and intelligibility rather than sensibility, see Padrón, The Spacious Word, chapter 3. 55. Ringe, “The Function of Landscape in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico,” 572. 56. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 166. 57. On the importance of both scene and plot, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, and William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, Nation and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992). 58. Calderón de la Barca to Prescott, October 15, 1840, in The Correspondence, 168. 59. Evans, Romancing the Maya, 68.

352 · n o t e s

to chapter eight

60. Evans, Romancing the Maya, 68–69. The quoted passage from Stephens appears on page 69. 61. On the celebration of viceregal power and the route of Cortés, see Beatriz Berndt León Mariscal, “Discursos de poder en un nuevo dominio: El trayecto del Virrey Marqués de las Amarillas de Veracruz a Puebla, las Fiestas de Entrada y el Ceremonial Político,” Relaciones 101 (Winter 2005). 62. Given the explosion of violence that accompanied the insurgencies of the 1810s, of which they were often targets, Creole liberals also avoided overt celebrations of an indigenous past reminescent of their Creole patriot ancestors. See Ruedas de la Serna, Los orígenes de la visión, 12. On the exaltation of the indigenous past, see Luis Villoro, Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México (Mexico City: SEP, 1987); Guillermo Bon­fil Batalla, México profundo: Una civilización negada (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987); Brad­ing, The First America; Rebecca Earle, Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and with explicit attention to its implications for landscape representation, María del Car­men Millán, El Paisaje en la Poesia Mexicana (Mexico City: Imp. Universitaria, 1952), chapter 4. 63. Quoted in Hale, Mexican Liberalism, 120. 64. I discuss these moves further in Craib, Cartographic Mexico, chaps. 1 and 4. See José Guadalupe Romero, “Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes de mudar los nombres geográficos de las poblaciones de la República aprobado por la Sociedad,” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 1a Epoca, Tomo VIII (1860), 387–89; Antonio García Cubas, Díaz Covarrubias and Fernández, “Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes de variar los nombres a los lugares de la República,” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 2a época, tomo 1 (1869), 601–4; Agustín Díaz, Memoria de la Comisión Geográfico-­Exploradora presentada al oficial mayor, encargada de la Secretaría de Fomento, sobre los trabajos ejecutados durante el año fiscal de 1878 a 1879 (Mexico City: Imprenta Francisco Díaz de León, 1880), 26–27; and “Dictamen presentado a la Sociedad por los socios ingenieros Ricardo García Granados, Francisco de P. Piña y Ricardo Ortega y Pérez Gallardo,” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 5a época, tomo 3 (1908), 461–67. 65. Siemens, Between the Summit and the Sea, 53. 66. The best discussion of the events behind the controversy of Cuauhtémoc’s remains is Paul Gillingham’s superb Cuauhtémoc’s Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), and for an abbreviated overview, Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 467–68. 67. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés (Mexico City: FCE, 1950). 68. Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999), 150; and Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 82–85. The sheer volume of output prohibits any comprehensive bibliography, but an excellent analysis can be found in Villoro, Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México. For a particularly powerful critique of how concern with “lo mexicano” was constitutive of the phenomenon it purported to examine; see Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987), esp. 15–26. An overview of the cultural history of the period can be found in José Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Planeta, 1990). 69. Nicola Miller astutely notes that José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica was intended not as

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r e i g h t  · 353

a meditation solely on mexicanidad, but a universalizing discourse on “Latin America’s place in world culture.” Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 142. 70. Knight, “Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo,” 83–84. 71. Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought, 466–67. 72. Luis Cabrera, as cited in Knight, “Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo,” 85–86. 73. Ana María Alonso has argued that such “botanical imagery territorialized the nation and its prototypical citizen, the mestizo, rooting both in the fecund earth of America as the source of indigenous creativity.” Alonso, “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje,’ Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004): 465. 74. Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 78. Neruda’s Canto General was intended in part as an effort to convey an American—a continental—history and reality. It is a self-­conscious effort to speak for a continent, for a shared political experience. Indeed, Neruda came to and began the work while in postrevolutionary Mexico, surrounded by the similarly continentalist in scope and politically didactic murals of Orozco, Siquieros, and Rivera and the universalist meditations of Octavio Paz. For a useful discussion, see René de Costa, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 104–8. 75. The passages of Neruda’s poetry come from Neruda, Canto General, trans. Jack Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 13 and 46 respectively. 76. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 236. 77. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 176; 174–75. 78. Benítez, Los Indios de México (1967), cited from Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought, 467. 79. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 306. 80. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 132, 249. 81. Something not lost on former boosters and governors of Veracruz. See, for example, the introductory comments of then Governor Miguel Alemán-­Velasco in Bernardo García Díaz and Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Veracruz y sus viajeros (Mexico City: GM Editores, 2001), 7. Even so, this should not suggest that one resort to the opposite extreme and dismiss all invocations of tradition or authenticity as little more than disingenuous tropes strategically wielded by self-­interested individuals. For insightful comments on the dangers of dismissing any claims of authenticity and, conversely, uncritically celebrating “hybridity,” see Deane, introduction to Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 82. Benítez, La Ruta de Hernán Cortés, 177. Two works that I have found particularly useful in thinking through how iconic images or scenes can be reworked or taken up to challenge hegemonic readings are Diane Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Daegan Miller, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 83. See Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought, 550. 84. John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884– 1915 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Publishers, 1992), 228. 85. Archibald MacLeish, Conquistador (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), unpaginated note. 86. Franck, Trailing Cortez, 107–8. 87. Franck, Trailing Cortez, 177. Their guide was part of a small group who competed with

354 · n o t e s

to chapter eight

the larger organizations in trekking and guiding and, in their efforts to monopolize a particular route to the top, had taken a page from Moctezuma’s strategy to detour Cortés on his route to Tenochtitlán—felling trees to block the paths under their control. Franck, Trailing Cortez, 178. 88. Franck, Trailing Cortez, 58. 89. Franck, Trailing Cortez, 191. 90. In an earlier journey through South America, Franck’s initial motivation had been to walk “the Inca Highway from Quito to Cuzco.” Driever, “Geographic Narratives in the South American Travelogues of Harry A. Franck: 1917–1943,” Journal of Latin American Geography 10, no. 1 (2011): 58. 91. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chapter 2; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 180–81. 92. The quoted passage comes from González-­Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 4. 93. On ghost-­writers and hauntings, I am indebted to Adam Lifshey, Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 94. Charles Nichols, The Creature in the Map: Sir Walter Ralegh’s Quest for El Dorado (London: Vintage, 1996), 8. 95. See Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991); and more broadly, Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 96. Noyes, Colonial Space, 227. 97. Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Reconquest of Mexico: An Amiable Journey in Pursuit of Cortés (New York: Vanguard Press, 1974), 247. My emphasis. 98. On the double meaning of possession, see Judith Richardson, Possessions: The Uses and History of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 99. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 148 and, more generally, chapter 5. 100. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), ix. 101. On the route of the torch, see George G. Daniels, XIX Olympiad: Mexico City, 1968, Sapporo, 1972 (Los Angeles: World Sport Research & Publications, 1996), 9. I am indebted to Anne Marie Hallal for bringing this reference to my attention. chapter 9





1. Señor Romero to Mr. Gresham, Legation of Mexico, Tacoma, Washington. August 5, 1893, in the US Department of State, executive documents of the House of Representatives for the second session of the Fifty-­Third Congress, 1893–94 papers, Mexico (“DOS Ex Docs, 1893–94”), 408–71, 455. Madison Digital Libraries, University of Wisconsin, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS189394v01, accessed April 2, 2016. 2. Mr. Gresham to Señor Romero, Department of State, Washington. October 12, 1893 in DOS Ex Docs, 1893–94, 408–71, 463. 3. General Mabry to Governor Hogg, Adjunct General’s Office, Austin, Texas. September 9, 1892 in DOS Ex Docs, 1893–94, 408–71, 464. 4. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Article 5, February 2, 1848, Guadalupe Hidalgo, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=26&page=transcript. Accessed March 1, 2016.

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r n i n e  · 355

5. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2, 76–78. 6. See, for instance, Robert M. Utley, Changing Course: The International Boundary, United States and Mexico, 1848–1963 (Tucson: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1996); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-­Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848–1857 (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007); Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the U.S.-­Mexico Divide (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Paula Rebert, La Gran Linea: Mapping the United States–­Mexico Boundary, 1849–1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 7. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Article 5. 8. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Article 5. 9. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Article 5. 10. Rebert, La Gran Linea, 9. 11. Rebert, La Gran Linea, 6. 12. St. John, Line in the Sand, 13. 13. St. John, Line in the Sand, 13. 14. For more on this issue, see St. John, Line in the Sand, 12–38. 15. William H. Emory, “Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey,” Vol. 1 (William H. Emory, 1857). Personal Account, 1. Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. 16. Emory, “Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey,” 44. 17. Emory, “Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey,” xiv. 18. Emory, “Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey,” 21. 19. Report of A. B. Gray Relative to the Mexican Boundary (report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1855), 8–9. Everett D. Graff Collection, Newberry Library. 20. “Report of A. B. Gray Relative to the Mexican Boundary,” 25–26. 21. Robert R. Humphrey, 90 Years and 535 Miles: Vegetation Changes along the Mexican Border (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 6. 22. Humphrey, 90 Years and 535 Miles, 6; Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work, 11. For more specific and recent work on the 1890s boundary survey and monument construction, see Katherine Morrissey, “Borderline Photography: The Visual Legacy of the 1890s U.S./ Mexico Border,” paper presented at the Western History Association 52nd annual conference, Denver, Colorado, October 4, 2012. 23. St. John, Line in the Sand, 27. 24. St. John, Line in the Sand, 6; and Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-­Mexico Border (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 25. George T. Diaz, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 8. 26. Rachel St. John, “Divided Ranges: Trans-­Border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western U.S.-­Mexico Border,” in Benjamin Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 116–40; Mary E. Mendoza, “Building Fences and Constructing Race,” in Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S. Mexico Frontera, edited by Katherine G. Morrissey and John-­Michael H. Warner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018); and Mary E. Mendoza, “Unnatural Border: Race and Environment at the U.S.-­Mexico Divide” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2015), 17–51. 27. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 23. See also, generally, Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese

356 · n o t e s

to chapter nine

Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 28. Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-­Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); St. John, Line in the Sand; Hernández, Migra!; Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-­ Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-­Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Robert Lee Maril, The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). 29. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 3. 30. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Article 5. 31. Comisión Internacional de Límites entre México y los Estados Unidos, Sección Mexicana, Eliminación de Bancos, Tratado de 1905, Cuarta Seria, Valle de Juárez–­El Paso, Rio Bravo, núms. 301a 319. F:11–3-­240, Archivo Historico de la Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City. 32. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 33. Chamizal Arbitration: United States and Mexico, Minutes of the Meetings of the International Boundary Commission June 10 and 15, 1911 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1911). 34. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 35. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 36. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 37. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 38. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 39. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 40. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 41. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 6, 51–52. 42. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 43. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 44. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 45. Comisión Internacional de Límites, F:11–3-­240. 46. W. W. Follett to (?), International Boundary Commission / United States and Mexico, El Paso, Texas, February 4, 1908. Record group 59: General records of the Department of State, 1930–39, decimal file 711.12.158. NARA II, College Park, Maryland. 47. Letter to John Hay, secretary of state, Washington, rom Laredo, Texas. March 5, 1902, in Follett, International Boundary Commission. 48. International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico, minute no. 149, Jua­ rez, Chihuahua, November 8, 1935, in Follett, International Boundary Commission. 49. See Sheldon Liss, A Century of Disagreement: The Chamizal Conflict, 1864–1964 (Washington: University Press, 1965); James E. Hill Jr., “El Chamizal: A Century-­Old Boundary Dispute,” Geographical Review 55, no. 4 (October 1965): 510–22; Norris Hund­ley Jr., Dividing the Waters: A Century of Controversy between the United States and Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Jerry E. Mueller, Restless River: International Law and the Behavior of the Rio Grande (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1975); Charles A. Timm, The International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1941); Utley, Changing Course; Gladys Gregory, The Cha­mi­zal Settlement: A View from El Paso (El Paso: Texas Western College Press, 1963); Alan C. Lamborn and Stephen P. Mumme, Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign Policy n o t e s t o c h a p t e r n i n e  · 357

Mak­ing: The El Chamizal Dispute (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988); César Sepúlveda, “El Chamizal y algunas cuestiones diplomáticas pendientes entre México y los Esta­dos Unidos,” Revista de la Facultad de Derecho de México 12, no. 47 (1962): 487–91; La frontera norte de México: Historia, conflictos, 1762–1975 (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1976); Antonio Gómez Robledo, México y el arbitraje internacional (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1965); and “The Chamizal Arbitration: The United States and Mexico, Minutes of the Meetings of the International Boundary Commission June 10 and 15, 1911,” at the Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, Texas. 50. Memorandum to John Hay, secretary of state, Laredo Texas, March 5, 1902. Entry 479, box 38, record group 76: Records of the Boundary and Claims Commission and Arbitrations, 1716–1979, NARA II. chapter 10











1. George Otis Smith et al., The Classification of the Public Lands, US Geological Survey Bulletin 537 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1913), 7. 2. See Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Neil Safier, “The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscapes, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica,” in The Imperial Map, edited by James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133–83; Heidi Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 3. This description of space is significant in the context of what Susan Schulten describes as the “power of maps to condition consciousness,” as she examined their “function as arbiters of power” and the “‘power of the mapmaker’ to both reveal and conceal.” Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5; US Geological Survey, “Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts,” 1916; map collection at the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee. 4. J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 55. 5. Rodman Paul, The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859–1900 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Mary C. Rabbit, “The United States Geological Survey: 1879– 1989,” US Geological Survey Circular 1050 (US Geological Survey, 1989), http:// pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1050/surveys.htm; Jeremy Vetter, Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 3; Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Vetter, Field Life, 140. 7. “The Four Great Surveys of the West,” USGS Circular 1050, accessed June 15, 2015, at http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1050/surveys.htm; Robert W. Karrow Jr., “George M. Wheeler and the Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, 1869–1879,” in Exploration and Mapping of the American West, edited by Donna P. Koepp (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1986), 121. 8. The phrase is taken from the sundry civil expenses bill that funded the creation of this new agency, the Organic Act of the US Geological Survey. U.S. Statutes at Large, 20 Stat. L., 394; Karrow, “George M. Wheeler,” 151.

358 · n o t e s

to chapter nine

9. Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 156. 10. Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 7. 11. For a fuller analysis of this turn toward scientific expertise, see Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959, 1999); Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 12. Sara M. Gregg, “Imagining Opportunity: The 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act and the Promise of the Public Domain,” Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2019): 1–23; Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 7. 13. Timber Culture claims could be taken in addition to a homestead or preemption claim, and entitled settlers to a third quarter section. Desert Land claims had to be paid at upon entry at twenty-­five cents per acre, with an additional one dollar per acre to take title. Kincaid Act improvements were to be worth $1.25 an acre in the value of total investment. For a full accounting of the terms of these laws, see Paul Wal­lace Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1968), xi, 399–401, 484–85, 498 ff. “An Act to Provide for an Enlarged Homestead,” 35 Stat 639, Public law no. 245, February 19, 1909. 14. This fits within the process of state simplification described by Scott in Seeing Like a State, merging the first two elements of his process: the administrative ordering of nature and society, and the “self-­confidence about scientific and technical progress” alongside ideas about “mastery of nature” embedded within high-­modernist ideology. The optimism about the potential for “comprehensive planning of human settlement and production” was a crucial element of high modernism as it pertains to the Great Plains. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–4. 15. Spatial methods, and especially geographic information systems (GIS), make it possible to blend the thirteen state-­level maps into one sheet synthesizing the extent of the Enlarged Homestead Acts. The process relied upon converting the maps to .tiff format, georeferencing, clipping the boundaries, and merging them into one ArcMap layer. This base map can support additional data sets, including numbers of homesteads by state and year, other maps displaying land offices and the numbers of homesteads claimed under the various laws, and relevant information that will make it possible to better contextualize the regional patterns at play during the first century of homesteading. This project represents a new dimension to efforts in historical GIS that have gained increasing academic and public attention in recent years, as they rely primarily on digitizing boundaries and experience, whereas this project relies upon historical maps as a crucial source of geographic and political information. This is a rapidly changing field of study, and several books and articles published over the last decade chronicle the work of historians in the spatial humanities. Smithsonian Magazine recently named one of the founders of HGIS, Anne Kelly Knowles, one of its 2012 Innovators of the Year. Patricia Cohen, “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land,” New York Times, July 26, 2011; Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2002); Anne Kelly Knowles, Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008); Kenneth M. Sylvester and Eric S. A. Rup­ley, “Revising the Dust Bowl: High above the Kansas Grasslands,” Environmental History 17 ( July 2012): 603–33. 16. This fits with Susan Schulten’s analysis of the evolution of the practice of geography:

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t e n  · 359

“Twentieth-­century school geography understood nature as, above all, an opportunity. By focusing on the extraction of natural resources, it also connected humans to their environment . . .” Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 12. 17. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 239. 18. “Brief History of the Bureau of Reclamation,” accessed July 28, 2018, at https:// www.usbr.gov/history/2011NEWBRIEFHISTORY.pdf; Pisani, Water and American Government, 1–4. 19. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1913, 1985), 411. 20. Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: 11–12, 22–23; Donald Pisani, Water and American Government; 2–4; Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire, 172–75; National Park Service, “Water in the West,” accessed March 24, 2016, at http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/Reclama tionDamsIrrigationProjectsAndPowerplants/water_in_the_west.html. 21. Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 187. 22. “Mondell, Frank Wheeler,” http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index =M000852, accessed June 15, 2016; “To Provide for an Enlarged Homestead,” Committee on Public Lands report no. 1513, 4. 23. 42 Cong. Rec. 6832, House debate over conference report on S. 6155, May 23, 1908. 24. “An Act to Provide for an Enlarged Homestead,” Public Law no. 245, S. 6155. 25. The original law applied to the states of Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, as well as the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. “An Act to Provide for an Enlarged Homestead,” 35 Stat 639, Public Law no. 245, February 19, 1909. In 1910 Congress extended the provisions to Idaho: 36 Stat 531, Public Law no. 298, June 17, 1910; California and North Dakota were added on June 13, 1912 (37 Stat 132), to Kansas on March 3, 1915 (38 Stat 953), and to South Dakota in 1915 (38 Stat 1163). Forty-­Third Annual Report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1922 (Washington: US Goverment Printing Office, 1922), 69; “Thirty-­Seventh Report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey,” in Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 1916, volume I (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1917), 521. 26. The term “thematic,” in this sense, refers to the focus in these maps on information about irrigability as the most significant factor in determining their composition. This represents a form of analysis of opportunity, rather than a particular attunement to location or navigational possibilities. Topography in these maps came as a subordinate feature to access to water. For more on this distinction, see Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 1–3. 27. For more on the concept of “silences” on maps, see Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” 67. 28. Harley reflects provocatively on a related question in regard to American road atlases: “What sort of an image of America do these atlases promote? On the one hand, there is a patina of gross simplicity. Once off the interstate highways the landscape dissolves into a generic world of bare essentials that invite no exploration. Context is stripped away and place is no longer important. On the other hand, the maps reveal the ambivalence of all stereotypes. Their silences are also inscribed on the page: where, on the page, is the variety of nature, where is the history of the landscape, and where is the space-­time of human experience in such anonymized maps?” Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” in The New Nature of Maps, 167. 29. In keeping with its mission, and with the body of knowledge available within the Department of the Interior, these maps did not include information about climate or rainfall that had been gathered over the previous decades by the US Army and Navy, and which might have been useful for assessing the value of Western lands. In actuality, however, the unavailability of perennial streams can be used as an indicator of 360 · n o t e s

to chapter ten

precipitation, and so the limits within the agency had no real effect on the accuracy of the enlarged homestead maps. Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 98–104. 30. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 12–13, 15. 31. More recently, red has been used to designate the intensity of temperatures, or elements of the built environment including roads, buildings, and surface surveys. US Geological Survey, Topographic Instructions of the U.S. Geological Survey (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1918), 151; US Geological Survey, Topographic Map Symbols, accessed July 15, 2018, at https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/TopographicMapSymbols /topomapsymbols.pdf. 32. J. H. Andrews, introduction to The New Nature of Maps, 13. 33. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170–71; Yi-­Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 13–29. 34. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 170. 35. This is not an unusual or unproblematic inconsistency during the period. See J. H. Andrews, introduction to The New Nature of Maps, 20. 36. “This result was achieved in part by the use of topographic maps, the accumulation of 35 years of work, in connection with a large number of which unpublished land-­ classification sheets were on file; in part by the application of available data on rainfall, run-­off, and stream flow; in part by consultation with the Reclamation Service; and in part by the cooperation of the several State engineers.” Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 187. Schulten describes geographic information systems (GIS) as “any system that correlates data to geography,” an apt description for these thematic maps of nonirrigability, which “captured complexity and concretized the abstract.” Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 6, 7. 37. Under the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act there were 161,428,184 acres designated by the USGS as eligible for entry under the Enlarged Homestead Act, and over the subsequent years, this acreage rose steadily. 35 Stat. 639, Public Law 245, February 19, 1909; Paul Wallace Gates, “Homesteading in the High Plains,” Agricultural History 51 ( January 1977): 123; Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 1916, vol. 1 (Washington: US Goverment Printing Office, 1917), 38. 38. “Thirty-­Seventh Report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey,” in Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 1916, vol. I (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1917), 119. 39. Much has been written about the impacts of the Dawes Act in Indian Country. See Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Janet McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Stephen Pevar, The Rights of Indians and Tribes, 4e (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40. Public Law 177, 60th Congress, chapter 237, An Act for the Survey and Allotment of Lands Now Embraced within the Limits of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, in the State of Montana, and the Sale and Disposal of All the Surplus Llands after Allotment, passed May 30, 1908; Montana Office of Public Instruction, “Fort Peck Reservation Timeline,” accessed June 3, 2016, at http://www.opi.mt.gov/Pdf/IndianEd/IEFA/FortPeckTimeline .pdf; Great Northern Railway, “Map of Fort Peck Indian Reservation Showing Waterways, Railroad Facilities Present and Proposed, etc., Land Withdrawn from Settlement in Red, Land Open for Settlement in White: Total Area of Reservation 2,094,003 Acres, Open to Settlement 1,345,000 Acres or Approximately 8,406 One n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t e n  · 361







Hundred and Sixty Acre Farms.” Accessed July 28, 2018, at http://www.mtmemory .org/cdm/ref/collection/p15018coll5/id/866. 41. The lottery submissions were open from September 1 to 13, and the submissions selected on September 23. The land opening took place on June 30, 1914. “Fort Peck Lands Will Be Opened,” Glasgow Courier, August 4, 1913, 1. During this same period, Congress oversaw the partitioning of reservation lands and their opening to homesteading in North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Arizona. 42. The General Land Office commissioner reported that these petitions were filed “under the amendatory act of March 4, 1915 (38 Stat., 1162),” for “lands alleged to be properly subject to entry under the law allowing enlarged homestead entries.” US Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1916 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1916), 26, 66–67. 43. Enlarged Homestead Act Classifications, Montana, Central Classified Files, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, NARA-­College Park, RG 48, entry 749, boxes 700–703. 44. Smith et al., Classification of the Public Lands, 32; Enlarged Homestead Act Classifications, NARA College Park. 45. Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Secretary of the Interior for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1916 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1916), 106. 46. “An Act to Provide for an Enlarged Homestead,” Public Law no. 245, S. 6155, as quoted in “Statement of Managers on Part of the House,” in House Report no. 2135, 60th Congress, 2nd Session, February 12, 1909, 3. chapter 11

1. Quoted in Richard I. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670–1870 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1991). 2. Writing a review in Forest History 12, no. 4 (1969): 30—first noticed by Graeme Wynn in May 2019—the American historian Robin Winks observed that in comparison with Canada, “perhaps only Australia could provide so formidable a set of problems for the surveyor.” Among other factors, Winks cited the variety of landforms, climate, colonial status, and a small population. 3. G. Malcolm Lewis, “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region in Intercultural Contexts: A Historical Review,” Michigan Historical Review 30, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 1–34. 4. G. Malcolm Lewis, Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and, more broadly, David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For an important recent addition to this literature, arguing that Plains Indians were central to the “cartographic creation” of the American West, see David Bernstein, How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-­Mississippi West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). See also the discussion of “An Indigenous View of the Deerskin Trade” in chapter 3 of Susan Schulten, A History of America in 100 Maps (London and Chicago: British Library Press and University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Ian Chambers, “A Cherokee Origin for the ‘Catawba’ Deerskin Map (c. 1721),” Imago Mundi 65, 2 (2013): 207–16.

362 · n o t e s

to chapter ten

5. For example: Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Matthew H. Edney, “The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories,” Cartographica Monograph 54, also Cartographica 40, nos. 1 & 2; Matthew H. Edney, “The Irony of Imperial Mapping,” in The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, edited by James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11–45; Scott Kirsch, “The Allison Commission and the National Map: Towards a Republic of Knowledge in Late Nineteenth-­Century America,” Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010): 29–42; Dan Clayton, “Snapshots of a Moving Target: Harley/Foucault/ Colonialism,” Cartographica 50, no. 1 (2015): 18–23. 6. Theodore Binnema, “How Does a Map Mean? Old Swan’s Map of 1801 and the Blackfoot World,” in From Rupert’s Land to Canada: Essays in Honour of John E. Foster, edited by Theodore Binnema, Gerhard J. Ens, and R. C. MacLeod (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2001), 201–24. 7. Barbara Belyea, Dark Storm Moving West (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007). 8. The most useful accounts covering something of the story dealt with here are Don W. Thompson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada. Volume I Prior to 1867. Volume II 1867–1917 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966, 1967); Ger­ ald Mc­Grath and L. M. Sebert, eds., Mapping a Northern Land: The Survey of Canada, 1947–1994 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1999). Thompson’s project was originally envisaged as at least three volumes. The focus is heavily on surveying; McGrath and Sebert combined to cover remote sensing, the intended focus of Thompson’s third (or later) volume. 9. The allusion is to Adam Shoalts, A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2018), reviewed by Graeme Wynn in The Ormsby Review 493 (February 25, 2019), at https://bcbooklook.com/2019/02 /25/493-­maps-­of-­canada-­the-­bucket-­list/. We would be remiss not to note the outstanding works of Jeffers Lennox and Dan Clayton on the east and west coasts of the country, each of which engages deeply and effectively with cartographic representations alongside a wide range of other sources subject to effective, theoretically informed interrogation: Jeffers Lennox Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), and Daniel W. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000). 10. Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 11. Edney, Mapping an Empire; Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and Colonization in New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001). 12. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber, 1987); Kapil Raj, “Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,” Osiris 15 (2000): 119–34. 13. We leave aside here the early Norse contacts of ca. 1000 CE, of which Western Europeans were unaware when John Cabot described the newfound land. For an introduction to the discussion that follows, see Cole Harris, ed., and Geoff Matthews (cartographer), The Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. I, From the Beginning to 1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Louis Nicolas, François-­Marc Gagnon, Réal Ouellet, and Nancy Senior, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2011).

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r e l e v e n  · 363

14. Graeme Wynn, “Painting the Map Red,” in Colin Coates and Graeme Wynn, eds., The Nature of Canada (Vancouver: On Point Press / University of British Columbia Press, 2019), 51–83. 15. Lawrence J. Burpee, “Unrolling the Map of Canada,” Canadian Geographical Journal 4, no. 5 (November 1934): 231–36. 16. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting. 17. Iain C. Taylor, “Official Geography and the Creation of ‘Canada,’” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 31, no. 4 (1994): 1–15, notes that this topographical survey in forty-­four sheets ordered by General James Murray was never published; he reproduces part of it, showing Montreal at 1:24,000 as figure 1 in this article. 18. Stephen J. Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. F. W. Des Barres and the Mak­ ing of the Atlantic Neptune (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2011); Taylor, “Official Geography.” 19. Suzanne Zeller, “Classical Codes: Biogeographical Assessments of Environment in Victorian Canada,” Journal of Historical Geography 24, no. 1 ( January 1998): 20–35. 20. Morris Zaslow, Reading the Rocks: The Story of the Geological Survey of Canada, 1842–1972 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975). 21. G. M. Dawson, “On Some of the Larger Unexplored Regions of Canada,” address to the Ottawa Field-­Naturalists’ Club (1890), 1; J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 54; and J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge and Power,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277– 312. 22. R. Bell, “Government Map-­Making,” Proceedings of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors at its Third Annual Meeting Held at Ottawa, February 16 & 17, ’86 (1886), 19–20. 23. N. L. Nicholson and L. M. Sebert, The Maps of Canada: A Guide to Official Canadian Maps, Charts, Atlases and Gazetteers (Folkestone, UK: Dawson & Sons, 1981), 6. 24. E. H. Grove-­Hills, Report on the Survey of Canada (Ottawa, 1904), 7. 25. Royal Society of Canada Commission mentioned by T.H.H., “Review: Canadian Survey Methods” (review of Report on the Survey of Canada by E. H. Hills), Geographical Journal 24, 2 (1904): 199–201. 26. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 27. Such discussions did more than establish a discursive “episteme” of what counted as accurate knowledge. Historical geographers Fraser Macdonald and Charles Withers have shown how surveyors used their bodies as measures of truth and accuracy, and noted discussions of the “frailty” of the human body against the durability of instruments able to withstand harsh weather and cold frontier environments. Fraser Macdonald and C. W. J. Withers, eds., Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 28. William Ogilvie, “The Relative Value between Ordinary Chaining and Absolute Distance,” Proceedings of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors at Its First Annual Meeting Held at Ottawa, February 19 and 20, 1884. 29. Otto Klotz, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors at Its Second Annual Meeting Held at Ottawa, February 17, 18, 19, and 20, 1885. 30. T.H.H., “Review: Canadian Survey Methods,” 200. 31. John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early

364 · n o t e s

to chapter eleven











Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation. 2nd edition (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2009), 161–80. 32. Anonymous, “Aerial Surveying in Canada,” Geography 15 (1929): 287–88. 33. J. A. Fletcher, “Report of Aerial Topographic Survey Committee,” Annual Report of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors Together with the Papers Read at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting Held at the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa on the 2nd and 3rd February, 1927, 34–38. 34. A.R.H., “Air Survey: Review” (reviewed works: Mapping from Air Photographs by M. N. Mac­Leod; Report of the Air Survey Committee: Graphical Methods of Plotting from Air Photographs by L. N. F. I. King; Simple Methods of Surveying from Air Photographs by M. Hotine; The Stereoscopic Examination of Air Photographs by M. Hotine) Geographical Journal 71, no. 6 ( June 1928), 588–91. 35. Colonel E. M. Jack in E. M. Jack, C. H. D. Ryder, H. L. Crosthwait, Dr. Bishop, Charles Gale, A. R. Hinks, and H. S. L. Winterbotham, “The Surveys of Canada: Discussion,” Geographical Journal 67, no. 5 (May 1926): 416–21, on 416. 36. F. H. Peters, “Surveying and Mapping in Canada,” Empire Survey Review 1, no. 2 (October, 1931):78–82; F. H. Peters, “Conference of Empire Survey Officers, 1935,” Empire Survey Review 3, no. 19 ( January 1936): 299–303; F. H. Peters, “Mapping Canada,” Canadian Geographical Journal, 12 (1936): 3–16. 37. “100 Years of Geodetic Surveys in Canada,” accessed at http://www.nrcan.gc.ca /earth-­sciences/geomatics/geodetic-­reference-­systems/canadian-­spatial-­reference -­system/9110. See also Noel Ogilvie, “The Geodetic Survey of Canada,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 15, no. 5 (May-­June 1921): 173–93. 38. “100 Years of Geodetic Surveys in Canada.” 39. Fletcher, “Report of Aerial Topographic Survey Committee,” 34. 40. G. S. Andrews and L. G. Trorey, “Use of Aerial Photographs I,” Forest Surveying (1930): 35. 41. A. M. Narraway, “The Surveyor, the Aeroplane, and Canada,” The Canadian Surveyor, 4 (1933): 3–9. 42. Narraway, “The Surveyor, the Aeroplane, and Canada.” 43. McGrath and Sebert, eds., Mapping a Northern Land, 2. 44. Iain C. Taylor, “Official Geography and the Creation of Canada,” Cartographica 31, no. 4 (1994): 1–15. 45. Norman L. Nicholson, “The Geographical Branch, 1947–1957,” The Canadian Geographer / Le géographe canadien 3, no. 10 (1957): 61–68, quote on p. 62. Trevor Lloyd, “The Geographical Bureau,” Canadian Geographical Journal 36 (1948): 39. 46. F. Kenneth Hare, “The Re-­exploration of Canada,” The Canadian Geographer/ Le géographe canadien 1, no. 4 (1954): 85–88. 47. See Marie Sanderson, Griffith Taylor: Antarctic Scientist and Pioneer Geographer (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988); Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, Griffith Taylor: Visionary Environmentalist Explorer (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008); Virginia Maclaren and Gunter Gad, eds., Reflections on the History of Geography at the University of Toronto (Toronto: Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, 2010). 48. For the Branch, see Lloyd, “Geographical Bureau,”; A. H. Clark, “Contributions to Geographical Knowledge of Canada since 1945,” Geographical Review (1950) 285–308; Nicholson, “The Geographical Branch, 1947–1957.” In its twenty years of existence, the Geographical Branch was part of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Geological Survey of Canada. When plans were being made for ARDA, the Geographical Branch seemed likely to assume responsibility for the mapping project; but it was ultimately disbanded in

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r e l e v e n  · 365











1963, as the Canada Land Inventory was created and the development of CGIS took the mapping exercise in new directions, away from the community-­centered practices of the branch and on to the trajectory discussed in the concluding section of this chapter. For the branch’s single greatest product, see Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, Geographical Branch, Atlas of Canada (Ottawa, 1957). 49. For general accounts of the development of geography, see R. J. Johnston and James Sidaway, Geography and Geographers: Anglo-­American Human Geography Since 1945 (Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2015); and David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Some of the work of Geographical Branch members in eastern Canada is contextualized with respect to human ecology and “sequent occupance” approaches in Graeme Wynn, “W. F. Ganong, A. H. Clark and the Historical Geography of Maritime Canada,” Acadiensis 10, no. 2 (1981): 5–28. 50. Norman L. Nicholson, “Rural Settlement and Land Use in the New Glasgow Region,” Geographical Bulletin 7 (1955): 38–64; J. W. Watson, “Relict Geography in an Urban Community,” in R. Miller and J. W. Watson, eds., Geographical Essays in Memory of Alan G. Ogilvie (London, Nelson, 1959), 110-–­43; see also, for other similar work, Brooke Cornwall, “A Land-­Use Reconnaissance of the Annapolis-­Cornwallis Valley, Nova Scotia,” Geographical Bulletin 9 (1956): 23–51; C. W. Raymond, “Agricultural Land-­Use in the Upper Saint John River Valley, New Brunswick,” Geographical Bulletin 16 (1961): 65–83; C. W. Raymond and J. A. Rayburn, “Land Abandonment in Prince Edward Island,” Geographical Bulletin 19 (1962): 78–86. 51. Norman L. Nicholson, November 8, 1956, “Memorandum on the Organization and Program Structure of the Geographical Branch,” Library and Archives Canada, RG 91–1, vol. 1, file 1-­2 (part 2); G. Hewelcke, “Eleven Regions of Canada,” Canadian Geographical Journal 41 (1950): 84–89. See also Norman L. Nicholson and Z. W. Sametz, The Regions of Canada and the Regional Concept (Ottawa: Economic and Social Research Division and Citizenship Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, 1961). This is discussed in Matthew Dyce, “A Spatial History of Canada: Archives, Knowledge and Geography,” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2014, 40–41 and 193–95. A more extensive review of the regional concept is provided by R. J. Johnston, J. Hauer, and G. A. Hoekveld, eds., Regional Geography: Current Developments and Future Prospects (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 52. In addition to Johnston, Geography and Geographers, and Livingstone, Geographical Tradition, see David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); William Bunge, Theoretical Geography (Lund, Sweden: Department of Geography, Royal University of Lund, 1966); and for later commentary, Trevor J Barnes, “What’s Old Is New, and New Is Old: History and Geography’s Quantitative Revolutions,” Dialogues in Human Geography 4, no. 1 (2014): 50–53; T. J. Barnes, “Lives Lived, and Lives Told: Biographies of Geography’s Quantitative Revolution,” Society and Space: Environment and Planning D 19 (2001): 409–29; T. J. Barnes and M. Hannah, “The Place of Numbers: Histories, Geographies and Theories of Quantification,” Society and Space: Environment and Planning D 19 (2001): 404–08. 53. R. J. McCormack, “The Canada Land Inventory of ARDA,” Forestry Chronicle 42, no. 1 (1966): 45–50. 54. L. C. Munn, “The Canada Land Inventory,” in Land and Its Uses—Actual and Potential: An Environmental Appraisal, edited by F. T. Last, M. C. B. Hotz, and R. G. Bell (New York: Plenum/Springer US, 1986), 391–406. 55. John McClellan, “Airphoto-­Interpretation in the Present Land-­Use Sector of the Canada Land Inventory,” in Canadian Institute of Surveying, Proceedings: 2nd Seminar

366 · n o t e s

to chapter eleven









on Air Photo Interpretation in the Development of Canada, Held at Ottawa, March 13–15, 1967 (Ottawa: Roger Duhamel, Queen’s Printer, 1968), 27–31: quote on 27. 56. Department of Forestry and Rural Development Canada, Data for Decision, a National Film Board of Canada production, directed by David Millar and produced by Sidney Goldsmith, available at https://www.nfb.ca/film/data_for_decision. A version of this film with text-­script added was placed on YouTube in 2013 under the title “CGIS history Captioned,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VLGvWEuZxI. The developments discussed in this section (approximately between figs. 11.6 and 11.7) are seen to underpin a particular vision of natural-­resource management that also helped to shape the Canadian state in Shannon Stunden Bower, “Tools for Rational Development: The Canada Land Inventory and the Canada Geographic Information System in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Canada,” Scientia Canadensis Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Revue canadienne d’histoire des sciences, des techniques et de la médecine 40, 1 (2018): 44–75. 57. ESRI, “Looking into the Past and Future of GIS: A Conversation with Dr. Roger F. Tomlinson” (2009), http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0509/tomlinson.html. 58. Roger Tomlinson and M. A. G. Toomey, “GIS and LIS in Canada,” in Mapping a Northern Land, edited by McGrath and Sebert, chapter 15. 59. McCormack, “The Canada Land Inventory of ARDA”; see also R. F. Tomlinson, An Introduction to the Geo-­Information System of the Canada Land Inventory, published under the authority of the Honourable Maurice Sauve, P.C., M.P., minister of forestry and rural development, Ottawa, 1967. Available at https://gisandscience.files.wordpress .com/2014/02/3-­an-­introduction-­to-­the- ­geo-­information-­system-­of-­the- ­canada -­land-­inventory_complete.pdf. 60. J. T. Coppock and D. W. Rhind, “The History of GIS,” in Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications, vol. 1, edited by D. J. Maguire, M. F. Goodchild, and D. W. Rhind (Harlow, UK: Longman Group, 1991), 21–43. 61. I. K. Crain and C. L. Macdonald, “From Land Inventory to Land Management: The Evolution of an Operational GIS,” Cartographica 21 (1984): 40–46. 62. See, e.g., Roger Tomlinson, Thinking about GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2003). 63. Rick Boychuk, “Obituary: Roger Tomlinson: The Father of Computerized Cartography,” Globe and Mail, March 1, 2014. However, Charles Waldheim, in “The Invention of GIS,” Harvard Gazette, October 12, 2011, claims: “GIS was an innovation that emerged from the Laboratory for Computer Graphics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The ‘Lab’ was founded by Harvard College and GSD graduate Howard Fisher in 1965 with a grant from the Ford Foundation.” See also Nicholas Chrisman, Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2006), which claims that Fisher caught the computer mapping bug in 1963 while taking a short course taught by Edgar Horwood, a professor of urban planning and civil engineering at the University of Washington. 64. Tomlinson claimed that the first use of the term “geographic information system” was in R. F. Tomlinson, “A Geographic Information System for Regional Planning,” in Symposium on Land Evaluation, edited by G. A Stewart (Melbourne: CSIRO/Mac‑ Millan, 1968), 200–210, available at https://gisandscience.files.wordpress.com/2012 /08/1-­a-­g is-­for-­regional-­planning_ed.pdf. The conclusion of this paper avers: The Geographic Information System of the Rural Development Branch is still in an early stage of its development. Not all the procedures described have yet been fully implemented and at present rates of progress it will be several years before the data bank contains maps for any one type of information that cover

n o t e s t o c h a p t e r e l e v e n  · 367







the whole of the settled portion of Canada. The effectiveness of the system will of course depend as much on the quality of the data into the bank as on the capabilities for handling data. Nevertheless, the system is further advanced than any other major land data bank and contains several new concepts and techniques, especially those relating to the compact storage of boundary data and the rapid comparison of one map with another. Such a system is essential to effective rural planning in any country and offers for the first time the possibility of rapid and efficient geographical analysis. . . . 65. Tomlinson and Toomey, “GIS and LIS,” 467. 66. Tomlinson and Toomey, “GIS and LIS.” 67. D. F. Symington, “Land Use in Canada: The Canada Land Inventory” Canadian Geographical Journal 71, no .2 (1968), 44–55; quote on 54. 68. The use of mathematics was important in ecology at least as early as the 1920s, with the development of the Lotke-­Volterra model of competition and predation. See V. Vol­terra, “Fluctuations in the Abundance of a Species Considered Mathematically,” Nature 118 (1926): 558–60; and S. E. Kingsland, Modeling Mature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. But R. H. MacArthur and E. R. Pianka, “On the Optimal Use of a Patchy Environment,” American Naturalist, 100 (1966): 603–10; and R. H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967) exemplify the new work of the 1960s. 69. The latter critique was articulated by P. J. Taylor in “Editorial Comment: GKS,” Political Geography Quarterly 9 (1990): 211–12; but the quoted summary is from p. 572 of N. Schuurman, “Trouble in the Heartland: GIS and Its Critics in the 1990s,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 4 (2000): 569–90, which tracks the ensuing debate in some detail. 70. J. Dobson, “Automated Geography,” Professional Geographer 35 (1993): 135–43; J. Dobson, “The Geographic Revolution: A Retrospective on the Age of Automated Geography,” Professional Geographer 45, no. 4 (1993): 431–39, quote from 435. 71. E. Sheppard, “Sleeping with the Enemy, or Keeping the Conversation Going?” Environment and Planning A 27 (1995): 1026–28; quote from 1027. The “grid of control” fear is from J. Pickles via Donna Haraway, as cited in Schuurman, “Trouble,” 578. 72. On this point, with particular reference to GIS, see J. W. Crampton, “GIS and Geographic Governance: Reconstructing the Choropleth Map,” Cartographica 39, no. 1 (March 2004): 41–52. 73. See, inter alia, D. Z. Sui and M. F. Goodchild, “A Tetradic Analysis of GIS and Society Using McLuhan’s Law of the Media,” The Canadian Geographer / Le géographe canadien 47, no. 1 (2003): 5–17. 74. S. Bell and M. Reed, “Adapting to the Machine: Integrating GIS into Qualitative Research,” Cartographica 39, no. 1 (March 2004): 55–66. 75. In illustration of this point, Nadine Schuurman has noted the value of GIS in addressing the challenges of groundwater management. The difficulties here are legion. The fluid quality and subterranean existence of this resource make it notoriously difficult to develop robust estimates of its quantity and distribution. Such information about groundwater as there is comes from those who drill water wells. In some, but only some, Canadian jurisdictions, they are required to report locational and lithological data to the provincial government. Drillers are more or less competent to provide this information, and some are less than assiduous. Lithological classification systems are not always complete or useful, and well locations are sometimes described verbally rather than with universal coordinates. In sum, such records as there are provide spotty data for an unsystematic set of location points. Seeking to better under368 · n o t e s

to chapter eleven

stand groundwater reserves in the Oak Ridges Moraine near Toronto, scientists first reduced dozens of lithological descriptions to a manageable set of categories, then integrated well data with geological and other surveys in a GIS that allowed them to interpolate, model, and visualize, in three dimensions, the stratigraphy and subsurface distribution of ground water. By these means, limited and poor-­quality data were improved to enable more effective land use and pollution management decisions. N. Schuurman, “The Ghost in the Machine: Spatial Data, Information and Knowledge in GIS,” The Canadian Geographer / Le géographe canadien 47, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–4. 76. A. Leszczynski, “Poststructuralism and GIS: Is There a ‘Disconnect’?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 4 (2009): 581–602; cf. J. W. Crampton, “Being Ontological: Response to ‘Poststructuralism and GIS: Is There a “disconnect”?.’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 4 (2009): 603–8. chapter 12











1. See, for example, Benjamin Kline, First along the River: A Brief History of the US Environmental Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Gifford Pinchot’s widely read memoirs in his Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1947); Daniel Payne and Richard Newman, The Palgrave Environmental Reader (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); and Roderick Frazier Nash, The American Environment: Readings in Conservation History (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1968), all of which remain in print in successive editions. 2. See, for example, Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 3. See, for example, the long-­running textbook The American People: Creating a Nation and Society, edited by Gary B. Nash et al. (New York: Pearson, 1986), which remains in print in multiple editions. 4. See, for example, J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998); and Donald VanDeVeer and Christine Price, People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees: Basic Issues in Environmental Ethics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986). For the latter, see The Preservation of Natural Conditions, bulletin 1, Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions, Ecological Society of America, with the aid of the National Research Council and the Committee on an Ecological Survey of the State, Illinois Academy (Springfield, IL: 1921). 5. William E. Shands and Robert G. Healy, The Lands Nobody Wanted: A Conservation Foundation Report (Washington: Conservation Foundation, 1977); Agnes M. Larson, The White Pine Industry of Minnesota (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949); James Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry of Wisconsin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Richard W. Behan, Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of Public Lands (Washington: Island Press, 2001). 6. Such are the key observations in reports like Filibert Roth and Bernhard Fernow’s Forest Conditions and Interests in Wisconsin (1897). While Roth and Fernow were among the first to publish studies of this nature, their work would be expanded upon by the first wave of publications articulated as ecological studies, starting with Charles C. Adams’s Ecological Survey in Northern Michigan (Lansing: Geological Survey of Michigan, 1906) and Ecological Survey of Isle Royale, Lake Superior (Lansing: Biological Survey of Michigan, 1909). 7. This distinction is analyzed in depth in Peter Nekola, “The Concept of the Geon o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w e l v e  · 369

graphical, 1919–1939,” PhD dissertation, New School for Social Research, New York, 2015. 8. For an explanation of this term, see Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past (Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers, 1939). 9. Anna Maria Clara Godlewska, “From Enlightenment Vision to Modern Science? Hum­boldt’s Visual Thinking,” in Geography and Enlightenment, edited by David N. Liv­ ing­stone and Charles J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 236– 81; and Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, translated by Sylvie Romanowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 10. On Fernow, see Andrew Denny Rodgers III, Bernhard Eduard Fernow: A Story of North American Forestry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951). 11. See, for example, Ecological Society of America, Preservation of Natural Conditions (Springfield, IL: Ecological Society of America, 1921). 12. “An Act to Enable any State to Cooperate with Any Other State or States, or with the United States, for the Protection of the Watersheds of Navigable Streams, and to Appoint a Commission for the Acquisition of Lands for the Purpose of Conserving the Navigability of Navigable Rivers.” H.R. 11798, Public Act no. 435, 61st US Congress, 3rd session (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1911). 13. Filibert Roth and B. E. Fernow, Forestry Conditions and Interests of Wisconsin, bulletin no. 16, Division of Forestry, US Department of Agriculture (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1898), 27. 14. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 32–33. 15. V. M. Spalding and B. E. Fernow, The White Pine. bulletin no. 22, Division of Forestry, US Department of Agriculture (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1988); Agnes Larson, The White Pine Industry in Minnesota: A History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949); Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow, 99. 16. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 34. 17. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 9. 18. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 11. 19. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 12. 20. H. B. Ayres, “Forest Reserves,” in Timber Conditions in the Pine Region of Minnesota: Extract from the Twenty-­First Annual Report of the Survey, 1899–1900, part 5 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1900). 21. Roth and Fernow, “Forestry Conditions,” 14. 22. Henry Chandler Cowles, The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899); Victor M. Cassidy, Henry Chandler Cowles, Pioneer Ecologist (Chicago: Kedzie Sigel Press, 2007); Alexander S. Mather, “Geddes, Geography and Ecology: The Golden Age of Vegetation Mapping in Scotland,” Scottish Geographical Journal 115, no. 1; Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45. See also Arthur Tansley, Practical Plant Ecology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), which emphasizes correlating patterns and conditions on successive vegetation and other maps throughout, and Tansley’s edited volume Types of British Vegetation: By Members of the Central Committee for the Study of British Vegetation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), which includes a chapter by William G. Smith, meant to accompany the maps of Robert and William G. Smith’s Botanical Survey of Scotland. 23. B. E. Fernow, “Report of the Chief of the Forestry Division,” annual report of the Division of Forestry, US Department of Agriculture, for 1887 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1888). 24. Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow, 128–29. 370 · n o t e s

to chapter twelve

25. Charles Sprague Sargent, Sixteen Maps Accompanying Report on Forest Trees of North America (Washington: Census Office, Department of the Interior, 1884). 26. William Austin Burt, plat book manuscript, 1846, Maclean Collection, Chicago. 27. See Larson, The White Pine Industry. 28. Brotherton family maps and papers, MacLean Collection, Lake Forest, IL. See also Theo­dore J. Karamanski, Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging in Northern Michigan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 29. Craig William Kinnear, “Cruising for Pinelands: Knowledge Work in the Wisconsin Lumber Industry, 1870–1900,” Environmental History 21 (2016): 78. 30. See, for example, B. E. Fernow, “Practicability of an American Forest Administration,” in Publications of the American Economic Association 6, no. 3 (May 1891): 77–101. 31. R. H. Campbell, Forestry Branch, Canada Department of the Interior, cited in James Elliott Defebaugh, History of the Lumber Industry of America (Chicago: American Lumberman, 1906), 73. 32. Report of the Committee Appointed by the National Academy of Sciences upon the Inauguration of a Forest Policy for the Forested Lands of the United States to the Secretary of the Interior, May 1, 1897 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1897), 6. 33. Report of the Committee Appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, 27. 34. B. E. Fernow, Report upon the Forestry Investigations of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1877–1898, 55th Congress, 3rd session, document no. 181 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1899), 138–39. 35. Fernow, Report upon the Forestry Investigations, 326–29. 36. Stephen F. Arno, “The Forest Explorers: Probing the Western Forest Reserves, 1897– 1904,” Forest History Today (Fall 2012); “John George Jack (1861–1949): Dendrologist, Educator, Plant Explorer,” Arnold Arboretum Visual Archives, https://www.arbore tum.harvard.edu/library/image-­collection/botanical-­and-­cultural-­images-­of-­east ern-­asia/john-­george-­jack/; “Death of Fred Gordon Plummer,” American Forestry 19, no. 9 (September 1913): 629–30. 37. George B. Sudworth, The White River Plateau and Battlement Mesa Forest Reserves, extract from the Twentieth Annual Report of the Survey, 1898–99, Part V: Forest Reserves (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1900), 119. 38. H. B. Ayres, The Washington Forest Reserve, extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Survey, 1897–98, Part V, Forest Reserves (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1899), 187–288. 39. Fred G. Plummer, Forest Conditions in the Cascade Range, Washington, between the Washington and Mount Rainer Forest Reserves (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1902); H. D. Langille et al., Forest Conditions in the Cascade Range Forest Reserve, Oregon (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1903). 40. John G. Jack, The Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, extract from the Twentieth Annual Report of the Survey, 1898–99, Part V: Forest Reserves (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1900), 41. 41. Jack, The Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, 96–97. 42. Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow, 463. 43. Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow, 439. 44. B. E. Fernow, Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation, Canada, 1912), 4. 45. This argument, for example, characterizes James C. Scott’s account of nineteenth-­ century territorial maps and forest policy within what was then the Kingdom of Prussia, in Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott, for example, has maintained a distinction between a “scientific” view of “natural resources,” objectified as they are commodified, in part through maps, and knowledge of “nan o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w e l v e  · 371

ture” itself, which he has characterized in ecological terms. The closer consideration of the relevant fieldwork and map work I offer here shows no such distinction. The emergence of ecological thinking grew out of localized and coordinated attempts to make sense of crises brought about by the objectification and commodification endemic to uninformed, unregulated markets. On this topic, abstract talk of “the state” offers nothing more than ideological distraction. epilogue

1. The Gallery section of the journal Environmental History, which invites scholars to tell environmental stories through visual images, is a notable exception. There are also a small number of recent books in environmental history that focus on visual methods. See, for example, Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2. For a recent example of a neomaterialist approach to environmental history, see Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 3. Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 4. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 5. For a recent discussion of “scalar thinking,” see Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 6. Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry, A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 7. Catherine Dunlop, “Teaching History through Maps in the Classroom,” Seeing History through Maps, Paper presented at the meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, Northridge, CA, August 4, 2017.

appendix



1. Materials in this guide are drawn, with modifications, from various sources. We are specifically indebted to multiple conversations with Matthew Edney, who has developed a similar form.

372 · n o t e s

to chapter twelve

inde x

The letter f following a page number indicates a map or other figure; the letter t indicates a table Adirondack forests, preservation work on, 280 Adirondack Mountains, Fernow on, 276 Adirondack Reserve (NY), 284 adoption, Indian, to counter population loss, 55 aerial photography: in Canada, 15, 249–53; Can. Land Inv., 259, 263; fear that it would imperil accuracy, 251; reveals “intimate secrets” of resources, 253 aerodist used in Canada, 254 Africa in Vallard atlas (1547), 167 Africa, Southeastern, on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 African Americans, 9; bring oysters to Fair Haven, 101; escape on oyster boat, 110; moonlighting, 106–7; oyster industry, 108–11; purchase freedom for themselves or others, 109; sense of mobility in oystering, 103, 106–8 AGN (Archivo General de la Nación), 24 Agnese, Battista, Atlas (ca. 1550), 169 agricultural: agencies dominate forest studies, 272; areas on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52; lands in Canada, Act to rehabilitate, 257; products shipped south in antebellum US, 89

Aa, Pieter van der, 173; map of Carolina and Florida coast (1706), 71f abolitionism in Philadelphia, 109 abolitionists and oyster industry, 108 Académie française, 149–50 Acadian coast mapped by Champlain, 49 Acala, Rio de (GA), 72, 73f Accomack County (VA) slaves moonlighting as oystermen, 106 accretion causing movement in US-­ Mexican border, 218 accuracy of mapping: central concern of ADLS, 246; error, paradox of, 247, 252, 263–69; fear that aerial photos would imperil, 251; new questions raised by GIS, 268; as watchword in Can. Land Inv., 262 Ackomokki’s map conveys landscape unseen by Westerners, 240 acordado (record of land grant), 23, 24 acreage for homestead: 160 acres, 227; 320 acres, 224, 227, 230–33, 235, 237 Acuña, Cristóbal de, Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran Río de los Amazonas (1612), 148 Adams, Ansel, and conservation movement, 271

373

Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Administration (Canada), 264–65 agriculture: among the Haudenosaunee, 43, 45; Can. Land Inv., 257; data on, in Western states, 226–29 AGS Collection, pl. 10, 104–5f, 225f Aguirre, Lope de, quoted by Humboldt, 146 Ainsworth, C. M., on US-­Mexican border, 218 airplanes used for geodetic surveys in Canada, 250–51 Akankia ou Riviere d’Iberville on d’Anville map, 75 Akerman, James R.: “Critical Map Reading for the Environment,” 303–6; “Introduction,” 1–16 Alabama River, 75 Alamán, Lucas, 191, 194 Alaqua River (FL) on GLO maps, 84t Alaska, 85 Albany (NY), 56, 58 Albemarle Sound (NC), 94 alcalde mayor (in New Spain), 23 Alert (NU), 255 Alexander the Great learns fate from trees, 163 Alibamons River, 75 alidades in Canadian mapping, 246 Allegheny River (PA and NY), 45, 60, 64 allegorical: border on Hondius world map (1630), 177f; control of mountainous areas, 123 alliances, as signs of French possession, 66 Alligator River (FL), 84t Alps compared to the Andes, 115–34 altepetl (polities) on Mexican maps, 28 altitude sickness: depicted on de Fer map, 123; noted by La Condamine, 120 altitudes, of Andes peaks, on La Condamine view, 130 altitudinal (vertical) view combined with profile views, 123, 124f Amadis of Gaul and Cortés’s perception of Mexico, 185 amate paper (amatl ), 32–33, pl. 1 Amazon River: Basin, under Portugal and Spain, 146; canal connecting to Orinoco, 135–36; connection to Orinoco, 145–46; as “exotic,” 115–16; French name Grand Marañón, 135; Fritz map

(1707), 149f; Humboldt on, 146; La Condamine’s map (1745), 150–51f; La Condamine’s map “most accurate 18th cent. view,” 151–52; La Condamine’s narrative of voyage on, 117; a “textual labyrinth,” 145 ambassador, Spanish, to Mexico, 181, 184 ambiguity of Cortés’s route, 181 Amecameca de Juarez (Mex.), Franck in, 203 Amelia Island (FL), 81 America: “discovery” of, 5; map by de Fer (1704), pl. 2; palm trees associated with, 175; in Vallard atlas (1547), 167 American Anti-­Slavery Society, 89 American Geographical Society Library (AGS), pl. 10, 104–5f, 225f American Indians: agricultural productivity of, 46; consulting maps, 41; depicted on Romer’s map of Iroquoia, 58; depiction of rivers and lakes on maps, 54; lands reduced by Homestead Acts, 233–35, 235f; map making skills, 41; maps made with sticks, 48–49; maps not drawn to scale, 52; provide Europeans with sketches, 48–49; reservations, 233–36, 235f; supposed ignorance of geography, 41; trace maps in dirt, 48–49; used a scale of time rather than distance, 54. See also under Indigenous; and names of particular tribes or groups American Museum of Natural History, 20 American West. See West (US) Amite River (LA), 75, 83t, 84t Andaquies, Mission of, in Humboldt Atlas, 154 Andean guides, 120 Andean noble on de Fer map (1705), 123 Anderson, Jones, escapes slavery on oyster boat, 110 Andes Cordillera, 10–11; compared to the Alps, 115–34; on de Fer’s map of America (1704), 123; as “exotic,” 115– 16; Humboldt’s studies of, 273; as “infinity of points lost in the clouds,” 119; Prescott on, 193; profile of, 129; representation of relief in, 125–31; as “too high for European bodies,” 123; as “unknowable, inconceivable and even sublime,” 120; views of, in Bouguer’s La Figure, 130, 132–33f

374 · i n d e x

Andrews, G. S., on deficiencies of aerial survey, 252 Anglo-­Saxon map (ca. 1025) indicates trees by green color, 163 animals: on Catalan portolans, 164; on Hondius world map (1630), 174, 177f; map of distribution (1777), 176; as source for environmental history, 3; treated in Humboldt’s Voyage (1814), 137 Animals and Maps (George, 1969), 160 animated map of Canadian discoveries, 242 Animilie Group, iron deposits, 122 antebellum US, importance of north-­south trade, 89 Anthropocene, 4 anthropologists and map use, 4 antislavery: literature, part of coastwise trade, 106; oyster industry, 108, 110; sentiment in Eastern Shore (VA), 106 Anville, Jean Baptiste d’: as “armchair geographer,” 148–49; Carte de la Louisi­ ane (1752), 76–77f; Carte del l’Amerique meridionale, 147, 149, 152; Cartes géographiques, 149; “correction” of earlier maps, 149, 155; map of Gulf Coast, 74; on mouth of Rio Negro, 148; used French and native names, 75 Anville, Jean Baptiste d’: anxiety: about geographic certainty, 148; of banality, 202–9; about mountains, 11, 116, 120, 124, 131, 134; in travel and writing, 189; “Vue de la Base mesurée dans la plaine de Yaroqui” (1751), 128–29f Apalachee Bay (FL), 72, 82 Apalachicola Bay (FL), 75, 80 Apalachicola River (FL), 74, 84t Appalachian Mountains, 79; British expansion in, 60; forestry mapping of, 284 apples in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Arabia in Miller Atlas (1519), 171 arboreal images: “at the edges of the world,” 173; on maps, 160 arbre de la vache (cow tree), 141 archaeological: evidence for diet, 46; features, on maps of Teotihuacan, 29; map of Teotihuacan, 38; work in Mexico, 198 archaeology “nationalized” in Mexico, 37– 39

archaizing practices in Mexican maps, 32– 34, 40 architectural details on map of Tenochtitlán, 27 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), 24, 35 ARDA (Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Administration, Canada), 264–65 Argentina, 157; coast, how Brazilian palm trees migrated to, 171; palm varieties in, 169; range of palm trees, 159 Argentines, 12 arid and semiarid regions, recognition of natural limits, 227 aridity and moisture on forest reserve maps, 287 “aristocratic tableland,” Benítez on, 200 Arizona: map of Homestead Act lands (1916), 225f; US-­Mexican border at, 221 “armchair geographer,” d’Anville as, 148– 49 armed inspectors to intercept and search northbound ships, 108 Arnold Arboretum, 280 Arreola, José Maria, 28, 33; “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” 21f–22f art historians and map use, 4 artisanal labor, networks linking North and South, 91 “arvoledas” on Cabot world map (1544), 170 “arvoreda” (Grove) on Turin-­Spanish map (1523), 170 Ascanthya, native name for Louisiana bayou, 74 Asia in Vallard atlas (1547), 167 Asia, Central, on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 aspen trees in N. Wis., 275–76 Assiniboine nation offered individual plots of land, 234 Association of Dominion Land Surveyors, Canada (ADLS), 246–47, 249 Atchafalaya River (LA), 78, 83t, 84t Atlantic coast (US): Gulf Coast trade as larger than overseas trade, 89; preferred Spanish names along, 68 Atlantic world market economy, 59 Atlas curieux, 123

i n d e x  · 375

Atlas geográfico e histórico de la República Mexicana, 191 Atlas Maior (1662–72), 173 Atlas Mountains: associated with vegetation, 163; Beatus-­type vegetation atop, 165; on Catalan-­Estense map (ca. 1450), 165; on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166; on London Roselli map (1465), 165 Atlas of Canada, 255 Atlas pittoresque (1820), pl. 3 atlases, commercial, give good overview of place names, 82 Atures Falls (Venezuela), 136, 141–42, 147 auditory sense replaces visual, 145 Australia, Carter on mapping of, 241 authenticity, historical, Rolph-­Trouillot on, 205 authorial presence, Humboldt’s “carefully crafted,” 137 Auturès, Raudal d’. See Atures Falls Auvergne, maps of mountains in, 120–25 Avenue of the Dead, 20, 27, 33–34 Avilés, Pedro Menéndez de, massacres Huguenots, 71 avulsion causing movement in US-­ Mexican border, 218–19 Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, 19–20, 32, 38–39 Ayres, Horace Beemer, 284, 286–87; “Timber Conditions in the Pine Region of Minnesota” (map, 1899), 278 Aztecs: map making, 19–40; map of routes taken by their ancestors, 195, 196f; migration of, 7, 8f; pictorial histories, 36; violence associated with, 193 Aztlan, 7, 8f Bache, Alexander Dallas, 91, 94 Badaraco, Joseph Francisco, Plano I descripcion de la costa . . . (1756), 73f Bahamas export fruit to New England, 102 Baja California, 211, 221 balsam fir trees in Canadian Crown Lands, 288 balsam trees associated with Palestine, Egypt, and India, 163 Baltimore (MD), 89, 102–3, 110 Baltimore, Lord, royal grant (1632), 79 Baltimore & Ohio R.R. and oyster industry, 103 Banco San Lorezo, 217–20

“bancos” on US-­Mexican border, 217–18 Banff National Park (AB), map of tourism potential, 260–61f “barbaric” view of colonial landscapes, 116 “barren lands” in Canadian Crown Lands, 288 barrios, 35 Bartlett, John Russell, 211–12, 214, 220f baselines, 127, 248 bass (fish) in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Bathurst Inlet (NU), 255 Batres, Leopoldo, 37–39 “battle of the bones,” 196–97 Baylis, William, Capt., aids escaping slaves, 109 Bayou Buffalo (LA), 83t Bayou Cypress (LA), 83t Bayou de Large (LA), 84t Bayou Dupont (LA), 83t Bayou Grand Caillou (LA), 83t, 84t Bayou Lafourche (LA), 75, 78, 83t, 84t, 86 Bayou Manchac (LA), 75, 80, 84t, 86 Bayou Petit Caillou (LA), 83t, 84t Bayou Plaquemines Brule (LA), 75 Bayou Terrebone (LA), 84t Bayouk Pierre, Stoney R., in Hutchins’s description, 75 bayous frequently bear indigenous names, 66 bays and islands tend to get European names, 75 beaches as “beginnings and endings,” 184 beans in Haudenosaunee diet, 45, 48 bear in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Beatus map (1086), 163, 165 Beaver Kill (NY) on Romer’s map of Iroquoia, 58 beaver pelts, importance to Haudenosaunee, 55 Beaver Wars (1687–96), 55, 63 beavers: on de Fer’s map of America (1704), 123; hunted by Haudenosaunee, 46; illustrated on Mitchell map (1755), 61 Beccario, Battista, chart shows palm trees (1426), 165 beech nuts in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 beech trees in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177 Bell, Robert, Canadian surveyor, 243 Bello, Andrés, 199

376 · i n d e x

Beltrán, Alberto, mestizo landscape, 200f Belyea, Barbara, on use of indigenous maps, 69 Benítez, Fernando, 203; In the Footsteps of Cortés, 197; La Ruta de Hernán Cortés (1950), 181, 197–201, 197f, 200f; on Native Mexicans, 201; sense of anxiety, 203 Beresford, Lake (FL), 82 Berghaus, Heinrich: Physikalischer Atlas (1838–), 177–78f; “Umrisse der Pflanzengeographie” (1845–48), 178f Bermúdez, Josefa Jáquez, 220 Berry, Michelle K., on environmental history, 295 “Beyond the Map,” 180–206 Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare (Vercelli, It.), pl. 4 Bibliothèque nationale, 160 bicycle tours of Cortés’s route, 202 Big Black River (MS) in Hutchins’s description, 75 Big Water (Lake Okeechobee, FL), 82 biology, as source for environmental history, 3 biota, spatial distribution of, 10 birch bark as mapping medium, 41 birch trees on timber charts, 281, 282 bird’s eggs in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 birds on Hondius world map (1630), 174, 177f blackberries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 black color on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27 Black Legend in Prescott and Humboldt, 193 Black oystermen: escape on oyster boat, 110; moonlighting, 106–7; purchase freedom for themselves or others, 109 Black River (LA), 78, 84t black spruce trees in Canadian Crown Lands, 288 Black suffrage movement, 109–10 Black Water River (FL), 83t, 84t Blackfoot Indians, worldview in Ackomokki’s map, 240 Blackwater River (VA), 83t Blaeu, Joan, Atlas Maior (1662–72), 173 Blake, J. E., Map of the Seat of War in Florida (1839), 81f Blake, W. W., and Teotihuacan map, 39

blue color: on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27–28; on Geological Survey maps, 232 Board on Geographic Names (US), established, 83, 85 Board of Trade and Plantations, 60 Bockelman, Brian: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 12; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 293; “Palms and other Trees on Maps,” 157–79 bodies, human, 126–27, 129–30 Bodleian Library, Oxford, 26f body language, and diplomatic conferences, 43 bogs and Can. Land Inv., 257 Bogue Chito River (LA), 84t Bolívar, Simón, on Humboldt, 187 Bonpland, Aimé, 12, 135; on “earth, overloaded with plants,” 141 Boone, Elizabeth, on orality and performance of maps, 36 Boothia Isthmus (NU), 255 border markers, 209 border pictures on maps, 173–75 borders, shifting nature of, 13 Borja (Peru), La Condamine’s arrival at, 144 Boston (MA), market for oysters, 100 botanical distribution, thematic maps of, 176–78 Botanical Survey of Scotland, 279, 289 botanists, 279, 286 Botello, David, Columbus Lands on Las Indias (1992), pl. 8 Boturini, Lorenzo, 38 Bouge Chito River (LA), 83t Bouguer, Pierre, 11–12, 115–34; La Figure de la terre (1749), 118, 130, 132–33f; “Profile de la cordeliere de Pérou” (1749), 132–33f; “represent[ed] the unrepresentational,” 131; seen as mathematician of expedition, 117; studies gravity in Andes, 119; visceral response to Andes, 120 Bouk-­Houma, native name for Riviere Rouge, 75 boundaries shown on Mexican maps, 21, 33–34 Boundary Commission (US-­Mexican), 211–13, 215, 218 Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and Colo­ nization in New Zealand, 241

i n d e x  · 377

Boutelle, Charles O., 95 bracero program, 198 Brazil: associated with palm trees, 159; in Lopes portolan atlas (ca. 1565), 167, pl. 6; maroon community in, 158; in Martius’s maps (1850), 177; in Miller Atlas (1519), 171; as “neo-­Edenic paradise,” 167; in portolan atlas (ca. 1565), pl. 6; palm trees migrate to Arg. coast, 171; plantation scenes, 173; Viceroyalty of, 146 brazilwood trees, 167, pl. 6 Bridgland, M. P., “Photographic Surveying in Canada” (1916), 250–51f brill (fish) in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 British: forts established in Haudenosaunee lands, 59; land claims in Ohio Valley, 60; treaty conference with Iroquois Confederacy, 56 British Columbia: aerial survey of forests, 252; geodetic surveys in, 250; joins Dominion (1871), 243 British Guiana, Schomburgk in, 152 “Brobdingnagian” mountain of data, 259 Brosnan, Kathleen A.: “Critical Map Reading for the Environment,” 303–6; “Introduction,” 1–16 Brotherton, Charles and Frank, as timber cruisers, 281–83 Brotherton, Frank, timber chart (1878), 281, 282f Brown, Anthony and Albert, escape slavery on oyster boat, 110 brown color on Geological Survey maps, 232 Bruccoli, Matthew, Reconquest of Mexico, 202, 205 Bry, Theodor de, Grands Voyages (1592), 171 Bueno, Christina, on nationalization of archaeology, 37–38 Buenos Aires, 12, 157, 159, 169, 179 Buffalo (NY) gets oysters from Norfolk, 102 buildings: on map of Tenochtitlán, 27; as sign of English possession, 66 bullfight related by La Condamine, 117 bullhead (fish) in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Bullock, William, in Mexico, 189 bureaucracy and mapping, 12–13 Bureau of Indian Affairs (US), 234 Burgo d’Osma Beatus map (1086), 163

burned areas. See forest fires Burnett, D. Graham, on metaleptic cycles, 204 Burpee, Lawrence, makes animated map of Canada, 242 Burt, William Austin, GLO mapping, 281 bus tours of Cortés’s route, 202 Byrnes, Giselle, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and Colonization in New Zealand, 241 cabecera, cabeza ( jurisdiction in New Spain), 34 Cabot, John, early descriptions of Canada, 242 Cabot, Sebastian: founds Espíritu Santo, 157; world map (1544), 169–70 cachoeiras, Humboldt’s term for waterfall, 142 cactus (nochtli ) on Mexican maps, 28 cadastral maps by Mexicans, 23 “Cadraqua Lake” (Lake Ontario) visited by Romer, 58 Caesalpina echinata (brazilwood), 167, pl. 6 Cahuitas, alt. name for Apalachicola, 75 Calcaieu River (LA), 84t Calcasin River (LA), 83t Caldas, Francisco, influence on Humboldt, 187 Calderón de la Barca, Fanny, 193; on Columbus, 182–84; compares her journey to that in Dante’s Commedia, 184; corresponded with Prescott, 189–90; deep knowledge of Cortés’s writings, 184–86; echoes in Winfield Scott, 191; first view of Mexico City, 185; gets daguerreotype from Prescott, 190; on landscape that faced Cortés, 184; letters published, 190; Life in Mexico (1842), 181, 190; Prescott relies on for sense of place, 187 Calexico (CA), US-­Mexican border at, 221 California: Coast Survey extended to, 91; in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 211; oysters shipped to, 90; US-­Mexican border at, 221 Caloosahatchee River (FL), 82, 84t Calpotitlan (Mex.), 33 camels in Lopes portolan atlas (ca. 1565), 167, pl. 6

378 · i n d e x

cameras: in aerial photography, 252, 255; as mapping tool, 248–49, 250f; record coordinates, 266 Camisards depicted on Danckert map (1703), 124 Camocio, Giovanni Francesco, map (1567), 169 camps on timber charts, 283 Canada: “a country so interesting,” 239; Commission of Conservation, pl. 16; computer mapping in, 263–69; Crown Lands, forestry mapping in, 288–89; deficiencies of mapping program, 249; Dept. of Agriculture, 243, 264; Dept. of Dominion Lands, mapping branch, 243; Dept. of Energy, Mines, and Technical Surveys, 268f; Dept. of Indian Affairs, mapping branch, 243; Dept. of Militia and Defense, surveying division, 243; Dept. of Mines and Resources, 253; Dept. of Railways and Canals, 243; Dept. of Regional Economic Expansion, 260–61f; Dept. of the Interior, 243, 252–53; early European encounters with, 242; enlarged after Confederation, 243; as Euclidian space or human environment, 263; Fernow’s role in forestry mapping, 288–89; filmstrip on physical regions, 256; forest mapping in, 15, 288–89; forest reserves in, 285; Forestry Association (CFA), 285; Geographical Branch, 254–55, 267; Geographical Bureau, 254; Geographic Information System, 264; as goal of escaped slaves, 109, 110; Land Data System (CLDS), 265; Land Inventory, 257, 259–63, 265; map of tourism potential, 260–61f; map showing extent of mapping, 268f; mapping, 239– 69; mapping by nation-state, 15; maps of receding frontier, 244–45f; much of area, as “inhospitable to humans,” 239; National Film Board, Data for Decision (1968), 259, 262, 264; National Topographic Survey, 249; New Haven oysters shipped to, 97; paradoxes of mapping, 247, 252, 263; phototopographical surveying in, 247–51; Senate, committee on land use, 257; Surveys and Mapping Branch, 268f; Topographical Survey, 249, 251

Canada Land Inventory Report (1970), 260– 61f Canadian: Air Board experiments with aerial photography, 249; Air Surveys, 251; Geodetic Survey, 250; Geographic Information System, 265; judge arbitrates dispute at US-­Mexican border, 222; land-­use studied by Watson, 256; “Method” of aerial photography, 249; schools and weather recording, 247 Canadian, mapping: basic conflict: described as “grossly erroneous” in 1904, 243; likened to “building a mansion on quicksand,” 247; relatively little studied, 241; remains incomplete, 269; should “align” with US survey systems, 253; size of country vs. efficiency, 240 Canadian Geographer (1950), 254 Canadian Geographic (1968), 266 Canadian Rockies, phototopographical surveying in, 247–51 Canadian Shield, forestry mapping in, 288 Canajoharie (NY, Deganahoge, Dekanohage), 58 canal: connecting Amazon and Orinoco, 135–36; on map of Tenochtitlán, 27 Canary Islands compared to Andes, 119 canning of oysters, 103 Cantino map (1502), “fantastical appearance” of trees on, 172 Cape Breton Island (NS), 288–89, pl. 16 Cape Canaveral (FL), 81 Cape Charles (VA) on Smith’s map of Virginia (1612), 69 Cape Henry (VA), 69 Cape of Good Hope, 123, 124f Capello, Ernesto: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 10–11; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 293; “Transcending the Alps in the Andes,” 115–34 captives, 27, 55 Caranday, variety of palm, 169 Carandí, variety of palm, 169 caretaking by Haudenosaunee women, 45 Caribbean Area, palmares as place name in, 168 Carlosahatchee (Caloosahatchee River, FL), 82 Carolina, French river names in, 68 Carolina and Florida coast, Dutch map of (1706), 71f

i n d e x  · 379

carp (fish) in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Carpentier, Alejo, Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953), 156, 204 Carranza, Venustiana, 202f Carta Histórica y Arqueológica, 196f “Carte de la Baye de la Table” (18th cent.), 124f “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673,” 74f Carte de la Louisiane (1752), 76–77f Carte de la Nouvelle France (1632), 52, 53f Carte de la Provincia de Quito, 126 Carte de l’Amérique meridionale, 147, 149, 152 “Carte du Cours de Maragnon . . .” (1745), 150–51f Carte geographique de la Nouvelle France (1612), 49, 50–51f “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Oré‑ noque . . .” (1811), 152–53f Carter, Paul, 186; The Road to Botany Bay, 241 Cartes géographiques, 149 Cartesian cartography as “entrenching imperialism,” 240 Cartesian logic of US townships, 13 Cartes marines (Newberry Library collection), 123, 149f Cartier, Jacques, 48–49, 242 cartographers. See mapmakers cartographic resource inventories, 15 cartography. See mapping cartouche, 8–9; on de Fer’s map of America (1704), pl. 2; on Mitchell’s map (1755), 62f; on Romer’s map of Iroquoia (1700), 58; on Sanson map of Dauphine (1693), 122f Carvajal, Gaspar de, reliance on auditory stimuli, 145 Cascade Range, forest reserves in, 284, 287 Casiquiare Canal (river, Venezuela), 138; on d’Anville’s map, 149; “discovered” by Humboldt, 136; Humboldt on, 148; Humboldt sees as navigable route, 156; lacking on Fritz map, 148 Cassini, Jacques, promoted prolate spheroid, 117 Cassini de Thury, César-­François, 127 Castile (Spain), 34 Castillo, Bernal Díaz del, 186, 203 Catalan atlas (ca. 1375) shows trees in Asia, 165 Catalan-­Estense map (ca. 1450), 163, 165

Catalan portolans slow to visualize trees, 164 catfish in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 cattle diseases along US-­Mexican border, 215 Caucasus Mountains associated with vegetation, 163 Cauriacani woman as canoe traveler, 155 caves on indigenous maps of Teotihuacan, 29 Caximbas River (FL), 83t Cayambe (Ecuador), 130 Cayuga people, 55, 59 cedar trees, 281, 287 celestial maps by Mexicans, 23 celestial observation illustrated by La Condamine, 130 Census Bureau (US) inventory of waterways, 82–83 Central Asia on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 ceremonial acts as signs of European possession, 66 ceremonial centers on Mexican maps, 28 Cevennes region (France) difficult to manage, 124 Ceylon (“Zailon”) on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 Chafalaya (MS) in Hutchins’s description (1784), 80 chains, use in Canadian mapping, 246 Chamizal migrates from Mex. to US, 221– 22 Champagne region (France), 121 Champlain, Samuel de, 44; Carte de la Nouvelle France (1632), 52, 53f; Carte geographique de la Nouvelle France (1612), 49, 50–51f; early descriptions of Canada, 242; frustration with Jesuit mapmakers, 54; joins campaign against Haudenosaunee, 49; map of New France (1616), 49, 52; maps Atlantic coasts, 49; as skilled mapmaker, 49 Chapultepec, Mex., 7 Charleston (SC) as source of oysters, 89 Charlotte Harbor (FL), 82 Chassahowitzka River (FL), 82 Chasse, Riviere de la, alternate name for Pascagoulas, 75 Chaumont, Joseph, S. J., on fishing at Oti­ hatangué, 47

380 · i n d e x

Chefunette River (LA), 84t chemical principles link all of nature, 141 Chequamegon Peninsula (WI), 276 cherries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Chesapeake & Delaware Canal as route for escaping slaves, 109 Chesapeake Bay, 9, 79, 104–5f; Coast Survey chart (1862), 104–5f; commercial economy of, 108; ecosystems altered by oystering, 102; has largest number of surviving native place names, 70; oyster grounds in, 102; oysters from, bedded in New England, 97, 99–100; schooner icebound, 88; source of oysters, 102; trade with Fair Haven, 102 Chetimachas, native name for Bayou Lafourche, 75 Chevreuil R., emptying into Mobile Bay, 75 Chichimec people, 30–31 Chickahominy River (VA), 83t Chickasawhay River (MS), 75 Chiens R., emptying into Mobile Bay, 75 Chietimachas, Hutchins’s name for Bayou Lafourche, 75 Chihuahua (Mex. state), 209, 218 “Chili, Montagnes de” on de Fer’s map of America (1704), 123 chimalli (shield) on Mexican maps, 28 Chimalpa Caltenco (Mex.), 28 Chimborazo (Ecuador), 10–11f, 118–19, 130 China, 97, 172 Chincoteague Bay (MD and VA), 99 Chincoteague Island (VA), 103 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 215 Chippewa County (WI), 276 Chissenessick River (VA), 85 Chitimacha Indians on Darby’s map (1816), 78 Chocktawhatchee River (FL), 83t Choctawhi River (FL), 84t chorographical maps attributed to American Indians, 41 chorros, Humboldt’s term for waterfall, 142 Churchill (MB), 255 “Chute du Tequendama,” 142, 143f Cincquack, near mouth of Potomac, 79 citizenship affected by movement of Rio Grande, 218 city plans by Indigenous Mexicans, 23

Ciudadela, 20 clams in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 classification, 142, 274, 280 classroom teaching with maps, 296–97, 303–6 CLDS. See under Canada clear-­cutting, consequences of, 283 Clements, Frederic E. on Front Range ecology, 287 Cleveland, Grover, and forest reserves, 284–85 cliffs depicted on Danckert map (1703), 124 climate: change, as source for environmental history, 3; Coast Survey studies in Florida Keys, 94–95; data on, in Western states, 229; forest conditions in N. Wis., 277; topography on forest reserve maps, 287 cloak (tilmatl ) on Teotihuacan maps, 30 clock on La Condamine map, 127 cloth shipped south in antebellum US, 89 clothing and accessories on indigenous Mexican maps, 30 cloud cover, 119, 125 Coast Chart 33: Chesapeake Bay (1862), 104–5f Coast Survey (US). See United States Coast Survey coastal: environment “naturalized” by Coast Survey maps, 111–12; names vs. inland names, 86; residents operate “under the radar” of central control, 111 coasts as “beginnings and endings,” 184 coastwise trade (Atlantic): antislavery movement, 109–10; more economic impact than overseas trade, 89 Coatlan (Mex.), 27, 35 Codex Canadensis (ca. 1700), 242 Codex Huamantla, depiction of Teotihuacan, 29 Codex Mendoza, 25–28, 26f, 31 Codex Xolotl, 29, 31 codices as legal evidence in Mexico, 24 “Códices y documentos en mexicano,” 21f­22f Cofre de Perote (Mex.), view of, from Gulf, pl. 7 cognitive maps, 5 Cohen, Saul, on place names and nation building, 67

i n d e x  · 381

Colbert R., name applied by LaSalle to Mississippi, 74 Cold War and Canadian markets, 257 cold weather in northeast US (1856–57), 88 Coleti, Giandomenico, map of S. Am. (1770), 173 College of William and Mary, 157, 159 colonial: Americans, 69; “impulse to expunge local toponyms,” 66; land grant (merced ), 23; landscapes as “exotic” and “barbaric,” 116; maps, 12; Mexico, importance of mapmaking in, 21; theory challenged by place name evidence, 87; “triangle,” relationships between Europeans and Native Americans, 69 colonialism entrenched by Western mapping, 240 color blue on Geological Survey maps, 232 color brown on Geological Survey maps, 232 color green: on Geological Survey maps, 232; indicating mts., 164, pl. 5 color printing, 4 color red: ambiguity as symbol, 231, 236– 37; indicates irrigation projects, pl. 11; indicates lack of water, pl. 10; indicates “more challenging” areas, 231 Colorado River, 211, 217 colors used by various Canadian mapping agencies, 243 Coloztitlan (Mex.), 33 Colten, Craig E.: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 9; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 294; “Currents of Influence,” 65–87 Columbus, Christopher, 5, 194, pl. 8 Columbus Lands on Los Indios (Healy), pl. 8 commemorative objects related to La Condamine’s expedition, 115 commerce, facilitating, as mission of Coast Survey, 89 commercial: atlases provide good overview of place names, 82; mapping, 2; possibilities of South America, 12; shipping, peak period in America, 89 Committee on Public Lands, 230 Commonwealth countries get surplus aircraft, 248 “Computer Mapping” (paper), 263–64 computer mapping in Canada, 263–69

Condé, Pedro García, 211–12, 214, 220f “conditions” of forests as topic of innovative maps, 271–73 Connecticut, 91, 95–96 Connecticut Valley, 42 conquest inextricable from landscape, 186 Conquistador (MacLeish), 203 conquistadors awarded with tracts of land, 23 conservation, 271, 284 “consilience,” 137, 141 construction projects along US-­Mexican border, 221 continents, allegories of, 174–75 contingency of Cortés’s route, 181 contour lines to represent relief, 121 control of mountainous areas expressed allegorically, 123 Cooler, Philip, free Black oysterman, 111 Coote, Richard, seeks English fort in Haudenosaunee territory, 57 Copernica, palm variety, 169 copper mining competes with forestry, 281 Coppermine (NT). See Kugluktuk (NU) Coppock, Terry, and GIS in Canada, 265 copying, in Mexico, 24–25, 32–34, 213–14 Cordillera of the Andes, 118 Cordova Island, on US-­Mexican border, 221–22 cordwood on timber charts, 283 Corkscrew River (FL), 84t corn, 45–47; grown around Albemarle Sound, 94; meal, part of coastwise trade, 89; shown on Romer’s map of Iroquoia, 58; soup, in Haudenosaunee diet, 46. See also maize Cornell University, Fernow at, 285 cornucopia on Hondius world map (1630), 174, 177f Coronelli, Vicenzo, shows palm trees in Patagonia, 173 Corotoman River (VA) reported in 1722, 85 corporations as forest stewards, 277–78 corregidor (in New Spain), 23 corregimiento (Spanish reorganization of indigenous communities), 35 Cortés, Hernán: ambiguity and contin­ gency of, 181; Archibald MacLeish on, 203; as conundrum, 194; on Disturnell’s map (1847), 192, 192f; 1887

382 · i n d e x

map, 182–83f; exhumation of, 196; on jacket of Benítez’s book, 197f; as a kind of ghostwriter, 204; late efforts to retrace, 195; map of (1843), 188–89f; Mexican responses to, 194; Prescott commissions portrait of, 194; reticent about landscape, 186; route in Mexico, 12, 180–206; to be followed by Olympic runners, 206; tops list of historical tours, 202 Cosgrove, Denis, on mountain landscapes, 116 cosmological maps by Indigenous Mexicans, 22–23, 28–29 cost-­effective mapping, struggle for, in Canada, 246 costumes on Mexican maps, 31 Cotopaxi (Ecuador), 126, 130 cotton in coastwise commerce, 89–90 Country So Interesting, A (Ruggles), 244–45f cow tree (arbre de la vache) and “fundamental unity of nature,” 141 Cowles, Henry Chandler, on ecological succession, 279, 287 Craib, Raymond B.: “Beyond the Map,” 180–206; chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 12; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 294 Crain, I. K., on GIS history, 265 cranberries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Crane, Hart, poem about conquest of Mexico, 202 Crane River (FL), 84t crayfish in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Creek Indians used paths following streams, 69 Creole scientists, influence on Humboldt, 187–88 Cresques, Abraham, Catalan atlas (ca. 1375), 165 crews on oyster schooners, 100 “Critical Map Reading for the Environment” (Appendix), 303–6 Cronon, William, 3 crops: and Can. Land Inv., 257; destroyed by French, 48; shown on Mexican maps, 33–34 cross, on Mexican maps, 28 cross hatching (hachures): on map of province of Quito (1751), 127; to represent relief, 121

Crown Lands (Canada), forestry mapping in, 288–89 Cruser, Cornelius, Capt., oysterman “enmeshed” in slavery, 110 crypt that displays pictures (Tzacualcuicuilco) on Mexican maps, 29 Crystal River (FL), 83t Cuauhtémoc, 195–96 Cuba as part of Cortés’s route, 181 cucumbers grown by Haudenosaunee, 46 cuitlamitzli (leopard) on Mexican maps, 28 Cuitlamizteuctli, Don Juan, on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27–28, 30 Culhuacan on Tenochtitlan map, 31 cultural: associations on Indigenous Mexican maps, 22; filters produce an effect on places, 185; values reflected on maps, 1 culture as definition of nation, 6 Cumaná (Venezuela), Humboldt at, 140, 145 Cumberland-­Pictou Lowlands (NS), landscapes of, 256 “cut and run” logging practice, 272 Dablon, Claude, on fishing at Otihatangué, 47 daguerreotype sent to Calderón de la Barca by Prescott, 190 Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA), 107 Dakota nation offered individual plots of land, 234 Damascus on Vercelli map (ca. 1200), 163 dangers: associated with mountain landscapes, 116; of coastwise shipping, 91 Dante’s Commedia, 184, 193 Darby, William, 78, 80 Darnley Bay (NT), 255 data, “mountains of ” in Canada, 15, 259 Data for Decision (film, 1968), 259, 262, 264 date trees, 165–66 Dauphiné on Sanson’s map of 1693, 122–23 David Rumsey Collection, pl. 11, 62f Davis, Joshua, escapes slavery on oyster schooner, 109 Dawes Severalty Act (1887), 234 Dawson, George, Canadian surveyor, 243 “deaf vibration” ( fréissement sourd), Humboldt senses, 145 Debarbieux, Bernard, The Mountain (2015), 120

i n d e x  · 383

DeBow’s Commercial Review on unfairness of oyster trade, 107 Debret, Jean-­Baptiste: Forêt Vierge (view, 1834–39), 140; Voyage pittoresque et his­ torique au Brésil (1834–39), 140 deciduous trees on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 deer: hunted by Haudenosaunee, 46; on indigenous Mexican maps, 28 de Fer, Nicolas, Atlas curieux, 123 Deganahoge, Dekanohage (Canajoharie, NY), 58 Delaware: Bay, 99–100; Coast Survey extends to, 91; fishermen settle on Chincoteague Island, 103 Delhi on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 Delisle, Guillaume, uses native name for Pensacola Bay, 72 della Dora, Veronica, on mountain landscapes, 116 dendrologists and forest reserve mapping, 286 Dept. of Agriculture (US). See United States Dept. of Agriculture Dept. of Interior (US). See United States Dept. of Interior Dept. of Mines and Resources (Canada). See under Canada Dept. of the Treasury (US) initiates US Coast Survey, 91 Descartes, René, and shape of the earth, 117 Desceliers, Pierre, world map (1550), 172 description: inscription, John Noyes on, 205; regional, as focus of Canadian geographers, 256; vs. illustration in Humboldt’s view of Orinoco, 138, 140 Desert Land Act (1877), 227 desires, projected by travelers on the places they visit, 185 deslumbramiento, 137, 142 destruction of crops by French, 48 determinism, geographical, Humboldt’s belief in, 139 Detroit (MI) gets oysters from Norfolk, 102 development promoted by mapping, 2 De Vorsey, Louis, on European confidence in native geosophy, 68 Díaz, Porfirio, 195 Dickens, Charles, on Prescott, 191

dieout of forests, 272 digital information and Can. Land Inv., 264–69 diplomatic conferences with American Indians, 43 diseases: and forestry, 272; among Haudenosaunee, 47 “disorderly littoral,” Benítez on, 200 disorientation evident in Humboldt’s narrative, 137 distances: on Mitchell map (1755), 63; on pinturas, 24 distribution of palm trees, 178 Disturnell, John: Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico (1847), 192, 192f, 212, pl. 9; reviled by Emory, 213–14 Dix, William W., 107 Dominion of Canada (1867) established, 243 Donnavan, Corydon, on US invasion of Mex., 191–92 “doubtful contours” take on “permanent significance,” 186 Douglas firs, forestry maps of, 280 Downing, George and Thomas, involved in Underground Railroad, 109 Drayton, Daniel, Capt., attempts to free slaves, 109 dredging vessels, 100 droughts: affecting US-­Mexican border, 216; and Canadian markets, 257; in Haudenosaunee areas, 47 drum scanners and Can. Land Inv., 264–65 “Dry Tree” in Alexander legend, 163 drying of food by Haudenosaunee, 46–47 ducks in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Dulcert, Angelino, portolan chart (1339), 164–65 dunelands, Indiana, ecological work in, 279 Dunlop, Catherine T.: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 15–16; “The View from across the Pond,” 291–97 Dunn’s Lake (FL), 82 Duplessis, Captain, on destruction of native food supplies, 48 duplication of effort in Canadian mapping, 246, 249 Dyce, Matt, and Graeme Wynn: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 15; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 295; “Mapping Canadian Nature and

384 · i n d e x

the Nature of Canadian Mapping,” 239– 69 eagle on indigenous Mexican maps, 28 Earl of Bellomont (Richard Coote), 57 earth, figure of, 117 East African coast on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 East Indies on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 East Los Streetscrapers, Columbus Lands on Las Indias (1992), pl. 8 Eastern Seaboard, inventory of waterways, 82 Eastern Shore (VA): Coast Survey sketch, 95; Fair Haven oyster trade, 99; free Blacks in, 100, 110–11; settled by northern fishermen, 103; slaves moonlighting as oystermen, 106; source of oysters, 101 Eau Noires, French name for Oke-­Loussa, 75 Ebstorf map (ca. 1235), trees on, 163 Ecofine River (FL), 84t ecological: consequences of human actions, 3; ideas in Roth and Fernow map (1897), 279; study, emergence of visual thinking in, 270–90; study, maps as tools for, 284 Ecological Society of America, 274, 289 ecology, 15; in Canada, 289; correlative and conditional practice, 273; human, 256; studies “conditions,” 271 Econfuie River (FL), 84t economic: aspects of forests in Wis., 277; factors required Haudenosaunee mobility, 42; value of homestead lands, 237 Econtena River (FL), 83t ecosystems: American Indians’ knowledge of, 47; based on study of conditions, 271; familiar to oyster tongers, 101; Haudenosaunee knowledge of, 42; integrated through oyster industry, 110; of Orinoco, 141; protected by Haudenosaunee settlement, 63; Tansley’s work on, 279 Edisto (SC), 94 Edney, Matthew: on European audience for maps of America, 67; Mapping an Empire, 241; on need for “processural analysis,” 36 eel in Haudenosaunee diet, 46

efficiency in mapping, Canadian struggle to achieve, 246 Egypt, and trees on maps, 163–64, 166 El Dorado: and indigenous place names, 154; Ralegh’s search for, 204 El Paso (TX), “banco” near, 217–18, 221 El Paso-­Juarez Valley, 219–20 elevations: difficulty of determining, 118; shown in cartouches, 122 elk hunted by Haudenosaunee, 46 emancipation and oyster industry, 108–11 “emancipatory pathways” in Coast Survey maps, 111–12 Emory, William H., 213–14 emotional response to nature, Humboldt warns of, 139 Empire Survey Review (1931), 248f, 249, 252f Empiricism and traditional science, 6 empty spaces on maps, as positive statements, 2 encounter, inextricable from landscape, 186 English: desire trading posts in Great Lakes region, 56; established possession by building and marking, 66 Enlarged Homestead Act (1909), 15, 224, 227, 229 Enlightenment, 12, 144; and nation-­state, 6; view of mts., 120 enslaved people, 5; “corrupting influence” of northern traders on, 106; on Eastern Shore of Maryland, 95; “insurrection” threatened by northern traders, 106; manumitted, prohibited from residing in Md., 111; moonlighting oyster industry, 101, 108–11; as oystermen, 106–7; purchased by northern oysterman, 110 environment, human vs. Euclidian space, 263 Environment Canada, on GIS history, 265 environmental: context of Homestead Act, 228; determinism in Canada, 255–56; evidence of change in US-­Mexican border, 219; humanists, mapmakers as, 292; humanities, Humboldt’s relevance to, 156; studies and GIS, 267; variations in Haudenosaunee areas, 48 environmental history: history of cartography, 15–16, 291–97; an interdisciplinary field, 3; “makes the past come alive,” 295; merges with history of cartogra-

i n d e x  · 385

environmental history (continued) phy, 5; summer institute, 3; teaching with maps, 296–97, 303–6 environments: difficulty of mapping Canadian, 239–69; inextricable from Cortés’s route, 181; local, depicted in Vallard atlas (1547), 167; portrayed by Ackomokki’s map, 240; “produce a surfeit of information,” 240 epidemics: among Haudenosaunee, 47; in Great Lakes region, 55; ravage native populations, 72 equatorial landscape, ambivalence toward, 118 Erie Indians dominated by Haudenosaunee, 55 errors compounded by new techniques, 247, 252, 263–69 Escalada Beatus map (ca. 950) shows vegetation, 163 Escambia River (FL), 83t, 84t Escuela Nacional de Antropología, 198 Esmeraldas (Ecuador), Humboldt travels to, 148 Espiritu Santo (Tampa Bay, FL), 80, 157 Essai sur la geographie (Humboldt), 10–11f Essay on the Geography of Plants (Humboldt), 131 estancias, 35 Ethiopia in Miller Atlas (1519), 171 eucalyptus trees in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177 Euclidian space vs. human environment, 263 Eureka (NU), 255 Eurocentric racism, influence on Porfirian elites, 37 Europe: control tenuous in mountain regions of, 116; mapping and environment in, 15–16; maps of, rarely showed trees, 179; vegetation map of (1806), 176–77 European: influence on Am. forest policy, 285; lands almost never showed flora or fauna, 165; mapmakers “acquiesced” to native place names, 66; mapping practices combined with indigenous practices, 156; maps incorporating native intelligence, 44–64; paper used by Nahuatl writers, 33; perspective on this book, 291–97; place names imposed

on landscape, 87; weapons adopted by American Indians, 55 Europeans: incorporate indigenous knowledge in their maps, 49; “threatened” or “degraded” by tropics, 140 evergreen trees on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 exactness in mapping, as “philosophical overreach,” 280 exotic: animals on Catalan portolans, 164; nature of Andes and Amazon, 12, 115– 16 expectations projected by travelers on the places they visit, 185 experiential knowledge of landscapes, 111 exploration: of Atlantic Coast of N. Am., 68; impact of La Condamine and Bouguer on, 131; narratives employing metalepsis, 152 explorers as mapmakers, 9 expropriation of indigenous lands in Mexico, 37–39 “Extract from the Treaty Map of Disturnell,” 220f Fair Haven (CT): on Coast Survey map of New Haven (1846), 97; exporter of oysters, 96–97, 99, 101–2, 107; streets “paved with Virginia oyster shells,” 107 Fair Haven Tribune, 101 famine rare among Haudenosaunee, 48 fantastic quality of terre inconnue, 147 farming: by Haudenosaunee, 42; difficulty of, on Homestead Act lands, 227 Farmington Canal (CT), 110 farmsteads came to be favored over longhouse communities, 55 fears projected by travelers on places they visit, 185 feminist studies, and GIS, 267 Fenaholoway River (FL), 83t Fer, Nicolas de, L’Amerique (1704), pl. 2 Fernnow, Bernhard E.: Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin (1897), pl. 12; Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (1912), 289; “Forest Distribution in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton sheet” (1912), pl. 16; Report upon the Forestry Investigations (1899), 285; role in Canadian forestry, 288–89; trained in Humboldtian philosophy, 273

386 · i n d e x

fertility of soil shown on Mazapan map, 34 fertilizer made from oyster shells, 107 Fidler, Peter, and Ackomokki’s map, 240 field clearing among Haudenosaunee, 45 fields on Mexican maps, 24, 33–34 fieldwork: becomes focus of geography, 255; by Census Bureau to establish place names, 83 fig tree bark used as paper in Mexico, 32– 33 fig trees on Ebstorf map (ca. 1235), 163 filmstrip on physical regions of Canada, 256 Finger Lakes (NY), 46, 58 Finnalana River (FL), 84t fir trees: on forest reserve maps, 286; forestry maps of, 280; in N. Wis., 277; in Nova Scotia, 289; on timber charts, 281; in Wash. forests, 287 First Audiencia in New Spain, 23 fish: in Haudenosaunee diet, 46–47; part of coastwise trade, 89 “fish scales” to represent relief, 121–23 Fishburn, Randolph E., on US-­Mexican border, 219 fishing: among the Haudenosaunee, 43, 45; areas on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52; camps, seasonal, become permanent villages, 45; grounds on Mitchell map (1755), 63; stations in Iroquoia, 60 Five Nations, 56 flags on portolan charts, 165 Fletcher, J. A., describes view from air as “living map,” 251 floods: affecting US-­Mexican border, 216; in Haudenosaunee areas, 47 flora on maps little studied, 160 Florence (schooner), 88–89 Florentine Codex, 32 Florida, 9, 66–68, 72, 78, 80, 82, 86; coast, Dutch map of (1706), 71f; on Desceliers world map (1550), 172; Keys, Coast Survey studies soils and climate, 94– 95; MacKay and Blake map (1839), 81f Florida Parishes (LA), 80, 82 Follett, W. W. (boundary commissioner), 218, 221 Foncin, Myriem, on trees on old maps, 160 Fondo de Cultura Económica, 197

food industries begin to consolidate, 90 footpaths: on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52; shown on Mexican maps, 33, 197, 197f foreign travelers and native assistants, 139, pl. 3 forest conditions: as seen by field cartographers, 288; maps of, help see nature as a system, 289–90; in North America, mapping of, 270–90; in North Woods, 274–80; in northern Wisconsin (map, 1897), pl. 12; vs. “timber value,” 279; in W. A. Burt’s field notes, 281 Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin (1897), 274–80, 286, pl. 12 Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (1912), 289, pl. 16 forest fires: as factor in forest regrowth, 275; on Geological Survey map (1898), pl. 15; and logging, 283; on Roth and Fernow map, 274–80 Forest Reserve Act (1891), 284, 286 forest reserves: maps of, detailed and complex, 286; seen as systems rather than objects, 289–90; in Western states, 236 Forest Service (US), 284 forestry, 15; Can. Land Inv., 257; in Great Lakes region, 280–84; knowledge required for, 278; maps by C. S. Sargent, 280, 285–86; surveys by Can. Land Inv., 264 forests: associated with mtns. on maps, 163; changing depictions after 1750, 175–79; as complex systems, 272; data on, in Western states, 226–28, 229; density, on Geological Survey map (1898), pl. 15; distribution in Cape Breton Island (map, 1912), pl. 16; doubts about regrowth, 275; “grow in mixture,” 278; management, maps as tools for, 284; mapping by US GLO, 280–81; on old maps, 160–66; present vs. former condition, 275; surveyed by air in B.C., 252; as “timber crop,” 272; “value” of in N. Wis., 276 Forêt Vierge, “somber lithograph,” 140 fort at S.E. corner of Lake Ontario, 44 Fort Hunter, British fort in Mohawk country, 59 Fort Peck Allotment Act, 234 Fort Peck Reservation opened to homesteading, 234

i n d e x  · 387

Fort William (ON), paper mills in, 283 forts, Haudenosaunee exploit advantages of, 60 Fountain, Alfred, Capt., aids escaping slaves, 109 Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450) abounds in trees, 166 France: Académie française, 149–50; archaeological excavations in Mexico, 37; cedes Louisiana to Spain, 79; contest with Great Britain for N. Am., 41; incursions into Ohio country, 42; sponsors geodesic mission to Quito, 117 Franck, Harry and Rachel, Trailing Cortés (1932), 181, 203 Fraser River Valley (BC), geodetic surveys in, 250 free Blacks: barred from moving to Maryland, 106; in Eastern Shore (VA), 106; engaged in harvesting oysters, 101; moonlighting as oysterman, 106–7; in oyster industry, 100, 108–11; restaurant in Philadelphia, owned by, 109 freedom: expanded notions of, provided by oyster industry, 108–11; purchased by Black oystermen, 109 fréissement sourd (“deaf vibration”), Humboldt senses, 145 French: Academy of Sciences promote oblate spheroid, 117; Alps, on Sanson’s map of 1693, 122–23; attack on Senecas, 48; ceremonial alliances with Native peoples, 66; desire trading posts in Great Lakes region, 56; forts, on Haudenosaunee lands, 59; and Indian War, 79; Revolution, viewed from Mexico, 194; river names, 71f, 75; treaty conference with Iroquois Confederacy, 56 Fritz, Samuel, Map of the Great River Marañón (“Plan de la riviere de Maragnon,” 1707), 136, 148, 149f, 152 frosts in Haudenosaunee areas, 47 fruit trees on medieval maps, 163–64, 166 fruits: gathered by Haudenosaunee, 45; in Haudenosaunee diet, 46; in Humboldt’s view of Guayaquil, 139, pl. 3; part of coastwise trade, 89, 102 fuel as factor in village relocation, 45 Fugitive Slave Law, 109 fur traders, 54, 240

Gamio, Manuel, 198; La población del Valle de Teotíhuacán, 21f–22f Gannett, Henry, and forest reserve mapping, 286 Garamantica Mountains topped by trees in Rome Ptolemy (1478), 163 García Cubas, Antonio: Atlas geográfico e histórico de la República Mexicana (1885), 191, 195; Carta Histórica y Arqueológica, 196f; map of Mexico (1858), 195 García Márquez, Gabriel, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1963), 156 Garden of Eden on maps, 163 Gardiner, John, Map of the Bounty Lands, Illinois (1818), 14f Gastaldi, Giacomo, 168–69 gathering, by Haudenosaunee, 43, 45 Gayangos, Pascual de, assisted Prescott, 187 Gaza on Vercelli map (ca. 1200), 163 Geelkercken, Nicolaum à, 174–75f geese in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 General Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments (Mex.), 37, 39–40 General Land Office (US). See United States General Land Office geodesists and Canadian oil industry, 253 geodesy, role in defining mountain, 116 geodetic: measurement, impact of La Condamine and Bouguer on, 131; signal illustrated by La Condamine, 129–30; surveys in Canada, 247, 250–51; tools, on La Condamine map, 127; triangulation, 118, 126–28 geographers, regional vs. nomothetic approaches, 256 geographic: information, bidirectional exchange of, 86; information systems (see GIS) geographical: determinism, Humboldt’s belief in, 139; imagery, 2; imagination transformed by aerial photos, 252 “Geographie des plantes equinoxiales” (Humboldt), 10–11f geography: as definition of nation, 6; im‑ bedded in Cortés’s route, 181; as objective science, 12; professionalization of field, 255 geological: change as source for environmental history, 3; characteristics as defining mts., 120; features on Mexi-

388 · i n d e x

can maps, 28; section in Bouguer’s La Figure, 130; surveys authorized by Congress, 226; uses underly USGS maps, 254 Geological and Natural History Survey (MN), 286 Geological Survey (US). See United States Geological Survey Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), 243, 249, 253 geomorphology mapping in Canada, 255 geophysical surveys in Canada, 253 “geopolitical literacy”: aided Blacks to “navigate within and out of slavery,” 90, 112 georeferencing in Western states, 228 George, Wilma, Animals and Maps (1969), 160 Georgian Bay (ON) on Champlain map, 49 Gerdes, Ferdinand, map of Wade’s Point, Md. (1845), 95, 96f German archaeological excavations in Mexico, 37 Gila Mountains (AZ), forest reserves in, 284 Gila River (AZ) in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 211, 212 Gilbert’s Bar (FL), 82 GIS (Geographic Information Systems), 15; advantages predicted, 264–65; as “cybernetic grid of control,” 267; critiques of, 267; development in Canada, 264–69; solved Canadian mapping paradox, 266; transformed the nature of the map, 266 globalization as “painful, sometimes brutal process,” 6 globe, 121, 127–28, 155, 162, 174, 179, 241, 291, 295 glosses on Mexican maps, 22f, 28–29, 33– 34 glyphs on Mexican maps, 27–30 Gmelin, Wilhelm Friedrich, “Chute du Tequendama,” 143f “God’s eye view,” 125–27, 131, 134, 134f Gómora, Francisco Lopez de, Franck follows, 203 gooseberries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 governmental control, as tenuous in mountain regions, 116 Graham, Col. James D., 220f

Gran Parà (Brazil), woman traveler to, 155 grand lac contenant (Lake Erie), 49 Grand Marañón, French name for Amazon, 135 Grand Settlement of 1701, 56 Grande, label for Mississippi R. on Joliet/ Marquette map, 74 grapes in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 “graphic invention”: of Andean Cordillera, 125–31; of mountain range, 115–34 gravitational attraction of mountains, 118 gravitational theory and shape of the earth, 117 gravity, Newton and Richer on, 119 Gray, A. B. (Andrew Belcher), 212, 214, 220f Great Britain: Board of Trade and Plantations, 60; contest with France for N. Am., 41; Superintendent for Indian Affairs, 41 Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, and Humboldt, 136, 144, 147 Great Depression, and Canadian markets, 257 Great Egg Harbor (NJ), 101–2 Great Lakes, 8; on Mitchell’s 1755 map, 61f; visited by Champlain, 242 Great Lakes region, 41–64; forest mapping in, 280–84 Green Bay (WI and MI), 276 green color: indicating mts., 164, pl. 5; on Geological Survey maps, 232; on map of Tenochtitlán, 27; used to indicate trees, 163 Gregg, Sara M.: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 15; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 295; “Visualizing the Enlarged Homestead Act,” 223–38 Gresham, W. Q., 209–10 Griffins, Daniel, 102 growing season in Haudenosaunee areas, 45 Guadalupe (Mex.), claims town had separated from Mex., 218 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 192 Guaraní people, their name for Querandí neighbors, 169 Guerrero (Mex. state), 196 Gulf Coast (US): Anville’s map of, 76–77f; in Hutchins’s description (1784), 80; native population ravaged by epidemics,

i n d e x  · 389

Gulf Coast (US) (continued ) 72; Spanish place names on, 72; trade compared to overseas trade, 89 Gulf of Mexico: many multilingual place names, 74; in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 210 Gunilla, Joseph, Oronoco ilustrado (1745), 136, 146 Gunter’s chain in Canadian surveying, 246–47 hachures (cross hatching), 121, 127 Hagar, Stansbury, on Teotihuacan maps, 39 hairstyles depicted on Tenochtitlan map, 31 Hakluyt, Richard, Principall Navigations (1589), 171 Halifax River (FL), 84t “Halls of Montezuma,” 191–92 Hamilton (ON) gets oysters from Norfolk, 102 handwriting in Techialoyal codices, 32 Hannibal crossing the Alps, 115 Hare, F. Kenneth, on the “re-­exploration of Canada,” 254 Harley, J. Brian, 4–5, 68; on “appetite for maps,” 224; on frequency of native place names on European maps, 67; on “manipulation of place-­names,” 154; on maps and the “launching of empires,” 146; on maps reflecting “a particular political system,” 243; on maps as “stridently geopolitical documents,” 67; “what is missing on a map is as important as what is included,” 69 Harrewyn, Jacob, map of America (1692), 173 Harris, Cole, on state-­sponsored mapping, 13 Harrison, Benjamin, 85, 284, 286 Harrison, Robert Pogue, “no one is self-­ authored,” 206 Harvard University, Arnold Arboretum, 280 Hassler, Ferdinand, 91, 94 Hassler, J. J. S., Coast Survey asst., 88–89 Hatfield, April, on persistence of native place names, 70 Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 8, 41–46, 54–56, 60–63; exhaust their beaver supply, 55; exposure to European pathogens, 54; hunting practices, 46;

illustrated on Mitchell map (1755), 61–63; intimate knowledge of their environment, 42; lack of hunting grounds, complaint of, 42; object to being “hemm’d in,” 42; responses to population loss, 54–55; role as economic intermediaries, 59; settlements protected ecosystems, 63; staple crops, 45 Haute Languedoc (France), difficult to manage, 124 Haute-­Savoie (France), maps of mountains in, 120–25 Havana (Cuba), 182–83 Hawaii, Western place names imposed upon, 67 Healy, Wayne, Columbus Lands on Las Indias (1992), 206, pl. 8 hearing replaces vision, 145 heights of Andes peaks, on La Condamine view, 130 hemlock trees, 276–77, 281, 287 Hereford map (ca. 1290) shows Trees of the Sun and Moon, 163 herring in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 hickory nuts in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, leads rebellion, 194 hides shipped to New York, 88 High Arctic islands (Canada) join Dominion (1880), 243 high oblique images in “Canadian Method” of aerial photography, 249 “High-­wrought expectation” (view of Veracruz), pl. 7 hill (tepetl) on Mexican maps, 28 hill symbols (hillocks), 121, 123, 124f hills favored by Haudenosaunee for village sites, 43 Hillsboro River (FL), 82, 83t, 84t Hinckley (MN) great fire of, 283 “Histoire de la Géographie de l’Orénoque et du Dorado” (Humboldt), 147 Historia Naturalis Palmarum (von Martius), 177 historians need for greater geographic imagination, 3 Historic Jamestowne (VA), 157–58 historical maps as encapsulated stories, 1 history: authenticity of, 205; dictates perception of place, 185; dictates our view

390 · i n d e x

of landscapes, 185; effects on vision, 186; imbedded in Cortés’s route, 181; inherited by travelers, 186; textbooks and conservation movement, 271; unfolds in landscapes, 181 history of cartography: and environmental history, 15–16, 291–97; increasingly deconstructs maps, 43; an interdisciplinary field, 4; merges with environmental history, 5; summer institute, 3, 292 “History of GIS” (Coppock and Rhind), 265 Holguin, Jesus, 209–10 Holy Land on Sanson’s map of, 121 Homestead Act, 227; 160 acre claims, 227; 320 acre claims, 231; enacted by Congress (1862), 223; Enlarged (1909), 15, 223–38; Indian lands reduced by, 233– 35, 235f; lands as “landscapes of limitation,” 228, pl. 10; lands with “virtually no economic value,” 237; map of lands in Ariz. (1916), 225f; non-­irrigability primary focus of maps, 231 Hondius, Hendrik, Nova totius orbis . . . tabula (1630), 174, 177f Hondius, Jodocus, 171 Hooper Strait (MD), source of oysters, 101 Hopkins, Kelly: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 8–9; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 293; “Into the Interior,” 41–64 horizontal (longitudinal) view: alternate with vertical views, 127; combined with vertical views, 123, 124f; of mountain, 116 horsemen in Lopes portolan atlas (ca. 1565), 167, pl. 6 Horsman, Stuart, on place names in the Pamirs, 67 horticulture and Can. Land Inv., 257 Houser, Rhonda, map of areas designated “nonirrigable,” pl. 10 huckleberries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Hudson River School and conservation movement, 271 Hudson’s Bay Company: employee’s letter to London, 239; history of mapping efforts, 242; interprets Ackomokki’s map, 240; lands come under Canadian control (1870), 243

Huguenots, 68; in Cevennes region, 124; depicted on Danckert map (1703), 124; massacred by Spanish troops, 71 Huiztilopochtli (god), 28 human: ecology, Canadian focus on, 256; environment vs. Euclidian space, 263; error vs. instrumental error, 246; figures on Mexican maps, 27–28, 30–31; nature relationship, 3, 9; occupation, areas marginal for, 239; sacrifice site on Mexican maps, 29 human bodies: illustrated by La Condamine, 129–30; on map of city of Quito, 127; as paratext in La Condamine, 126 Humboldt, Alexander von, 9, 10–11, 11f, 12, 199, 284; in Andes, 273; on “armchair geographers,” 149; Atlas géographique et physique du nouveau continent (1814–54), 136–37, 147–48, 152, 153f; attitude toward indigenous sources, 152–54; beauty of America’s nature, 187; belittles previous mapmakers, 152; Black Legend in, 193; Bolívar’s opinion of, 187; carefully crafts “authorial presence,” 137; “Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque . . .” (1811), 152, 153f; “Chute du Tequendama,” 143f; claims discovery of Amazon, 148; on conflict between Spain and Portugal, 146; corresponds with Prescott, 187; “discovers” Casiquiare Canal, 136; “discovery” of Orinoco, 154; echos La Condamine, 144; “erasing” earlier tracks, 152; Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805), 131; exalted view of nature, 142; graphic treatment of mountains, 116; his “persona dwindles” before forces of nature, 156; “Histoire de la géographie de l’Orénoque et du Dorado,” 147–48; on hyperfecundity of tropics, 139; on indigenous place names, 154; influence on Prescott, 190; influenced by La Condamine, 131; on La Condamine’s “imaginary system,” 152; map of Orinoco “dictated” by native woman, 155; as mapmaker, 137, 145–55; maps combine European and indigenous practices, 156; maps of New Spain praised by Prescott, 187; maps on names for waterfalls, 142; on native place names, 154; palm trees seen as icon of

i n d e x  · 391

Humboldt, Alexander von (continued ) tropics, 140; Personal Narrative, 156; portrait by Weitsch, 135; Prescott relies on for sense of place, 187; “Radeau de la Rivière de Guayaquil,” 138–39; on range of vegetation in Mexico, 188; Rélation historique (1814–34), 137–38, 146–47; Relation historique. Atlas pittoresque (1820), pl. 3; relevance to “environmental humanities,” 156; reviled by Emory, 213; on Saint-­Pierre’s bucolic landscapes, 141; seeks terre inconnue, 147; self-­fashioning, 136–37; substitutes hearing for vision, 145; in “tension” with narrative, 138; traveling scientist vs. mapmaker, 138; “trinity of volcano, plain, and jungle,” 187; view of “nature,” 12; Views of Nature, 154; vision of “planetary ecology,” 141; Voyage au Régions Équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814), 137, 152–53; Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland (1820), pl. 3; Vues des Cordi­ llères (1810–13), 139, 143f Humboldtian science, 141–42, 155 hundred-­foot intervals for data on Can. Land Inv. maps, 259 hunting, 42, 45–46, 60, 63 Huron Indians, 49, 55 Hutchins, Thomas, 75, 80 Hutchinson Island (FL), 81 hydrographic mapping, 4 hydrological: boundaries merged with political, 224; data synthesized by Geological Survey, 233 hydrology in Western states, 226–29 hyperfecundity associated with tropics, 139 “hypothetical geography” practiced by mapmakers, 213 Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d,’ uses native name Malbanchya for Mississippi, 74 Iberville, Riviere de, 75, 78–80, 83t ibixes on Sanson’s map of 1693, 122 IBM invents drum scanner, 265 Icazbalceta, Joaquín García, praise for Prescott, 191 ice formations, mapping in Canada, 255 iconography of mts., in French geographies, 120–25 Ictzotitlán (Mex.), 33

Illinois Territory, map of Bounty lands, 13, 14f illustrations: in borders of maps, 173–75; vs. descriptions, in Humboldt’s view of Orinoco, 138, 140 images as paratext, not illustrations, 126 imagination dictates perception of place, 185 imagined landscape of Calderón de la Barca, 186 IMAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mex.), 37 Imhof, Eduard, on fish scale symbols, 121 immigration, restrictions along US-­ Mexican border, 215–16 imperial: conquest, maps as mediators in, 2; contest for North America, 60; naming practices, 66 imperialism entrenched by Western mapping, 240 In the Footsteps of Cortés (Benítez), 197 inaccuracy of maps, Emory on, 214 Incidents of Travel in Central America (Steph­ ens), 190 India: associated with balsam tree, 163; Edney on mapping of, 241; mapping of, 241; in Miller Atlas (1519), 171; on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 Indian River (FL), 84t Indiana Dunes, ecological work in, 279 Indians. See American Indians; Indigenous; and names of particular tribes or groups indigeneity, visualized in Mexican maps, 32 Indigenous: dispossession and Homestead Acts, 233–36, 234–35f; erasure, a goal of settler communities, 13; guides provide “too much” or “wrong” information, 240; land claims on Teotihuacan map, 20; land use on European maps, 44; lands in Mexico systematically expropriated, 37–39; languages and diplomatic conferences, 43; leaders ( principales) on map of Tenochtitlán, 25, 27; lineage stressed in maps made for the Crown, 31; mapmakers resist colonial policies, 21; maps of Great Lakes Region, 280–84; nobility (tlatoque), 25; sources, Humboldt’s attitude toward, 152–54; subsistence patterns, on European maps, 44; understanding of environment, on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52

392 · i n d e x

Indigenous communities: depicted “at rest,” 123; on European maps, 44; exposure to European pathogens, 54; reorganized by Spanish (corregimiento), 35 Indigenous geographical knowledge: highly valued by Europeans, 68; implicit in Humboldt’s “discovery,” 138 Indigenous mapping: conventions, in Mexico, 25–27; features, on Mitchell map (1755), 62; practices, Humboldt combines with European practices, 156 Indigenous Mexican: artists (ittlacuiloque), 24; maps, 23, 36–37 Indigenous Mexicans: active participants in culture of mapping, 25; ambivalent status of, 198 Indigenous peoples: efforts to control in New Spain, 34; erased from maps, 5, 13; Humboldt considers “excellent geographers,” 154; in Humboldt’s narrative, 147; knowledge incorporated in European maps, 5; land claims, 8; land use, 13; make and preserve maps to assert land rights, 21; map use, 68; as mapmakers and users, 2; need for consistent access to trade goods, 59; of Orinoco River “worship . . . powers of nature,” 156; ravaged by epidemics, 72; shown on map of America (1704), pl. 2; using several names for parts of rivers, 79. See also American Indians; and names of specific groups Indigenous place names: as act of appropriation, 67; in American South, 65–87; became more fixed in 19th cent., 78; and El Dorado, 154; as first step in communication with Europeans, 82, 86; persistence of, 85–86; “powerful legacy,” 87; replaced by colonists, 65; on US Coast and Geod. Surv. map, 82; used with European names, 69–78 Indochina on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 industrial production networks linking North and South, 91 infrastructure dependent on resources, 231 “inhospitable” to humans, said of much of Canada, 239 inland names vs. coastal names, 86 inscription and description, John Noyes on, 205

insect invasions and forestry, 272 inspectors to intercept and search northbound ships, 108 Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 198 instrumental vs. human error, 246 Inter-­American Highway, 201 interdisciplinarity, 3 International Boundary Commission, 212, 215–17, 222 Introduction de la géographie (Sanson), 122– 23 Iron Range (MI), area of prominent relief, 122 Iroquoia, 41, 44, 58, 60, 63 Iroquois Confederacy, 8; desire freedom of movement and trade, 56; encounter with Cartier, 48–49; exaggerated on Mitchell map (1755), 63; opens a “refugee haven,” 60; referenced on Mitchell map (1755), 61; treaty conferences, 56 irrigability and Homestead Act, 227, 230 irrigation: data on, in Western states, 226– 28; highlighted in mapping of Western states, 228; limitations on, focus of Geological Survey maps, 230–33; map of areas designated “nonirrigable,” pl. 10; Reclamation Act (1902), 229; Teddy Roosevelt on, 229 Isaiah (slave), escapes on oyster boat, 110 Isidore mappamundi (ca. 1130), indicates forests, 163 islands and bays get European names, 75 Israel, importance of place names for nation building, 67 Isteen Hache River (FL), 84t ittlacuiloque (native artists), 24 Ixquitlan (Mex.), 33 Ixtlico (Mex.), 34 Iztaccíhuatl (mtn, Mex.) on Calderón de la Barca’s route, 184 Jack, E. M., on difficulties of mapping Canada, 249 Jack, John George, 286–88; “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves” (1898), pl. 15 Jacob, Christian, on palm trees as “vegetal stereotype,” 166 Jaillot, Alexis Hubert, Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (1693), 122f Jamaica, associated with palm trees, 159

i n d e x  · 393

James River (VA), 70, 83t, 86, 106 Jamestown (VA), 69 Japan on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia (1801), 79 Jesuits, 54, 127 John G. Ferris (schooner), 88 Johnson, Henry, escapes slavery on oyster schooner, 89–90, 109 Johnson, William, 41, 63 Johnston, Alexander Keith, Physical Atlas (1848), 178 Joliet, Louis, 68–69, 72, 74, 86; “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 . . . ,” 74f Jombert, publisher, Paris, 132–33f Jones, Frank C., 209–10 Jordan River, on Gulf Coast, 72 Journal du voyage . . . a l’equateur (La Condamine), 118 jungle, plain, and volcano, Humboldt’s “secular trinity,” 187 Juvenal, on the Alps, 115 Karrow, Robert W., 2 Kemp, John W., owns “eight head of blacks,” 95 Kennedy, John F., ends dispute at US-­ Mexican border, 222 Kensett, Thomas, oyster canning business, 103 Kent Island (MD), on Coast Survey sketch map (1845), 96f Kenya, Canadian project in, 263 Keyes Lake (WI), 281–82, 282f Kincaid Act (1904), 227 King, William F., 247, 250 kings and rulers, on Catalan portolans, 164 Kinnear, Craig, on “privatized information,” 282 Kissimee River (FL), 83t Kliot, Nurit, on place names and nation building, 67 Klotz, Otto (Canadian surveyor), 247, 268 Knight, Alan, on mestizaje, 198 knowledge/power relation implied in European mapmaking, 138 Kowapt River (VA), 83t Kubler, George, on dating map of Teotihuacan, 32 Kugluktuk (NU), 255

labels on maps as acts of possession, 66–69 labor, networks linking North and South, 91 La Chine Rapids (QC), 48–49 La Condamine, Charles Marie de, 11, 12, 115–34; “Carte de la meridienne de Quito” (1751), 134f; Carte de la Provincia de Quito, 126; “Carte du Cours de Maragnon . . .” (1745), 150–52, 151f; compares Andes to European mts., 119; “correction” of earlier maps, 155; “Coupe du Terrain de la Meridienne de Quito” (1751), 134f; declares authorship of Maldonado map, 127; on difficulty of placing signals, 125; echoed by Humboldt, 144; Humboldt and Bonpland follow, 135; as Humboldt’s competitor, 149–50; imagines canal connecting Amazon and Orinoco, 135–36; influence on Humboldt, 131; as inventor of thematic mapping, 131; Journal du voyage . . . a l’equateur (1751), 118, 126, 128– 29f; map of city of Quito, 127; Mesure des trois premieres degrés (1751), 118, 126– 30, 134f; mountains as “boon and hinderance,” 120; on mouth of Rio Negro, 148; narrative style, 150–51; provided means to “represent the unrepresentational,” 131; quoted by Humboldt, 146; Relation, 136; Rélation abrégée, 136, 144, 150–52, 151f, 155; seen as narrator of expedition, 117; superimposes his map over Fritz’s, 152; “tames” Andes, 131; uses images as paratext, 126 La Figure de la terre (Bouguer), 118 La Fourche R., on LaFon’s map (1806), 78 “La Grande Famine,” 47 La Hontan, Baron de, 41, 47 “La Palmar” on Verrazzano chart (1529), 170 La población del Valle de Teotíhuacán (Gamio), 21f-­22f La Ruta de Hernán Cortés (Benítez), 181, 197–201, 197f, 200f Lac Contenant (Lake Ontario), 49 LaFon, Barthélemy, map of lower Mississippi (1806), 75, 78 Lafourche, Bayou, native name Chetima­ chas, 75 Lake Beresford (FL), 82

394 · i n d e x

Lake Cananda (Onondaga Lake), 58 Lake Champlain (NY), 49 Lake Chelan (WA), forest reserve map of, 287 Lake Erie, 48–49, 52 Lake George (FL), 82 Lake Huron on Champlain map, 49 Lake Michigan, 279 Lake Okeechobee (FL), 81f, 82 Lake Ontario, 44, 46–49, 58 Lake Ponchartrain (LA), 75, 78, 80 Lake St. Joseph (MB-­ON), 251–53 Lake Superior, 276 Lake Superior region, 122 Lake Texcoco (Mex.), 27 lakes, on Onondaga map, 42 lakes and rivers, importance to indigenous diet, 44 Lambdin, William H., Capt., aids escaping slaves, 109 L’Amerique (map, DeFer), pl. 2 land: classification, 223–24, 226, 233, 236, 260f; cover, 226–29, 249; description in Techialoyal codices, 32; disputes, Mexican, 33, 36; grant, colonial Mexican (merced ), 23; grant record, colonial Mexican (acordado), 23; grants in Western states, 224; lottery at Fort Peck Reservation (1913), 234–35; management, Congress attempts to rationalize, 226–28; Ordinance of 1784, 13, 226; ownership shown on Mexican maps, 33–34; policy in US Western states, 223–38; tenure on Teotihuacan maps, 34; use, 13, 255–57; and water boundary, 94 “land capability” equated with nature, 257 landmarks, as sign of English possession, 66 landscape: “abstracted” in arid states, 231; art of, 2; associations provided by, 180; “bewildering” to Humboldt, 144; “built” by travelers, 186; Calderón de la Barca’s reflections on, 184–85; from the air, described as “living map,” 251; imagined, of Calderón de la Barca, 186; of “limitation rather than opportunity,” 228, “not created equal,” 180, pl. 10; rendered in aesthetic and sensual terms, 193; of “space, political will, and information,” 237; transformation through

place names, 67; tropical, Humboldt on, 140; as viewed through the lens of history, 185 “Landscape, history, and the routes of Cortés” (Craib), 180–206 languages: as definition of nation, 6; indigenous, preserved on US maps, 65 Lanson, William (Black man of New Haven), 97, 109–10 Lapland, expedition to measure meridian, 117, 124 Larsen, Reif, a map “formulates meaning,” 16 Larson, Agnes, on “wasteful” logging, 276 LaSalle, Rene-­Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 74, 79 Latin America, associated with palm trees, 159 latitude, measurement of degree of, 11, 117, 124 Laurentian Shield, forestry mapping in, 288 lawsuits, indigenous land claims in Mexico, 24 layering techniques and forest mapping, 273 Lazarus Project, pl. 4 Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (Sanson), 122f Le Monnier, Pierre Charles, on difficulties with mountain dwellers, 124 legends: associated with trees, 163; in Humboldt’s account of Orinoco, 137 legislation to protect slavery, 108 legislative control of oyster industry, 103, 106–8 Leiberg, John B., and forest reserve mapping, 286–87 leopard (cuitlamitzli) on Mexican maps, 28 Lewis, Malcolm, on use of maps by native peoples, 68 Lewis and Clark expedition, 202 lianas lend air of melancholy to tropics, 139–40 Libya, 163–64, 166 lichens in Wash. forests, 287 Liebaux, Jean Baptiste, “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 . . . ,” 74f “Liliputians” working on “Brobdingnagian” data, 259

i n d e x  · 395

Limagne, Plains of (France) fosters “gay and hardworking people,” 124 Linares, Juan, Plano I descripcion de la costa . . . (1756), 73f lineage stressed in Mexican maps, 31 Linnaean system, 140–41, 147, 280 liquor forbidden to oystermen, 102 literature: scholars of, and map use, 4; as source for environmental history, 3; texts, “maps read as,” 147 “Little Africa,” early name for Sandy Ground (NY), 100 livestock shipped south in antebellum US, 89 “living map,” landscape from the air described as, 251 Livingston, Robert, obtains Iroquoian map of Great Lakes region, 42 lo mexicano, 197–201 Lobos River (LA), 83t local usage, preferred by Board on Geographic Names, 85 Lockhart, James, on Prescott’s History, 192 logging, 15, 270, 283; on Roth and Fernow map, 274–80 logographs on Mexican maps, 25, 28 loincloth (maxtlatl ), 30 Long Wharf (New Haven, CT), 97, 110 longbow on Teotihuacan maps, 30 longhouses abandoned for dispersed settlements, 55 longitudinal (horizontal) view combined with vertical views, 123, 124f Loon Lake (WI), 281, 282f Lopes, Sebastião, portolan atlas (ca. 1565), 167, pl. 6 López Luján, Leonardo, 32, 34 Lords of Trade and Plantations, 62 Los pasos perdidos (Carpentier), 204 Lost Steps, The (Carpentier), 156 “lost world,” tropics viewed as, 140 lottery for homestead lands, 234–35 Louisiana, 9, 60; Anville’s map of, 76–77f; became American territory in 1803, 78; Coast Survey recommendations, 95; indigenous names for waterways, 66; place names, mostly French and indigenous, 82; Purchase, 1803, 79 Lousa Chitto, native name for Big Black R., 75

lumber, 89, 283. See also logging Lyell, Charles, on Prescott, 191 macana depicted on Teotihuacan maps, 30– 31 Macdonald, C. L., on GIS history, 265 MacKay, John, Map of the Seat of War in Florida (1839), 81f MacLeish, Archibald, Conquistador, 203 macrobian zonal maps ignored vegetation, 162 “Magallanica,” 172–75f Magellan, Ferdinand, expedition (1519– 22), 170 magnolia trees in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177 maize. See corn Malaya in Miller Atlas (1519), 171 Malbanchya, indigenous name for Mississippi, 74 Maldonado, Pedro Vincente, map of province of Quito (1750), 126–27 Maltby, Caleb S., oystering business in Baltimore, 103 “managerial” state approved by Congress, 228 Manchac (LA), 74 Manchac, Bayou (LA), 74–75, 78 Manitoba, railroads in, 255 “man’s eye view” contrasted with “god’s eye view,” 126, 131, 134, 134f “mansion on quicksand,” simile applied to Canadian mapping, 247, 268 manufactures shipped south in antebellum US, 89 manumitted slaves prohibited from residing in Maryland, 111 map: labels as acts of possession, 66–69; library in Canadian Geographical Branch, 255; scale, 67, 72, 79, 175–76, 231, 266, 269; work as geographical tool, 273 “Map of Chihuahua,” derided by Gray, 214 Map of Louisiana (GLO), 84t “Map of River Movements near San Lorenzo” (US-­Mex. Bdry. Comm.), 219 Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, A (Mitchell), 61f–62f “Map of the country traversed by the Spaniards . . .” (Prescott), 188–89f

396 · i n d e x

Map of the Republic of Mexico (Disturnell), pl. 9 Map of the Seat of War in Florida (US Army), 81f Map of the State of Florida (GLO), 84t “Map of Washington Forest Reserve” (USGS), pl. 14 A and B Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico (Disturnell), pl. 9 “Mapa del pais por donde pasaron los españoles . . .” (Palacio), 182–83f Mapa Quinatzin, 31 Mapa Sigüenza, 7–8, 8f mapmakers: as “first environmental humanists,” 292; notes on forest con­ ditions, 288; southern limit of palm trees, 160 Mappa Uppsala depiction of Teotihuacan, 29 mappaemundi, “cloths of the world,” 291 Mappe of Colonel Römer’s voyage to ye, A (1700), 57–59 mapping: in Canada, 239–69; by Canada Land Inventory, 258, 259–63; of Canadian forest reserves, 285; by Canadian indigenous people, 239–40; creation of landscape, 180; as dispassionate science, 4; “errors” increase as technology improves, 247, 252; exactness a “philosophical overreach,” 280; history of, and environmental history, 291–97; of history by Indigenous Mexicans, 23; by Humboldt, 145–55; in Humboldt’s Rélation historique, 146; inertia of, 211; locations vs. conditions, 272; practices standardized between US and Canada, 253; provided more complete view of native perspective, 43; provides illusion of mastery, 228; scale of (see scale of mapping); as tool for national development, 224; as tool of state power, 13, 237; traditional Eurocentric view, 5; of US-Mexico border, 209–22; by variety of Canadian agencies, 243 Mapping an Empire (Edney), 241 maps: as abstractions, 1; “appropriated” by the state, 146; as basis for GIS in Canada, 265; to bolster territorial claims, 136; culturally laden depictions, 1; Emory on inaccuracy of, 214; employed as forms of rhetoric, 2; engender

“rituals of repetition,” 186; “formulate meaning,” 16; foster “articulated reasoning,” 274; as “foundational texts,” 16; have power to “organize social energies,” 2; increased emphasis on context, 43; increased emphasis on power relations, 43; inherently unnatural, 1; as “instrument[s] of power,” 146; interpret topography, 5; in La Condamine’s Mesure, 128; as legal evidence in Mexico, 24; not static representations, 1; as paratext, not illustrations, 126; practice of copying, 213–14; provide “compelling record” of change in Western states, 237; “read as literary texts,” 147; scale of (see scale of mapping); as “spatialized nature,” 4; as “stridently geopolitical documents,” 67; in “tension” with narrative, 138; understood to be “non-­fiction,” 2 Marañón River (Peru), 144, 146 Marine (Canadian dept.), mapping branch, 243 marine insurance industry, 91 Maritime Provinces (Can.), forestry mapping of, 284 Marquette, Jacques, 68–69, 72, 74, 86; “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 . . . ,” 74f Márquez, Gabriel García, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1963), 156 Marrakesh on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 marshland and Can. Land Inv., 257 Martines, Joan, portolan atlas (1587), 171 Martinique in de Fer’s Atlas curieux, 123 Martius, Karl Friedrich Phillipp von, Historia Naturalis Palmarum (1850), 177 marvels associated with trees, 163 Maryland: border with Virginia, 79; Coast Survey sketch of Wades Point, 95; legislation and oystering, 106; oysters from, bedded in New England, 99; proposes tax on oyster production, 108 Maskelyne, Nevil, studies gravity in Scotland, 119 mass of Andes interferes with observations, 119 Massachusetts, New Haven oysters shipped to, 97

i n d e x  · 397

materiality of indigenous Mexican maps, 32–33 mathematical mapping and surveys, 4, 12 Mattaponi River (VA), 85 Maudslay, Alfred P., 203 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, expedition to measure meridian, 117, 124 Maurepas, Lake (LA), 79 Maximilian, Emperor, 38 maxtlatl (loincloth), 30 mayasi described by La Condamine and Humboldt, 144 Maye, name applied by Ribault to St. Johns River (FL), 71 Maypures, Raudales de (Colombia), 136, 142, 147 Mazapan map (of Teotihuacan), 20, 21f– 22f, 28, 39 Mazateuctli, Don Diego, on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27–28, 30 mazatl (deer) on Mexican maps, 28 McGill University, 254 McKay, R. B., on “Canadian Method” of aerial photography, 249 McNeill, J. R., 6 McNeill, William, 6 meanings projected by travelers on the places they visit, 185 meat in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 medieval world maps ignored vegetation, 162 Medrano, Ethelia Ruiz, 24–25, 36 Mejía, Pérez, on suppression of indigenous sources, 152 “melancholy tropics” represented in view by Debret, 140 Méndez Rodenas, Adriana: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 11– 12; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 294; “On the Trail with Humboldt,” 135–56 Mendoza, Antonio de (Viceroy), 23–24 Mendoza, Mary E.: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 13, 15; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 294–95; “Nature Knows No Bounds,” 209–22 Menominee River (MI and WI), 274 Men’s Journal, 202 Mer Douce (Lake Huron), 49 “Mer du nord,” in d’Anville’s atlas, 149

Mercator, Gerard, 170; Atlas (1595), 168, 171; world map (1569), 168 Mercator, Michael, map of America (1595), 168 Mercator, Rumold, world map (1587), 168 merced (colonial land grant), 23, 24 merchant capital networks linking North and South, 91 meridian measurements, 115, 117, 124 Mermento River (LA), 84t Mermentou River (LA), 83t Mesopotamia associated with palm trees, 159 mesquite tree (mizquic) on Mexican maps, 28 mestizaje, 198, 201 mestizo character of Mexico, 197–201 “mestizo landscape,” 200 “mestizophilia,” 198 Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien (La Condamine), 118 metalepsis in travel and exploration narratives, 152 metaleptic cycles, D. Graham Burnett on, 204 metonymic: association of vegetation and space, 139; Humboldt’s motif, 187; landscapes, 186; parameters for envisioning Mexico, 192 metzli ytzácual (Pyramid crypt) on Mexican maps, 29 Mexicali (Mex.), 221 Mexican scientists’ influence on Humboldt, 187–88 Mexicas, 19, 29–31 Mexico, 12, 32; after independence (1821), 194; archaeological work in, 198; border with US (see under United States); Disturnell’s map of (1847), pl. 9; forest service established, 288; García Cubas map of (1858), 195; General Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments, 37, 39–40; Humboldt in, 187; invaded by US (1846), 191; as land of abundance and prodigal nature, 192–93; loses land due to shifting Rio Grande, 218; mestizo character begins to be recognized, 197–201; National Anthropological Museum, 198; National Insitute of Anthropology and History, 37; “nation-

398 · i n d e x

alization” of archaeology, 37–39; outmigration to the US, 198, 201; paper money (1915), 202f; railways in, 201; reception of Prescott’s History in, 191; Revolution (1910–20), 201; Scientific Commission, 38–39; Secretariat of Education, 38; Spanish ambassador to, 181, 184; Valley of, 7 México a través de los siglos (Palacio), 182–83f, 187 Mexico City (Mexico), 19, 24, 39, 185, 194, 203, 206; Matthew Bruccoli on, 205; route to Veracruz, 180–206; Winfield Scott on, 191 Miami River (FL), 82, 84t Michigan, Upper Peninsula, 281 micrometers, use of in Canadian surveying, 246 Midwestern states, 90, 122 migration histories, Mexican, 36 migrations, seasonal, among Haudenosaunee, 48 military, 4, 254 Milk River (MT), 229–30 Mill River (CT), 97 Miller Atlas (1519), trees in, 171 mineral lands excluded from Homestead Act, 227 mineral mapping in Canada, 255 minerals, data on, in Western states, 226– 29 Minneapolis (MN), Atlantic oysters reached, 99 Minnesota, Geological and Natural History Survey, 286 missionary records document Indians’ knowledge of ecosystem, 47 Mississippi Delta, 74 Mississippi River, 69, 72, 74, 80, 83t, 84t, 86, 122 Mississippi River Valley, 60, 79 Missouri, Atlantic oysters reached, 99 Missouri River, 224, 240 Mitchell, John, 44; A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755), 60–61f, 62f, 64 Mitchisipi, name for Mississippi on Joliet/ Marquette map, 69, 74 mixed forests, 286, 288 mixed-­subsistence economy: among Hau-

denosaunee, 45; reflected on Champlain’s map, 52; reflected on Mitchell map (1755), 63 mizquic (mesquite tree) on Mexican maps, 28 Mizquiteuctli, Don Hipólito, on map of Teotihuacan, 27–28, 30 Mobile (AL), 95 Mobile Bay (AL), 75 mobility of African Americans, in oystering, 103, 106–8 Moctezuma, 187 Mohawk people, 55, 60 Mohawk River (NY), 46, 57 moisture and aridity in forestry, 275, 287 molasses shipped north in antebellum US, 89 Mondell, Frank (D-­WY), and Homestead Act, 230 monoculture not natural for forests, 272, 278 Mont Blanc, 121 “Montagnes de Chili,” on de Fer’s map of America (1704), 123 Montana, maps of (1910–16), 234–35f Monte Alban (Mex.), excavations at, 198 Montreal (QC), 49, 56 monuments along US-­Mexican border, 215 moonlighting as oystermen, African Americans resort to, 106–7 Mora, José María Luis, on Cortés and Mexico, 195 Morelos, José María, leads rebellion, 194 Morris, Eliza, free African American oyster­woman, 111 Morris Cove (CT), 97 mosses: “transcend categories of European science,” 141; in Washington forests, 287 motorcycle tours of Cortés’s route, 202 Mould Bay (NT), 255 Mount Teide (Canary Islands), compared to Andes, 119 mountain: climbers on Sanson map of Dauphine (1693), 122f; climbing, difficulties narrated, 118; definitions of, 120–21; dwellers as difficult colleagues, 124; as geologic promontory within a range, 116; lack of clarity in definition, 116; landscapes as “high places,” 116;

i n d e x  · 399

mountain (continued ) paths, La Condamine on, 125; regions as uncontrollable, 123 Mountain, The (Debarbieux and Rudaz), 120 “Mountain” of Étampes and Reims, 121 mountain ranges, 10–11; “graphic invention” of, 115–34; on map of province of Quito (1751), 126–27; in Midwestern states, 122 mountains: depicted in de Fer’s Atlas curieux, 123; depicted in Sanson’s atlas (1695), 121; gravitational attraction of, 118; suggest danger and chaos, 120; vertical vs. horizontal views, 116 “mourning war” among Haudenosaunee, 54–55 movement through space, in Humboldt’s view of Guayaquil, 139, pl. 3 Mt. Sinai on Sanson’s map (1695), 121 Muir, John, 271, 280 mulattos barred from moving to Maryland, 106 multilingual place names, 69–78 Mundy, Barbara, on indigenous Mexican maps, 23 Murray, James, orders survey of New France, 242 muskmelons grown by Haudenosaunee, 46 Mutis, Alvaro, influence on Humboldt, 187 Myakka River (FL), 84t mysteries associated with trees, 163 myths: associated with trees, 163; in Humboldt’s account of Orinoco, 137 Nahuatl glyph map, 8f Nahuatl language, 20, 28, 30, 32, 36 naked bodies in Humboldt’s view of Gua­ yaquil, 139, pl. 3 names, geographical. See place names Nanauatzin (god), 19 Nanticoke (MD), 102 Napoleon, Louis, free Black porter, 89 narrative: strategies of La Condamine and Bouguer, 131, 134; style of La Condamine, 150–51; in “tension” with maps, 138 Narraway, A. M., on aerial photos, 252 Nassau River (FL), 83t, 84t Nat Turner’s rebellion, 106 Natalbany River (LA), French name R. de l’Ours, 75

nation-­state, 12; and Enlightenment, 6; and power of maps, 237; role in mapping becomes more entrenched, 15 National Academy of Sciences (US), on forest reserves, 285–86 National Air Photographic Library (Canada), 252–53 National Archives at College Park, 96f National Archives II, 93–93f National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 2, 292 National Film Board of Canada, Data for Decision (1968), 259, 262, 264 national identities, maps as mediators of, 2 National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH, Mex.), 37 National Land Capability Inventory (Canada), 263 national mapping, 4 National Origins Act (1924), and US-­ Mexican border, 215 national parks and study of forestry, 271– 72 National Topographic System (Canada), 253 “Nationalist currency,” 202f native: Americans (see American Indians); assistants and foreign travelers, 139, pl. 3; Mexicans, Benítez on, 201; peoples (see Indigenous peoples) natural: features as definition of a nation, 6; history, as source for environmental history, 3; landmarks as sign of English possession, 66; a taxonomic practice, 273 natural resources: of Canada, mapping, 239–69; difficulty of identifying and allocating, 226; efficient use of, in Canada, 257–58; “intimate secrets” of, revealed by aerial photos, 253; management in Western states, 237 nature: in Amazon as “place of radical otherness,” 139; cow tree as affirming “fundamental unity of,” 141; cultural constructions of, 1, 3, 19, 37–38, 43–44, 52, 116, 125–31, 141–45, 160– 79, 196–201, 223–24, 226–27, 230–31, 239–40, 271–74; difficulty of mapping Canadian, 239–69; as “dynamic and disordered,” 222; dynamism of, 1, 4, 7, 9, 14–16, 94, 188, 211, 216, 221–22,

400 · i n d e x

272, 292–93, 305; emotional response to, Humboldt warns of, 139; exalted by “Humboldtian science,” 142; “fundamental unity” of, 141; as “human idea,” 3; illusion of control, or mastery of, 15, 70, 116, 123, 211, 228, 237, 263; as interconnected whole, 12; interferes with US-­Mexican border, 216; as “land capability,” 257; map provides illusion of mastery over, 228; mapping of, in Canada, 239–69; maps as cultural constructions of, 1; naming of, 87; in Neruda’s Canto general, 199; or natural resources, as commodities, 13, 55, 61, 85, 89, 98, 224, 226, 229, 257–58, 272, 281–83; not amenable to state control, 211; proximity to, in Humboldt’s view of Guayaquil, 139, pl. 3; relation to society evidenced in old maps, 87; Romero ( José Luis) on, 198; seen as “untamed and savage,” 140; as system of interconnected parts, 137; as “ultimate ‘other,’” 137; as “unknowable, inconceivable, and even sublime,” 120; tropical, requires shift in Humboldt’s rhetoric, 142 nautical log as kept by Humboldt, 144 naval stores as part of coastwise trade, 89 navigation hazards in coastwise shipping, 91 “Negroes” mentioned in Coast Survey notes, 95 NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), 2, 292 Nekola, Peter: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 15; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 295; “Seeing Forests as Systems,” 270–90 Nelson, George, on “clear, concise, and expressive” indigenous maps, 54 Neruda, Pablo, Canto general, 199 Neutral Indians dominated by Haudenosaunee, 55 New England: coast mapped by Champlain, 49; oystermen become Chesapeake residents, 102–3; palm trees in, 173 New France, 44, 60 New Granada, Viceroyalty, 146 New Haven (CT), 95–97, 98f, 103, 109–10 New Haven Harbor (map, 1846), 98f

New Jersey, 99, 101, 103 New Mexico, 210, 214 New Orleans (LA), 79 New River (FL), 83t, 84t New Spain, 23, 34, 36, 187 New Universal Atlas (Tanner), 83t New World: discovery of, and depiction of vegetation, 166; on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 New York (City), 44, 57–58, 88, 90, 100, 102, 107 New York Bay and Harbor (Coast Survey), 93–93f New York Board of Underwriters, 88 New York Ship Inspection Law, 106, 108 New York Tribune, 102 New Zealand, Byrnes on mapping of, 241 Newberry Library, 2–3, 292; Cartes marines collection, 123 “newness,” Humboldtian trope, 143–44 Newton, Isaac, 117, 119 Niagara Falls, 49, 52 Nichols, Charles, on following a historic route, 204–5 Nichols, George Elwood, corresponds with Fernow, 289 Nicholson, Norman L., 256, 269 Nicolas, Louis, S. J., Codex Canadensis (ca. 1700), 242 nighttime observation illustrated by La Condamine, 130 nochtli (cactus) on Mexican maps, 28 Noir, Riviere, name applied by Hutchins, 75 nomothetic (law-­seeking) approach by geographers, 256 non-­irrigability, as focus of Geological Survey maps, 230–33 Nopaltenco (Mex.), 28, 33 Norfolk (VA), 89, 100, 102–3 Norfolk County (VA), 110 North Africa: associated with palm trees, 159; “chief geographic ‘other’”on portolan charts, 165; in portolan atlas (ca. 1565), pl. 6; on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172; on Roselli chart of 1456, pl. 5 North America, maps of receding frontier in, 244–45f North River (FL), 83t North Woods, forest conditions in, 274–80

i n d e x  · 401

Northampton County (VA), 106–7 northern abolitionists and oyster industry, 108 northern oystermen seen as threats to slave system, 106 northern Wisconsin, map of forest conditions in, 274–80 North-­South tensions exacerbated by oyster industry, 107–8 Northwest Passage hinted at, on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52 Notalbany River (LA), 83t notaries, ittlacqiloque function as, 24 Nottoway River (VA), 83t Nouvelle introduction a la géographie (Sanson), 121–22 Nova Scotia: landscapes of, 256; map of forest conditions (1912), pl. 16 Nova totius orbis . . . tabula (Hondius), 177f Noyes, John, on inscription and description, 205 Nubia on Dulcert portolan (1339), 165 Nueces River (TX), 210 Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran Río de las Amazonas (Acuña), 148 Nutabani (Natalbany River, LA), 75 nuts in Haudenosaunee diet, 45–46 oak trees, 280, 288 Ocitta River (FL), 84t Ocklokony River (FL), 84t Ocone, Rio de (Oconee River, GA), 72 offshore oil wells in Canada, 253 Ogdensburg Agreement (1940), 253 Ogilby, John, 173; America (1671), 176f; “Tabula Magellanica” (1671), 176f Ogilvie, William, on chaining errors, 247 O’Hare, Daniel: map of lands in Ariz. (1916), 225f; maps (1910–16), 234–35f Ohio country, French incursions, 42, 60 oil industry in Canada, 253 Okaloosa River (FL), 75 Okeechobee, Lake (FL), 82 Oke-­Loussa, French name Les Eaux Noires, 75 Old John (schooner), 99 Oliver, John David, oysterman, 109 Olympic Mountains, forest reserves in, 285 Olympics in Mexico (1968), 206 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Már­ quez), 156

Oneida people, 55, 58, 60 Onondaga Lake (“Lake Cananda”), 58 Onondaga people, 42, 58–60 Ontario, 283, 288 Opossum River (FL), 83t oral testimony, as source for Mexican maps, 34 orality of indigenous Mexican maps, 36 orchards, 257 orchids “transcend categories of European science,” 141 Ordaz, Diego de, 203 Ordnance Survey (Gt. Brit.), 254 Oregon, 91 Organa (Saharan city), 165 Orinoco River, 12, 135–56; Amazon “bewildering landscape” to Humboldt, 144; Amazon “complex network of associations,” 141; canal connecting to Amazon, 135–36; connection to Amazon, 145–46; on d’Anville’s map, 149; description vs. illustration, 138, 140; Humboldt attempts to “map” in words, 142; Humboldt’s map of (1811), 152, 153f, 155; Humboldt’s passage through, 138; in Humboldt’s verbal map, 147; as “limit” or border zone, 143; its mapping a “palimpsest,” 147; origins of, 136; in painting by Weitsch, 135; on Sanson’s map, 148; as transnational space, 147; woman traveler from, 155 Orizaba, Pico de (Mexico), 184, 193, pl. 7 Oroonoko, Humboldt’s name for Orinoco, 146 Orozco y Berra, Manuel, 191, 203 Ortelius, Abraham, 159; map of America (1570), 168–69; references to palm trees, 170; Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), 157, 158f, 168, 171; world map (1564), 168–69 orthogonal projection combined with profile views, 123, 124f Oswego River, 58 Otihatangué (fishing station on Lake Ontario), 47 Ottawa Indians, used by Champlain as informants, 49 Ottawa office of Canada Land Inventory, 259 Oudijk, Michel, on Teotihuacan maps, 32, 34

402 · i n d e x

Ours, Riviere de l,’ native name Nutabani, 75 Ovalle, Alonso de, shows palm trees in Patagonia, 173 overlays, transparent, used by Can. Land Inv., 263, 266 Oxford University, Bodleian Library, 26f “oyster barns” in Fair Haven, 99 oyster industry, 9, 90; control of Black bodies, 107; creates “pathways out of slavery,” 108; economic value in 1850s, 90; as “foundational to . . . emancipatory work,” 110; helped blacks construct “spaces of relative freedom,” 90; importance of social relations, 101; operates “under the radar” of central control, 111; opposition to slavery, 109; plantations off Staten Island, 100; potential damage to ecosystem, 107; processes, 96–97, 99; production figures, 88, 99–101; provides “pathways out of the South,” 109; schooners carry escaped slaves, 89, 109; sources of workers, 100; Southern legislation against, 108 Oyster Point (CT), 97 oystermen: familiarity with ecosystems, 101; moonlighting slaves, 106 Pacific Coast (US), 91 Pacific Northwest (US), 284 Pacific Ocean, 211–12 Pacific Railroad Survey, 226 painted manuscripts, as legal evidence in Mexico, 24 painting, Columbis Lands on Las Indias (Healey) 206, pl. 8 Palacio, Vicente Riva, México a través de los siglos (1887), 182–83f, 187 Palestine associated balsam tree, 163 palimpsest, mapping the Orinoco as, 147 Palizada, Rio de la, name given to Mississippi by Sigüenza y Góngora, 72 palm toponym on Hereford map (ca. 1290), 164 palm trees, 12, 159–60, 165–66, 168–69, 172–73, 175; on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27; in Berghaus atlases, 177–78f; on de Wit world map (ca. 1660), 175; on Dulcert portolan (1339), 165; on Hondius world map (1630), 177f; in John-

ston’s Physical Atlas (1848), 178; in Lopes portolan atlas (ca. 1565), 167, pl. 6; Martius’s maps of (1850), 177; on Matthew Paris map of Holy Land (ca. 1250), 164; on Mazapan map, 33–34; in Miller Atlas (1519), 171; in Patagonia, 172–73, 174– 75f; on Peutinger map, 164; as principal trope defining tropics, 140; in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177; the “tropical tree par excellence” to Europeans, 160; as “vegetal sterotype,” 166; on Vercelli mappamundi (ca. 1200), 164, pl. 4 Palm Trees of the Amazon (Wallace), 178 “Palmar,” 170 palmares (palm groves), 157–58, 158f, 160, 168–72, 178–79 palmeris, 164 “Palms and other Trees on Maps” (Bockelman), 157–79 “Paluares,” place name on Gastaldi map (1546), 169 Pamir Mountains, 67 pampas, as natural landscape of Arg., 159 Pamunkey River (VA), 83t Pantoja, Don Juan, map of 1782 (1802), 212 paper: mills begin to replace lumber mills, 283; money, Mexican (1915), 202f; used by Nahuatl writers, 33 paradise, as journey’s goal, 184 paradox of mapping: as technology improves, errors multiply, 247, 252, 263–69 Paraguay, 159 Paraná River (Brazil-­Argentina), 157, 159, 170, 179 parasitic plants “transcend categories of European science,” 141 paratext, images serve as, 126 Paris, Matthew, map of Holy Land (ca. 1250), 164 Paris meridian, 124, 127 Paris Observatory, 117 parrots pictured in Brazil, 167 Pascagoula Bay and River (MS), 75 passenger pigeons, 46 pasture land and Can. Land Inv., 257 Patagonia, 170, 172–76f Paz, Octavio, Labyrinth of Solitude, 199 Peace River (FL), 82, 83t, 84t peaches in Haudenosaunee diet, 47

i n d e x  · 403

Pearl (schooner), 109 Pearl River (LA), 83t, 84t pears in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 peas in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Peas River, Pease Creek (Peace River, FL), 82, 83t, 84t “Pelar Nares,” place name on Agnese map (ca. 1550), 169 pendulum clock, on La Condamine map, 127 “Penelope’s Web,” 201 peninsulas favored for village sites, 43 Pennsylvania, 60 Pensacola Bay (FL), 72, 75, 80, 83t “Peraluares,” place name on Camocio map (1567), 169 perch in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Perdido River (FL), 72, 83t, 84t “perfect storm,” metaphor for Canada Land Inventory, 263 performative nature of indigenous Mexican maps, 36 Permanent Joint Board on Defence, 253 Persian fruit trees on Vercelli map (ca. 1200), 163–64 Persian Gulf: on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166; on Ribeiro world maps (1529), 172 personal names on Mexican maps, 27–30 perspectives on Mexican maps, 25, 27 Perth Amboy (NJ), 102 Peshtigo (WI), great fire of, 283 pest counts by Can. Land Inv., 264 Peters, F. H., 249–50; “Surveying and Mapping in Canada” (1931), 248f, 252f Petun Indians dominated by Haudenosaunee, 55 Peutinger map, trees on, 164 Peyto Lake (AB), map of tourism potential, 260–61f Pflanzengeographischer Atlas (Schouw), 177 Philadelphia, 91, 101, 109 “Photographic Surveying in Canada” (Bridgland), 250–51f photography for surveying in Canada, 247–53 photomosaic mapping, 249 phototopographic mapping, 248 phototopographical surveying, 247–51 Physical Atlas ( Johnston), 178 physical maps, 5 Physikalischer Atlas (Berghaus), 177–78, 178f

phytogeography, 179 Piakemines R. (Bayou Plaquemines Brule, LA), 75 pictographic documents, 24 pictorial symbols on maps of Teotihuacan, 29 pictorial testimony, as source for Mexican maps, 25, 34 Pictou-­Cumberland Lowlands (NS), landscapes of, 256 “Pieraluares,” place name on Ortelius maps, 169 Pierre, Bayouk, or Stoney R., in Hutchins’ description, 75 pike in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Pikes Peak (CO), 287–88; map of forest reserves (1898), pl. 15 Pinchot, Gifford, 271 pine trees, 282; on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166; on Matthew Paris maps, 164; in Mexican forests, 288; in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177; in Wash. forests, 287 Piney Point Creek (VA), 107 pintura, 24 Pinus strobus (white pine), 276 pirijao palm, 140 place, as product of “a myriad of cultural filters,” 185 place names, 1, 9; Board on Geographic Names (US), 83, 85; established through field work, 83; as fixed in 19th cent., 78; fluidity of, 86; glyphs, 30; Harley on, 154; indigenous, survival of, 65; on Mexican maps, 27–30; multilingual, 69–78; as “naming of nature,” 87; role in nation building, 67; of stone serpent (Tecohuac), 29 plain, volcano, and jungle, Humboldt’s “secular trinity,” 187 “Plan de la riviere de Maragnon . . .” (Fritz, 1707), 149f Plancius, Petrus, 171; world map (1594), 172–75 Planet (schooner), 102 planetary motion, 117 planimetric maps, 9, 27 Plano I descripcion de la costa . . . (Badaraco and Linares, 1756), 73f plantations, forests as, 272 plants: distribution, maps of, 176–78; para-

404 · i n d e x

sitic, “transcend categories of European science,” 141; as source for environmental history, 3; world atlas of (1823), 177 Plaquemines Brule, Bayou (LA), 75 Plaquemines R. on LaFon’s map (1806), 78 Platt, Lee, of Canada Land Inventory, 263 Plaza of the Three Cultures (Mexico City), 206 Plum Creek (CO), 287–88; map of forest reserves (1898), pl. 15 Plummer, Fred Gordon, and forest reserve mapping, 286–87 plums in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Pocomoke River (VA), 85 Poinsett, Joel, 188–89 Point Comfort (TX), 69 Poissons R., empties into Mobile Bay, 75 political: boundaries merged with hydrological, 224; entities (altepetl) indicated on Mexican maps, 28; power extended to remote areas by place naming, 67; responsiveness on part of Coast Survey, 95; systems reflected in mapping, 243 Ponchartrain, Lake (LA), 75, 78–79 ponds on Mitchell map (1755), 63 pongos, Humboldt’s term for waterfall, 142, 144 poplar trees on Fra Mauro map (ca. 1450), 166 Popocatépetl (Mexico), 184 population: growth along US-­Mexican border, 215; loss in indigenous com­ munities, 54; sparse in Canada, 239 “Poraluares,” place name on Gastaldi map (1561), 169 Porfiriato, 37; expropriates site of Teotihuacan, 38; view of Cortés during, 195 port access mapping in Canada, 255 portages: Humboldt on, 148; on Mitchell map (1755), 63; on Onondaga map, 42; on Romer’s map of Iroquoia, 58 Portland (ME), 100 portolan charts, 162, 164, pl. 5–6 Portugal controls Amazon basin, 146 possession, as expressed by colonial powers, 66 Post Office (Canadian dept.), 243 Potomac River (FL), 83t Potomac River (MD and VA), 78–79 power: dynamics reflected on maps, 1; extended to remote areas by place nam-

ing, 67; and knowledge relation implied in European mapmaking, 138 Powhatan River (now James River, VA), 70, 86 precision in mapping, 134, 262 pre-­Hispanic Mexican maps, 23 Prescott, William H.: becomes a kind of ghostwriter, 204; commissions portrait of Cortés, 194; corresponded with Calderón de la Barca, 189–90; corresponded with Humboldt, 187; History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), 181, 186– 91, 189f, 192–93; inspiration for Hart Crane, 202; on Humboldt’s influence, 190; “Map of the country traversed by the Spaniards . . .” (1843), 188–89f; Matthew Bruccoli on, 202; praises Humboldt’s maps of New Spain, 187; relies on Calderón de la Barca for “appearance of things,” 190; relies on Humboldt for geology, 190; sends daguerreotype to Calderón de la Barca, 190 preservation, not just “what” but “how,” 274 Price County (WI), 276 Prince Edward Island joins Dominion of Canada (1873), 243 Prince’s Bay (Staten Island), 100, 111 principales (indigenous leaders), 25 printed maps, 5, 166 private property, 13 “privatized information,” Craig Kinnear on, 282 processual analysis, need for, 36 productivity symbolized on Can. Land Inv. maps, 259 profiles: on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27; combined with triangulation diagram, 130, 134f; on Sanson’s map (1695), 121; views in Bouguer’s La Figure, 130 progress, vs. solitude in Humboldt’s vision of Orinoco, 156 Progressive Era land policy, 223–38 projections used by Canadian mapping agencies, 243 propaganda and mapping, 4 property: boundaries on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27; ownership in Techia­ loyal codices, 32; plans by Indigenous Mexicans, 23

i n d e x  · 405

Protestant Huguenots on Danckert map (1703), 124 protoecological ideas in Roth and Fernow map (1897), 279 Psalter map (ca. 1265), 163 Ptolemy’s Geography, 162–63 public lands: classification of, 226; Committee on, 230 public opinion important to Coast Survey, 95 Puebla (Mex. state), routes through, 180– 206 pueblos, smaller (sujetos), 34 pulpwood on timber charts, 283 Pumpkin Field River, translation of Chassahowitzka on 1851 map, 82 punch cards for storing aerial data, 266 Pungotegue River (VA), 85 Purificación (Mex.), 33, 35 pyramid crypt (metzli ytzácual ), 29 pyramids, on Aztec maps, 19–20, 27, 29, 33 Pyrenees, 119, 121 quadrant on La Condamine map, 127 Quaker oystermen, 106, 109 quality of mapping constantly critiqued in Canada, 239–69 Quanzhou (China), 172 Quebec, 42, 242, 284, 286, 288 Querandí people: sack Buenos Aires, 169; synonymous with palmares, 171–72 Quilombo de Palmares (Brazil), 158 Quinnipiac River (CT), 97, 99, 110 “Quirandies,” label on 17th cent. maps, 169 Quito (Ecuador): map of province, 126; map and view of, 130, 134f; meridian of, 115; valley of, 125 racial homogeneity, as goal of settler communities, 13 racism, Eurocentric, influence on Porfirian elites, 37 rack for hanging sculls (tzompantli), 27 radar distance measuring in Canada, 254 “Radeau de la Riviere de Guayaquil,” pl. 3 raft on Guayaquil, 139, 148, pl. 3 railroad: land grants, 224, 237; in Manitoba, 255; in Mexico, 201; sidings on timber charts, 283 Railways and Canals (Canadian dept.), 243 rain in Andes, La Condamine on, 125

rainforest, as “untamed and savage nature,” 140 Raj, Kapil, on science in colonial context, 241 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 146, 204 Ramírez, José Fernando, critique of Prescott, 191 range land and Can. Land Inv., 257 rapids (raudales) encountered by Humboldt, 136, 142 Rappahannock River (VA), 83t raspberries in Haudenosaunee diet, 47 Raynham (CT estate), 96 Reclamation Act (1902), 229 Reclamation Service (US). See under United States Reconquest of Mexico (Bruccoli), 202, 205 Reconstruction, 226 recreation and Can. Land Inv., 257 rectangularity of Western mapping, 240 Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot (1681?), 74f red color: ambiguity as symbol, 231, 236– 37; on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27; denotes “landscapes of limitation,” 228, pl. 10; indicates irrigation projects, pl. 11; indicates lack of water, pl. 10; indicates “more challenging” areas, 231; on Tenochtitlan map, 31 Red Head (Onondaga headman), 42–43, 63 Red River (TX-­LA), 75, 78 reeds on map of Tenochtitlán, 27 regional approach stressed by Canadian geographers, 256 regrowth of forests, doubts about, 275 Rélation historique. Atlas pittoresque (Humboldt, 1820), 136–38, 142, 146–47, pl. 3 relief representation, 122, 125–31 religion: and globalization, 6; and Haudenosaunee mobility, 42 religious texts, as source for environmental history, 3 Report upon the Forestry Investigations (Fernow, 1899), 285 reservation lands reduced, 233–35f Resolute (NU), 255 resources, 2; directly related to infrastructure, 231; management of, in Western states, 237; shown in cartouches, 9 “Resources for Tomorrow” (conference, 1961), 257 revolution: in France, 194; in Mexico, 201

406 · i n d e x

rhetoric, maps as forms of, 2 Rhind, David, and GIS in Canada, 265 Rhode Island, 91 Ribault, Jean, 68, 71, 71f Ribeiro, Diego, world maps (1529), 172 rice shipped north in antebellum US, 89 Richer, Jean, gravitational studies, 119 Richmond (VA), 89, 106, 109 Richmond Daily Dispatch, 107 Rio Branco (Brazil), Humboldt on, 148 Rio Bravo. See Rio Grande Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay): on Mercator world map (1569), 168; in Miller Atlas (1519), 171; originally called Río Jordan, 170; place names around, 168; in Schouw’s atlas (1823), 177; southern limit of palm trees, 159; in Theatrum orbis terrarum, 157 Río de las Palmas, Cabot explores, 170 Rio Grande: displacement of, on Disturnell map, 214; fortified and reinforced, 222; shifting nature of, 15, 216–18; as US-­ Mexican border, 210 Río Jordan, original name for Río de la Plata, 170 Rio Negro (Brazil and Uruguay), 136, 146, 148–49, 154 Rio Ratones (Boca Raton, FL), 83t Ritter, Carl, Sechs Karten von Europa (1806, 176–77 ritual: execution in reaction to population loss, 55; sites on indigenous Mexican maps, 29 River St. Louis, Delisle’s alternate name for the Mississippi, 72 rivers: on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27; flowing “both ways at once,” 144; frequently bear indigenous names, 66, 75; on General Land Office maps, 84t; on Mitchell map (1755), 63; names in American South, 65–87; on Onondaga map, 42; shown on Mexican maps, 33 Riviere de la Chasse, alternate name for Pascagoulas, 75 Riviere d’Iberville, on d’Anville map, 75 Riviere Rouge (Red River, TX-­LA), native name Bouk-­Houma, 75 Road to Botany Bay, The (Carter, 1987), 241 roads on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27 Robertson, Donald, on amate paper, 33–34 robins in Haudenosaunee diet, 46

Robinson, Peter, escapes slavery on oyster schooner, 109 Rocky Mountain Front Range (CO), 286 Rocky Mountains, 284–85 Rodenas, Adriana Méndez. See Méndez Rodenas, Adriana Rolph-­Trouillot, Michel, on historical authenticity, 205 Romero, José Luis, on discourse of “nature,” 198 Romero, M. (boundary commissioner), 209 Romer, Wolfgang, 44, 63; A Mappe of Colonel Römer’s voyage to ye (1700), 57–59 Roosevelt, Theodore, 229, 271, 284 Roselli, Petrus, portolan chart (1456), 164–65, pl. 5 Roth, Filibert and B. E. Fernow, 284; “Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin” (map, 1897), 274–80, pl. 12; Forestry Conditions and Interests of Wisconsin (1898), 274–80 route of Cortés. See under Cortés, Hernan Rowe, Elijah, John, and Ruel (oystermen), 99, 101–2 Royal Society of Canada, 243, 246 Rudaz, Gilles, The Mountain (2015), 120 Rugendas, Johann, Vista de Vercruz desde el mar (1831), pl. 7 Ruggles, Richard, 242; A Country So Interesting (1991), 244–45f rum shipped north in antebellum US, 89 runaway slaves employed in New Haven, 110 rural areas in Canada, Act to rehabilitate, 257 S. Espirito (Espíritu Santo), 157 Sabine River (LA), 83t sacred sites on Mexican maps, 29 sacrificial victims on map of Tenochtitlán, 27 Safier, Neil, 115, 126 sailing directions on Coast Survey maps, 94 Saint Augustine (FL), 80 Saint Croix River (MN), 122 Saint John, Rachel. See St. John, Rachel Saint Johns River (FL), 71, 81, 83t, 84t Saint Lawrence River, 49 Saint Louis (MO), 74 Saint Louis River (MN and WI), 274

i n d e x  · 407

Saint Louis River, alternate name for Mississippi, 72, 74 Saint Marks River (FL), 82, 84t Saint Martin[s] River (FL), 72 Saint Mary’s County (VA), 107–8 Saint Mary’s River (FL), 71, 81, 83t, 84t Saint-­Pierre, Bernardin de, bucolic landscapes, 141 Saint Pierre River (FL), 72 Saint Sebastian River (FL), 84t Sainte Marie de Galbes (Pensacola Bay), 75 saint’s names, preferred by Spanish for place names, 68, 71–72 Salem (MA), 100 Saline River (LA), 84t Salix humboldtiana (willows), 170 salmon in Haudenosaunee diet, 46, 47 Salmon River (NY), 47 salt licks on Mitchell map (1755), 63 Salt River (AZ), 229–30 saltos, Humboldt’s term for waterfall, 142 San Carlos River (Ecuador), Humboldt on, 148 San Fernando mission, Humboldt on landscape of, 140 San Francisco Mazapan, Mex., 28, 33, 35, 38 San Ildefonso, Treaty of, 1800, 79 San José de Checa ( Jesuit hacienda), 127, 130 San Juan (Teotihuacan, Mex.) 35 San Juan, Rio de (St. Johns River, FL), 72, 73f San Juan River, on Ayer map of Teotihuacan, 27 San Lorenzo (Mex.), claim re: boundary change, 218 San Martin Obisbo (Mex.), 35 San Pedro (Mex.), 33 San Sebastián Chimalpan (Mex.), 28 San Simon, Rio de (GA), 72, 73f Sandy Ground (NY), free Black community, 100, 110–11 Sanson, Guillaume, Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (1693), 122f Sanson, Nicolas: Introduction de la géographie (1693), 122–23; Nouvelle introduction a la géographie (1695), 121–22; represen­ tation of Orinoco, 148 Santa Cathalina, Rio de, Atlantic coast, 72, 73f

Santa Maria, Spanish name for Pensacola Bay, 72 Santa Maria Cuatlán (Mex.), 35, 38 Santa Maria de Galve, name given to Pensacola Bay in 1693, 72 Santacruz, Armando (boundary commissioner), 218–19 Sanybel (Sanibel) River (FL), 83t Sappony River (VA), 83t Saracino, Jennifer: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 7–8; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 293; “Staking Claims on Native Lands,” 19–40 Sargent, Charles Sprague, forestry maps, 280, 285–86 sauces criollos (willows), 170 sault d’eau (Niagara Falls), 49 Saville map of Teotihuacan, 20, 28, 39 Sawanee (Suwanee) River (FL), 84t Sawyer County (WI), 276 scale of mapping: and appearance of trees, 162; Canadian “Wilderness line,” 269; depiction of trees, 175–76; as factor in preserving indigenous names, 67; irrelevant in GIS, 266; lack of coordination, in Canada, 253; lack of indigenous names, 72, 79; non-­irrigability, 231; used by Canadian mapping agencies, 243 Schávelson, Daniel, on maps of Teotihuacan, 29, 38–39 Schiehallion (Scotland), 119 Schomburgk, Richard, in British Guiana, 152 schools, Canadian, and weather recording, 247 schooners in oyster trade, 99–101 Schouw, Joakim Frederik, Pflanzengeograph­ ischer Atlas (1823), 177 Schulten, Susan, 228; History of America in 100 Maps, 241 science, traditional, challenged by Empiricism, 6 scientific: community, its view of mts., 120; mapping in Canada, 15; revolution, 6, 9; terms applied to mts., 116 Scientific Commission of Mexico, 38–39 scientists, 9; Mexican, influence on Humboldt, 187–88 Scony River (VA), 83t Scotland, botanical survey of, 279

408 · i n d e x

Scott, Daniel Sánchez, Veracruz y sus viajeros, pl. 7 Scott, James C., 12; on state “seeing through” nature, 295; on “statecraft,” 211; on “unwieldy reality” of Western lands, 231 Scott, Winfield, 191, 202 Scottish Highlands, 119 sculls on map of Tenochtitlán, 27 seasonal activities among Haudenosaunee, 45 Sebert, Louis, on Canadian “Wilderness line,” 269 Sechs Karten von Europa (Schouw, 1806), 176–77 “Second Nation” (Oneidas), 58 Secretariat of Education (Mex.), 38 sectional profile in Bouguer’s La Figure, 130 Seed, Patricia, on “acts of possession,” 66 “Seeing Forests as Systems” (Nekola), 270– 90 Seminole Indians, campaigns against, 86 Seneca people, 48, 55, 59 Seneca River (NY), 46 Seniergues, Jean, 117 Serna, Ruedas de la, on the beauty of America’s nature, 187 settlements: on pinturas, 24; promoted by mapping, 2 settler colonialism, settler colonial states, 13; state-­sponsored mapping as instrument of, 13 settlers as forest stewards, 277–78 shade, as factor in forest regrowth, 275 “shallopers,” 103 shape of the earth, debate over, 117 Sharks River (FL), 83t sheep, on Hondius world map (1630), 174, 177f shellfish: industry and emancipation, 88– 112; as part of coastwise trade, 90 shield (chimalli ), on Mexican maps, 28, 30 ship inspections required in Va. and S.C., 106 shorelines: as “beginnings and endings,” 184; “most striking and important feature in nature,” 94 Siam, in Miller Atlas (1519), 171 Sienne, name applied by Ribault to St. Mary’s River (FL), 71 Sierra Madre (Mex.), 193

Sierra Madre Oriental (Mex.), 184 Sierra Nevada (Spain), on Roselli chart (1456), 164, pl. 5 Sierra Nevada Mountains (CA), forest reserves in, 284 signs on Mexican maps, 27–30 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, renames Pensacola Bay, 72 silence felt by Humboldt at Great Cataracts, 145 silences, on maps, 1–2, 69, 111–12 Silos Beatus map (1106), showing vegetation, 163 Simpson, Lesley Byrd, 202 Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. See Haudenosaunee Confederacy slash logging consequences of, 283 slash-­and-­burn agriculture among Haudenosaunee, 45 slave: economy of Chesapeake Bay, 108; labor, impact on coastwise trade, 89; quarters on Coast Survey (US) sketches, 95 slavery: emancipation and the shellfish industry, 88–112; and oyster industry, 108–11; “pathways out of ” provided by oyster industry, 108; “tacitly supported” on Coast Survey maps, 95; threatened by northern oystermen, 106. See enslaved people Slotten, Hugh, on “politically responsive” Coast Survey, 95 Sluyter, Andrew, concept of “colonial triangle,” 69 smelt in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 SMGE (Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística), 195 Smith, Edward (HBC employee), 239 Smith, John, Virginia (1612), 68–69; Virginia (1624), 70f Smith, William Gardner, 279, 289 Smoot, Reed (R-­Utah), and Homestead Act, 230 smuggling along US-­Mexican border, 215 Smyth Island (VA), 69 Snake River (ID), 229–30 snow depth, La Condamine on, 125 Snow Hill (MD), 100, 110–11 social: geography and mapping, 4; institutions, linking North and South, 91; issues ignored by GIS, 267; relations,

i n d e x  · 409

social (continued ) importance of, in oyster industry, 101; taxonomy in Humboldt’s narrative, 147 Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, 198 Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (SMGE), 195 society-­nature relationships, as evidenced in old maps, 87 Socklokony River (FL), 84t soils: Coast Survey studies in Florida Keys, 94–95; data on, in Western states, 229; as factor in forest regrowth, 275; quality shown on Mexican maps, 33–34; related to topography, 287; surveys of, by Can. Land Inv., 257, 259, 264 solitude, vs. progress in Humboldt’s vision of Orinoco, 156 Song of Roland and Cortés’ perception of Mexico, 185 Soto, Hernando de, 72, 86; records native place names, 68 South America, 11–12, 158f, 168, 171, 177, 178f, 187 South Carolina, 71, 95, 106 South Platte River (CO), 287–88; map of forest reserves (1898), pl. 15 Southampton Island (NU), 255 Southern States: lack coastal charts and infrastructure, 94; river names in, 65–87; trade with, 96, 99, 112 Southwest (US), forestry mapping in, 284 “spaces of relative freedom” provided to Blacks, 90 Spain: acquires Louisiana from France, 79; ambassador to Mexico, 181, 184; colonists’ “tenuous ideological control,” 36; controls Amazon basin, 146; land claims on Teotihuacan map, 20; as part of Cortés’s route, 181; on Roselli chart (1456), 164, pl. 5; rules and ceremonies for conquest, 66; sponsors geodesic mission to Quito, 117; violence associated with, 193 Spanish: place names for rivers, 75; scientists’ influence on Humboldt, 187–88 sparse population of Canada, 239 Spartan Air Services, 263–64 spatial: distribution of biota, 10; epistemologies of indigenes erased, 240 “species” and conservation movement, 271 speculators, as forest stewards, 278

Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum (Spilbergen, 1619), 174–75f spices shipped north in antebellum US, 89 Spilbergen, Joris van, Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum (1619), 172, 174–75f Spring Garden Lake (FL), 82 Spruce River (FL), 84t spruce trees, 277, 281, 286, 289 squash in Haudenosaunee diet, 45, 48 Sri Lanka (“Zailon”) on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 St. See also Saint; San; Santa St. John, Rachel, on “searching for” US-­ Mexican border, 212 staff with obsidian blades (macana), 30 standardization of US-­Canadian mapping, 253 state: “appropriates” maps, 146; “managerial,” approved by Congress, 228; and power of maps, 237 “State of Arizona” (map, 1916), 225f “State of Montana” (maps, 1910–16), 234– 35f statecraft on US-­Mexican border, 211, 222 Staten Island (NY), 100, 110–11 Stephens, John Lloyd: Incidents of Travel in Central America (1841), 190; sense of anxiety, 204; troubled by his association with Cortés, 194 Stewart, Mart, on cartouches, 9 Still, William, on escaping slaves, 109 Stinhachee River (FL), 83t stone (tetl ) on Mexican maps, 28 Stoney River, or Bayouk Pierre, in Hutchins’ description, 75 stowaways, ships inspected for, 106 strawberries, 47 streams, frequently bearing indigenous names, 66 sturgeon in Haudenosaunee diet, 46–47 sub-­Saharan Africa, palm trees in, 168 subsistence patterns among Haudenosaunee, 42, 48 Sudworth, George Bishop, and forest reserve mapping, 286–87 sugar shipped north in antebellum US, 89 sujetos (smaller pueblos), 34–35 Sulphur River (FL), 84t sun symbol on indigeous Mexican maps, 29

410 · i n d e x

superimposition of La Condamine’s map over Fritz’s, 152 surplus food stored by Haudenosaunee, 46– 47 survey markers, instability of, in Andes, 118 surveyed map of Teotihuacan, 38 “Surveying and Mapping in Canada” (Peters, 1931), 248f, 252f Susquehanna River and Valley, 42, 45, 60, 63–64 Susquehannock Indians dominated by Haudenosaunee, 55 Sutton, Elizabeth A., 6 Suwannee River (FL), 82, 83t swamps and Can. Land Inv., 257 sweet potatoes, part of coastwise trade, 89 swidden agriculture among Haudenosaunee, 45 symbolic power of Aztec maps, 19–40 symbology: of complex landscapes, 237; experiments by Geological Survey, 232; on Mexican maps, 25, 27–30; used by Can. Land Inv., 258–59 Symington, D. F., on virtues of GIS, 266 T-­O maps ignored vegetation, 162 Table Bay (S. Africa), map of (18th cent.), 124f “Tabula Magellanica” (Ogilby, 1671), 176f Tabula Peutingeriana. See Peutinger map Taft, William Howard, 274 Talakchopko (Peace River, FL), 82 Talbot County (MD), Coast Survey sketch, 95 Tampa Bay (FL), 80, 82 Tanchioah River (LA), 83t Tangier Sound (MD), 102 Tangipaho River (LA), 84t Tangipahoa River (LA), 75 Tanner, Henry Schenck, New Universal Atlas (1849), 83t Tanner’s Creek (VA), 110 Tansley, Arthur George, 289; and ecosystems, 279 Tanzipao (Tangipahoa River, LA), 75 tariffs along US-­Mexican border, 215 Tartaron, Thomas, on experiential knowledge of landscapes, 111 tax on oyster production, 108 taxonomy: central to “natural history,” 273; focus of forestry maps, 280

Taylor, Griffith, 255 Tchefunte River (LA), 83t Tchicachas (Chickasawhay) River (MS), 75 teaching environmental history with maps, 7, 296–97, 303–6 Techialoyan codices and maps, 31–32, 39– 40 technological paradox: as technology improves, errors multiply, 247, 252, 263–69 technologies: limitations and proclivities of, 247, 252, 263–69; and nature, in Canadian mapping, 239–69; of travel in Humboldt’s view of Guayaquil, 139, pl. 3 Tecohuac (place of the stone serpent), 29 Tecuciztecal (god), 19 Telegraphic Service (Canadian dept.), 243 tellurometer used in Canada, 254 temperature variations and forestry, 272 Temple of the Feathered Serpent, 20 Tenango (Mex.), 25 tenant farmers harvesting oysters, 101 Tenochtitlán (Mex.), 7, 8f, 26f, 181, 185, 187, 203, 205 Teotihuacán (Mex.), 8f, 19–40, 198; map of (1560), pl. 1 tepetl (hill) on Mexican maps, 28 terra cognita (areas of European settlement), 43, 60, 62 terra incognita (areas known only to Native Americans), 43, 244–45f terra semicognita (areas of European exploration, but not yet of settlement), 43, 60, 62 territorial claims, 136, 270 Tet Offensive, 206 tetl (stone) on Mexican maps, 28 Texas, as source of hides and wood, 88 Texas Rangers invade Mexico, 209 Texcoco (Mex.), 25, 27 textbooks and conservation movement, 271 thematic maps: La Condamine as inventor of, 131; trees on, 176–79; used by US Interior Dept., 15 theodolites, 38, 246 Thévenot, Melchisédec, Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot (1681?), 74f “Third Nation” (Onandagas), 58 Thompson, Edwin, 102

i n d e x  · 411

Thoreau, Henry David, 271 Thornton, Thomas, place naming, 69 “three sisters” (maize, beans, squash), 45 Thunder Bay (ON), 283 Tickfaw River (LA), 83t tidal variations on Coast Survey maps, 94 Tidewater region (VA), indigenous place names in, 70 Tierra del Fuego, 176f Tierras branch (of the AGN), 24 “Tijpus Freti Magellanici” (Spilbergen, 1619), 174–75f Tikfaw River (LA), 84t tilmatl (cloak) on Teotihuacan maps, 30 timber: cruiser charts, 281–82; lands excluded from Homestead Act, 227; pest counts by Can. Land Inv., 264; “Timber Conditions in the Pine Region of Minnesota” (Ayres map, 1899), 278; trees on Geological Survey map (1898), pl. 15; “value” vs. “forest conditions,” 279 timber charts, 282, 283 Timber Culture Act (1873), 227 time, linear, reflected in Western mapping, 240 Tlacotepec (Mex.), 24 tlatoque (indigenous nobility), 25 Toltecs, 31 Tomatlan (Mex.), 29, 33 tomatoes shown on Mexican maps, 33–34 Tomlinson, Roger, 263, 265 Tomoka River (FL), 82 tonging, method for harvesting oysters, 101 “too much information” produced by environment, 240 topographic: drawing, 2; features on Mexican maps, 28 Topographic Instructions (USGS, 1918), 232 topography: and climate on forest reserve maps, 287; as factor in forest regrowth, 275; on forest reserve maps, 287 toponymy. See place names Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494), 146 Toronto, University of, 288 tourism potential, 2; Canada Land Inventory map of, 259–61f towns on timber charts, 283 Townsend family, thanks Coast Survey for map, 94 Townsend, William, oysterman, 96–97, 99

Townshend, Charles H., oysterman, 95– 97 townships in US, 13 trading: among Haudenosaunee, 43; coastwise (Atlantic), 89, 109–10; imbalance, exacerbated by oyster industry, 107–8; posts, 59–60 Trailing Cortéz (Franck, 1932), 181, 203 train tours of Cortés’s route, 202 Tramezzino, Michele, world map (1554), 168–69 “Transcending the Alps in the Andes,” 115– 34 transnational space, Orinoco as, 147 transparent overlays use by Can. Land Inv., 263, 266 trapping among the Haudenosaunee, 45 travel: in Andes, La Condamine on, 125; and anxiety, 189; by Haudenosaunee, 43; narrative, Humboldt’s Voyage (1814) as, 137; narrative employing metalepsis, 152 travelers: foreign, and native assistants, 139, pl. 3; inherit a story, build a landscape, 185–86 treaties between European powers and Haudenosaunee, 56 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 192, 210–11, 216, 222 Treaty of Paris, 1763, 79 Treaty of San Ildefonso, 1800, 79 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 146 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on maps, 163 trees: associated with mts., 163; associated with mysteries and myths, 163; “at the edges of the world,” 173; changing depictions after 1750, 175–79; as conveying character of region, 179; as enticement to commerce or colonization, 160; harvested and burned by Haudenosaunee, 45; on maps, 157–79, 270–90; world atlas of (1823), 177 Trees of the Sun and Moon, 163 Tres Jacales (Mex.), 209 trial of land claims in Mexico, 24–25 triangulation, 88–89, 118, 125–26, 128, 130, 134f, 250 Tripoli (Libya) on Dulcert portolan (1339), 165 Trithrinax, palm variety, 169

412 · i n d e x

tropical landscapes: air of melancholy in, 139–40; Humboldt on, 139–40, 142; as paradise, 138–40; powerful impression on human senses, 139; as “threatening” or “degrading” to Europeans, 140 Trorey, L. G., on deficiencies of aerial survey, 252 trout in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Troutman, Philip, on “information passed . . . across the space of slavery,” 112 Tsalo Papko Hatchee River (FL), 84t Tsuga canadensis (hemlock), 276 Tula (Mex.), 198 tunics on Teotihuacan maps, 30 Turin-­Spanish map (1523), 170 Turker River (FL), 84t Turner, Frederick Jackson, 85 Turner, Nat, 106 turtle eggs in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 two-­dimensions reflected in Western mapping, 240 Tylor, Edward B., on Prescott, 191 “Typus orbis terrarum” (Ortelius, 1570), 158f Tzacualcuicuilco (crypt that displays pictures), 29 tzompantli (rack for hanging sculls), 27 “Umrisse der Pflanzengeographie” (Berghaus, 1845–48), 178f Underground Railroad, 109–11 Ungava Peninsula (NU), 255 United States: archaeological excavations in Mexico, 37; Army, 91, 202; Biological Survey, 13; Board on Geographic Names, 83, 85; border with Mexico, 13–14, 209–22, 220f; Bureau of Indian Affairs, 234; Census Bureau, 82–83; Coast and Geodetic Survey, 82; Dept. of State, 209; forest mapping, 15; invasion of Mexico (1846), 191; Land Ordinance of 1785, 13; land policy, 223–38; Navy, 91, 94, 191; Reclamation Service, 229, 232–33; Surveys should “align” with Canadian surveys, 253; Topographical Engineers, 81f; War of 1812, 13; war with Mexico, 210, 212 United States Coast Survey, 9, 88–92, 94– 96; Chesapeake Bay (map, 1862), 104–5f; Coast Chart 33: Chesapeake Bay (1862), 104–5f; “interpolation” of silences on

their maps, 111–12; map of Wade’s Point, Md. (1845), 96f; maps and “emancipatory . . . practices,” 90; maps “naturalize” coastal environments, 111– 12; maps “tacitly supported” slavery, 95; New Haven Harbor (map, 1846), 98f; New York Bay and Harbor (1845), 93–93f United States Dept. of Agriculture: Fernow with, 284; Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin (map, 1897), pl. 12; issues “new sort of map,” 274 United States Dept. of Interior, 15, 224, 285; attempts to rationalize land policies, 226–28; forestry maps, 280; fragmentation of work, 236; land policies, 223–38; map of areas designated “nonirrigable,” pl. 10; “State of Arizona” (map, 1916), 225f; “State of Montana” (maps, 1910–16), 234–35f; use of colors on maps, 232 United States General Land Office, 14f, 82, 230; and forest mapping, 280–81; Map of Louisiana (1866), 84t; Map of the State of Florida (1866), 84t; place name policies, 82; river names on by, 84t; use of colors on maps, 232; United States Including Territories and Insular Possessions (1913), pl. 11 United States Geological Survey, 289; charged with “classification of public lands,” 226; experiments with symbology, 232; gazetteer (1904), 79; influence on Canadian mapping, 254; on land values, 223; makes new maps of 13 states, 230; “Map of Washington Forest Reserve” (1897), pl. 14A and B; Nineteenth Annual Report (1897), pl. 14A and B; “only” agency for forest mapping, 285; “Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves” (1898), pl. 15; role in fixing place names, 85; Topographic Instructions (1918), 232; Twenti­eth Annual Report (1898), pl. 13; use of colors on maps, 232; “White River Plateau Timber Reserve” (map, 1898), pl. 13 United States Including Territories and Insular Posessions (GLO, 1913), pl. 11 University of Chicago, ecology at, 279 University of Leeds, 279 University of Montana, 234–35f

i n d e x  · 413

University of Toronto, 255, 288 Upper Peninsula (MI), forestry competes with mining, 281 Upper St. Croix River (WI-­MN), 274 Utah, land policies in, 230 Valk, Gerard, map of America (ca. 1690), 173 Vallard atlas (1547), 167 Valley of Mexico, 7, 19, 32, 203 value: of forests in N. Wis., 276; of homestead lands, 237 vegetables in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 vegetation: begins to appear on charts in 15th cent., 165; changing depictions after 1750, 175–79; on Hereford map (ca. 1290), 164; Humboldt on Mexican, 188; map of Europe (1806), 176–77; on map of Tenochtitlán, 27; mapping, 160, 179, 255; on portolan charts, 164; shown more generically on printed maps, 166; thematic maps of, 176–78; world atlas of (1823), 177 Venezuela, Captain Generalcy of, 146 Venice, compared to Tenochtitlán by Cortés, 185 Veracini, Lorenzo, on settler colonialism, 13 Veracruz (Mex.), 194; decline of port, 202; Humboldt on climatic variations in, 187–88; invaded by US forces, 191; on route to Mexico City, 180–206; view from the Gulf of Mexico, pl. 7 Veracruz y sus viajeros (Scott), pl. 7 Vercelli map (ca. 1200), 163, pl. 4 Vermillion Bay (LA), 78 Vermillion River (LA), 83t Vermont, 97 Verrazzano, Girolamo da, world chart (1529), 169–70 vertical (altitudinal) views, 116, 127; combined with profile views, 123, 124f Vesconte, Pietro, portolan chart (1311), 164 Vespucci, Giovanni, Turin-­Spanish map (1523), 170 “View from Across the Pond, The” (Dunlop), 291–97 Viladesters, Joan de, 1428 chart, 163 villages: relocations among Haudenosaunee, 43, 45; as sign of English posses-

sion, 66; sites on Champlain’s 1632 map, 52 vineyards in Canada, 257 Virgil, La Condamine’s epitaph to, 118 virgin forest represented in view by Debret, 140 Virginia, 9, 66, 69–70, 70f, 78–79, 82–83, 99–100, 106–8; Smith’s map of (1612), 68 vision: affected by history, 186; replaced by hearing, 145 Vista de Veracruz desde el mar (Rugendas, 1831), pl. 7 visual: analysis and environmental historians, 292; ecological thinking, 270–90; sense gives way to auditory sense, 145 volcano, plain, and jungle, Humboldt’s “secular trinity,” 187 volcanoes, on map of province of Quito (1751), 126 Voltaire, friend of La Condamine, 117 Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland (Humboldt, 1820), pl. 3 Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (Debret, 1834–39), 140 “Vue de la Base mesurée dans la plaine de Yaroqui” (d’Anville, 1751), 128–29f Vues des Cordillères (Gmelin, 1810–13), 142, 143f Wacasu (Wicassa) River (FL), 84t Wades Point (MD), 95; Coast Survey sketch map (1845), 96f Wager Bay (NU), 255 Wakild, Emily, on teaching environmental history, 295 Waldseemüller, Martin, Universalis cosmographia (1507), 162 Wall Street oyster parlor, 90 Wallace, Alfred Russel, Palm Trees of the Amazon (1853), 178 Walls, Laura Dassow, on “consilience,” 137 walnuts in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 Warwick River (VA), 83t Washington (DC), 109 Washington (state), 91; map of forest reserve (1897), pl. 14A and B water: highlighted in mapping of Western states, 228; land boundary, 94; on map of Tenochtitlán, 27; role of in Western states, 229–36

414 · i n d e x

waterfalls, Humboldt on names for, 142 watermelons grown by Haudenosaunee, 46 waterpower survey by Census Bureau, 82 watersheds and forest preservation, 274 waterways, 9, 66, 82 Watson, J. Wreford, studies of land use in Canada, 256 Waucasassa River (FL), 83t Wausau (WI), 283 weather observations in Canada, 247 weather systems reflected in forest reserve maps, 286–87 Weddle, Robert, on Spanish place names, 72 Weekiwachee River (FL), 83t Weeks Act (1911), 274 Weitsch, Friedrick Georg, painting of Humboldt, 135 Wekaiwoochee River (FL), 84t Wellfleet (MA), 100 West (US), 85; arid lands in, 15; classification of public lands, 226; land policy in, 223–38; map of areas designated “nonirrigable,” pl. 10; map showing homesteading areas, 228, pl. 10; maps provide compelling record of change, 237; and Reclamation Act (1902), 229; recognition of natural limits, 227; “unwieldy reality” of its landscapes, 231; water, role of in, 229–36 West Indies, 97 Western Hemisphere. See America Western landscapes “abstracted” in GS maps, 231 Western Shore (VA), 107 wheat farmers in western Canada, 257 White, Richard, on the world “in motion,” 216 white pine trees, 276–80 White River Plateau Timberland Reserve (CO), 286–87 white spruce trees, 259 whitefish in Haudenosaunee diet, 46 whites and oyster industry, 101, 106–7 Whiting, Henry L., 94 Wiccocomoco River (VA), 85 “wilderness” and conservation movement, 271 “wilderness line,” map of Canadian, 268f wildlife and Can. Land Inv., 257

willow trees on Verrazzano chart (1529), 170 Wilmington (DE), 89 Winnipeg (MB), 255 Wisconsin, 283; map of forest conditions (1897), 274–80, pl. 12 Wisconsin Dells (WI), as area of prominent relief, 122 Wise, Henry A., 108 Wit, Frederik de, world map (ca. 1660), 175 Withlacoochee River (FL), 83t woman traveler cited by La Condamine and Humboldt, 155 women, supposed lack of, in Humboldt’s atlas, 155 wonder (deslumbramiento) sense of, in Humboldt, 137 wood, shipped to New York, 88 Wood, Denis, on naturalization of the map, 6 Wood, Stephanie, 31, 33 Wood Kill (NY), 58 Woodhouse, James H., 88–89 woodlands, 175–79, 257 Worcester County (MD), 100, 110–11 World War I, 248 World War II, 253–57 Worster, Donald, 3, 5 writing, and the creation of landscape, 180 written testimony as source for Mexican maps, 34 Wynn, Graeme, and Matt Dyce: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 15; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 295; “Mapping Canadian Nature and the Nature of Canadian Mapping” 239–69 Xalapa (Mex.), 184, 190, 200 Xomolco (Mex.), 33 Yaruquí (Ecuador): in Bouguer’s La Figure, 130; La Condamine’s view of, 127 Yberville, LaFon’s name for Bayou Manchac, 75, 78 yellow color map of Teotihuacan, 27 Yellow River (FL), 84t Yellow Water River (FL), 83t Ylarregui, José Salazar, 212 York River (VA), 83t, 88

i n d e x  · 415

Young River (FL), 83t Yucatan (Mex.), 181 Zacks, Michelle: chapter summarized by Brosnan and Akerman, 9; chapter summarized by Dunlop, 295; “Oysters and Emancipation,” 88–112 “Zailon” (Ceylon), on Desceliers world map (1550), 172

“Zailton” (Quanzhou, China), on Desceliers world map (1550), 172 Zayas, E. (Mexican boundary commissioner), 218, 221 Zelinsky, Wilbur, on Indian place names, 65 Zimmermann, E. A. W., map of animal distribution (1777), 176

416 · i n d e x