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Mapping and Empire

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Mapping and Empire u

Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier edited by dennis reinhartz and gerald d. saxon

universit y of texas pre ss Austin

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2005 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mapping and empire : soldier-engineers on the southwestern frontier / edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-70659-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Military topography—Southwestern States—History. 2. Southwestern States— Discovery and exploration. 3. Southwestern States—Maps. 4. Maps, Military—History. I. Reinhartz, Dennis. II. Saxon, Gerald D. ug472.m37 2005 623'.71—dc22 2005003914

to virginia garrett whose beneficence and love of cartographic history have inspired the authors whose work is in this book


Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction ric hard v. francaviglia

xv

One

Spanish Maritime Charting of the Gulf of Mexico and the California Coast w. mic hael mathe s 1 Two

Spanish Military Engineers in the New World before 1750 david buissere t 44 Three

Spanish Military Mapping of the Northern Borderlands after 1750 dennis reinhartz 57 Four

U.S. Army Military Mapping of the American Southwest during the Nineteenth Century ralph e. ehrenberg 80 Five

Henry Washington Benham: A U.S. Army Engineer’s View of the U.S.-Mexican War gerald d. saxon 130

viii u mapping and empire Six

Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados: Unknown Works and Forgotten Engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission paul a rebert 156 Seven

Soldier-Engineers in the Geographic Understanding of the Southwestern Frontier: An Afterthought john r . hébert 185 Contributors Index

193

191

Illustrations

b l ac k a n d w h i t e i l l u s t rat ion s 1.1. Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, Gulf of Mexico, 1519 6 1.2. Robert Dudley, Carta Particolare della Baia di Messico con la Costa, 1646–1647 9 1.3. Giacomo Gastaldi, Nveva Hispania Tabula Nova, 1548 10 1.4. Guillaume Delisle, Carte de la Louisiane, 1718 16 1.5. Dirección de Hidrográfía, Carta Particular de las Cóstas Selentrionales del Seno Mexicano . . . , 1807 20 1.6. Joseph Nicolas Deslisle, Carte Génerale des Découvertes de l’Amiral de Fonte, 1752 28 1.7. Didier Robert de Vaugondy, Carte de la Californie, 1774 29 1.8. Servicio Hidrográfico, Plano del Puerto de San Diego: Plano del Puerto de San Blas, 1825 35 2.1. Bautista Antonelli, Map of Cartagena, ca. 1590

47

2.2. Tiburcio Spanoqui, Drawing for a Fort at the Mouth of the Strait of Magellan, ca. 1584 48 2.3. Cristóbal de Rojas, Plan of Panamá and Environs, 1609 49 2.4. Adrian Boot, View of the Town of Veracruz and Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, ca. 1615 50 2.5. Marcos Lucio, Proposed New Fortification for Veracruz, 1663 51 2.6. Martin de la Torre, Project for the Fortification of Campeche, 1680 52

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2.7. Francisco Alvarez Barreiro, Plano Corográfico e Hydrográphico de las Provincias de el Nuevo México . . . , ca. 1717 54 3.1. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Descripición del Destricto del Avdienciade Nveva España, 1601 59 3.2. Guillaume Delisle, Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi . . . , 1718 59 3.3. Herman Moll, . . . Map of North America . . . , 1715 60 3.4. Francisco José de Haro, Mapa General Ychonographico de la nueba Colonia Santander . . . , 1758 62 3.5. Haro, detail 64 3.6. Juan Antonio Balthasar, Visita de la missiones en Sonora y sus contornos, ca. 1750 66 3.7. Juan Agustín de Morfi, Derrotero . . . , 1778 70 3.8. Mapa del territorio conprendido entre la Provincia de Nuevo Mexico y el fuerte de Natchitoches y Texas, 1789 71 3.9. Tomás Lopéz, Provincias de la Nueva Viscaya Culiacan y Cinaloa . . . , 1758 74 4.1. Isaac Roberdeau and William Rector, Sketch of the Western Part of the Continent of North America, 1818 84 4.2. Specimen sheet illustrating the depiction of terrain by contour lines and hachures, Seth Eastman, Treatise on Topographical Drawing, 1837 87 4.3. Detail of Stephen H. Long’s official map of the Country drained by the Mississippi Western Section, 1823 89 4.4. Detail of Lieutenants James W. Abert and William G. Peck’s Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains . . . during the year 1845 93 4.5. Detail of Lieutenant William H. Emory’s map 97 4.6. Map detail of Canyon de Chelly, 1849 100 4.7. Lithograph view of ancient Pueblo ruins in Canyon de Chelly based on a drawing made by Richard H. Kern, Sept. 8, 1849 101 4.8. Lieutenant John G. Parke and Richard Kern’s published map of the Territory of New Mexico, 1851 103 4.9. Detail for a Pacific Railroad route along the 35th Parallel from the Mississippi River valley to Los Angeles, 1853–1854 108

Illustrations u xi

4.10. Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren’s master map of the West, 1857

111

5.1. Henry Washington Benham, carte de visite 132 5.2. W. Kemble, Map of the Country Near Buena Vista, Mexico, n.d. 134 5.3. Thomas B. Linnard, Plan of the Battle of Buena-Vista, Fought February 22nd and 23d 1847. Surveyed by Capt. Linnard & Liets. Pope & Franklin. Corps. T. Engineers. Drawn by T. B. Linnard. Corps. of T. E., 1847 138 5.4. Itinerary of the march of Maj. Genl. Z. Taylor from Victoria to Agua Nueva 144 5.5. Reconnaissance of the Route from Monterey to Saltillo and Mazapil. Surveyed and drawn by Captain H. W. Benham, Corps of Engineers from Feb. 1847 to May 1847 145 5.6. Saltillo, Mexico, Copy of Lt. Benham, U. S. Engrs. from a minutely detailed map. Surveyed and drawn by Lt. A. Doubleday. 1st Art. USA, Dec. 1847 147 5.7. Sketch of Country Between Agua Nueva to la Punta and Encarnación and Back; Also Monterey to Saltillo, August 14, 15, and 16, 1847 148 5.8. Reconnaissance of Roads about Agua Nueva by Maj. Mansfield, Corps of Engrs., Feb. 27, 1847 150 6.1. Detail of map No. 54, showing the initial point on the Pacific coast 162 6.2. Detail of map No. 29, showing Socorro and San Elizario 164 6.3. Detail of map No. 25, showing Pilares and the Nota giving Salazar’s latitude determination 166 6.4. Map No. 1, showing the mouth of the Río Bravo and lower river 166 6.5. Detail (title) of field map by Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz, Río Bravo. Plano de la parte comprendida entre Laredo y Guerrero . . . No. I 168 6.6. Detail of map No. 2, showing the Río Bravo just above Matamoros 169 6.7. Field map by Manuel Fernández Leal, Francisco Herrera, and Miguel Iglesias, No. I. Croquis de la confluencia de los rios Bravo del Norte y Conchos 171

xii u mapping and empire

6.8. Field map by the Comisión de Límites, Croquis de la parte de la línea comprendida entre los paralelos 31°47' y 31° 20' 173 6.9. Detail of map No. 44, showing the initial point on the Colorado 175 6.10. Detail of map No. 14, showing the drafter’s signature

178

c ol or m a p s ( p l at e s f ol l o w p. 4 2 ) 1.

Abraham Ortelius, America Sive Novi Orbis, Nova Descriptio, 1587

2.

Abraham Ortelius, Culiacanae Americae Regionis Descriptio, 1580

3.

Leonardo Torriani, General View of the Canary Islands, with Crab Superimposed, ca. 1585

4. Bautista Antonelli, Map of the Road from Veracruz to Mexico City, ca. 1590 5.

Francisco José de Haro, Este Mapa comprende todas las billas y lugares de españoles haci como Missiones de indios y presidios existents en la Provincia Nuevo Santander . . . , ca. 1770

6. Detail, José de Urrutia, . . . Mapa que comprende la Frontera de los Dominios del Rey en la America Septentrional, 1769 7.

A. H. Campbell, Valley of the Gila & Sierra de Las Estrellas from the Maricopa Wells, 1853–1854.

8.

Detail of shaded relief map developed by Freidrich von Egloffstein, 1857

9. Joseph Goldsborough Bruff, A Correct Map of the Seat of War in Mexico, 1847 10. Carl Nebel, [Buena Vista], color lithograph, 1851 11. Detail of field map by Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz, Río Bravo. De Matamoros á la desembocadura. No. III 12. Detail of field map by Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz, Río Bravo. Plano de la parte comprendida entre Laredo y Guerrero . . . No. I

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributors to the book for participating in the First Biennial Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography in October 1998 and revising their lectures for publication in this volume. Special thanks goes to Richard Francaviglia, our colleague at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography, for his hard work in building programs that link the holdings of the UTA Libraries’ rich Special Collections to the curriculum and the interests of the general public. Sally Gross, now retired and living in Tennessee, was a great help in coordinating the staff and resources of Special Collections to make the first lectures and this publication happen. Betty Wood, a secretary at UTA, deserves special mention for her work in preparing the manuscript in what seemed like never-ending revisions. Betty’s good cheer and upbeat personality never let the work affect her positive attitude. Another hearty thank-you goes to Kit Goodwin, cartographic archivist in Special Collections, for her untiring efforts on behalf of the Garrett Lectures, this volume, and all things cartographic. Kit, more than anyone else, has come to symbolize UTA’s commitment to the studying, collecting, and promoting of cartographic history. Ann Hodges, current coordinator for Special Collections, has enthusiastically worked on behalf of the lectures, as has Tom Wilding, director of libraries at UTA. Our wives, Judy Reinhartz and Janis Saxon, lent love, support, and understanding to us during our time away from home working on this book. Finally, Jenkins and Virginia Garrett have made the book possible through their zealous support of UTA and its efforts to promote historical cartography to a wide audience.


Introduction ric hard v. francaviglia

One of the many ironies in southwestern history relates to the changing position of Texas in the region’s history and scholarship. A poorly explored backwater during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Texas long remained terra incognita to Spain—until, that is, the French showed a strong interest in the area by the mid-1680s. And yet, compared to the dearth of interest in Texas in centuries past, the scholarship about the area has flourished in the last half century. Today Texas takes a very strong— some might say passionate—interest in the history of the entire Southwest, as evidenced by the many academic institutions in the state hosting programs on the region and publications about it. Texas is the home of a distinguished journal about the region—the Southwestern Historical Quarterly—and has no fewer than three university-sponsored southwestern studies centers. Among these institutions is the University of Texas at Arlington. In the early 1970s, UTA Libraries set out to develop a Special Collections Division pertaining to the Southwest. By the early 1990s, UTA had created its Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and, in conjunction with Special Collections, had begun hosting symposia on the region’s history. Although conferences have been held on many subjects, one in particular—cartographic history—has become UTA’s strong suit. If, as one UTA professor once quipped, ‘‘Maps R Us,’’ then one person, longtime UTA friend Virginia Garrett, deserves credit for helping the university develop its internationally known collection of maps of the Southwest. An active supporter for many years, Mrs. Garrett donated nine hundred historic maps to UTA in 1997, bringing to about six thousand the number of maps in the university’s collection. That same year, the Garrett family helped the university initiate a biannual lecture series called, appropriately, the Virginia Garrett

xvi u richard v. francaviglia

Lectures on the History of Cartography. The UTA-sponsored series began in 1998 with ‘‘Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwest Frontier.’’ Like UTA’s program generally, these lectures employed a broad geographic definition of the Southwest, namely, the huge geographic area extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast. This region, of course, was not ‘‘the Southwest’’ to Spain, but rather el norte. It would become the Southwest later, under European-American expansion. As suggested by the title ‘‘Mapping and Empire,’’ the five presentations in the first set of Virginia Garrett lectures focused on the relationship between cartography and expansion into the region. The essays in this volume are based on those presentations and serve as a lasting record of them. Although the series’ sponsors recognized that expansion occurred through both church and state, it was the military role in initiating the process that concerned the presenters. The presenters agreed that traditional military history (battles, logistics, conquests) would not be the focus, but rather the speakers would deliberately concentrate on the processes by which the military mapped the region and helped various countries establish a presence in it. Those hoping for recountings of spectacular military engagements would be disappointed, but it was felt that the longoverlooked intellectual role of the military would be revealed through this conference. One thing was clear from the outset: the military’s encounter with the region had major consequences for the region’s native peoples. The Native Americans often bore the brunt of expansion and suffered in at least two ways—militarily, as they encountered the superior weapons, and culturally, as they experienced aggressive policies aimed at either dominating or removing them from the land. And yet, through it all, one must marvel that the native peoples persisted in many areas; their presence is still palpable in places like northern Sonora, northern Arizona, and the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. We now know that Native Americans not only survived, but in many cases they actually assisted in the process of European expansion by serving as guides to exploration and suppliers of information in mapmaking. If today the word ‘‘scout’’ signifies a turncoat to militant Native Americans, one must nevertheless recognize the debt owed them in creating the Southwest as we know—and generally appreciate—it. Although it is tempting to think of the Southwest as landlocked, this volume’s first essay, by W. Michael Mathes, reminds us that the region faces the sea on two sides—the Atlantic through its juxtaposition to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific by its proximity to both the Gulf of California (or Sea of Cortés, as it is sometimes called) and the Pacific shores

Introduction u xvii

of both Californias—Baja and Alta. In his essay, titled ‘‘Spanish Maritime Charting of the Gulf of Mexico and the California Coast,’’ Mathes underscores the importance of Spain’s military in exploring and mapping the coasts. Using a group of remarkable nautical charts and atlases of the period from about 1500 to 1800, Mathes reminds us that Spain had a strong interest in, and used considerable skill in delineating the configuration of, its shorelines. As Mathes also shows, Spain was not alone in its desire to understand, and ultimately control, this coastline. Rather, he beautifully connects developments in Europe with Spain’s fortunes, and misfortunes, in guarding her shores. This book’s second essay sheds considerable light on the process by which Spain gained a foothold on the shore. It is written by David Buisseret, holder of the Jenkins and Virginia Garrett Endowed Chair in Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at UTA. Professor Buisseret begins ‘‘Spanish Military Engineers in the New World before 1750’’ by citing two new landmark books on the subject by Mexican and Spanish scholars—voices that join the dialogue here through Professor Buisseret’s skillful translation. By first consulting these interpretations and then consulting other original documents, Buisseret shares an exciting discovery, namely, that the designers of the earliest and most effective Spanish forts were not Spanish at all, but Italian. This seems reasonable enough when one recalls that Columbus himself was not Spanish but rather an Italian in the service of Spain; it also makes sense when one recalls the skill and training of early Italian Renaissance architects and urban planners. Skillfully investigating original sources, Buisseret breathes life into these original forts as he interprets both the lives and the accomplishments of the Italian designers such as Baustista Antonelli. Buisseret also presents the many Spanish engineers who planned and oversaw the construction of the forts. One is struck by the sense of order conveyed in the beautiful plans of the forts; these maps confirm Spain’s seriousness in protecting its interests here. As is typical of Spain and other European powers, the forts were established using both ordinances and guidelines. Because the forts were strategic to a huge area, many described by Buisseret are outside the Southwest as defined by many scholars. Yet they were essential in ensuring that Spain would maintain a presence unmolested in the New World. Spain’s desire to dominate this part of the world did not go unchallenged. Although other powers eyed its possessions with envy from the very beginning, Spain was especially beleaguered after about 1750. In ‘‘Spanish Military Mapping of the Northern Borderlands after 1750,’’

xviii u richard v. francaviglia

UTA history professor Dennis Reinhartz describes how Spain met the challenges of English, French, Russian, and finally United States expansion. Two points raised by Reinhartz demand special attention. First, note the many decrees and ordinances used by Spain to establish, and then protect, its territorial interests. These empowered and yet ultimately strangled Spain through their elaborate administration. Second, note the emphasis on cartography—especially Spain’s considerable cartographic prowess, which was seldom understood by other countries. Reinhartz suggests a reason: although Spain sought to protect its geographic knowledge, this desire for protection through secrecy was ultimately counterproductive. Maps are essential tools of empire, and if Spain would not release such geographic information, others would. Thus it was that other countries prepared and used their own (sometimes inferior) maps to lay claims to the lands that were held by Spain. These maps of Spanish territories were done in seeming defiance of Spain and must have caused considerable concern and consternation. This situation reminds us that the Spanish presence in the New World is filled with ironies. Despite the Spanish military’s excellent mapping of the region, Spain ultimately lost much of its northern borderlands and then lost its grip on the New World. This process of attrition was fueled by political, economic, and military efforts in the United States. In ‘‘U.S. Army Military Mapping of the American Southwest during the Nineteenth Century,’’ Ralph E. Ehrenberg presents a wealth of information from the Library of Congress— including that institution’s fabulous Division of Maps and Geography. Ehrenberg notes how Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase (1803) precipitated the westward expansion of the United States into territory formerly held by—and still actively claimed by—Spain in the early nineteenth century. We now know that Spain sent a military expedition to stop Lewis and Clark but the expedition just missed the Americans by a few days. Although more successful in stopping early intruders from gaining a foothold in New Mexico, Spain ultimately yielded to the unceasing pressure of U.S. expansion—an expansion that was aided by a wide range of surveys and cartographers. Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, but soon faced the same problem of United States expansion. Ehrenberg’s essay concludes in the early 1850s, by which time the United States had acquired much of the present Southwest through war with Mexico (1846–1848) and the subsequent Gadsden Purchase (1853–1854). The story of the fabled U.S.-Mexican War has been told many times, and many of those tellings are based on the holdings of materials in UTA’s

Introduction u xix

Special Collections. In fact, this collection is recognized as among the finest in the nation—at least equal to Yale’s magnificent collection. However, whereas most of these tellings paint a broad picture of events, or focus on military leaders such as Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott, we still need answers to two questions: How did other officers fare during the war, and how did they use maps and other documents in the process? To answer these questions, UTA’s Gerald Saxon conducted original research into newly acquired records to write ‘‘Henry Washington Benham: A U.S. Army Engineer’s View of the U.S.-Mexican War.’’ As interpreted by Saxon, Benham emerges as a career soldier whose geographic knowledge and cartographic skills helped General Taylor win one of the war’s crucial battles—the Battle of Buena Vista. Analyzing previously unpublished maps of the battle, Saxon shows us how Benham’s technical cartographic skill helped the American generals better understand both the topography and the movements of the enemy. Saxon’s essay reminds us that maps are essential tools in understanding historical events, including battles. Maps also play an important role in establishing the peace. With the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, both countries faced the challenge of mapping their new boundary. As interpreted by Paula Rebert in ‘‘Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados: Unknown Works and Forgotten Engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission,’’ the challenge was formidable. Although determining the boundary along the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo del Norte, as it is called in Mexico) was relatively easy, things became more difficult west of El Paso. This difficulty resulted in part from inaccurate maps, such as Disturnell’s flawed map, that were originally used to define the boundary in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that the country west of El Paso for nearly 800 miles to San Diego was rugged, extremely arid, and topographically similar on both sides of the imaginary line that had to be drawn on maps. Rebert notes that the important work of the Mexican Boundary Survey has been overlooked by historians who tend to be much more familiar with the surveys of Bartlett and, later, Emory. But it takes two sides to set, and agree upon, a border. Using a wealth of Mexican reports and maps, Rebert tells the fascinating story of the Mexican Boundary Commission, which was reorganized no fewer than three times but persevered in delineating the border. As suggested by Rebert, the ultimate surveying of the border was a truly international effort that greatly benefited from the work of the dedicated members of the Mexican Boundary Commission. She urges us to remember that the bor-

xx u richard v. francaviglia

der surveys worked best when both sides worked cooperatively—a subtle reminder that international cooperation is infinitely more productive and efficient than international strife. To further help place these essays in context, we invited John Hébert to summarize how they relate to events in both the Americas and Europe. In his ‘‘Soldier-Engineers in the Geographic Understanding of the Southwestern Frontier—An Afterthought,’’ Hébert confirms the volume’s broader themes and sheds new light on each essay’s connections to geopolitical history. Collectively, the essays in this book cover a vast area—nearly a million square miles—and a long period of time—about four hundred years (1500– 1900). They represent contributions by both academic and nonacademic historians who have made fruitful use of collections from Spain, Mexico, and the United States. The University of Texas at Arlington is proud of the tradition of bringing together scholars of diverse backgrounds, as evidenced by the contributors of the following essays. We are also proud that our campus will permanently serve as the venue for the Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography, and as the permanent home of the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library.

One u

Spanish Maritime Charting of the Gulf of Mexico and the California Coast w. mic hael mathe s

i n t r od u c t ion Iberia, as direct heir of Greek and Arabic geometry, algebra, astronomy, navigation, and naval architecture, initiated the development of modern cartography. Catalán, Portuguese, and Mozarabic cartographers produced increasingly precise maritime charts, portolanos, during the fifteenth century, and by its final decade, this art, coupled with knowledge of navigational sciences, resulted in Portuguese maritime expansion to Africa and India and Castilian voyaging to the New World. To a degree, Africa and India were known to Portugal from the descriptions and cartographic representations of classical and medieval travelers. Castile, however, embarked upon discovery and exploration of a virtually unknown and appropriately named New World. By the opening of the sixteenth century—following the early Columbian voyages, the establishment of Spanish hegemony in the Western Hemisphere by treaty, and the founding of Spanish colonies in the Antilles—exploration of the American landmass in search of commercial markets or other sources of wealth was underway. In 1503, establishment of the Casa de Contratación in Seville to administer maritime traffic, trade, and immigration to overseas areas formalized Spanish expansion. A methodology was developed through precise, standardized, legally defined and performed acts of possession, written and graphic description, formal demarcation, and establishment of universal place names. Detailed logs, rutters, and charts with both landforms and coastal profiles were prepared by professionals trained in mathematics, celestial navigation, and cartography. By royal orders of 1508, 1552, and 1571, pilots major and cosmographers, educated in such institutions as Seville’s Colegio de San Telmo,

2 u w. michael mathe s

were licensed in these professions and charged with preparation of all geographic and cartographic information relative to the Americas.1 Their work was governed by officially sanctioned standards for description and demarcation, with place names generally based upon the liturgical calendar, affixed at evening anchorage in honor of the feast of the following day.2 From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish voyages of discovery and demarcation were generally contracted with the crown by private entrepreneurs, and thus were joint ventures. Customarily, the monarch provided funding, rights of commercial exploitation, and political honors to the contractor, who, in turn, would take possession of the region explored for the crown, chart it, promote its colonization, and pay a percentage of profits from its exploitation to the royal treasury. The pilots and cartographers employed by the organizer of the enterprise had to be royally licensed (though cartographers were not included in most voyages), and substantial geographic information was derived from their verbal descriptions and rutters. With creation of the Ministerio de Marina in 1714 and the subsequent administrative modifications under Carlos III (1759–1788), a product of the Enlightenment, these private enterprises were supplanted by royally organized and financed voyages, manned by officers and men of the royal navy, as well as civilian professionals appointed and paid by the crown. In 1524, the Real Consejo de Indias was created to administer the vast Spanish overseas empire, and royal orders of 1526, 1568, 1573, and 1596, all incorporated into the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias of 1681, Libro IV, títulos 1–4, governed all aspects of discovery and exploration. Far more extensive than originally imagined, the Americas, even in the early sixteenth century, were beyond full Spanish capabilities of colonization and fortification, and thus geographic-cartographic secrecy was a major factor in overseas defense. The Casa de Contratación restricted personnel on maritime expeditions for discovery, possession, and demarcation to screened loyal subjects, generally of Castilian birth. This institution also guarded results of these voyages—descriptive logs, charts, and other documents prepared by their cartographers—in its archive and was charged with preparation and maintenance of the padrón cartográfico, a form of master world map supervised by the cartographer major, upon which discoveries were delineated as they were made. Access to all of these sources was limited to pilots major and persons authorized by the Consejo de Indias.3 Although the arts of printing and engraving in Spain were of the highest standards in Europe, as a result of security policies, they did little

Spanish Maritime Charting u 3

to contribute to knowledge of geographic discovery and cartography. In addition to security established over manuscript descriptions and charts, printed information was controlled by royal orders of censorship. In the early 1500s, the Catholic monarchs in Spain required anyone wanting to print a book to have a Consejo Real license, and this was more specifically applied by royal order of 1554, which required review, taxation, and licensing by the Consejo de Indias for the printing and sale of imprints related to the Indies. These requisites were reiterated in royal orders of 1560, 1641, 1647, and 1668 and incorporated into the Recopilación . . . of 1681. As late as 1752, these restrictions were again decreed, and in 1755 the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid was ordered to review and approve all imprints dealing with the Americas.4 All of these security measures notwithstanding, geographic information relative to Spanish geographic discoveries in the New World was quickly available throughout Europe. As the first nation to claim possession of and colonize the Americas, Spain quickly acquired enemies, principally France and England, who considered themselves excluded from world expansion. In the late sixteenth century, these monarchies were joined by rebellious provinces of the Lowlands in the competition with Spain for American territory, a campaign generally carried out through piracy and filibustering. Charts, logs, and rutters were booty the enemy desired, and when capture was eminent, Spanish navigators frequently consigned them to the sea. Nevertheless, espionage and treason enabled foreigners to obtain detailed sailing plans and navigational charts of remote areas of the Spanish empire, as reflected in the successes of Francis Drake in 1579 and Thomas Cavendish in 1587 in the Pacific Ocean, the later intrusions by Oliver van Noort in 1600 and Joris van Spielbergen in 1615, and the expansion of New France under René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, from 1682 to 1687 and Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville, from 1698 to 1702. By the eighteenth century, Spanish geographic secrecy was essentially ineffectual, and English navigators such as Woodes Rogers (1709), George Shelvocke (1719), George Anson (1742), and James Cook (1778) entered Spanish territory with impunity. Possession by Spain and other European powers, acquired through formalized legal declarations, was valid until, in the eighteenth century, English threats of war converted the requisite for possession to effective occupation by the claimant nation. Spanish maritime charting expeditions were generally conducted without haste in regions unaffected by enemy intrusion, and foreign geographic knowledge of Spanish territory in the Americas was acquired hastily and was, at best, incomplete, thus contributing little other than occasional


confusion. Under all circumstances, Spanish cartography was essentially for navigational purposes and did not appear as engraved or decorative imprints but rather as working charts, and not for entertainment or edification of the curious.

s pa n i s h c h a rt i n g of t h e g u l f of m e x ic o Effectively an extension and cul-de-sac of the Caribbean, the Seno Mexicano (Gulf of Mexico) was avoided by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage of 1494 but became one of the earlier areas of the Americas to receive attention by Spanish navigators after settlement of the Antilles in the following two decades. The coastline, extending some 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) from Cape Sable on the peninsula of Florida to Cabo Catoche on that of Yucatán, is relatively low and regular, interrupted by the outflow of numerous rivers and estuaries, and is all within the same general meteorological and climatological zone, extending only from 18° to 30° North latitude and 82° to 98° West longitude. Columbus and his successors may have seen some part of the peninsulas of Yucatán and Florida prior to the sixteenth century, for some of their topographic characteristics appear on the Juan de la Cosa map of 1500, the Alberto Cantino map of 1502, and subsequent maps based upon the latter by Nicolo Caverio, Giovanni Matteo Contarini, Martin Waldseemüller, Johannes Ruysch, Pedro Mártir de Anglería, and Johannes Stobnicza engraved between 1504 and 1512.5 In 1508–1509 Sebastián de Ocampo circumnavigated the island of Cuba, thus entering the Gulf off Cabo San Antonio, and the first documented voyage to Florida was carried out by Juan Ponce de León in 1513. Sailing from Puerto Rico on March 4, Ponce and his pilot, Antón de Alaminos, explored the Atlantic coast from the region of modern Daytona Beach southward through the hazardous Florida Keys, which were named Los Mártires, and northward on the Gulf coast to the area south of the harbor of present-day Charlotte prior to returning to Puerto Rico in June along the Cuban coast and through the Bahamas. The other extreme of the Gulf, the peninsula of Yucatán, was first explored by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, with pilots Alaminos, Juan Alvarez, and Pedro Camacho, while searching for Indian slaves for labor in Cuba in 1517. Departing Santiago in February, Hernández de Córdoba continued to Cabo San Antonio and, after eight days following a westerly course, reached Cabo Catoche, where he encountered the Maya, the first high-level civilization seen by Europeans in the New World. After


a deadly skirmish with the Maya, the Spanish withdrew and survivors coasted westward into the Gulf of Campeche, where they were again attacked and over half of the expedition was killed, with Hernández de Córdoba mortally wounded. Again fleeing the Maya, Alaminos crossed the Gulf to the west coast of Florida, where he had landed four years earlier, but again the Spaniards were attacked. Alaminos and others were seriously wounded, and the expedition returned to Cuba, where Hernández de Córdoba died. Reports of a rich and cultured Yucatecan Maya civilization with large cities and gold ornaments brought renewed interest in exploration west of Cuba. Following the return of Hernández de Córdoba, Diego de Velázquez, governor of Cuba, appointed his nephew, Juan de Grijalva, to conduct a voyage of exploration to Yucatán with Alaminos as pilot; no attempt to settle was to be made, and conflict with the Maya was to be specifically avoided. After several months of provisioning, the expedition left Cabo San Antonio on May 1, 1518, and reached Cozumel two days later. From there, Grijalva continued northward to Cabo Catoche and coasted westward, southward, and again westward to the Gulf of Campeche, Champotón, Laguna de Términos, the mouths of the Usumacinta, Grijalva, Coatzacoalcos, and Papaloapan rivers, and to the site of Veracruz. Following the coast northward, Grijalva and Alaminos proceeded to Laguna de Tamiahua before returning to the Río Tonalá and Champotón and then to Cuba on September 30. In the interim, Velázquez had appointed his secretary, Fernando Cortés, to mount a new expedition to the west, and, following numerous delays, withdrawal of the appointment, and in contravention of superior orders, Cortés, with the experienced pilots Alaminos, Alvarez, and Camacho, sailed from Cabo San Antonio in February 1519. Following routes of Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva, Cortés coasted the peninsula of Yucatán and Gulf of Campeche, landing at Veracruz, where he legalized his expedition through the founding of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz on June 28 and initiated his march inland to the conquest of Tenochtitlan in August 1519. Concurrently, following his return from Yucatán, Alaminos had informed the governor of Jamaica, Francisco de Garay, of his explorations, and Garay, who had long been interested in new exploration, commissioned Alonso Alvarez de Pineda to explore the coast of Florida in search of a passage presumed to separate Florida from the mainland. Sailing from Jamaica in March 1519 with four ships, Alvarez de Pineda reached the northwesterly coast of Florida and sailed southeasterly until he reached the end of the peninsula and then returned northward, following the coast


1.1 Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, Gulf of Mexico (1519). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

of the Gulf of Mexico, passing the mouth of the Mississippi River, named Río del Espíritu Santo on June 2, and reaching Veracruz in July. Considered intruders by Cortés, six of the crew were taken prisoner, and Alvarez de Pineda returned northward along the coast of Veracruz to the Río Pánuco, and subsequently to Jamaica. Although driven off by Cortés, Alvarez de Pineda and his pilots succeeded in exploring the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Veracruz, and in preparing a surprisingly accurate chart of the entire coast from Florida to Yucatán (Fig. 1.1). Further, he had proved the peninsularity of Florida, discovered the Mississippi and other rivers, and demonstrated that a continuous mainland coast ran from Cape Sable to Cabo Catoche, thus enclosing the gulf. As a result, in 1520 Garay sent Alvarez de Pineda and Diego de Camargo to settle the Río Pánuco north of Cortés’ holdings in Veracruz. However, Huastecan Indian hostility caused the death of Alvarez de Pineda and many other settlers, forcing Camargo to flee to Veracruz with sixty wounded survivors and join Cortés. Unaware of the failure of the Pánuco colony, Garay sent two supply ships to the area, but when the captains were unable to find the settlement, they joined Cortés in his final and successful assault against Tenochtitlan in 1521.


In June 1521, Garay was issued a royal order permitting him to colonize the area of Pánuco, and in June 1523 he sailed with 600 men from Jamaica on eleven ships captained by Juan de Grijalva. Reaching Soto la Marina in late July, Garay proceeded overland to the Pánuco. Cortés had occupied the area in late 1522, but, in spite of skirmishes between the two factions, Garay was cordially received by Cortés in his new capital of Mexico in October. Meanwhile, under orders from Cortés, Gonzalo de Sándoval harshly quelled a Huastecan uprising, thus establishing the presence of Cortés in the region, and with the mysterious death of Garay following a Christmas breakfast with Cortés, the latter effectively controlled Pánuco.6 In 1524, a printed map of the Gulf of Mexico, generally following the cartography of Alvarez de Pineda although strangely showing Yucatán as an island, appeared in the Nuremberg edition of the second letter of Cortés to Emperor Carlos V, Praeclara Ferdinandi Cortesii de nova maris oceani Hyspanis narratio, and subsequent maps of the region produced in 1525 (Salviati and Castiglioni), 1526 (Juan Vespucci), 1529 (Giovanni Verrazzano), 1525–1532 (Diego Ribeiro), and 1534 (Giambattista Ramusio) continue its general form, with Yucatán reestablished as a peninsula by 1535, although Battista Agnese in 1542 retained it as an island, as did Paolo Forlani as late as 1562 on a world map printed in Venice.7 As Cortés’ position as captain general of New Spain was consolidated, he and his lieutenants explored the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Pánuco to Honduras between 1523 and 1525, establishing settlements and ports in the modern states of Veracruz and Tabasco. To the north, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán was granted governorship of the province of Pánuco in 1525 and, after forcing out Cortés’ followers and attempts at expansion northward, he established it as a center for trade in Indian slaves for service in the Antilles. As governor of Nueva Galicia, from 1531 to 1533 Guzmán sought to join the two provinces into a transcontinental entity with access to both the Pacific and Atlantic. However, his removal as governor of Pánuco and later recall to Spain ended the enterprise. After the ill-fated attempt of Juan Ponce de León to settle the Atlantic coast of Florida in 1521, another rival of Cortés, Pánfilo de Narváez, led a colonizing expedition to the peninsula, landing south of Tampa Bay in 1528. Proceeding overland to the north, Narváez dispatched his ships to explore the coast toward Apalache and westward to Pánuco. When, upon return to the Tampa coast, they failed to contact the land party, their captains considered Narváez to have perished and returned to Cuba. Thus stranded, Narváez and his party relied upon raids on Indian villages and slaughter of horses for food and, finally, after four months, constructed


crude wood boats in which they set forth across the Gulf in an attempt to reach Pánuco. Only four of the expedition survived to recount its fate, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, his slave Estebanico, and Alonso del Castillo. They were finally found in Sinaloa by soldiers of Nuño de Guzmán in 1536, after having wandered across Texas and northern New Spain. As Guzmán and Narváez sought to colonize the northern regions of the Gulf, Francisco de Montejo and Alonso de Avila concurrently sailed for the peninsula of Yucatán, where they established a settlement named Salamanca near Xelhá in 1527. Despite disease, shortage of supply, and difficult travel overland, Montejo was able to maintain friendly contact with the Maya, but this was short-lived, and by 1528 Montejo was forced to return to Veracruz for aid. With his son of the same name, Montejo succeeded in occupying Tabasco in 1529, and continued into Acalán and to Chompotón in 1530. In the following year, Francisco de Montejo the younger proceeded northward by sea to the region of Chichén and, in 1531, founded Ciudad Real. Numerous uprisings caused withdrawal to Tabasco in 1534; however, by 1537 the son, accompanied by a cousin, also Francisco de Montejo, renewed the conquest and succeeded in expanding to Campeche in 1540, founding Mérida in 1542 and Valladolid in 1543. As conquest of Yucatán entered its final phase, a major expedition for exploration and settlement of Florida and the northern Gulf coast was organized under Hernando de Soto in Spain in 1538. Sailing to Cuba, Soto reprovisioned, and proceeded to the west coast of Florida, landing near Charlotte harbor. Going ashore, the expedition encountered hostile Indians and swampy terrain but continued northward overland, visiting Indian villages, into Apalache, Pensacola Bay in 1539, Georgia, Carolina, Tennessee, and, returning to Alabama in 1540, reached Mobile Bay. Heading westward, Soto entered Mississippi and in 1541 reached Arkansas, returning to the Mississippi River, where he died in 1542 and was succeeded by Luis Moscoso de Alvarado, second in command. Moscoso ordered return to New Spain, and continued westward into Louisiana and east Texas, but, unable to find a route to New Spain, he returned to the Mississippi and followed the lead of Narváez, ordering the construction of boats in 1543. Sailing down the Mississippi, Moscoso, with charts made earlier by Juan de Añasco, succeeded in crossing the Gulf and reaching Pánuco after almost two months.8 Despite numerous hardships and tragedies, the Soto expedition provided substantial increase in geographical knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico. In Seville, in about 1544, royal cartographer Alonso de Santa Cruz,


1.2 Robert Dudley, Carta Particolare della Baia di Messico con la Costa (Florence, 1646–1647). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

drawing upon information derived from prior expeditions as well as those of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Hernando de Soto, composed a map of the Gulf showing numerous rivers, bays, and estuaries in great detail. This delineation served as the format for subsequent maps by Battista Agnese (1557), Diego Gutiérrez (1562), Gerard Mercator (1569), Fernam Vaz Dourado (1571), Abraham Ortelius (1584 and later; see Plate 1), Joan Martínez (1587), followed by Cornelius Wytfliet (1597), Josua Van den Ende (1604), Gabriel Tatton (1616), Hessel Gerritsz (1631), Sebastián de Ruesta (1654), Nicolas Sanson (1656), Giovanni Battista Nicolosi and Pierre Duval (1660), and Robert Dudley (1661; see Fig. 1.2, from 1646– 1647 edition).9 Although further attempts to settle Florida were made in 1549 by Dominican Fray Luis Cáncer de Barbastro near Tampa Bay, in 1558 a maritime expedition under Guido de Lavazares sought to explore northward from Pánuco. After taking possession at Matagorda Bay, the mouth of the Mississippi, Mobile Bay, and Choctawhatchee Bay, Pensacola Bay could not be entered, and the enterprise was abandoned. Between 1559 and 1561, Tristán de Luna y Arellano and Angel de Villafañe explored and attempted settlement of Mobile Bay, Apalache, and Santa Elena on the


1.3 Giacomo Gastaldi, Nveva Hispania Tabula Nova (Venice, 1548). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

Atlantic coast. However, none of these expeditions contributed to cartographic knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico. Entry into Atlantic Florida by French Huguenots under Jean Ribaut in 1562 and René de Laudonnière in 1564 and raiding in the Gulf by English corsair John Hawkins in 1562 and 1565 led to permanent occupation with the founding of St. Augustine by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in the latter year, but raiding by Hawkins and his nephew Francis Drake continued in the Gulf in 1567 and 1568 and led to increased naval vigilance and extensive fortification of San Juan de Ulúa at Veracruz. Inland areas north of Pánuco were explored and settled by Luis de Carvajal between 1580 and 1590, and in 1596 Diego de Montemayor established Monterrey as capital of the province of Nuevo León. The coastal areas of Tamaulipas and Texas, however, remained uncolonized (Fig. 1.3). During the same period, expansion in Florida was concentrated on the Atlantic, into Georgia and the interior of Apalache, with the founding of Franciscan missions between 1597 and 1677.10 Penetration of the Gulf of Mexico by English and French voyagers demonstrated absence of colonization by Spain north of Pánuco and west of Florida and vulnerability to the south, and with increased conflict between those monarchies


and Spain and separation of the Low Countries, the seventeenth century saw increasing encroachment into Spanish domains in North America by English, French, and Dutch marauders. Mariners of these nations became active cartographers of the Gulf in search of unsettled areas to settle or occupy as temporary refuges from Spanish patrol fleets. As an extension of the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico became a center of piracy and privateering with attacks upon San Juan de Ulúa, San Francisco de Campeche, and lesser settlements; English dyewood cutters openly occupied areas of the coast of Tabasco; and French buccaneers from Haiti, Dutch pirates from the lesser Antilles, and renegade Spaniards raided with the English in west Florida and the northern Gulf, frequently greatly outnumbering Spanish defenders. During voyages en route to exploitation of pearl beds in the Gulf of California, Nicolás de Cardona, who had suffered at the hands of various corsairs, anchored in ports in the Gulf of Mexico and incorporated their cartography into a series of maps he produced in 1632. In 1614 he had anchored in Campeche, Laguna de Términos, Veracruz, and San Juan de Ulúa, and in 1623 was assigned to salvage operations in the Florida Keys, resulting in a map of Cape Sable and the Florida peninsula with details of Dry Tortuga Keys and sunken silver galleons.11 In 1673, Louis Joliet and Fr. Jacques Marquette, S.J., attempted descent of the Mississippi from New France to its mouth. Although they returned northward upon reaching confluence with the Arkansas, French cartography delineated the full course of the river. It was not until 1682, when René Robert Cavelier (Sieur de La Salle) and Henri Tonti permanently altered political and cartographic development of the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico by achieving this feat in an eight-month expedition. On the basis of his discoveries, La Salle estimated the course of the Mississippi to be substantially more westerly and its outfall on the Texas coast, and thus proposed establishment of French hegemony throughout the length of the river and its tributaries and its use as a means of invading Spanish mining regions in Nueva Vizcaya, a plan approved by Louis XIV in 1684. Sailing from France in August, La Salle reprovisioned and obtained information relative to the Gulf of Mexico in Haiti and proceeded westward, searching for the mouth of the river and its bay, Espíritu Santo. In January 1685 he reached the Texas coast. Failing to find the desired mouth of the Mississippi, La Salle initiated exploration and ordered construction of a fort, Saint-Louis, at Lavaca Bay. Unable to find the great river, La Salle was faced with increasing discontent among his colonists and, following loss of his last ship in March 1686, he initiated an overland trek to New France to obtain aid. Unrest continued, and in March 1687 La Salle


and some of his followers were murdered by their companions, who then fought among themselves, leaving only six survivors. Subsequently, other members of the colony disappeared into the interior and survivors at Fort Saint-Louis were massacred by Karankawa in early 1689. In 1685, Spanish officers had learned of the French presence through interrogation of captured French pirates and, combined with other reports of intrusions into the Gulf coast, this gave greater urgency to planned reconnaissance of the coast from Apalache to Pánuco for establishment of fortifications and ports. In 1685, Juan Enríquez Barroto of the Armada de Barlovento was given command of an expedition to explore the coast from Florida, and in January 1686 he sailed from Havana for Tampa, Apalache, Pensacola, and Mobile bays and the Mississippi Delta, but the river was unrecognizable and at that point a storm drove Enríquez Barroto toward Campeche and forced his return to Veracruz in March. This failure led to the mounting of a land expedition under Alonso de León, former interim governor of Nuevo León, to search for the French, and in June and July of 1686 he explored the region of the Rio Grande, without success. A second maritime expedition, employing shallow-draft galleys was mounted in December 1686 under Martín de Rivas and Pedro de Iriarte, with Enríquez Barroto and Antonio Romero as chief pilots. Proceeding northward from Veracruz, the expedition reached Matagorda Bay in April 1687 and found a wrecked ship, the lost Belle of La Salle, but the fort of Saint-Louis was not discovered, although rumors of European presence were received from Indians. The expedition continued on to Galveston Bay, Sabine Pass, and Atchafalaya Bay, and in May the Mississippi Delta was explored and the river recognized, as were Mobile and Pensacola bays, prior to reaching San Marcos de Apalache. After reprovisioning, the expedition proceeded down the Florida coast to Tampa Bay and Key West, anchoring in Havana in June. Returning to Veracruz along the peninsula of Yucatán, and coasts of Campeche and Tabasco, the ships reached home port in July with extensive charts, descriptions, soundings, corrections in longitude, latitude, and distance, although Mobile Bay, previously thought to be Espíritu Santo, was recognized not to have a river of sufficient size to extend from New France. Just prior to the return of the Rivas-Iriarte expedition, at the end of June 1687, Francisco López de Gamarra and Andrés de Pez, with Luis Gómez Raposo as pilot, sailed from Veracruz in search of the French establishment. The Tamaulipas and Texas coast was incompletely examined, but extensive reconnaissance of the Mississippi Delta and sounding Mobile Bay was carried out. Bypassing Pensacola, the expedition returned


to Veracruz from Cape San Blas, the draft of the vessels having impeded more detailed observation. In 1688, Pez and Enríquez Barroto were again dispatched to explore the north coast, and sounding from Mobile to the Mississippi was performed. Later in the year, Rivas and Pez, commanding the galleys, explored the Soto la Marina, the Rio Grande, and the Matagorda and Lavaca bays in detail and observed the French wreck prior to returning to Veracruz. Although Fort Saint-Louis had not been found, modern, detailed cartographic information relative to the coast of the Gulf from Veracruz to Apalache had been obtained as a result of this intensive search. The fort was finally discovered in April 1689 by the overland expedition of Alonso de León, then governor of Coahuila. Although Spanish response to La Salle had been rapid, France also sought to follow up on the ill-fated discoveries with exploration by Tonti in 1686 and 1689, extending French influence down the Mississippi and into east Texas. To counter French advances, in 1690 Juan Enríquez Barroto, with Alejandro Bruno as pilot, was ordered to continue exploration of the Texas coast directly from Matagorda Bay as part of planned occupation of the area by Governor Domingo Terán de los Ríos and Franciscan missionaries, but, following attempts to explore the Louisiana coast, severe weather forced return to Veracruz. To secure the coast, Mexican savant Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, who had prepared maps based upon information supplied by Andrés de Pez, recommended occupation of Pensacola Bay in 1689, as did Pez in 1691 and 1692. In that year a new expedition under Pez, with Sigüenza as cosmographer, was ordered to sound the bay and, sailing from Veracruz on March 25, 1693, to the Mississippi Delta, reached Pensacola Bay on April 7. Employing launches, Sigüenza made detailed observations regarding resources, measurements, and soundings, and the expedition proceeded to Mobile Bay. Contrary weather prevented entry however, and Pez returned to the Mississippi Delta, where Sigüenza found observations difficult due to logjams and currents. On May 6, the project was suspended to sail for Veracruz. The cartographic results of Enríquez Barrotos’ exploration appeared in manuscript maps by pilot Juan Bisente in 1696 and 1700, and Sigüenza’s observations, with proper location of the Mississippi Delta, were included in a manuscript map of New Spain, the most detailed and precise to date, but were not incorporated into print until José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez published his map of New Spain in Paris in 1775. Although settlement of Santa María de Galve at Pensacola was ordered in 1694, it was delayed due to lack of funds. In 1695, Andrés de Arriola was ordered to patrol the coast from Tampico to Pensacola, and after recon-


naissance of river mouths without encountering intruders, he returned to Veracruz, recommended settlement for control of the Mississippi, which he recognized as the river used by survivors of the Soto expedition and that sought by La Salle. Pensacola, however, continued to be the objective of settlement, and on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession in October 1698, to prevent French or English encroachment, Arriola was ordered to fortify the bay.12 After a century and a half, Spanish reconnaissance in the Gulf of Mexico had been renewed, and substantial cartographic information relative to estuaries, bays, and river mouths acquired. However, entry of La Salle and his successors brought France to the forefront in cartography of the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-seventeenth century Paris had supplanted Antwerp as center of European map production, and information from Joliet and Tonti was incorporated into maps published by Thévenot in 1681 and Father Louis Hennepin in 1683 and 1699. Nevertheless, royal cosmographer Jean-Baptiste Franquelin, who had received information from La Salle in Quebec, produced a map of the Gulf in 1684, shifting the mouth of the Mississippi far to the west, on the coast of Texas, a style followed by Vincenzo Coronelli in 1688 and as late as 1737 by J. F. Bernard.13 As Arriola was preparing to leave Veracruz, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, successor to La Salle, sailed from Brest to renew the plan for French control of the Mississippi. In Haiti he gathered information and charts and, entering the Gulf of Mexico in January 1699, reached Santa María de Galve, where Spanish commander Francisco Martínez was informed that the French were chasing corsairs. Iberville continued on to Mobile Bay, explored it, and, sounding, proceeded westward and anchored near Biloxi Bay. From there, for a month he explored by boat to the Mississippi and upriver through its bayous and channels, prior to establishing a fort, Maurepas, at Biloxi Bay. Further exploration of the Mississippi by Iberville’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, resulted in establishment of a fort on the river in 1700 and renewed reconnaissance upriver. Iberville, enjoying an uneasy friendship with the Spanish at Santa María de Galve through the Franco-Spanish alliance in the War of Succession, was able to relocate his fort to the more protected site of Mobile Bay in 1702.14 To formalize cartography in keeping with the Enlightenment and to incorporate new discoveries, in 1695 France established a Bureau of Maps and Plans, including Guillaume and Nicolas Delisle, Nicolas de Fer, Hubert Jaillot, and Jean-Baptiste Franquelin as members. Exploration initiated by Iberville corrected the erroneous location of the Mississippi, and


in 1699 and 1701 Nicolas de Fer illustrated this on manuscript maps, followed in 1701 and 1702 by Guillaume Delisle. In 1703 Delisle published this correction on Carte du Mexique et de la Floride, derived from Bisente and other Spanish sources as well as French maps primarily by Iberville. It was the first precise map of the Gulf coast and a pattern for subsequent cartography. By the final peaces of the War of Spanish Succession, Louisiana was ceded to France with possession formalized through concession to Antoine Cruzat in 1713, and in that year the former commander of the Mississippi fort, Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis, was sent to establish control of the interior at Nachitoches. Traveling by canoe from Mobile, Saint-Denis ascended the Mississippi to the Red River and continued to the Nachitoches, and then went overland through east Texas to the Rio Grande, where he met and befriended Captain Diego Ramón at San Juan Bautista. Taken to the City of Mexico in 1715, Saint-Denis was interrogated by the oidor (judge) Juan Manuel de Oliván Rebolledo concerning Texas and French settlements, and in 1717, recommending settlement of the San Antonio River and Matagorda Bay, Oliván Rebolledo prepared maps of Texas largely based upon Saint-Denis’ descriptions. Data derived from Saint-Denis, together with that from maps prepared by Sigüenza obtained at Santa María de Galve, were employed by Father François Le Maire, missionary and cartographer at Mobile. Remitted to the Ministry of Marine in Paris, Le Maire’s information from his 1716 manuscript map of the Gulf was incorporated into maps of Nicolas de Fer printed in 1718 and Carte de la Louisiane et cours du Mississippi of the same year by Guillaume Delisle (Fig. 1.4), principal source for subsequent maps of the Gulf of Mexico from Tampa Bay to the Rio Grande produced in the eighteenth century.15 Although the succession of Felipe V brought a family alliance between Spain and France, territorial interests were to remain sovereign, Spanish policy against further French encroachment was retained, and continued charting of the Gulf of Mexico was divided between the two powers. To determine the efficiency of fortification in Texas, Pedro de Rivera conducted extensive inspection of the region from 1724 to 1727, with Francisco Alvarez Barreiro serving as engineer and cartographer. Maps prepared by Alvarez Barreiro, the first by a professional cartographer as a result of direct observations, were primarily designed to depict internal details. Upon return of the expedition to San Antonio in 1727, however, Alvarez Barreiro was ordered to explore and chart in detail the Texas coast, and much of his information appeared on the map of José Antonio de Alzate y Ramí-


1.4 Guillaume Delisle, Carte de la Louisiane (Paris, 1718). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

rez printed in Madrid in 1768. Across the frontier, with publication of the Delisle map of 1718 and the founding of New Orleans in the same year, France proceeded with detailed charting and sounding of the coast from Texas to Florida, producing single maps of bays, rivers, bars, and reefs with indications of depth and anchorages, exemplified in work of Valentin Devin, royal engineer, between 1720 and 1735. These details were incorporated into maps based upon the Delisle format produced by Philippe Buache between 1723 and 1740, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville from 1731 to 1752, and Jacques-Nicolas Bellin from 1721 to 1764. Contemporarily, extremely accurate detail, latitude, and longitude were achieved by royal geographer Tomás López and Juan de la Cruz Cano, following d’Anville, in a navigational chart, Mapa Marítimo del Golfo de Mexico e Islas de la America, published in Madrid in 1755. However, Spanish additions to general cartography of the Gulf region in the eighteenth century were primarily directed to internal terrestrial detail. This was demonstrated on the Yconismo hidroterreo of Joseph Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez in 1746 and on maps from the colonizing expedition to Nuevo


Santander (Tamaulipas) under José de Escandón between 1747 and 1755 and that of Bernardo de Miranda to the Trinity River in Texas in 1757, although courses of rivers to the coast and their estuaries and bays with relative locations were shown. In 1747, Antonio de Benavides produced detailed maps of coastal sites for fortification in Tabasco and the Yucatán peninsula, in 1756 Juan Bautista Franco charted the west coast of Florida to Apalache in search of timber and, accompanied by Francisco María Celi, mapped Tampa Bay in 1757, and in the same year, engineer Gaspar de Courseulle completed detailed charting of the lagoon and Isla del Carmen.16 The Treaty of Paris of 1763, ending the Seven Years’ War, transferred Canada to English rule, stipulated cession of Florida to England in exchange for recovery of Havana by Spain and, in compensation to her ally, transfer of the lower Mississippi Valley to Spain; through the removal of France from North America, Spain was directly confronted with a bitter enemy which had gained control of the entire Atlantic seaboard. Considerations of Spanish defense of the Gulf of Mexico were thus substantially augmented and, to renovate frontier fortification, in 1766 the Marqués de Rubí conducted a detailed survey from California to Louisiana. In the same year, rumors of English occupation of Padre Island resulted in a viceregal order issued by Diego Ortiz Parrilla, interim governor of Coahuila, for inspection of the interior of Texas and a highly detailed survey of the coast from the Rio Grande to Nueces. Extensive knowledge of the barrier islands and passes was acquired and delineated in a map of the south coast by Ortiz Parrilla in 1767. These details were partially incorporated, as were those of the Escandón map of 1747, into the map of the Rubí inspection by his engineer, Nicolás de Lafora, and cartographer, Joseph de Urrutia, which also included the coast to the Trinity River. English establishment of a strike base at Laguna de Términos during the War of Spanish Succession recalled the vulnerability of the Tabasco coast, and in 1766 Miguel del Corral and Manuel de Santiestevan prepared detailed maps of Veracruz, with Gabriel Muñoz sounding and charting the coast of Yucatán from Laguna de Términos to Cabo Catoche in the following year. Improved longitudinal readings of the Gulf resulted from calculations of the transit of Venus across the sun in 1769, from contemporary instruments and clocks employed by Vicente Doz, captain of the royal fleet, at Veracruz and Havana in 1770, and from new, detailed maps of the Yucatán peninsula by Juan de Dios González and of Isla del Carmen by Pedro Pablo de Acosta were produced in 1770. Coastal reconnaissance in Texas was renewed in 1777–1778 by Antonio Gil Ybarbo from the Colo-


rado River to Sabine Pass, and by the ill-fated expedition of Luis Andry, destined to map the coast from New Orleans to Matagorda Bay in the same year, while the extensive bayous of Louisiana were explored by Francisco Bouligny from 1776 to 1779. Defense of the coast of New Spain against possible English invasion was advanced by exploration from Veracruz to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in 1772 and 1773 by royal engineer Agustín Crame, who revived the two-centuries-old concept of a trans-isthmian route from the Pacific to the Gulf via Río Coatzacoalcos, and in 1776 and 1777 detailed sounding by engineer Miguel del Corral and pilot Joaquín de Arranda of bays, rivers, and bars from Alvarado to Coatzacoalcos for use as anchorages or a shipyard provided extensive knowledge of the southeastern coast of Veracruz. This was followed by a survey of defenses from Tampico to Coatzacoalcos by Matías de Armona in 1780, with an opinion that the best defense of the coast was its forbidding topography and hostile environment. Plans for fortification of Laguna de Termínos continued, however, with maps produced in 1781 by Alvaro Benito Bermúdez. In possession of Florida, England was able to augment greatly her knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico, and in 1764 George Gauld initiated detailed exploration and charting of the coasts of Florida, West Florida, Louisiana, and Texas from the Florida Keys to Galveston Bay. Between 1764 and 1781, as a royally appointed surveyor-cartographer, Gauld employed the most accurate chronometers of the period and succeeded in entering Spanish domains to produce maps which were followed by English and French cartographers in the late eighteenth century. During the same period, a detailed survey of Tampa Bay was conducted in 1769, and cartographic results printed in 1775. Spanish occupation of Pensacola in 1781 and England’s defeat by her American colonials two years later returned Florida to Spain, and thereby returned to Spain a short-lived hegemony in the Gulf of Mexico. To recover and modernize Spanish cartographic knowledge of the coasts, in 1783 José de Evia, experienced pilot and naval officer, was appointed to survey and chart the coast from Cape Sable to Matagorda Bay. Sailing from Havana, Evia charted the coast to New Orleans in 1783–1784, and in 1785 explored the Mississippi and adjacent bayous, continuing along the coast to Galveston in 1786. Following presentation of his charts and logs, he was ordered to continue the survey northward along the Veracruz, Tamaulipas, and Texas coast. He sailed from Veracruz in 1786, but at Corpus Christi was forced to head back due to supply shortages. Nevertheless, he completed the most thorough Spanish charting of the region


conducted in a century. The results of the Evia survey were not published until 1799, by the Depósito Hidrográfico de la Marina in Madrid. Spanish hegemony in the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf of Mexico was substantially altered by the western expansionist policy of the newly created United States in America and by the loss of alliance with France upon the demise of the French monarchy and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in the final decade of the eighteenth century. The secret devolution of Louisiana in 1796 through the Treaty of San Ildefonso, although having little impact upon governance of the province, subsequently permitted the United States to initiate negotiations with France for its acquisition. In response to the United States threat, plans for fortification of the Mississippi were drawn in 1785 by Joaquín de Peramas. In 1794 Tomás de Ugarte y Liaño, using a highly accurate chronograph, corrected longitudinal readings made by Doz in 1770, with Bernardo de Orta providing data on winds and currents. These Ugarte y Liaño incorporated into a very precise chart of the Gulf in 1797 and a detailed map of Veracruz in 1798. Vicente Folch, commandant at Pensacola, mapped the Apalache area in 1799 to demonstrate Pensacola’s vulnerability. The purchase of Louisiana by the United States in 1803 again changed the political nature of the Gulf. Subsequent cartography was generally based upon prior exploration (for example, the 1807 Félix María Calleja del Rey maps of the Texas-Louisiana border) and was designed to confirm traditional Spanish claims in Louisiana rather than provide new information.17 United States encroachment resulting in cession of Florida by Spain in 1819 and Mexican Wars of Independence from 1810 to 1821 effectively terminated Spanish charting in the Gulf of Mexico during the final years of the viceroyalty of New Spain (Fig. 1.5). Heir to the Gulf coast from the Sabine to Cabo Catoche and with Spanish forces still in control of San Juan de Ulúa, Mexico initiated independence as a short-lived empire. With the abdication of Agustín de Iturbide in 1823, Mexican republicans feared reinvasion by imperialist factions, and in 1824 the leading military engineer of the period, Ignacio Mora y Villamil, prepared a plan for coastal defenses with four detailed charts of the coast from Texas to Tabasco, the earliest Mexican maps of the Gulf of Mexico. The invasion did not occur, and in 1825, to assist growth of a republican navy and merchant marine, President Guadalupe Victoria ordered publication of a series of 111 charts of bays and anchorages engraved by the Spanish Ministry of Marine in Portulano de la America Setenrional Dividido en quatro partes Publicado por Orden del Escmo Sor D, Guadalupe Victoria Primer Presidente de la Republica Mexicana, as well as the accompanying 599-page Derrotero de las Islas An-


1.5 Dirección de Hidrográfía, Carta Particular de las Cóstas Selentrionales del Seno Mexicano que Comprehende las de la Florida Ocidental las Margenes de la Luisiana . . . (Madrid, 1807). From a private collection.

tillas, de las costas de Tierra Firme y de las del Seno Mexicano, plus the Plano del Puerto de Vera-Cruz: Levantado en 1807.

s pa n i s h c h a rt i n g of t h e pac i f ic c oas t of n ort h a m e r ic a Extending from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Bering Strait, the Pacific coast of North America is some 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) in length, exclusive of interior coasts of the Gulf of California, which would provide an additional 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers), and covers the globe from 15° to 70° North latitude and 95° to 170° West longitude. Its climates and meteorology possess all of earth’s variants from tropical to arctic, and its topography from south to north includes low tropical estuaries and swamps in Mexico, coastal desert in Baja California, temperate low coast in northern Baja California and southern California, high rugged cliffs from central California through Oregon and Washington, and myriads of cold to arctic glacial inlets and bays in British Columbia and Alaska. As


the Pacific coast extends northward from Point Conception, the number of rivers breaking it increases, though it holds relatively few large, protected bays along its entire extension. Early knowledge of the Californias was shrouded in myth and speculation. In Fernando Cortés’ third Carta de Relación to Carlos V, May 15, 1522, he reported information he had received from Gonzalo de Sandoval of the existence of Cihuatlán, an island off the west coast of New Spain populated entirely by women. This report coincidentally affirmed the episode from a widely read volume of tales of chivalry, the Sergas de Esplandián (Seville: 1510), in which the protagonist visited a great, rocky island to the ‘‘right hand of the Indies, near earthly paradise,’’ California, populated by Amazons and ruled by Queen Calafia. Shortly following his conquest of Tenochtitlan, Cortés initiated on the west coast construction of ships destined for exploration of a route to the East Indies and possible discovery of similar wealthy civilizations to the north. To provide him with appropriate authority, in 1528 Carlos V appointed him captain general of New Spain and the South Sea, and, despite two failed expeditions in 1527 and 1532, under Alvaro Saavedra Cerón and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, respectively, Cortés continued ship construction. In October 1533, Diego Becerra de Mendoza and Hernando de Grijalva sailed northwesterly from the Tehuantepec coast. After their ships separated in a storm, a mutiny led by pilot Fortún Ximénez against Becerra aboard the Concepción resulted in the murder of the captain and escape of the mutineers to the north. Reaching the east coast of the peninsula of California north of Cabo San Lucas, Ximénez and his men were killed by Pericú Indians, and the few survivors aboard ship fled to the Sinaloa coast, where they were captured by Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, rival of Cortés. To recover the Concepción, as well as establish his rights to northern coastal regions of New Spain, Cortés personally mounted an expedition to Sinaloa destined to take possession of lands discovered by the mutineers in hope of finding a source of wealth in pearls. Following a meeting with Guzmán in which an accord was reached and leaving his captain Andrés de Tapia on the mainland, Cortés sailed due westward with the San Lázaro, Santa Agueda, and Santo Tomás. Entering a bay he named Santa Cruz (La Paz) on May 3, 1535, Cortés took formal possession of the peninsula of California for Carlos V, and established a short-lived settlement. This initial expansion north along the Pacific coast resulted in the first known map of the Californias, with a highly detailed depiction of the Bahía de La Paz with El Mogote; the islands of San José, Espíritu


Santo (Perlas), and Cerralvo (Santiago); Sierra de la Laguna (San Felipe) in the region of Cabo San Lucas; northward along the Pacific coast to the area immediately south of Bahía Magdalena; and the Sinaloa coast from Cabo Corrientes northward to Topolobampo. To date, no documentation of exploration from Cerralvo to the Pacific has come to light nor has the cartographer been identified. No royal cartographer accompanied the expedition, thus the chart was probably prepared by one of the pilots employed by Cortés. Following abandonment of the colony at Santa Cruz, Cortés ordered Francisco de Ulloa, his lieutenant who had been at the colony, to explore the Gulf coast of the peninsula northward. With the Santa Agueda, Trinidad, and Santo Tomás, Ulloa sailed from Acapulco on July 8, 1539, and on August 21 he departed from Sinaloa, crossed the Gulf of California, and continued to the mouth of the Colorado River. From the head of the gulf, he returned southward, rounded Cabo San Lucas into the Pacific, passed Bahía Magdalena (Bahía del Abad), and reached Isla de Cedros, which he named in April 1540. From there, the Santa Agueda under chief pilot Francisco Preciado returned to Acapulco with diaries and possibly charts. Also in 1540, on May 9, Hernando de Alarcón, as part of the expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, sailed from Acapulco with the San Pedro, Santa Catalina, and San Gabriel, reaching the Colorado River on August 17, and continuing northward in longboats to its confluence with the Gila River. Unsuccessful in contacting the Vázquez de Coronado expedition, Alarcón returned to Acapulco. As an aftermath of the death of his governor, Pedro de Alvarado, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, under orders of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, sailed from Navidad in Nueva Galicia on June 27, 1542, with the San Salvador and Victoria to explore the Pacific coast northward from Isla de Cedros. The expedition proceeded from Cabo San Lucas along the coast, passed Bahía Magdalena (Puerto de San Pedro) to Ensenada de Todos Santos (San Mateo), where possession was taken on September 17, and continued to San Diego Bay (San Miguel) and the Santa Barbara Channel Islands (San Lucas, Posesión, and San Sebastián), where Rodríguez Cabrillo was seriously injured. Severe weather encountered north of Point Conception forced the expedition to return to San Miguel Island, where Rodríguez Cabrillo died from infection and command passed to chief pilot Bartolomé Ferrelo de Lavantisa. A second attempt to continue northward was made in February 1543, but Ferrelo was able to reach only the region of Monterey Bay (Bahía de Pinos) and San Pedro Point (Cabo de Pinos) before


weather again forced him southward, with the expedition reaching Navidad in April. While all of these expeditions carried pilots, there were no licensed cosmographers known to participate, nor has any cartographic documentation resulting from them come to light, although geographic descriptions by professional navigators have survived. This absence of cartographic evidence from these voyages is not unusual in that they were not ordered for demarcation, but rather for search and discovery of potential wealth or for supply, and thus carried no appropriate instruments nor personnel for mapping. When aims of voyages were not met, they were of little contemporary consequence, and thus knowledge of the Pacific coast remained relatively speculative and the few place names established by them were vague and arbitrary.18 This imprecise geographic data appeared in varying degrees on hemisphere and world maps depicting peninsular California by Battista Agnese (1542), Alonso de Santa Cruz (1542), Sebastián Caboto (1544), and Giacomo Gastaldi (1546). However, none of these were delineated to serve for navigation and certainly could not have done so. A map of the peninsula of California reputedly drawn in 1541 by Domingo del Castillo, pilot for Hernando de Alarcón on his voyage to the Colorado River in 1540, was engraved and printed in Mexico in 1770 in the Historia de Nueva España of Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana, but the form in which it appears is far more similar to eighteenth-century geography than that of the sixteenth century, which indicates that it was extensively modified and therefore of no historical importance in determining the extent of true cartographic knowledge of the period. If that early exploration demonstrated that the Pacific coast offered little promise of wealth, its cartographic importance was minimal during the half century following its discovery. Francisco López de Gómara in Historia de las Indias (Zaragoza, 1552) published an outline map of North America with no place names. The Venice edition of Ptolemy (1548) followed the cartography of Agnese and, like the later maps of Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp, 1564; see Plate 2) and Bolognino Zaltieri (Venice, 1566), confused place names and propagated concepts of the strait of Anián and kingdom of Quivira, northwesterly imagined extensions of North America characteristic of sixteenth-century cartography. Acceptance of this cartographic vision was firmly established by Gerard Mercator in 1569, expanded by Ortelius in maps of the world (1579), the Pacific Ocean (1589), and the North Pole (1595), and followed by royal chronicler Antonio de


Herrera in Descripción de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1601). Successors to Ortelius—Jodocus Hondius, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, and Joannes Janssonius, as well as lesser cartographers—produced costly, artistic engraved maps depicting North America, which, difficult to modify, retained these landforms for many decades.19 Spanish occupation of the Philippine Islands under Miguel López de Legaspi in 1565 opened long-desired maritime commerce with Asia. In the following year, a route northward from the Philippines off the coast of Japan, easterly across the Pacific to the California coast, and thence southward to Acapulco in New Spain was established for employment by annual trade ships, the Manila galleons. A need for defense and refuge for Manila ships became increasingly evident following the entry of Francis Drake into the Pacific in 1578, his raids along the coast of the Americas in 1579, and the subsequent capture of the galleon Santa Ana in 1587 by his successor, Thomas Cavendish. The return of these expeditions to England, virtually unobserved, also led to Spanish concern that they might have discovered the strait of Anián, thus permitting encroachment on Asiatic markets through unobstructed English transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. Royally ordered exploration of the California coast in search of a potential safe port for Manila ships was initiated from the Philippines. On July 29, 1584, Francisco Gali, a highly experienced trans-Pacific navigator, sailed with the San Juan Bautista, crossed the Pacific, and, nearing the North American coast, experienced a notable current which he calculated to be outfall of the strait of Anián. Making landfall in the region of Monterey Bay, Gali coasted southward, noting the presence of numerous coves, bays, and rivers, and reached Acapulco in January 1585. The sudden death of Gali resulted in his being succeeded by Pedro de Unamuno, who on July 12, 1587, sailed from Macau with pilot Alonso Gómez aboard the Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza and, following exploration off the coast of Japan, reached the California coast at Santa Cruz Bay (Bahía de San Lucas) on October 17. The interior was surveyed for four days, and the expedition continued its voyage southward, observing until October 28, when Unamuno suspended operations due to fog and proceeded directly to Acapulco, anchoring there on November 22. A third attempt at demarcation from Manila was delayed due to the presence of Thomas Cavendish in the Pacific. It was not until July 5, 1595, that Sebastián Rodríguez Cermeño, a native of Portugal but a very trusted pilot who survived capture of the Santa Ana by Cavendish in 1587, sailed with the San Agustín for Acapulco; a second pilot, Juan de Mor-


gana, and a Philippine longboat for shallow water exploration were aboard. Making landfall on the California coast near Trinidad Bay, Cermeño proceeded southward and, high winds arising, anchored in the lee of Point Reyes on November 6. Exploration inland and friendly contact with Indians followed, but on November 20 a storm arose, battering the San Agustín against the shore, destroying her. Employing the longboat, Cermeño and his surviving crew sailed from Drake’s Bay (Bahía de San Francisco) on December 8 and reached the coast of Nayarit on January 7, 1596. Because of the lengthy voyage across the Pacific, illness of the crews, and poor weather on the California coast, all of these expeditions failed in their missions of demarcation, and the disaster of Cermeño, best prepared for the task, indicated that exploration from Manila by cargo-laden galleons was impractical. While some nomenclature established by Drake in possession of Nova Albion during the careening of the Golden Hind in California appeared on some engraved maps, this merely added to geographic confusion and provided no new specific information. The need for accurate demarcation of the Pacific coast of North America for retention of Spanish hegemony in the Pacific Ocean was met by the ordering of a specific expedition for this purpose by Felipe III on September 27, 1599. Under the command of Sebastián Vizcaíno, the San Diego, Santo Tomás, and the shallow draft frigate Tres Reyes were outfitted for protracted exploration from Acapulco northward to Cape Mendocino. On March 18, 1602, the viceroy Conde de Monterrey, Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo, gave specific orders to chart and sound all bays, islands, reefs, and bars; take solar and stellar readings, note wind directions, and mark locations of anchorages, water, and firewood sources; and to clarify geographic information, establish universal place names through topographic description, and prepare detailed logs and charts. In addition to experienced navigators and ship handlers, the professional pilots Francisco de Bolaños (former boatswain of the San Agustín), Juan Pasqual, and Antonio Flores and assistant pilots Baltasar de Armas, Esteban Rodríguez, and Juan Sánchez were appointed. Royal cosmographer Gerónimo Martín Palacios, licensed by the Casa de Contratación on March 31, 1595, was named first cosmographer, and Discalced Carmelite Fray Antonio de la Ascención, who had studied at the Colegio de San Telmo, was to serve as second in the post. Sailing from Acapulco on May 5, 1602, the expedition followed the coast of New Spain, charting northward from Navidad in Nueva Galicia to Mazatlán, across the Gulf of California, and again northward from Cabo San Lucas. Charting and naming, inter alia, Bahía Magdalena, Ba-


hía de San Quintín, Ensenada de Todos Santos, San Diego Bay, Santa Barbara Channel Islands, Point Conception, Monterey Bay, Point Reyes, and Point Arena to Cape Mendocino and Cape Blanco, Oregon. Thirtytwo detailed charts, all but two of the California coast, were produced between May 19, 1602, and the return of the expedition to Acapulco on March 21, 1603. The charts show appropriate compass headings, scale in leagues, profiles of landforms, soundings, and indications of anchorages and include written descriptive annotations and place names affixed to points of land, bays, islands, and other landmarks visible from the sea. They were redrawn in clean copy in Mexico by Enrico Martínez, cosmographer, mathematician, engineer, and printer. Particular detail was provided for bays at Cabo San Lucas, Magdalena, San Diego, and Monterey, in keeping with the plan for ports of refuge for Manila ships, and permanent place names, readily identified through precise cartography and written description, were established. Sailing directions and geographic descriptions were prepared in detailed reports by Vizcaíno, Bolaños, and Fray Antonio de la Ascensión, the latter appearing in print in Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana (Seville, 1615).20 As a result of this demarcation, cartography of the Pacific coast of North America remained unchanged to 1771, although, the landform of California was substantially altered from peninsula to island as a result of concepts proposed by Fray Antonio de la Ascensión between 1604 and 1634, and the world map of Pieter van de Keere (Amsterdam, 1611) was among the last important depictions of peninsular California during the period. A map of insular California with Vizcaíno place names, if not delineated by Asención then certainly a result of his insular concept, accompanied hearings held by the Audiencia de México between 1628 and 1634 and reflected official acceptance of the landform. This radical cartographic change, initiated by Henry Briggs in 1625, justified the engraving of new plates depicting California as an island and containing coastal nomenclature established by Vizcaíno; a formalized insular California, devoid of place names on the gulf, appeared on engraved maps by such influential cartographers as Joannes Janssonius of Amsterdam and Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville of Paris in the seventeenth century.21 The cartographic establishment of California as an island, and reputed entry to the strait of Anián located off its north coast, diverted exploration from the Pacific coast into the Gulf of California in hope of discovering an ‘‘inside passage’’ to the fabled strait. The voyage of Nicolás de Cardona, in command of the San Francisco, and the experienced mariner Juan de Iturbe to the Gulf of California north of Isla Tiburón resulted in several


maps produced in 1632 illustrating the voyage, but these did not provide new cartographic information. Subsequently, voyages of the Madre Luisa de la Ascensión under Francisco de Ortega, an accomplished shipwright, in 1632, 1633, and 1636 produced detailed geographic descriptions and sailing instructions, as well as permanent naming of the islands of Cerralvo, Espíritu Santo, San José, Danzantes, Carmen, Los Coronados, San Ildefonso, and La Ballena. Nevertheless, cartographic additions did not appear until 1685, following the expedition of Isidro de Atondo y Antillón and Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., in the attempt to establish a mission on the peninsula from 1683 to 1685. Kino, a professional mathematician and cartographer who had studied at the University of Ingolstadt in Austria under direction of famed cartographer Heinrich Scherer, S.J., was familiar with use of navigational instruments, including the astrolabe. He drew up a detailed map of the gulf coast of the California peninsula from Cabo Porfía to Isla San Ildefonso, along with a small part of the Pacific coast west of the Bahía de La Paz that he explored with Atondo in late 1684 and early 1685. On this map he retained established coastal place names but noted names of Indian groups and new internal nomenclature. This was incorporated into an engraved map, Delineatio Nova et Vera Partis Australis Novi Mexici cum Australi parte Insulae Californiae, published by Scherer in Munich in 1703, and in Cette Carte de Californie et du Noveau Mexique, printed in Paris by Nicolas de Fer in 1705.22 Interior place names in the Californias appear on maps (see Fig. 1.6) following subsequent establishment of missions by Jesuit (1697–1767), Franciscan (1768–1823), and Dominican (1773–1834) orders and exploration by parties led by Gaspar de Portolá (1768–1771), Juan Bautista de Anza (1774– 1775), and Franciscan Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Garcés (1777). Restoration of cartographic depiction of peninsular California was also achieved as a result of the overland expedition of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., from Sonora to the lower Colorado River in 1699, by publication of his map Passage par Terre a la Californie at Paris and Trevoux in 1705, and by subsequent maps depicting explorations in the northern peninsula by Fernando Consag, S.J., between 1746 and 1751, engraved by Joseph González for the Noticia de la California of Jesuit fathers Miguel Venegas and Andrés Marcos Burriel (Madrid, 1757). Nevertheless, Robert de Vaugondy cautiously delineated California as both peninsula and island on a plate engraved for the Enciclopedie ou Dictionnaire Raissonné des Sciences . . . of Denis Diderot (Paris, 1770–1779; see Fig. 1.7), and coastal areas north of Monterey appeared as increasingly vague, imaginary, or simply nonexistent. Combining Jesuit exploration on the peninsula and earlier ex-


1.6 Joseph Nicolas Deslisle, Carte Génerale des Découvertes de l’Amiral de Fonte (Paris, 1752). Personal collection of the author.

ploration in Alta California, the Nuevo Mapa Geographico de la America Septentrional drawn by Mexican savant José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez and engraved in 1768 marks extensive change in published maps. Major changes in cartography of the Pacific coast were to come from professional royal navigators and engineers.23 In May 1768 Visitor General José de Gálvez ordered establishment of the port of San Blas on the coast of Nayarit as a Departamento Naval under direct jurisdiction of the viceroy and Ministerio de Marina. The port was to be a base for Spanish expansion northward from the peninsula of California, for provisioning of new mission, civil, and military foundations, and for maritime exploration along the coast and discovery of any extant strait from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Naval vessels of frigate class were to be constructed and maintained at San Blas by professional naval personnel, and command was to be placed under officers of the fleet and coast guard, graduates of the naval college at San Fernando in Cádiz. Initially, sailing directions to California were those compiled by Vizcaíno, but all voyages from San Blas were to maintain scientifically precise logs with


exact headings, latitudes, and longitudes based upon a meridian established at that port. The maritime expedition of the San Carlos under Vicente Vila and the San Antonio under Juan Pérez in 1769 enabled the founding of a mission and presidio at San Diego in July, and Vila completed a modern chart of the bay. Expansion northward was substantially facilitated following overland exploration under Gaspar de Portolá with royal engineer Miguel Costanzó, resulting in discovery of San Francisco Bay (Estero de San Francisco) in November 1769 and the establishment in June 1770 of a presidio at Monterey, where ship repair, reprovisioning, and rest for crews could be accomplished following the long voyage from Nayarit. Upon Miguel Costanzó’s return to Mexico, his observations were incorporated into the first map of the Pacific coast to delineate the modern San Francisco Bay and to reflect geographic discovery since the area was charted by Vizcaíno. Carta Reducida del Oceano Asiático, ó Mar del Sur, dated October 30, 1770, was printed in Madrid the following year.

1.7 Didier Robert de Vaugondy, Carte de la Californie (Paris, 1774). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


Increased English penetration of the Pacific Basin in the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by reports of Russian expansion into the region from Siberia, gave impetus to Spanish expansion beyond the limits reached by Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1603, and in 1773 Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli ordered an expedition from San Blas to take formal possession of the Pacific coast from Monterey northward to 60° latitude. Licensed pilot Juan Pérez was given command of the Santiago, with Esteban José Martínez as second pilot. It sailed from San Blas on January 25, 1774 and, after reprovisioning in Monterey, continued northward on June 11. Estimating latitude reached as that ordered, Pérez, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, was unable to make landfall for formal acts of possession and returned southward along Vancouver Island, arriving at Monterey on September 27 and at San Blas on November 3. Although vague and unsupported cartographically, a number of short-lived place names were given to bays, points of land, and islands by Pérez in his logs. Failure to take formal possession by Pérez resulted in a second expedition that sailed from San Blas in March 1775 under royal officers Bruno de Hezeta, aboard the Santiago, and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, commanding the Sonora. After provisioning at Monterey, Bodega with his second in command, Francisco Antonio Maurelle de la Rua, and Hezeta commanding the Santiago continued northward on June 18 to take possession of the northern coast. On July 11, Hezeta went ashore at Point Granville (Rada de Bucareli) to take possession, while the Sonora continued northward to Sitka and took possession at Sea Lion Bay (Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) on August 19. Following two attempts to reach 60° North latitude, Bodega returned southward at 58°30' and, passing the bay he named for himself on October 3, reached Monterey four days later. Rada de Bucareli, Puerto de los Remedios, and Ensenada de Bodega were delineated on charts of the voyage and the ‘‘Carta reducida’’ of Bodega, but this information did not appear in print until publication of maps depicting the voyages of Captain James Cook in London in 1780. Discovery of San Francisco Bay (Estero de San Francisco) by Portolá and Costansó in 1769 resulted in maritime exploration and charting initiated on August 1, 1775, with the entry of the San Carlos under Juan Manuel de Ayala, who anchored off the island he named Nuestra Señora de los Angeles (Angel Island). Detailed reconnaissance and demarcation of the northern arm of the bay was conducted by José Cañizares and of the southern extension by Juan Bautista Aguirre, both licensed pilots. Returning to Monterey on September 22, Ayala and Cañizares prepared charts and descriptions of the bay, and following the founding of Mission San Francisco


de Asís and a presidio at the entry to the bay, explorations were extended in August and September 1776 by Fernando Quirós and Cañizares with the longboat of San Carlos and a land expedition to the Sacramento River and inland to the upper San Joaquín. These reconnaissances were shown on the map Californias: Antigua y Nueva engraved in Mexico by Diego Troncoso in 1787 for Vida . . . de Fray Junipero Serra by Fray Francisco Palóu. The voyages of Pérez, Bodega, and Ayala and occupation of San Francisco Bay permitted further Spanish expansion northward and, as a result, extensive, detailed cartographic production. In February 1779 the Princesa, under Ignacio Arteaga, with pilots José Camacho and Juan Pantoja y Arriaga, and the Favorita, commanded by Bodega, with Maurelle, and Cañizares and Aguirre as pilots, sailed from San Blas for the northwest coast and in May reached the Queen Charlotte Islands. During the following three months, the coast northward to Prince William Sound, Kenai Peninsula, and Afognak Island was explored and charted, with precise latitude and longitude readings made, detailed plans of anchorages drawn, and possession taken at the Ensenada de Regla on the Kenai Peninsula, prior to initiating return southward in August. Additional observations of details were made along the California coast en route to San Blas and, in the summer of 1782, also in the Santa Barbara Channel subsequent to the founding of the presidio of Santa Barbara (the Princesa and the Favorita now commanded by of Esteban José Martínez and Juan Agustín de Echeverría and piloted by Pantoja and José de Tobar, respectively). Increased foreign entry into the north Pacific as exemplified by the voyage of Resolution under James Cook to the northwest coast and Alaska and into Bering Strait in 1778, establishment of a Russian settlement on Kodiak Island by Grigory Shelikhov in 1783, and exploration of the coast from the Aleutian Islands to California by Jean François Galaup de la Pérouse with the Boussole and the Astrolabe in 1786 produced concern over possession of the region north of San Francisco and potential foreign discovery of a strait to the Atlantic. To investigate the extent of foreign intrusion, the Princesa under Esteban José Martínez and the San Carlos commanded by pilot Gonzalo López de Haro, carrying pilots Antonio Palacios, Antonio Serrantes, Esteban Mondofía, Juan Martínez Zayas, and José María Narváez, sailed from San Blas in March 1788. Prince William Sound was reached in May and possession taken on June 1 at Puerto de Flores, and on June 30 López de Haro met with Russians at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island, where he was informed of various Russian settlements in the Aleutians and at Cook Inlet. Exploration of the


Aleutians was carried out in July, and at Unalaska Martínez took possession on July 21, anchoring off the Russian establishment eight days later. After meeting with the commander of Unalaska, Potap Zaikof, and learning of Russian interest in occupying Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, Martínez and López de Haro initiated return southward to San Blas on August 18. Martínez and López de Haro not only confirmed Russian and English activity in territory claimed by Spain, but also produced a number of detailed maps delineating the coast from southeastern Alaska through the Aleutians and into Bering Strait. To prevent further encroachment, in December 1788 and January 1789, Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores ordered Martínez to establish a fortified settlement at Nootka and secure Spanish control of the coast from San Francisco to Prince William Sound. Again commanded by Martínez and López de Haro, the Princesa and the San Carlos, with pilots Tobar, Mondofía, Narváez, and José Verdía, departed San Blas on February 17 and reached Nootka on May 5. There Martínez met United States and English fur trading ships, and ensuing conflict with the Argonaut, commanded by English captain James Colnett, and the Princess Royal led to serious diplomatic friction between Spain and England, resulting in the Nootka Convention of 1790 and subsequent withdrawal of Spain from Vancouver Island. In the interim, detailed cartography of Vancouver Island and the coast of British Columbia was achieved by expeditions out of San Blas. Ordered to construct a fort at Nootka, Francisco Eliza, commanding the Concepción (ex-Argonaut), Salvador Fidalgo with the San Carlos, and Manuel Quimper with the Princesa Real (ex-Princess Royal ) sailed from San Blas on February 3, 1790. After arrival at Nootka on April 4, Fidalgo, with Serrantes and Mondofía, sailed a month later to chart Prince William Sound, where he named Córdova, Gravina, and Valdés in honor of officials of the Ministerio de Marina, and then continued to Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula, charting and taking possession before returning southward to Monterey on August 17. During the same period, on May 31 Quimper proceeded to explore and chart the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the south coast of the island, and the opposite coast of Washington, where he took possession at Neah Bay on August 1 prior to heading for Monterey two days later. As a result of the Nootka Convention of October 28, 1790, Eliza was ordered in 1791 to carry out further explorations from Nootka. On May 4, commanding the San Carlos with Pantoja and Verdía as pilots, and accompanied by the Santa Saturnina under Narváez and pilot Juan Carrasco,


Eliza proceeded to chart in detail Clayoquot Sound, Barkley Sound, Esquimalt, Haro Strait, the San Juan Islands, Rosario Strait, the Gulf of Georgia, Nanaimo, and the Washington coast from Port Angeles, which he named, to Neah Bay, prior to suspending operations on August 11. While Eliza was charting, Spanish scientific circumnavigation under Alejandro Malaspina, commander of the Descubierta (carrying cartographer Felipe Bauzá), and José Bustamante y Guerra with the Atrevida sailed from Acapulco on May 1 with orders to search for a passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic in the area of 60° North latitude. The coast was reached on June 23 and explored from Cape Edgecumbe northward to Yakutat Bay, the outside of Prince William Sound, and Kodiak Island. On July 16 Malaspina headed south, reaching Nootka on August 12 and San Blas on October 10. Dissatisfied with his reconnaissance of the northwest coast, Malaspina suggested further exploration by his officers Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés employing two schooners recently constructed in San Blas, the Sutil and the Mexicana, and chronometers from the Descubierta. Arriving at Nootka on May 13, 1792, Alcalá Galiano and Valdés on June 5 proceeded to Neah Bay, where Fidalgo had established a small fort. From there they sailed to López Island, Rosario Strait, and Bellingham Bay and met W. R. Broughton, a lieutenant of George Vancouver, British commissioner to the Nootka Convention. The Spanish and English parties joined in exploration of the numerous inlets of the coast of British Columbia until July 13, when Alcalá Galiano and Valdés returned to the east coast of Vancouver Island, circumnavigating it to arrive at Nootka on September 1. The work of Alcalá Galiano and Valdés resolved continued doubt of the existence of the strait of Anián in lower latitudes, and cartographic results of the expedition were published in two charts in Madrid in 1795 and in three maps in the atlas to the Viage de las Goletas Sutil y Mexicana (Madrid, 1802). While the Sutil and the Mexicana were at sea, the Aranzazu, commanded by Jacinto Caamaño, with Pantoja and Martínez Zayas as pilots, sailed from San Blas on March 20 and reached Nootka on May 14. Continuing northward on June 13, Caamaño examined the coast from the Entrada de Bucareli to the Scott Islands and returned to Nootka on September 7. Cartographic data obtained by Caamaño was added to the maps of the atlas of the Viage de las Goletas . . . in 1802. Upon return to San Blas, Martínez Zayas was assigned to command the Mexicana, second under Eliza with the Activa, with Tobar and Juan Kendrick as pilots, for detailed


exploration of the coast from the Straits of Juan de Fuca to San Francisco and, in particular, the Columbia River. Sailing from San Blas on April 30, the Mexicana was forced to return before reaching the Straits of Juan de Fuca, but on July 26 the Activa anchored at Neah Bay. From July 17 to September 30, Martínez Zayas, commanding the final Spanish demarcation of the northwest coast, completed a precise reconnaissance of the coast to San Francisco, having entered the the Columbia for fourteen miles before going aground, and prepared charts of Grays Harbor, the mouth of the Columbia, Bodega Bay, Monterey, and San Diego. A clear, composite view of this last terra incognita of Pacific North America was achieved through demarcation of the northwest coast from San Francisco to the Aleutian Islands by Spanish naval officers, combined with Franco-Russian cartographic knowledge of the Bering Strait and the Aleutian Islands eastward to Kodiak Island acquired during the second voyage of Vitus Bering in 1742 and with expansion of the RussianAmerican Company by Alexander Andreivich Baranov in 1794 and English charting by James Cook in 1778 and George Vancouver in 1792 and 1793. In 1794, Mapa de América, showing recent discoveries in the Pacific, was engraved by royal geographer Tomás López in Madrid. By 1800, coastal and internal place names reflecting their multinational origins were well fixed upon modern maps, such as those published with accounts of the voyages of La Pérouse (Paris, 1797), Vancouver (London, 1798), and Alcalá Galiano-Valdés (Madrid, 1802) and those printed for geographic instruction in Isidoro de Antillón’s La America Septentrional desde su extremo Norte hasta 10° de Latitud (1802).24 The important contributions of the Spanish Ministerio de Marina following establishment of the Departamento Naval de San Blas were recognized by the recently independent Mexican Republic and marked the end of Spanish cartography of the Pacific coast of North America (see Fig. 1.8). In 1825, two important maps, Carta general para las navegaciones a la India Oriental por el Mar del Sur y el grande océano que separa el Continente Americano del Asiático construida según las derrotas, observaciones y trabajos de los más celebres navegantes españoles and Carta esférica de las costas y golfo de Californias, llamado Mar de Cortés, que comprende desde el Cabo Corrientes hasta el Puerto de S. Diego Construida por los oficiales de la Marina Española with individual maps of the ports of Guaymas, La Paz, and Pichilingue, using plates engraved in Spain, were printed in Mexico by order of President Guadalupe Victoria to serve the new navy and merchant marine.

1.8 Servicio Hidrográfico, Plano del Puerto de San Diego: Plano del Puerto de San Blas (México, 1825). Personal collection of the author.


a p p e n di x Chronological List of Maps Cited in ‘‘Spanish Charting of the Gulf of Mexico’’ Sources cited: A Michel Antochiw. Historia cartográfica de la Península de Yucatán. México: Gobierno del Estado de Campeche, 1994. B David Buisseret. ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping of the Gulf of Mexico in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’’ in Dennis Reinhartz and Charles C. Colley, eds. The Mapping of the American Southwest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. C Nicolás de Cardona. Descripciones Geográficas e Hidrográficas de muchas tierras y mares del norte y sur, en las Indias, en especial del descubrimiento del reino de California. Madrid: Turner Libros, 1989. J Jack Jackson. Flags along the Coast: Charting the Gulf of Mexico, 1519– 1759, A Reappraisal. Austin: The Book Club of Texas, 1995. JW Jack Jackson, Robert S. Weddle, and Winston De Ville, Mapping Texas and the Gulf Coast. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. AGI Pedro Torres Lanzas, Archivo General de Indias. Catálogo de mapas y planos de México. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1985, 2 vols. SGE Spain. Servicio Histórico Militar/Servicio Geográfico del Ejército, Cartografía y Relaciones Históricas de Ultramar: Méjico. Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 1990, 2 vols. Abbreviations:

Lám. Des.

Lámina Desplegado

Cartographer

Date

Illustration

Cosa Cantino Caverio Contarini Waldseemüller Mártir Stobnicza

1500 1502 1505 1506 1507 1511 1512

A p. 65 A Lám. I A Des. II A p. 46 A p. 72 A p. 85 A p. 77

Spanish Maritime Charting u 37 Ribeiro Alvarez de Pineda Vespucci Cortés Santa Cruz Agnese Forlani Gutiérrez Oliva Santa Cruz Tabasco Martínez Ortelius Mercator Tatton Gerritsz Cardona Ruesta Sanson Nicolosi Dudley Sigüenza Thevenot Hennepin Echegaray Ronquillo/La Salle Coronelli Gulf of Mexico Terán de los Ríos Bisente Arriola Martínez Fer Bisente Fer Delisle Andrade Le Maire Andrade

1519 1519 1523 1524 1542 1547 1562 1562 1562 1544 1579 1587 1587 1595 1600 1631 1632 1654 1656 1660 1661 1681 1681 1681 1686 1687 1688 1690 1691 1696 1698 1699 1699 1700 1701 1701 1704 1716 1717

A p. 84 AGI 5; J 1 A p. 96 B1 A p.121 B2 A p. 54 J2 A Lám. VI AGI 1 AGI 14 A Lám. VII A Lám. IX A Lám. X J 3; A Lám. XII J4 C J7 B3 J6 A p. 157 A p. 183 B Fig. 1–3 B Fig. 1–4 AGI 78 AGI 79, 80 B5 AGI 62 AGI 90 J 8; A Lám XXIII AGI 91 AGI 92 J 12 J 10 J 13 J 14 SGE 72 J 22 AGI 108, 109; A p. 243

38 u w. michael mathe s Oliván Rebolledo Fer Delisle Devin Aguayo Cortayre d’Anville Mediavilla Buache Florida Florida Keys Villaseñor y Sánchez Escandón Escandón López Texas Courseulle Veracruz Gulf of Mexico d’Anville Bellin Corral Montero Muñoz Laguna de Términos Lafora Cotilla Acosta González González Veracruz Alzate Laguna de Términos Veracruz Corral Laguna de Términos Bermúdez Corral Corral

1717 1718 1718 1719 1722 1722 1731 1732 1740 1742 1742 1746 1751 1755 1755 1757 1758 1758 1759 1761 1764 1766 1765 1767 1768 1769 1769 1770 1770 1771 1771 1772 1774 1777 1777 1780 1781 1782 1784

AGI 110; JW Fig. 4 J 15, 23 J 24 J 27,28, 29–37 AGI 111 AGI 119; A p.258 J 45 AGI 126 J 47 AGI 140 AGI 147 AGI 161 AGI 188 SGE 75 A p. 186 AGI 205 AGI 207; A p. 245 SGE 80 SGE 4 AGI 215 J 50 SGE 78 SGE 17 SGE 120 SGE 73 SGE 7 AGI 250 SGE 18 A Lám. XXXI A p. 260 AGI 270 A Lám. XXII AGI 310 AGI 330, 331 SGE 111 SGE 20 SGE 21 AGI 384–386 AGI 393, 397

Spanish Maritime Charting u 39 López Calleja Orta Evia Campeche Mora y Villamil Guadalupe Victoria

1792 1795 1798 1799 18th C. 1823 1825

A p.188 AGI 463, 464 SGE 88 A p.190 SGE 126 Sutro Library, San Francisco Not catalogued

Chronological List of Maps Cited in ‘‘Spanish Charting of the Pacific Coast of North America’’ Sources cited: León-Portilla, Miguel. Cartografía y crónicas de la Antigua California. México: UNAM–Fundación de Investigaciones Sociales, 1989. Spain. Servicio Histórico Militar/Servicio Geográfico del Ejército. Cartografía y relaciones históricas de Ultramar: Méjico. 2 vols. Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 1990. Torres Lanzas, Pedro. Archivo General de Indias. Catálogo de mapas y planos de México. 2 vols. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1985. Wagner, Henry R. The Cartography of the Northwest Coast of America to the year 1800. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937. CartographerExpedition

Date

Wagner Number

León-Portilla

Cortés Agnese Santa Cruz Caboto Gastaldi Castillo

1535 1542 1542 1544 1546 1541

1 (AGI 6) 4 5 10, Pl. VI 15, Pl. VII 2, Pl. VIII

Lám. X, pp. 48–49 Lám. XI, pp. 50–51 Lám. XII, pp. 52–53 Pp. 55–56 P. 65 P. 53

López de Gómara Ptolemy Ortelius Zaltieri

1552 1548 1564 1566

24 16 63, Pl. XI 69, Pl. XII

P. 69

Mercator Ortelius Ortelius Ortelius

1569 1579 1589 1595

75 158 156, Pl. XIV 177

Lám. XX, pp. 74–75

P. 75

P. 82

40 u w. michael mathe s Herrera Hondius, Blaeu, Janssonius

1601 Various

226 EG. 232, 243, 271, 294, 311, 339, 359

Martínez van de Keere

1603 1611

Ascensión Briggs Janssonius Sanson Cardona

1628 1625 1640 1650, 1656 1632

236 (AGI 53) [Sutro Library, San Francisco] 318 (AGI 56) 295, Pl. XXIII 339 360, 374

Kino Kino Scherer Fer Kino Consag Vaugondy Alzate Costansó Costansó Vila Vila Costansó Costansó Ayala Bodega

1683 1701 1703 1705 1705 1757 1774 1768 1768 1768 1769 1769 1770 1771 1775 1775

Hezeta

1775

Costansó Arteaga

1777 1779

Cook Pantoja Troncoso López de Haro

1780 1782 1787 1788

422 (AGI 76) (AGI 95)

483 588 637–5 612 (AGI 245; SGE 76) (AGI 246) (AGI 248) (AGI 251) (AGI 255) 625, Pl. XXXIII 640 (AGI 305) 641–644, Pl. XXXIV (AGI 309,359) 645–648 (AGI 306–308) (AGI 346) 660–670 (AGI 355–358) 671–672 682–688 709 711–714, Pl. XXIV

P. 86

P. 94 p. 90 Lám. XXVI, pp. 92–93 P. 91 Lám. XXIX, pp. 98–99 Lám. XXX, pp. 100–101 P. 107 p. 110 p. 112 p. 118 Lám. XLI, pp. 170–171 P. 156

P. 160

P. 173

P. 175 P. 162

Spanish Maritime Charting u 41 López de Haro Quimper/ López de Haro Bodega Eliza Malaspina Bodega Alcalá Galiano

1789

737, 749–757

1790 1791 1791 1791 1792 1792

Martínez Zayas López La Pérouse Vancouver Sutil y Mexicana Antillón San Blas San Blas Godoy Narváez Mexico

1793 1794 1797 1798 1802 1802 1803 1803 1803 1823 1825

(AGI 424–430) 772, Pl. XXXVII 784, 795–797 785–794, 798 800, Pl. XXXIX 816, 832–833, Pl. XXXVIII 818–824, Pl. XL 829 837–848 853–860 861 862 (AGI 486) (AGI 487) (SGE 15) (SGE 13) Not catalogued.

P. 176

notes 1. Ursula Lamb, Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995); José Pulido Rubio, El Piloto Mayor de la Casa de Contratación de Sevilla: pilotos mayores, catedráticos de cosmografía y cosmógrafos (Seville: EEHA, 1950). 2. Mariano Cuesta Domingo, Normativa para descubrimientos y ordenanzas del Bosque de Segovia (Madrid: Colegio Universitario de Segovia, 1994). 3. Pulido Rubio, El Piloto Mayor. 4. José Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América (Buenos Aires: Universidad Rioplatense, 1940), 39–47, 206, apéndices XII, XVII. 5. Michel Antochiw, Historia cartográfica de la Península de Yucatán (México: Gobierno del Estado de Campeche, 1994), 63–68. For additional cataloging of cartography of the Gulf of Mexico, see Pedro Torres Lanzas, Catálogo de Mapas y Planos de México, Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1985) and Spain, Servicio Histórico Militar / Servicio Geográfico del Ejército, Cartografía y relaciones históricas de Ultramar: Méjico, 2 vols. (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 1990). 6. Robert S. Weddle, Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500–1685 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 13–146. 7. Antochiw, Historia cartográfica, 89–130. See also David Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and

42 u w. michael mathe s French Mapping of the Gulf of Mexico in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’’ in Dennis Reinhartz and Charles C. Colley (eds.), The Mapping of the American Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 3–8; Jack Jackson, Flags along the Coast: Charting the Gulf of Mexico, 1519–1759, A Reappraisal (Austin: The Book Club of Texas, 1995), 4–6, 151. 8. Antochiw, Historia cartográfica, 131; Weddle, Spanish Sea, 147–233. 9. Antochiw, Historia cartográfica, 131–164; Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping,’’ 8–11; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 6–11, 151–152. 10. Weddle, Spanish Sea, 234–411. 11. W. Michael Mathes (ed.), Geographic and Hydrographic Descriptions of Many Northern and Southern Lands and Seas in the Indies, Specifically of the Discovery of the Kingdom of California (1632), by Nicolás de Cardona (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1974); Nicolás de Cardona, Descripciones geográficas e hidrográficas de muchas tierras y mares del norte y sur, en las Indias, en especial del descubrimiento del reino de California (Madrid: Turner Libros, 1989). 12. Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping,’’ 11–15.; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 11–33, 152; Robert S. Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 3–154. 13. Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping,’’ 12–15; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 36. 14. Weddle, The French Thorn, 157–189. 15. Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping,’’ 16–17; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 37–55, 152–154; Jack Jackson, Robert S. Weddle, and Winston De Ville, Mapping Texas and the Gulf Coast (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990). 16. Antochiw, Historia cartográfica, 164–197; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 59–96, 154–156; Weddle, The French Thorn, 190–347. 17. Antochiw, Historia cartográfica, 199–284; Robert S. Weddle, Changing Tides: Twilight and Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 42–263. 18. Miguel León-Portilla, Cartografía y crónicas de la Antigua California (México: UNAM–Fundación de Investigaciones Sociales, 1989), 35–68; W. Michael Mathes (ed.), Californiana I: Documentos para la historia de la demarcación comercial de California, 1583–1632 (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1965), 2 vols.; Mathes, Vizcaíno and Spanish Expansion in the Pacific Ocean, 1580–1630 (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1968), 1–7. 19. Henry R. Wagner, The Cartography of the Northwest Coast of America to the Year 1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937), I: 5–110; León-Portilla, Cartografía y crónicas, 68–84. For additional cataloging of cartography of the Pacific coast of North America, see Servicio Histórico Militar/Servicio Geográfico del Ejército, Cartografía y relaciones históricas de Ultramar: Méjico, and Torres Lanzas, Catálogo de mapas y planos de México. 20. Buisseret, ‘‘Spanish and French Mapping,’’ 11–15; Jackson, Flags along the Coast, 11–33, 152; and Weddle, The French Thorn, 3–154.

Spanish Maritime Charting u 43 21. Wagner, Cartography of the Northwest Coast, I: 114–142. 22. W. Michael Mathes (ed.), Californiana II: Documentos para la historia de la explotación comercial de California, 1611–1679, 2 vols., and Californiana III: Documentos para la historia de la transformación colonizadora de California, 1679–1685, 3 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1970 and 1974); Nicolás de Cardona, Geographic and Hydrographic Descriptions (1974) and Descripciones geográficas e hidrográficas (1989); and León-Portilla, Cartografía y crónicas, 88–122. 23. Wagner, Cartography, I: 144–162.; León-Portilla, Cartografía y crónicas, 122–154. 24. Warren L. Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543– 1819 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Wagner, Cartography, I: 163–250. For extensive cataloging of the eighteenth-century voyages to the Pacific coast, see Julio F. Guillén y Tato, Repertorio de los MSS., cartas, planos y dibujos relativos a las Californias, existentes en este Museo (Madrid: Museo Naval, 1932).

Two u

Spanish Military Engineers in the New World before 1750 david buissere t

The idea of the ‘‘engineer’’ goes back far into European history. In Latin the word was ingeniator, in Middle English engyneour, and in Old French engigneor. All these persons would have had something to do with ‘‘engines,’’ which were often machines used in warfare. So the engineer was thought of in medieval times primarily as somebody skilled in the art of making and operating military machines, like those which could hurl missiles at an enemy’s walls. In the early sixteenth century, a new kind of fortification came into existence, using what was called a ‘‘bastionned trace’’ to defend cities against the newly effective artillery.1 The laying out of such fortifications came to be the primary function of the military engineer, though many remained skilled in constructing infernal machines as well. At first, most of the new type of engineers were Italians. This is entirely understandable, not only because Italy was at the time the leader in almost all the arts and sciences, but also because it was the Italian cities which had experienced the devastating effectiveness of French artillery from 1494 onward. Up to that time, it had been possible to defend a city using high curtain walls, often broken by tall turreted towers set into them at intervals. But the new artillery made short work of such defenses, which had to be replaced by bastionned traces, completely surrounding cities with a series of walls and bastions, defended by guns whose fire was interlocking, in such a way that an assailant was caught in cross fire whatever the direction of approach. Throughout western Europe, in the age of what have sometimes been called the ‘‘New Monarchies,’’ roughly 1500 to 1550, rulers defended cities in this way. So the popes, for instance, built wonderful bastions around Rome, the Holy Roman emperors defended Vienna with a very extensive bastionned trace, and the kings of France defended their frontiers with

Spanish Military Engineers before 1750 u 45

works like the one at Calais. Even in faraway northern England, the town of Berwick came to be defended in the same manner, and as time went by virtually every place of any strategic importance had to use a bastionned trace laid out by the new engineers. At first almost all of them were Italians, but by the middle of the sixteenth century each region began producing its own engineers, who steadily supplanted the Italians. This development can easily be traced in ‘‘Spain,’’ as we may loosely call the kingdoms of Castille and Aragón. The emperor Charles V (1516– 1556), who engaged in constant warfare with the French and intermittent hostilities with other enemies, such as the Turks and the English, had a number of cities that he had to protect at all costs—and the costs were indeed very high, for they included a huge amount for acquisition of property and demolition to clear the ground needed for a work that could be a quarter of a mile in depth and two or three miles in circumference. One of the earliest and most famous of the engineers of Charles V was Francesco Pacciotto (1504–1576), who constructed great pentagonal citadels and extensive walls at Antwerp and Turin. Most of the engineers worked only in Europe, where much of their work survives. Some, though, worked in Spanish overseas possessions.2 There were about eight engineers in the sixteenth century and perhaps two dozen during the seventeenth century. The engineering service was reorganized in 1711, so that during the eighteenth century their numbers grew greatly, with rather more than a hundred being identifiable, particularly after 1750. Among these were the great figures in Central American cartography, such as Francisco Alvarez Barreiro, Miguel Costanzó, Nicolás de Lafora, and José de Urrutia. One of the earliest engineers to work on the route to the New World was the Italian Leonardo Torriani (ca. 1559–1628), who compiled a fascinating textual and cartographic record of the Canary Islands, then an important post on the way to the New World.3 Born in Lombardy, Torriani had worked in Prague for Rudolf II before being assigned by Philip II of Spain, in 1582, to the defense of the Canary Islands. He went there in 1584 and worked on the islands intermittently until 1593, when he came back and became the royal architect for Portugal.4 He had received a thorough humanist training and had interests far outside the normal ones. This no doubt explained his fascination with the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, whom he depicted in his ‘‘Descrittione,’’ which is now at the University of Coimbra. Of course, he visited the islands as the destruction of the original inhabitants and their culture was well under way; his observations are all the more interesting for that.

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Torriani produced an image of the Canary Islands, on which he superimposed the form of a crab (Plate 3). He mapped the islands in general at a small scale and made detailed plans of their main towns, such as Arrecife and Las Palmas. His style is characteristic of the period, showing any site in sufficient detail for the king’s council, holding such a map, to be able to come to a reasoned decision about the work to be done. At Las Palmas, for instance, the central urban area is shown, and Torriani’s plan has lately become important for city planners and archaeologists. The first engineer to reach the New World from Spain seems to have been Cristóbal de Eraso, who arrived in New Spain in 1570.5 He worked at only one site, as far as we know, initiating the fortification of San Juan de Ulúa, designed to protect the port of Veracruz. This was a stopping place for the annual flota, the convoy that brought supplies from Europe and carried back great quantities of bullion to Spain. It was the target for many English and Dutch attacks, and much effort over the centuries went into the fortification of the ports at which it called—Cartagena, Veracruz, and Havana.6 The English pirate Francis Drake had passed by Tenerife in November 1585 on his way to the West Indies, where he inflicted fearful damage on inadequately defended towns like Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and Saint Augustine. The Spanish response was to establish a royal commission to examine the forts of America,7 and in 1586 a royal cédula appointed Bautista Antonelli to carry out this work.8 He was the brother of GiovanniBattista Antonelli, who had been recruited from the Papal States in 1559 to inspect the defenses of Valencia;9 he also had a nephew, confusingly called Juan Battista Antonelli, who served the Spanish Crown between 1609 and 1645, largely in the New World. Bautista Antonelli carried out an astonishing amount of work on sites like Portobelo, Panama, Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, and San Juan (Puerto Rico), producing plans for most of the forts. These plans (see Fig. 2.1) were of remarkable quality, fully developed with scalebars and orientation, and would have permitted the king and his councilors easily to come to a conclusion on the nature of the work to be done. There is some attempt to show the internal streets and monuments, and buildings outside the walls are also summarily indicated. Antonelli’s most unusual map was undoubtedly the one compiled about 1590 to show the road from the coast at Veracruz to Mexico City (Plate 4). When examined in detail, this map can be seen to indicate large numbers of the most important towns, estancias and ingenios (sugar works), as well as such spectacular sites as the ‘‘bolcan.’’ It is an apparently unique


2.1 Bautista Antonelli, Map of Cartagena (c. 1590). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

example of the way in which these early engineers could turn their hands not only to town plans but also to maps showing large areas of the country in considerable detail. Considering the exploits on land of pirates like Francis Drake, the Spanish authorities were probably concerned about the crucial road linking the capital city with its main port. In 1583 a young Bautista Antonelli had been involved in a fascinating attempt by the Spanish Crown to establish forts at the Strait of Magellan, in order to control it. This project seems to have been confided primarily to Tiburcio Spanoqui [Spanochi], an Italian engineer who had entered the service of the Spanish king about 1580.10 He drew an elegant plan of one of the proposed forts (Fig. 2.2) that together would have closed the Strait to hostile vessels. The British Library contains a remarkably detailed account of the proposed construction.11 However, the project was eventually abandoned, when it became clear that many vessels would simply avoid the forts by sailing around Cape Horn.12 Spanoqui thereafter worked at Havana (1586–1587), and perhaps at San Juan and Cartagena, but eventually he concentrated on mapping sites in the Pyrenees, during a period of considerable tension with France over that ill-defined and extended frontier. In 1584 Philip II founded an academy of mathematics at Madrid, and this proved an excellent training ground for Spanish engineers. It is pos-


2.2 Tiburcio Spanoqui, Drawing for a Fort at the Mouth of the Strait of Magellan (ca. 1584). Museo Naval, Madrid.

sible that Pedro Ochoa de Leguizmo, who accompanied Antonelli to the New World in 1590, was a graduate of this academy.13 Leguizmo made a plan of the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa in 1590 and then continued work there for some time. In 1598 the cabildo of Mexico City consulted him about an aqueduct that was proposed between Chapultepec and the city proper, which shows that these engineers were by no means confined to military works. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the royal engineers employed by monarchs throughout Europe was that they provided a sort of informal civil engineering service. Perhaps the most prominent engineer to work in the New World at this time was Cristóbal de Rojas.14 A teacher at the Academy of Mathematics, in 1598 he published his Teoría y práctica de fortificación at Madrid, and in this book he emphasized the importance of mathematics, which would enable the engineer to make good plans of a site. During his career in the 1590s he drew many maps and made models of various Spanish coastal cities, such as Cádiz, La Coruña, and Gibraltar, and in the early seventeenth century compiled plans of the main Spanish strongholds in the New World: Cartagena, Havana, Panamá, and Portobelo. Plan of Panamá and Environs shows his view of Panamá in 1609 (Fig. 2.3). The city itself is set in its geographical surroundings, which are very well sketched in. Much


more than a mere city plan, this work shows that engineers of the time could also delineate countryside to good effect. Such mapping seems to have been part of the instruction received at the Academy of Mathematics, and not to have been part of the engineers’ standard duties. A law of February 1612 set out the royal engineers’ duties, which were theoretically confined to the construction of fortifications.15 They were to ‘‘construct the works which have been approved, in conformity with the plans that have been drawn,’’ and to make sure that these works were carefully constructed of the appropriate material. But technical experts were in short supply in the New World, and so, like their European counterparts, they were inevitably drawn into such activities as architecture, civil engineering, and cartography. The early seventeenth century was a time when the huge effort made under Philip II (1556–1598) had largely exhausted the peninsula and seems for a while to have dried up the supply of engineers, so that the Spaniards had to employ specialists from Holland, their former and continuing enemy. One of these was Adrian Boot (ca. 1590–1648), recruited in Paris in 1612 by the Spanish ambassador.16 He sailed to Mexico in 1614, and there began work as a specialist in water drainage, working with Enrico Martínez, who was engaged in the drainage of Mexico City. Boot worked on and off at this project until about 1627, but also became involved in the

2.3 Cristóbal de Rojas, Plan of Panamá and Environs (1609). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.


2.4 Adrian Boot, View of the Town of Veracruz and Fort of San Juan de Ulúa (ca. 1615). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

fortifications of Acapulco and of Veracruz. He made plans of both these sites, using a remarkable slanting shaded style. View of the Town of Veracruz and Fort of San Juan de Ulúa reproduces his plan of Veracruz (Fig. 2.4), with the fort of San Juan de Ulúa sheltering a small fleet and the town itself laid out in regular rectangular blocks. In 1618 he seems to have composed a Plan geográfico de México y su comarca, a plan of Mexico City and its environs not published until the eighteenth century, in the Giro del Mondo of Gemelli Careri.17 Boot died about 1648, and his career in Mexico offers a fine example of the different types of work these engineers undertook. After Boot’s death, there was something of an interval, when Spain was so diverted and enfeebled by the long struggle against France (1635–1659) that it could pay little attention to the fortification of overseas possessions. One engineer who served the Spanish king in Flanders was Marcos Lucio, from the city of Ghent in the Spanish Netherlands. As early as 1648 he seems to have made a general map of New Spain, while he was still in Europe.18 In 1658 he went to Veracruz and in 1661 to Havana, making plans and carrying out works at both places. He was in some sense the successor of Adrian Boot, though it is not clear how many of his recommenda-


tions could be carried out. Proposed New Fortification for Veracruz (Fig. 2.5) shows the plan that he designed for the city of Veracruz in 1663. He proposed to enclose the city in a large wall, studded with bastions. This was the solution eventually adopted to prevent foreign attacks on the ships of the treasure fleet, but it involved almost unimaginable expense. A contemporary of Marcos Lucio was Luis Osorio Venegas, who in the late 1570s became visitador general de las fronteras del Caribe.19 In his time, the activities of the engineers spread more widely through the Spanish Americas, now taking in such sites as Callao (Peru) and Valdivia (Chile). We know that he also visited the ports of Cartagena, Panamá, Portobelo, and San Juan, but no material evidence of his work appears to survive. Presumably he oversaw engineers such as Martín de la Torre, who is primarily associated with the fortification of Campeche, on the Gulf coast of Yucatán. La Torre drew a fine plan of Campeche in 1680, setting out the main lines of what would eventually be its fortified perimeter (Fig. 2.6). This was eventually constructed as he envisaged it, and survives largely intact to this day. La Torre also engaged in a polemic about natural phenomena with the Mexican savant Carlos de Siguënza y Góngora.20 He was a contemporary of the Austrian engineer Jaime Franck, who came to the New World in 1682 and worked at Campeche, San Juan de Ulúa, and Pensa-

2.5 Marcos Lucio, Proposed New Fortification for Veracruz (1663). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.


2.6 Martin de la Torre, Project for the Fortification of Campeche (1680). Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

cola, the latter figuring in a Spanish attempt to establish forts along the northern coast of the Gulf in order to forestall the French expansion down the Mississippi River valley, heralded by the voyage of the Sieur de La Salle in 1682. Franck also worked on the never-ending Mexico City reclamation schemes, producing a report about the ‘‘Desagüe de la Ciudad de México.’’ 21 Toward the end of the seventeenth century, it was the brothers [?] José and Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor who seem to have been most active in the New World. José extended the activities of the engineers to such relatively minor and remote places as Buenos Aires, Sacramento, and Valparaiso, while Juan eventually became ingeniero director de los ejércitos del rey en los dominios de América, working at sites from Valparaiso to Havana in the early eighteenth century.22 During the decades leading up to 1700, the engineers as a group began to take shape as a corporate entity within the Spanish army. This was partly the work of Sebastien Fernández de Medrano, who worked between 1674 and 1702 at the Brussels Academy, publishing in 1687 El Ingeniero, which became a foundation work for the engineers; he also drew a world map.23 Even more important was the work of Jorge Próspero Verboom, who founded the corps of engineers in 1711 under the title of El real cuerpo de ingenieros militares. Of course, much excellent engineering work had


been accomplished without this institutional framework, but thereafter the work was more formalized. As the French institutional theoreticians put it, the engineering service was now beginning to be ‘‘normalized.’’ 24 In 1718 a set of ordenanzas established the engineers’ duties.25 The preamble explained a wide range of responsibilities: The first section [of the ordinance] deals with the compilation of plans or geographical maps of provinces, with notes and observations about the rivers which may be made navigable, streams for mills, navigation, irrigation, and so forth and also with the mapping of strongpoints, ports, bays, coasts, and new works which may be necessary. The second section deals with the way in which these works are to be carried out, in repairing forts, warehouses, barracks, jetties, and other royal structures, and also how such works may be preserved. Clearly, the task of the engineers extended largely into the public works of the area in question. At about the same time that the corps was created, other schools were established in Barcelona, Pamplona, and Cádiz,26 with three-year programs that included much instruction in cartography as well mathematics and the more specific military arts like gunnery and fortification. Verboom was a prolific cartographer, many of whose maps and plans are preserved at Archivio General de Simanca.27 After the formal foundation of the corps, which resembled its counterpart in France, it grew steadily, until in 1728 there were about 128 engineers at work on a variety of projects. During the 1730s, one of the most active engineers in the New World was Antonio de Arredondo. His main post was as ingeniero jefe y commandante de las fortificaciones de La Habana, but he also worked at Saint Augustine in Florida, at Santiago de Cuba, and at Santa Marta in Colombia, to give only a partial list.28 Clearly, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the engineers were both more numerous and engaged in work that extended broadly throughout the possessions of Spain in the New World. One of these engineers was Francisco Alvarez Barreiro, who would produce a very interesting series of manuscript maps of the northern provinces of New Spain. Born in 1701, Barreiro served in his youth in Naples and Spain, and then in 1718–1719 accompanied the expedition of Martín de Alarcón to the Province of Tejas. Returning to Spain in 1720, he apparently became military engineer for the province and returned there in 1724. For the next four years he accompanied the force of Pedro de Rivera, compiling five relatively large-scale maps, which were combined into his


2.7 Francisco Alvarez Barreiro, Plano Corográfico e Hydrográphico de las Provincias de el Nuevo México . . . (ca. 1717). Hispanic Society of New York.

Plano corográfico e hydrográphico de las provincias de el Nuevo México etc., presumably made about 1727 (Fig. 2.7).29 Three years later he made two other maps, of Acapulco and of the Boca del Rio Goazacualcos, but after this time we lose sight of him. We have come, then, from the time when Philip II first sent his Italian engineers to the Canaries, and then to a few selected sites in the New World, to a period when the corps of engineers was responsible for the fortification of virtually every settlement of any size in the Spanish Americas. It is possible to establish a few stages in this progress. At first, the fledgling settlements of the 1550s and 1560s were sketched in by more or less amateur draftsmen, responding to the king’s desire to know what places like Havana and Saint Augustine looked like. In the 1580s, after the destructive voyage of Francis Drake, highly qualified engineers like the Antonellis were sent out to map all the possessions of any size, and to fortify them in accordance with the latest European theories about bastioned traces. This effort fell off during the 1640s and 1650s, to pick up again in the 1660s and 1670s, until by the end of the century the corps of engineers was gradually taking shape in preparation for the remarkable cartographic achievements of the Spanish engineers in the later eighteenth century.30


notes 1. The best survey of these developments is Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London: Routledge, 1979). 2. Until recently, it would have been impossible to give any sort of accurate quantitative estimate of the number of Spanish engineers active in the New World between about 1550 and 1750. The sources for generating this information are scattered among more than a dozen archives in Spain and in the New World, and secondary work on these engineers is contained in a large number of often obscure publications. During the past decade, however, two books have brought together much of the primary and secondary material. In 1993, José Omar Moncada Maya, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, published his Ingenieros militares en Nueva España: Inventario de su labor científica y espacial Siglos XVI a XVIII (México, D.F.: UNAM, 1993), in which he made an inventory of references to all the traceable works of all the military engineers in New Spain during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. For each engineer he provided a chronology, summarizing the engineer’s activity and referring each entry back to a primary or secondary source. Such a compendium allows the scholar to follow up these references in order to generate a full and reliable account of what these engineers did, in terms of their cartographic as well as their architectural activities. The second work is by José Calderón Quijano (1916–1995), for many years a leading member of the great school of Hispanic American Studies at the University of Seville. He died before he could put final order to his compendium called ‘‘Las fortificaciones españoles en América y Filipinas,’’ but the work has now been completed and brought to press by Ramon Serrera and forms an even more extensive compendium of the work of the Spanish engineers in the New World. Its title is Historia de las fortificaciones de Nueva España (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1953). Calderón Quijano divided up his work geographically, from Florida to the Philippines, describing the main developments at each site. To this geographical survey he added an alphabetical list of engineers, with indication of where they worked, and also a full bibliographical guide, again arranged geographically. Using these two books, it is now possible to get a very good idea of the nature and incidence of the work of the Spanish engineers. 3. Fernando Gabriel Martín Rodríguez, La primera imagen de Canarias: Los dibujos de Leonardo Torriani (Tenerife: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Canarias, 1986). 4. Rodríguez, La primera imagen, 27. 5. Maya, Ingenieros militares, 20. 6. Timothy Walton, The Spanish Treasure Fleets (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 1994). 7. Diego Angulo Iñiguez, Bautista Antonelli (Madrid: Hauser y Menet, 1942). 8. José Calderón Quijano, Historiá de las fortificaciones. 9. David Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology and Science in Philip II’s Spain (Cambridge’’ Cambridge University Press, 1988), 127.

56 u david buissere t 10. See his many maps listed in Concepción Alvarez Terán, Mapas, planos y dibujos [from the Archivo General de Simancas] (Valladolid: El Archivo, Ministerio de Cultura, Dirección General de Bellas Artes, Archivios y Bibliotecas, 1980). 11. Additional Manuscripts 17,621, fol. 133, Instrucción para la fabrica de los fuertos que se habian de construir en el Estrecho de Magellanes. 12. Mateo Martinic, Historia del Estrecho de Magallanes (Santiago: Andés Bello, 1977). 13. Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 21–22. 14. His life is described in Eduardo de Mariátegui’s El Capitan Cristóbal de Rojas: Ingeniero militar del Siglo XVI (Madrid: Imp. del memorial de imgenieos, 1880). 15. Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 25. 16. On his life, see Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 21–22. 17. See his entry in José Almirante, Bibliografia militar de España (Madrid: M. Tello, 1876). 18. Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 25. 19. Calderón Quijano, Historiá de las fortificaciones, 601. 20. Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 27. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. Calderón Quijano, Historiá de las fortificaciones, 563. 23. On Medrano, see Joaquin de La Llava, ‘‘Don Sebastian Fernandez de Medrano como geógrafo,’’ in Boletin de la Real Sociedad Geográfica, xlviii (1906): 41–63. 24. See the work of Catherine Bousquet-Bressolier, Le Paysage des cartes: Genèse d’une codification (Paris, Musée des Plans Reliefs, 1999). 25. Maya, Ingenieros mílítares, 41. 26. Ibid., 42–45. 27. See the many references in Alvarez Terán, Mapas, planos y dibujos. 28. Calderón Quijano, Historiá de las fortificaciones, 535. 29. The map is reproduced in Sandra Sider, Maps, Charts, Globes: Five Centuries of Exploration (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1992), and also Carl Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, 1540–1861 (5 vols.; San Francisco: The Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957–1963). 30. This story is best taken up in Janet R. Fireman, The Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers in the Western Borderlands: Instrument of the Bourbon Reform, 1764 to 1815 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1977).

Three u

Spanish Military Mapping of the Northern Borderlands after 1750 dennis reinhartz

The era of the latter half of the eighteenth century to Mexican independence in 1821 was a dynamic period in the history of Spain, its New World empire, and especially the northern borderlands of the North American Greater Southwest.1 With the occupations of Texas, Alta California, parts of Louisiana, and briefly even the western portion of Vancouver Island on Nootka Sound, the northern frontier was expanded to it greatest geographical limits. While a region large in area, by 1750 it was still vaguely defined, poorly organized, and inadequately developed, yet also experiencing population growth, restructuring, and reform. At the opening of the eighteenth century, Spain still viewed these northern borderlands primarily as defensive and not particularly profitable. Not only could these northern colonies barely support themselves, but also their very existence recurrently was threatened by the presence of unfriendly Indians (often agitated by Spanish slaving practices among them), such as the Pawnees and Comanches in the northeast and the Apaches and Navajos (Dinè) in the northwest. The Spanish colonies also regularly experienced the encroachments of some of their mother country’s principal European rivals—France, Great Britain, and Russia—who, for example, often armed and inflamed groups of those very same Indians against them. Thus, the relatively scanty allocation allotted this area for its protection by Spain was stretched pitifully thin. Accordingly, Spain’s policies towards its European rivals along the northern frontier of New Spain were ‘‘essentially reactive,’’ and its actions towards the Indians out of necessity often were innovative, employing one tribe against another.2 It should be kept in mind that the northern borderlands of New Spain geographically, politically, economically, and militarily were a frontier,

58 u dennis reinhartz

zonal in nature and not forming a hard and fast linear boundary, and endured as such in part due to Spanish imperial neglect.3 Although concerned largely with Texas and the northeast, the cultural geographer D. W. Meinig’s summary is appropriate for most of the northern frontier of New Spain in 1750: Although it might appear from the considerable sprinkling of names and network of trails on some of the maps of its time as a great northwestern of Spanish colonization, it was in fact more an area of widespread missionary failure and a tenuous feeble thrust against foreign powers in the lower Mississippi, and it had so little substance as to be affronted almost at will by the Comanches on one side and smugglers and filibusters on the other.4

A particular manifestation of this European rivalry in the Americas was the French and British campaign of cartographic ‘‘filibustering’’ against the Spanish northern borderlands. From the founding of its American empire and the 1503 establishment of Casa de Contratación, the official clearing house for New World information in Seville, Spain held such geographic knowledge to be a ‘‘state secret’’ and guarded at all cost. Hence, although Spain had the best data, over the next two centuries very few detailed Spanish maps of the Americas were published. The well-known maps of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, such as the Descripción del Destricto del Avdienciade Nveva España (Fig. 3.1), were an extreme expression of the Spanish geographic-cartographic paranoia during this period. They show only relatively accurate outlines of landmasses, with little interior detail.5 As a result, Spanish claims especially to frontier areas like the northern borderlands were never securely made public. As a result of the sparsity of Spanish settlements and printed maps in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French and British mapmakers found it relatively easy to encroach cartographically on Spanish territory. Using the explorations and claims of René Robert Cavelier (Sieur de La Salle), Father Louis Hennepin, Louis Juchereau Saint-Denis, and others, Louis XIV’s finest mapmakers like Vincenzo Coronelli and Guillaume Delisle on paper moved the boundary between Louisiana and New Spain westward from the Sabine and Red rivers across Texas to the Rio Grande, as shown on Delisle’s Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi . . . , published in Paris in 1718 (Fig. 3.2). Others readily copied this imperialistic distortion introduced by the French, for example, the British cartographer Herman Moll on his . . . Map of North America . . . (the

3.1 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Descripición del Destricto del Avdienciade Nveva España (Madrid, 1601). Personal collection of the author.

3.2 Guillaume Delisle, Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi . . . (Paris, 1718). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


3.3 Herman Moll, . . . Map of North America . . . (London, 1715). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

‘‘Codfish Map’’) from The World Described . . . , first published in London in 1717 and given yet wider distribution. Moll and other British cartographers of that time also freely imperialized on their own against Spain in the southeast along the border between the British Carolinas and Spanish Florida, as on Moll’s famous ‘‘Beaver Map,’’ ‘‘A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America . . .’’ of 1715 (Fig. 3.3), also from The World Described.6 These European mass-market colonial maps were good for the known and familiar (e.g., the Gulf of Mexico), but not so good for the unknown interior. As John Miller Morris indicates, ‘‘The actual means of appropriation involved considerably greater expense and effort.’’ 7 One of the more consequential aspects of the attempt at the rationalization of the Spanish Empire under its new Bourbon Dynasty for northern New Spain was the creation of the Royal Corps of Engineers. This organization of soldier-engineers was founded on April 11, 1711, by a royal decree of Philip V to rebuild a ‘‘war-torn decadent empire’’ after the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War), but ‘‘it was not until [1763] after the Seven Years War in Europe [the French and Indian War in America] that the Corps became truly significant on the northern frontier of Spain’s

Spanish Military Mapping after 1750 u 61

American Empire.’’ 8 The first director general of the Corps, Don Próspero, Marqués de Verboom, a Flemish nobleman, to help better educate these soldier-engineers, also established the Royal Military Academy of Mathematics in Barcelona in 1711. Their cartographic instruction was first detailed in a royal ordinance of 1718. At the outset of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, by royal decree Ferdinand VI combined the offices of the directors general of artillery and engineers, only to separate them again two years later and then to reconsider combining them in 1760. In 1797, after a long and distinguished career as a military engineer in New Spain and Europe, José Ramón de Urrutia y de las Casas, captain general of the armies of Spain, became engineer general and set about reforming the engineering corps. As Jack Jackson relates: Rather than have the functions of military engineers divided into four independent sections, as they had been in the Royal Corps since 1774, Urrutia proposed that they be reunited under a single director. Thus was brought about the management of such diverse activities as construction, fortification, cartography, and training under a centralized command. In turn, this unification led to the royal order of September 5, 1802, which created the Regimiento Real de Zapadores-Minadores (Royal Regiment of Sappers and Miners), followed by the Ordinance of July 11, 1803, for the Royal Corps of Engineers.9

But unlike previous royal ordinances, that of 1803 ‘‘prescribed complete instructions and forms for every commission an engineer might be given.’’ 10 The Corps represented scientific cartography, and in northern New Spain, the engineers were adjunct to the presidio and other military forces on the frontier.11 In 1763, chiefly to thwart Britain, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, and thereafter Spanish fears of British penetration of New Spain and now Spanish Louisiana rose substantially.12 A defensive reorganization of the northern frontier was deemed necessary. Thus, to maximize the utilization of finite resources and to facilitate administrative reorganization, in the second half of the eighteenth century almost to Mexican independence numerous official tours of inspection and further exploration were made, usually resulting in extensive reports with attendant accurate maps prepared by the engineers, which offered valuable data and observations and reaffirmed Spanish claims to the region.13 On March 29, 1757, the viceroy and captain general of New Spain, Agustín de Ahumada y Villalón de las Amarillas, commanded José Tienda


3.4 Francisco José de Haro, Mapa General Ychonographico de la nueba Colonia Santander . . . (1758). By permission of the British Library.

del Cuervo, Caballero of the Order of Santiago and a captain of Veracruz’ dragoons, and Agustín López de la Cámara Alta, a lieutenant colonel of the royal infantry and engineers, to lead a tour of inspection of all the settlements of the ‘‘new colony’’ of Nuevo Santander, with Cuervo as ‘‘Inspecting Judge.’’ Between 1739 and 1742, during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (later the War of the Austrian Succession, or King George’s War), the colony had been established with six thousand settlers to prevent the British seizure of this part of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, which became the forerunner of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The inspection expedition ‘‘reconnoitered of 2,393 square leagues’’ between late April and mid-October 1757 and filed an extensive report on February 1, 1758.14 While this informative report still exists in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville,15 the maps usually accompanying such a report are missing, despite the fact that the expedition was ordered to map the colony accurately. But the Bauzá collection in the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts contains a large map (125 × 230 cm) entitled Mapa General Ychonographico de la nueba Colonia Santander . . . (Fig. 3.4).16 This map was apparently drawn at least partially by the little-known Franciscan Fray Francisco José de Haro, a clerk-secretary for the expedition, under the direct supervision of López de la Cámara Alta, who signed and dated it in the lower left margin in Mexico City on February 5, 1758. It is probably the missing map, or a close copy of it, from the tour’s final report.17


This big map is a fine example of the best Spanish military mapping at the time. It is oriented approximately 9° to WSW with a grid of longitude and latitude. Construction lines still visible in the Gulf of Mexico suggest that this map was in part a composite compilation, perhaps from documentation supplied by the military commander of Nuevo Santander, Colonel José de Escandón, who was ordered by the viceroy to furnish upto-date maps and other information from the expedition. The map has two scales, one in royal rods and the other in maritime miles, corresponding to about one inch to twenty-one miles. Along the coast, the map extends from Tampico north to beyond ‘‘Bahia de San Miguel’’ (Corpus Christi Bay in present-day Texas). Somewhat surprisingly, Texas’ barrier islands and characteristic coastal bend are absent (Fig. 3.5). Inland the map extends from the coast in the east to ‘‘Guasteca’’ and the Sierra ‘‘Madre’’ and ‘‘Gorda’’ mountains in the southwest and to ‘‘Laredo’’ and the ‘‘Provincia de Coaguila’’ in the northwest. The Mapa General superbly shows the topography and natural features like rivers, forests, and salt flats (salinas), as well as Spanish and Indian settlements and roads. The roads are in red, the vegetation in green, and the line work and lettering in black. Below the title, across the top of the map, town plans of the Spanish settlements are aligned in a row. Below the plans are demographiceconomic summaries of each settlement in 1757. For example, for Laredo, which was emerging as a livestock-production and trade center, the following is listed: pueblo of laredo Captain with no salary 0 Families 12 comprising 84 persons Working horses 162 Breeding mares 701 Breeding cows 94 Oxen 4 Mules 125 Sheep goats 9,080 Male asses 15 Female asses 20

This procedure is repeated for all the other settlements. Collectively, these basic data provide not only a realistic picture of the colony, but also a rare glimpse of an aspect of the daily life of the colonists at the time of the tour of inspection.


3.5 Haro, detail. By permission of the British Library.

The Indians are dealt with in an extensive myth-historical commentary, Vida costumbres i Derivacion de los Indios Chichimecos (Life customs and ancestry of the Chichimec Indians), perhaps written by Haro. It is disclosed that, among other things, the Chichimecs are ‘‘dispersed throughout the country,’’ use the fat of various animals to protect their near-naked bodies from the sun, and dismember and disburse the bodies of respected loved ones among family members preceding an all-night wake. According to the author, the defeat of the ‘‘powerful Mexican and Chichimec Empire’’ by the ‘‘great Hero Don Fernando Cortes’’ turned the once gentle people into strong ‘‘knavish’’ resisters to ongoing Spanish civilizing efforts. And still typical for the times and perhaps pointing to Haro as the author of


the commentary, the origins of the Chichimecs (and other Indians) are related to the beginning of the Old Testament and ‘‘the confusion . . . that occurred 250 years after the Deluge, in conjunction with the Pride of Building the Tower of Babel.’’ Haro also is the reputed author of a much smaller (28.5 × 39 cm) yet related map, Este Mapa comprende todas las billas y lugares de españoles haci como Missiones de indios y presidios existentes en la Provincia Nuevo Santander . . . , of ca. 1770 (Plate 5).18 Revealing differences between the Mapa General and the smaller Mapa suggest that the latter was produced at the later date for a different purpose. It is beautifully colored, and obviously free of much of the influence of his soldier-engineer supervisor López de la Cámara Alta. Haro offered an ‘‘artistic’’ overview of Nuevo Santander in contrast to the detailed scientific presentation in the larger Mapa General. Neither a grid nor even a consistent scale is discernible. Almost no attention is paid to the Indians, with only one habitation site (‘‘Poblado de Indios’’) on the upper ‘‘Río de las Nueces’’ labeled. Three of the Spanish settlements indicated signify a later updating of the information on the Mapa over that on the larger Mapa General. Almost at the center of the Mapa, in the mountains below the bend in the ‘‘Río de las Conchas,’’ are the villages ‘‘Cruillas’’ and ‘‘San Carlos,’’ not founded until 1760, and the village of ‘‘Villa Croix,’’ founded only in 1770. The starting up of all three villages was recommended in the 1758 inspection report to further the development and security of this part of the northern frontier of New Spain. Hence, the undated smaller Haro map could have been produced no earlier than 1770. Given its decorative artistry, additions, and date of ca. 1770, the smaller map was not part of the 1758 report. Unlike the larger Mapa General, the Mapa is a work of art more than a scientific, military, or otherwise official document. The lush rolling hills on Haro’s smaller map are more appropriate to areas of his Iberian homeland than to the coastal plains of Nuevo Santander in New Spain. The Mapa is more an updated recollection of its author than an immediate record, and its elegance and style suggest that it may have been intended as a type of (commemorative) presentation piece. Of this type, aesthetically and even iconographically Haro’s Mapa is somewhat reminiscent of a map from at least two decades earlier, Vista de las missiones en Sonora y sus contornos, done by a fellow churchman, Fray Juan Antonio Balthasar (Fig. 3.6).19 More artistically than precisely, it locates the Spanish missions and their jurisdictions among the rivers and generalized mountains of Sonora east of the Gulf of California and south of the Colorado River. In the lower left corner it is signed by Balthasar,


3.6 Juan Antonio Balthasar, Visita de la missiones en Sonora y sus contornos (ca. 1750). Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

dated 1752, and indicated as a revision of an unnamed earlier map. Another and one of the most extensive and significant of these tours, one of approximately 7,600 miles, was made between March 1766 and February 1768 under the leadership of Cayetano María Pignatelli Rubí Corbera y San Climent, Marqués de Rubí, who in 1765 had been commissioned ‘‘military inspector of the borderlands’’ by order of Carlos III. In March 1766, just before the expedition’s departure, Viceroy Marqués de Cruillas appointed as Rubí’s technical assistant Captain Nicolás de Lafora of the Royal Corps of Engineers, who was a twenty-year military veteran and a graduate of the Academy of Mathematics. Both Rubí and Lafora had originally come to New Spain in 1764 as part of the relatively large military reorganization expedition headed by Lieutenant General Don Juan de Villalba y Angulo. This expedition had marked the arrival of the Royal Corps of Engineers in the northern borderlands. Rubí’s orders in 1766 were to inspect every northern presidio as thoroughly as possible and then to make recommendations based thereon for the improvement of frontier defenses. On the tour, Lafora not only took extensive notes and astronomical observations and made many sketch maps, but he also kept a detailed diary


of daily events that remains an exceptional source on life on the northern frontier.20 And upon their return to Mexico City, Rubí worked tirelessly on his report (dictamen) and recommendations and Lafora on his maps and accompanying report and recommendations. Essentially, they recommended a retrenched, more solidified frontier at about the 30th parallel to anchor Spain’s already established position more firmly before expanding further to the north and west. Their efforts eventually yielded the Reglamentos of 1772, governing presidios on the frontier and realigning frontier defenses, to replace those of 1729. The Reglamentos of 1729 had also resulted from a major northern frontier inspection carried out by Brigadier General Pedro de Rivera y Villalón, accompanied by the engineer Francisco Álvarez Barriero,21 in 1724–1728 and had codified previously evolved procedures. They therefore usually were ignored and followed mainly when convenient. The new Reglamentos of 1772 were somewhat more assertive but, as David Weber has pointed out, they also offered traditional ‘‘European solutions to American problems,’’ advocating efficiency over increased military presence, more direct military offensives against the Indians, and a ‘‘cordon of presidios spaced uniformly across the frontier from the Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico.’’ 22 And according to Croix, neither the earlier map of northern New Spain by Álvarez Barriero nor the later map by Lafora were wholly accurate.23 Nevertheless, as in part attested to by how many times it was copied, Lafora’s large surviving primary map, Mapa de la Frontera del Vireinato de Nueva España nuevamente construido por el Yngeniero Ordinaro D. Nicolás de Lafora . . . , although typically severely distorted longitudinally, was the best obtainable map of northern New Spain for years and represented a significant step forward in the cartography of the region based on direct observation.24 By this time the time-honored, largely anecdotal reports of hunters, trappers, and Indians were deemed unreliable sources for scientific cartography. Dated 1771, the map is based on his now lost sketch maps from the tour of inspection and essentially traced its route. It covers northern New Spain from just south of Taos in the north to Nayarit in the southwest and Tampico in the southeast and from the Gulf of California in the west to Louisiana in the east. In addition to the route, existing pueblos and suggested new ones, cities, towns, villas, missions, mines, Indian villages, ranches and haciendas and abandoned settlements, rivers, roads, and mountains are depicted and plainly designated. Undoubtedly, Don José de Urrutia was an unacknowledged contributor to Lafora’s map. Although not a member of the Corps of Engineers, he had some engineering training, held the rank of second lieutenant, and


served as draftsman of the Infantry Regiment of America, and was nevertheless an important cartographer of the Rubí expedition. He not only drew plans of more than twenty presidios (e.g., Los Adaes) along the way, but also seems to have completed a major map of the entire inspection in 1768, more than two years before Lafora (Plate 6).25 Lafora, too, did presidio maps of San Saba and Guajoquilla on the Conchos River. In March 1768, shortly after the Rubí tour concluded, a punitive military expedition of approximately 1,100 regular and frontier troops finally initiated its activities against the Yaquis, Apaches, and other Indians in Sonora. Led by Colonel Domingo Elizondo, who had departed Mexico City in April of the previous year, the troops stayed in the field until 1771 but generally were unsuccessful. Two engineers, Miguel Constanzó and Francisco Fersén, who also had come with Villalba, accompanied Elizondo to aid with planning, drafting, and mapping. During the various campaigns, they drew numerous plans and maps, few seemingly of any lasting import. But they also learned a great deal about the geography of this part of the frontier, as evidenced by the brief but informative Descripción de las Provincias de Culiacán, Sinaloa y Sonora, written by Fersén in 1770.26 And in his notes of December 13, 1769, the somewhat piqued Elizondo observed, ‘‘Until this general invasion there was ignorance, for the most part, of the ruggedness of these mountains . . . (where) these heathen would cheerfully prefer extreme hardship in gaining their freedom than to be subject to anyone.’’ 27 While in Sonora with Rubí, Urrutia helped draft plans for Elizondo’s attack on Cerro Prieto.28 Spanish explorers learned as much about frontier topography during combat with the Indians as during official inspections. Not all tours of inspection were as noteworthy as Rubí’s, nor were all reports as comprehensive or maps as imposing. The Reglamentos of 1772 called for the appointment of a comandante inspector for all the northern frontier provinces from Texas to Baja California. The first was Colonel Hugh O’Conor, who was appointed promptly in 1772 and served until 1777. By a royal decree of August 22, 1776, these same provinces, now known as the Provincias Internas, were removed from the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty and brought directly under the control of the Spanish Crown with the creation of the office of the comandancia general. The first to hold the office was the French-born Teodoro de Croix, Caballero of the Teutonic Order. He was a veteran of almost three decades of Spanish military service, and as the nephew of the former viceroy of New Spain, the Marqués de Croix, he was no stranger to North America.29


Teodoro de Croix returned to Mexico City from Spain on December 22, 1776, and began a tour of inspection of his new domains on August 4, 1777. In the next six months, with two companies of dragoons and three of tiradores (infantry marksmen), he traveled 800 leagues (approximately 2,100 miles) from Durango in the south to the new Texas capital of San Antonio de Béxar 30 in the east and then west to his own capital at Chihuahua, where he died in 1783. With regard to the Indian problems, Teodoro de Croix quickly observed, ‘‘The perfidy of the Lipanes [Apaches] is exposed, and the necessity to divide and confound that nation, whose wisdom, rapacity and industry are always dismal and indecorous to the progress of the arms of the king and the tranquility of these possessions.’’ 31 Luis Bertucat was the non-Corps volunteer engineer for the expedition, and its clerk-secretary was Teodoro de Croix’s chaplain, Fray Juan Agustín de Morfí. Morfí was a Franciscan from the province of Asturias who had come to the Americas in 1755, and he eventually became a prominent historian of the Greater Southwest.32 Bertucat ‘‘drew a fine map of Croix’s itinerary from Durango to Chihuahua for the commandant general,’’ which survives in the Archivo in Seville.33 He may have employed the services of Morfí, but perhaps not, for Morfí has left behind his own copy of Bertucat’s map, Derrotero. Hecho por el Comandante General Cavellero de Croix (Fig. 3.7).34 Morfi’s Derrotero (‘‘Route’’) probably was done as part of the response to a request by Teodoro de Croix, who in a letter from Chihuahua dated March 31, 1778, asked Morfi to review a map of the Provincias Internas (Lafora’s?) that accompanied the letter. After the inspection, Teodoro de Croix remained in Chihuahua, but Morfi seems to have returned to Durango and then moved on to Mexico City.35 This plain but nevertheless fine map shows the route of the inspection from Durango through San Antonio to Chihuahua and back to Durango and possibly reflects the military-engineering precision of Bertucat. It is clear, concise, and accurate, sparsely depicting presidios, friendly and hostile Indian settlements, roads, missions, haciendas, villas, rivers, mines, and more along the route. Nothing extemporaneous and only what was observed directly is recorded, all set out precisely in a legend and keyed to numbers, letters, and symbols at the bottom of the map. Some of the symbols even are grouped or ‘‘stacked’’ as needed to describe specific locales more completely. Parts of the provinces of ‘‘Tejas,’’ ‘‘Coahuila,’’ and ‘‘Nueva Viscaya’’ are designated boldly. Also shown is the general topography, but only along the route; beyond it are largely blank spaces, representing unseen phenomena. The map has a compass star and a scale in


3.7 Juan Agustín de Morfi, Derrotero . . . (1778). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

degrees ‘‘to which there are 25 leagues’’ or approximately 66 miles. A grid of single degree segments is present for the purpose of place location by distance and also likely as a device for copying the map. These Derrotero-type maps were easily the most common forms of the cartography accompanying the inspection reports of northern New Spain after 1750. They were basic, accurate, succinct, and functional. In their way, they were the precursors of the modern road maps of the Greater Southwest. And seemingly almost antithetically, this type of cartography, while largely excluding Indian hearsay information, often for the first time accurately mapped certain of the preexisting Indian paths later followed by the Spanish expeditions. Derroteros also often formed the stem and branches from which many larger composite maps blossomed. Another somewhat later illustration of this genre is an anonymous untitled map in the Archivo General de Indias that covers the route between Natchitoches in Louisiana and Santa Fe.36 A poorer copy of 1789, Mapa del territorio conprendido entre la Provincia de Nuevo Mexico y el fuerte de


Natchitoches y Texas, exists in the collection of the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin (Fig. 3.8).37 These maps most likely come from the expedition of Francisco Fragoso, Santiago Fernández, and former French contrabandista Pierre Vial, sent by the Spanish to blaze a trail from Santa Fe to Natchitoches and then to San Antonio in June 1787.38 Prior to 1763, the ‘‘mercantilist fears’’ of Spanish officials largely prevented the establishment of a French trade link with Santa Fe,39 but with the surrender of Louisiana to Spain, the route depicted on this map became an important commercial artery between Louisiana and New Mexico. In the last half-century of the Spanish occupation of the northern borderlands, the military provided cartographic input for numerous other forays of inspection, exploration, and colonization. In two impressive expeditions between 1774 and 1776, Captain (and later Colonel) Juan Bautista de Anza, guided by the Cochimí Indian Sebastían Tarabal, blazed a trail from his presidio in Tubac in northern Sonora (south of Tucson in present-day Arizona) into Alta California and founded the first permanent Spanish settlement on San Francisco Bay. And in 1779, as the recently appointed governor of New Mexico, he led a punishing raid against the Comanches in southwestern Colorado. This expedition, and other mili-

3.8 Mapa del territorio conprendido entre la Provincia de Nuevo Mexico y el fuerte de Natchitoches y Texas (1789). Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.


tary pressures as well as skillful diplomacy, eventually yielded, in 1786, a peace with the Comanches that lasted more than a generation. It also yielded a notable military map of the theater of the upper Rio Grande by the soldier-mapmaker Captain Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, dated 1779.40 He likewise produced several maps of the Province of New Mexico between 1777 and 1779.41 Miera y Pacheco too had been a member of the failed reconnaissance of the two friars Francisco Antanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante from July 29, 1776, to January 2, 1777, in search of a way west from Santa Fe to Monterey in Alta California. They also hoped to investigate a more direct route to the Pacific Northwest. Although they never reached California, they gathered much knowledge about the geography of the land traversed before turning back near present-day Milford, Utah, completing a journey of approximately 1,800 miles upon their return to Santa Fe. As a consequence of this expedition, Miera y Pacheco produced the first European map of the Great Basin based on direct observation, Plano Geográfico de la tierra descubierta y demarcada por Don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, al rumbo de noroeste y oeste del Nuevo México . . . , existing in several variants dated 1777 and 1778. Oakah L. Jones Jr., in a recent essay, goes so far as to characterize it as ‘‘arguably one of the most important maps ever drawn of the American West.’’ 42 The map portrayed much of the reality of the Great Basin previously not shown, and not to be portrayed again for at least the next half century as the area would not be seriously revisited and remapped until the coming of the American military. But Domínguez and Escalante never found Mesa Verde and the Río San Buenaventura (Green River), flowing westward to the Pacific, and thus they are not recorded on the map, nor are the mythical ‘‘Bearded Indians’’ (Spanish castaways?) and imaginary straits of Anián. The map’s relative accuracy gives way only with the depiction of the features not experienced expressly by the cartographer. For example, the merging of Utah Lake (visited near the site of present-day Provo) with the Great Salt Lake (not visited) into ‘‘Laguna de los Timpanogos’’ on the map was probably the result of misunderstood or vague information supplied to the friars by the Utes and other Indians along the way.43 In 1780, chief engineer Lieutenant Gerónimo de la Rocha y Figueroa, upon request from Teodoro de Croix, drew a map of the northern Sonora defensive frontier. Mapa de la Frontera para el establecimiento de la Linea de Presidios . . . , despite its flaws, is the most detailed Spanish map of this region, according to Navarro García.44 It reflects Croix’s plan to


relocate some of Rubí’s presidios to strengthen the northwestern frontier defenses, distinguishing by color between old and new sites; Rocha also made some suggestions of his own in yet another color. Apache and other Indian strong points are shown south of the Gila River. Generalized mountains and other rivers appear as well. And after serving in Fronteras fighting Indians, Rocha, now a captain, produced in 1784 another map of the region, Mapa del Terreno que ha de vatir la Expedición que deve executarse contra los Apaches . . ., incorporating his experiences and direct observations.45 Although the formal mapping activities of the Royal Corps of Engineers waned considerably after the appointment of Croix to the viceroyship Peru in 1783,46 the Spanish expeditions in the north carried on almost to Mexican independence. In the west, warfare with the Apaches flared up, and Spanish military action correspondingly increased. Also, the infrastructure of colonial administration like roads, bridges, official buildings, and so forth had to be sustained. On one occasion, after having written a brief and rather dismal Succinta Descripción de las provincias internas to former Corps of Engineers director Lieutenant General Luis Huet, the obviously disgruntled Lieutenant Juan de Pagazuartundúa prepared a handsome but error-laden Nuevo Mapa geográfico . . . of Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya in 1803. Untypically, the soldier-engineer cartography of this map, among its other failings, shows major towns (like Durango) in the wrong place and boundaries are generally inaccurate. Pagazuartundúa seems not only to have had a bad attitude about his situation, but also poor recollections of the lands depicted.47 The map, moreover, may have been a manifestation of administrative deterioration on a periphery of the Spanish Empire in the New World. The military ‘‘remapping’’ of the northern borderlands of New Spain, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century, greatly aided Spain’s reclamation, reorganization, and maintenance of these provinces until Mexican independence. These soldier-engineers’ maps showed all of the northern borderlands and provinces, as well as routes of inspection and roads; individual towns, settlements, and presidios; and plans of battles against the Indians in substantial detail. But as Oakah Jones has pointed out: The Spanish knew and understood well the northern New Spain lands that they had explored and settled by the opening of the nineteenth century. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of the relative accuracy of the Spanish view of the lands they had possessed, they guarded their geographical

3.9 Tomás Lopéz, Provincias de la Nueva Viscaya Culiacan y Cinaloa . . . (Madrid, 1758). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


knowledge as jealously in the early 1800’s as they had from the beginning. There were no Spanish equivalents of Richard Eden, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, Theodor de Bry, or of the chroniclers of New World exploration, and for many Spaniards (those not possessing access to the official reports in the Archives of the Indies or in church documents), the land of northern New Spain was still a mystery.48

At the end of the Spanish period, while the northern part of the Greater Southwest was relatively well settled, well known, and well mapped, not many Spanish maps were yet published. But some were, and they seemed to reflect the military mapping of the region. In 1758, for example, a wonderful little atlas, Atlas Geográphico de la América Septentrional y Merideonal . . . , by Tomás López, appeared in Madrid. Although it lists no sources, the accuracy and detail of many of its excellent maps such as Provincias de la Nueva Vizcaya, Culiacán, y Cinaloa . . . (Fig. 3.9) and Nueva Navarre, Primería, Sonora, Hiaquí, y Mayo . . . already hint at the military surveys and other official maps being accessed by its author during its preparation.49 The later even more striking and notable Nuevo Mapa Geográfico de la América Septentrional . . . (Paris, 1768) by José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez mirrored his access to the official information available in his native Mexico at the time.50 In addition, and as the research of Elizabeth John among others attests, such celebrated non-Spanish cartographers as the German Alexander von Humboldt and the American Lieutenant Zebulon Pike for their most important maps of New Spain of 1810–1811 also used Spanish military reports and maps.51 And there would be more. As Humboldt’s and especially Pike’s maps verify, even though the late eighteenthcentury Spanish military mapping of the northern borderlands of New Spain had its errors and less-than-objective aesthetic posturing, it nonetheless foreshadowed the yet more scientific nineteenth-century American military cartography of the Greater Southwest practiced by John C. Fremont, William H. Emory, and others.

notes 1. For example, see Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519–1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Oakah L. Jones Jr., Nueva Vizcaya: Heartland of the Spanish Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); and David J. Weber,

76 u dennis reinhartz The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), among others. 2. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 152, 177–186, and 220. 3. Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 200–201. 4. D. W. Meinig, Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 23–24; see also, for example, Gus Clemens, The Concho Country: A History of the Concho River Region of West Texas (San Antonio: Mullberry Avenue Books, 1981), 26–35. 5. See Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hecos de los Castellanos en las Yslas Firme del mar Oceano, 4 vols. (Madrid: 1601). 6. See Dennis Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). 7. John Miller Morris, El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536–1860 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1997), 331. 8. Janet K. Fireman, The Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers in the Western Borderlands: Instrument of Bourbon Reform, 1764 to 1815 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1977), 27. 9. Jack Jackson, Shooting the Sun: Cartographic Results of Military Activities in Texas, 1689–1829 (Lubbock: Book Club of Texas, 1998), 1:143. 10. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 48. 11. Ibid., 27–35. 12. Ibid., 57–59, and Morris, El Llano Estacado, 167. 13. For examples, see José Omar Moncada Maya, Ingeníeneros mílítares en Nueva España: Inventario de su labor científica y espacial Siglos XVI a XVIII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993). I do not intend in this article to construct a comprehensive or even partial annotated chronology of the expeditions of northern New Spain in the years 1750–1821, although such is readily extractable from the numerous archival and scholarly sources on the period, nor do I plan to offer a full slate of their resulting cartography, which would be somewhat more difficult to compose. Instead, my design here is to examine the role of the military in the mapping of the later Spanish northern borderlands of the Greater Southwest and to demonstrate how especially the remaining cartography can be employed to ascertain and embody that capacity. 14. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 169, and Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 194. 15. The documents of this expedition also are published in the Archivo General y Público de México. Historia, vols. liii–lvi. 16. Add. MS. 17657; Plate V. 17. See Dennis Reinhartz, ‘‘Two Manuscript Maps of Nuevo Santander in Northern New Spain from the Eighteenth Century,’’ in Images and Icons of the New World: Essays on American Cartography, ed. Karen Severud Cook (London: British Library, 1996), 55–65. See also Maya, Ingeníeneros mílítares, 119–123. 18. The Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, the University of Texas at Arlington, 86–225, 50/1, X/2.

Spanish Military Mapping after 1750 u 77 19. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin, M972.15/1752b. 20. See Lawrence Kinnaird, The Frontiers of New Spain: Nicolás de Lafora’s Description, 1766–1768 (Berkeley, CA: Quivira Society, 1958). 21. See Jack Jackson, Manuscript Maps Concerning the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Southwest (1519–1836): An Annotated Guide to the Karpinski Series of Photographs at The Newberry Library, Chicago, with Notice of Related Cartographic Materials (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1995), 37–39, and Maya, Ingeníeneros mílítares, 28–30. 22. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 204–225, quotes p. 216, and Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 73–81. 23. In Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 142. 24. Ibid., 80–81; Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 57; and Maya, Ingeníeneros mílítares, 107–112. For example, between 1778 and 1782 the military engineer Manuel Augustín Mascaró made several maps of northern New Spain from Lafora’s 1771 map and also those of Miguel Constanzó. See Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 158– 162; Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 60–61; and Maya, Ingeníeneros mílítares, 47–63 and 126–133. See also José Omar Moncada Maya, El Ingeníero Miguel Constanzó: Un Militar Ilustrado en la Nueva España del Siglo XVIII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994). 25. Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 56–57. See also Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 80–82; Luis Navarro García, Don José de Gálvez y la Comandancia General de las Provincias Internas del Norte del Nueva España (Seville: 1964), 216–218; Moncado Maya, Ingeníeros mílítares, 175–177; and Carl I. Wheat, Mapping of the Transmississippi West, vol. 1, The Spanish Entrada to the Louisiana Purchase 1540–1804 (San Francisco: Institute of the History of Cartography, 1957), 88–89. 26. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 64–71 and 194–200. See also Maya, Ingeníeros mílítares, 90–92. 27. In Don Garate, Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail (Tucson, AZ: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1994), 4. 28. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 81. 29. Alfred Barnaby Thomas, Teodoro de Croix and the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1776–1783 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948 [1941]), 17, and Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 220–227. 30. Based on the recommendations from Rubí’s inspection, in 1773 the Texas capital at the Presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes (built in 1721 near present-day Robeline, Louisiana) on the border between Texas and Louisiana and at the end of the El Camino Real, connecting it and the older Mission San Miguel de Linares de Los Adaes (founded in 1717) to Mexico City, was abandoned in favor of San Antonio; see Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 211. By 1779, Nacogdoches in East Texas with its small military force also represented a military retrenchment westward from Los Adaes after its abandonment; see Meinig, Imperial Texas, 24–26. 31. Ernest Wallace and David M. Vigness, eds., Documents of Texas History (Lubbock: Texas Technological College, 1960), 1:24–25, in Chipman, Spanish Texas, 191.

78 u dennis reinhartz 32. Fray Juan Agustín de Morfí, History of Texas 1763–1799, 2 vols. (Albuquerque, NM: Quivira Society, 1935), 13–24, and Thomas, Teodoro de Croix, 20. See also Fray Juan Augustín de Morfí, Diario y Derrotero (1777–1778) (Monterey, Mexico: Instituto Tecnológico Carretra Nacional, 1967). 33. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 144–145. See also Navarro García, Don José de Gálvez, 404–405, and Maya, Ingeníeros mílítares, 37. 34. Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, The University of Texas at Arlington, 54 × 56 cm, 85–26, 92/1, X/5. For more on Haro and Morfi, also see Dennis Reinhartz, ‘‘Maps from Inspections of the Northern Frontier of New Spain in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,’’ Cartographica 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 1998): 89–97. 35. Morfí, Diario, 21. See also Navarro García, Don José de Gálvez, 294–297. 36. Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 65. 37. Bryan Map Collection, #1347. Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 38. Wheat, Mapping, 1:126–128. See Felix Almaráz Jr., ‘‘An Univiting Land: El Llano Estacado, 1534–1821,’’ in Spain and the Plains: Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great Plains, eds. Ralph H. Vigil, Frances W. Kaye, and John R. Wunder (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994), 70–89, and in the same volume Ralph H. Vigil and John R. Wunder, ‘‘Spanish Exploration of the Great Plains: A Timeline,’’ 5–19. 39. Morris, El Llano Estacado, 167–178. 40. Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, ‘‘Plano de la Tierra que andubo y descubrio en la Compaña que hizo contra los Cumanches, el Thte. Coronel Dn. Juan Bautista de Anssa, Governacion y Comandte propietario de esta provincia del Nuevo Mexico, y la Victoria que consigio de los Enemigos’’ (1779). See Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 60, and Wheat, Mapping, 1:118–120. 41. Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 59–60, and Wheat, Mapping, 1:118–120. 42. Oakah L. Jones Jr., ‘‘Spanish Penetrations to the North of New Spain,’’ in North American Exploration, vol. 2, A Continent Defined, ed. John Logan Allen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 50. 43. Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 59; Jones, ‘‘Spanish Penetrations to the North of New Spain,’’ 51; Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 254–256; and Wheat, Mapping, 1:94–116. 44. Navarro García, Don José de Gálvez, 456. See also Maya, Ingeníeros mílítares, 158–160. 45. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 145–151, and Jackson, Manuscript Maps, 61, 64. See also Jackson, Shooting the Sun. 46. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 167–169. 47. Ibid., 167–177, 227–229. See also Maya, Ingeníeros mílítares, 136–138. 48. Jones, ‘‘Spanish Penetrations,’’ 40. 49. Tomás López (de Vargas Machuca), Atlas Geográphico de la América Septentrional y Merideonal . . . (Madrid: Se hallarà en Casa de Antonio Sanz, 1758), 11–23.

Spanish Military Mapping after 1750 u 79 50. James C. Martin and Robert Sidney Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 1513–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 100–101. 51. Ibid., 108–111. See also Elizabeth A. H. John, ‘‘The Riddle of Mapmaker Juan Pedro Walker,’’ in Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration, ed. Stanley H. Palmer and Dennis Reinhartz (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988), 102–132, and Wheat, Mapping, 1:96.

Four u

U.S. Army Military Mapping of the American Southwest during the Nineteenth Century ralph e. ehrenberg

‘‘Accurate geographical and topographical knowledge of a country are particularly essential to military operations. They are the eyes of the commanding general.’’ 1 This statement was never more valid than when Colonel John J. Abert wrote it in 1848 with the Southwestern Frontier in mind. The westward extension of American military power to the Pacific coast during the first half of the nineteenth century required up-to-date geographical and topographical information for strategic, tactical, administrative, and political purposes. Soon after the U.S. purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched several expeditions to map the newly acquired region. The first to take the field was that of captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark of the U.S. Army’s Corps of Discovery. Clark carefully documented the expedition’s epic 7,000-mile, three-year northern crossing of the American West in some two hundred route maps and field sketches.2 Clark’s master map provides a rich tabloid of geographic, ethnographic, and political information of the region. Engraved in Philadelphia in 1814 by Samuel Harrison for Nicholas Biddle’s History of the Expedition, it represents a fundamental contribution to western cartography and laid the foundation for subsequent American military exploring and mapping of the West. At the same time, Jefferson initiated two expeditions to the southern border of Louisiana Territory to map the course and headwaters of the Red River, the generally agreed upon boundary line separating Louisiana and Spanish territories. During the fall and winter of 1804–1805, Dr. George Hunter and William Dunbar explored the Ouachita River, a tributary of the Red River, to its source in central Arkansas.3 After their return, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis, accompanied by an army contingent

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 81

commanded by Captain Richard Sparks, set out April 19, 1806, to map the Red River to its presumed source in the Rocky Mountains.4 Turned back by an overwhelming force of Spanish soldiers near present New Boston, Texas, the expedition nevertheless covered more than 600 miles. War Department copyist Nicholas King compiled two sets of composite maps of the expedition from field notes and sketch maps forwarded to Jefferson. Trained as a land surveyor in England, King was the first of a long line of civilian cartographers the army hired during the next half century to prepare for publication the topographic field sketches government explorers and soldier-engineers had drawn.5 As the War Department had no means of publishing its work prior to 1818, and Congress had scant interest in the Far West, King’s Map of the Red River in Louisiana (1806) and Map of the Washita River in Louisiana from the Hot Springs to the Confluence of the Red River with the Mississippi (1806) were privately engraved and printed in Philadelphia by Francis Shallus and William Kneass, respectively.6 While limited in scope, these were the first maps to be printed under government sponsorship of hitherto uncharted western waters. Samuel Latham Mitchell, editor of The Medical Repository, the leading scientific organ of its day, wrote that King’s map of the Washita River was ‘‘a substantial addition to American geography.’’ 7 Concurrently, the mercurial General James Wilkinson, commander of United States forces in the Mississippi Valley and secret Spanish agent, directed his protégé Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike to explore the course and headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers. Pike earlier had mapped the upper waters of the Mississippi River for Jefferson and was therefore one of the few experienced frontier army explorers available for such an expedition.8 ‘‘In the course of your tour,’’ Wilkinson instructed, ‘‘you are to remark particularly upon the Geographical structure; the Natural History; and population; [sic] of the country through which you may pass, taking particular care to collect & preserve, specimens of every thing curious in the mineral or botanical Worlds, which can be preserved & are portable: [sic] Let your courses be regulated by your compass, & your Distances by your Watch, to be noted in a field Book & I would advise you when circumstances permit, to protract & lay down in a separate Book, the march of the Day at every evenings halt.’’ 9 Pike’s journey in 1806 took him into southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico where his party was apprehended by a Spanish patrol on suspicion of spying. The party was held in Santa Fé and later Chihuahua before finally being released.10 Pike’s map of his expedition, Chart of the Internal Part

82 u ralph e. ehrenberg

of Louisiana, was compiled by Sergeant Antoine Nau, a French draftsman who apparently served as Wilkinson’s personal clerk and cartographer in New Orleans. It covers a region extending from the Platte River south to the Red River and the from Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. While portions of the map are derived from the work of King and Alexander Humboldt’s Carte generale du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, Nau reconstructed the western portion from traverse tables that Pike had smuggled out of Santa Fé in the rifle barrels of his men, the Spanish having confiscated his original sketch maps. Consisting of two separate engraved sheets, Pike’s map was printed in 1810 by Fielding Lucas Jr., a Baltimore engraver who was to become a major publisher of maps and atlases during the next two decades.11 Military mapping of the Far West was temporarily halted during the War of 1812, but the war gave impetus to the establishment of a small professional unit of topographic engineers whose primary duties were surveying and mapping. The lack of adequate topographic and hydrographic maps with common standards and specifications for mapmaking emphasized the point that the army could not continue to rely upon civilians or untrained soldiers for the preparation of strategic and tactical military maps. This new organization, which never numbered more than thirtysix officers, served as the mapping arm of the United States Army from its inception in 1813 until its merger with the Corps of Engineers in 1863. Although created initially to provide tactical support during military campaigns, the role of the topographical engineers gradually expanded to include exploring and mapping the frontier, initially in the Old Northwest and later the Far West.12 Also critical to the development of the army’s western mapping program was the establishment of a Topographical Bureau and Map Depot in the City of Washington as part of Secretary of War John Calhoun’s major reorganization of the army. Modeled after the French military archives, the Topographical Bureau was headed by Major Isaac Roberdeau from its inception in 1818 to 1829. Descended from French Huguenots who had settled first in the British West Indies and then Philadelphia, Roberdeau was well connected politically and socially through his father, Daniel Roberdeau, a brigadier-general during the Revolutionary War and later a one-term congressman. An original member of the topographical engineers, Roberdeau was a skilled surveyor and mapmaker who had studied mathematics and engineering in London, but he probably received most of his cartographic training assisting the brilliant French military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who designed the city of Washington in


1791, and building canals in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. From 1815 to 1817, he carried out a series of military topographical surveys of the northern frontier of the United States.13 A component of the army’s Engineer Department, the Topographical Bureau and Map Depot initially served primarily as a central depository for surveying instruments, maps, reports, and memoirs submitted by military engineers; later it became a clearing house for geographical information for government officials and planning expeditions.14 In addition, Roberdeau carried out preliminary work on mapping standards, particularly following the appointment of General Simon Bernard to the Board of Engineers for Fortifications.15 Simultaneously, he promoted the commercial map trade in America by making his files available to private map and atlas publishers, a practice that government mapping agencies have followed to this day.16 In 1818 Roberdeau and William Rector, United States Surveyor for the Territories and Missouri and Illinois, produced a large wall-size manuscript topographic master map of the West summarizing the extent of the army’s geographical knowledge of the region. Based largely on the work of Clark, Pike, and Humboldt, their Sketch [Map] of The Western part of the Continent of North America between Latitudes 35 [degrees] and 52 [degrees] N[orth] graphically demonstrated the large regions of terra incognita that remained to be explored and mapped, particularly in the southwest (Fig. 4.1).17 From the establishment of the Topographical Bureau to the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, the War Department sent out more than one hundred separate topographic expeditions to fill in the blanks on Roberdeau’s master map, led mostly by army topographical engineers.18 For the most part, the topographic field parties that mapped the West under the aegis of the Topographical Bureau (and its successor, the Corps of Topographical Engineers) were well trained and adequately equipped. They were generally small in size. According to an 1830 War Department directive intended ‘‘for young officers when first placed in charge of a surveying party,’’ a complement of two officers and twenty men, including at least ‘‘one or two who can play on some musical instruments as they will help greatly to keep the rest cheerful and contented,’’ would be able to survey from 80 to 100 miles in five months.19 A typical topographical field party also included local guides, generally Indians or mountain men, one or two hunters to supply daily rations, ‘‘computers’’ or mathematicians to calculate astronomical data, draftsmen to prepare field maps and topographic sketches, and later naturalists and artists to record plant and


4.1 Isaac Roberdeau and William Rector’s Sketch of the Western Part of the Continent of North America, drawn in 1818, summarizes the army’s geographic and topographic knowledge of the Southwest on the eve of the Stephen H. Long expedition. Reduced engraving of manuscript map published by Gouverneur K. Warren in 1857. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

animal life. In addition, the army provided military escorts, ranging from ten to one hundred soldiers. Army topographical field parties were equipped with a wide range of instruments that improved over time. While some soldier-engineers had only a surveyor’s compass for determining courses and magnetic declination, others carried sextants, artificial horizons, chains and odometers for measuring distance, chronometers and telescopes for determining latitude and longitude, mercurial and aneroid barometers for plotting elevations, and theodolites or transits for recording horizontal and vertical angles. In addition, the better equipped expeditions carried drawing materials for preparing sketch maps. These included tracing linen and paper, blotters, black and red inks, steel pens, lead pencils, paper protractors, wooden triangles, and drawing boards.20 The scientific equipment soldier-engineers carried was generally hauled in a special wagon or cart known as the instrument wagon. One veteran of John C. Frémont’s 1844 transcontinental survey described this vehicle as ‘‘the Focus,—the Magnet,—the sun by day and the moon by night to our caravan, and ever the foremost on the march, it was continually the object of our most watchful and jealous care, as the repository of the wonderful


mechanism by means of which the world was to be enlightened for ages to come.’’ 21 The instrument wagon also served as a measuring device when the expedition’s odometer was mounted on one of its wheels. Sometimes, however, soldier-engineers were forced to carry their equipment on mules, horses, dog sleds, and, on several occasions, camels.22 Topographic surveying prior to mid-century was typically done by the traverse method along the line of travel. Distance was determined by dead reckoning (estimating), pacing, or revolutions of a wheel; direction by magnetic compass. Elevation above sea level was measured by barometer but, as these delicate instruments often broke before the completion of a survey, soldier-engineers had to often resort to other means, such as taking ‘‘the temperature of boiling water.’’ Route surveys were frequently adjusted for accuracy by astronomical observations during which latitude was determined by measuring the altitude of the North Star, Polaris, and longitude by chronometer, culminations of Jupiter’s moon, or lunar distances. Prominent landscape features in sight of the traverse line were sketched and their geographical positions obtained by intersecting lines with reference to the survey route. Knowledge of the terrain beyond the line of sight was obtained from interviews and from maps provided by local guides, Indians, Indian agents, or trappers.23 During the first half of the nineteenth century, soldier-engineers were trained in the French military topographic tradition. Following the defeat of Napoleon’s army, General Bernard and a small number of his military engineers emigrated to the United States, where they found a home in the army’s Corps of Engineers preparing fortification plans for coastal defenses and teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Claudius Crozet introduced West Point cadets to technical texts and teaching methods used at the school of ‘‘Ponts et Chaussée’’ in Paris and at the Military School of Engineers and Artillerists at Metz.’’ 24 Thomas Gimbrede, a ‘‘Frenchman of eccentric character,’’ taught drawing and French from 1819 to 1832. Gimbrede introduced a two-year course designed to teach the young engineers ‘‘the elements of the human figure, elementary studies in landscape, with the pencil, the art of shading geometrical figures, with India ink, and sketches from nature, and elements of topography with the pen and pencil, and with India ink, and colors.’’ 25 Topography and landscape drawing were taught in the second year (six hours weekly) and third year (two hours daily).26 Gimbrede was followed by Robert W. Weir, an accomplished American artist, who held the position from 1834 to 1876.27 Marilyn Anne Kindred, in her study of the army officer corps and the arts, notes that while most European military schools


taught students only topographic drawing, West Point cadets were also taught the art of landscape painting by professional artists, a policy she attributes to the army’s role in surveying and mapping a partially unexplored continent. In this activity, West Point followed British rather than continental topographic traditions (see Plate 7).28 In an effort to develop a uniform system for the preparation of army topographic maps, Lieutenant Seth Eastman, a West Point graduate and assistant teacher of drawing at the military academy from 1833 to 1840, published America’s first cartographic manual in 1837 under the title Treatise on Topographical Drawing (see Fig. 4.2). ‘‘The want of a uniform system of topography in this country,’’ Eastman noted, ‘‘has been the cause of much ambiguity in our topographical maps and plans. They have generally been made according to the taste or fancy of draughtsmen, without regard to any system whatever; and in consequence, are not well calculated to furnish that clear and precise information which is expected from them.’’ Eastman’s manual was illustrated with twelve lithographic maps and map symbol sheets based upon ‘‘the best French and German works on this subject.’’ 29 Eastman’s successor, Lieutenant Richard Somers Smith, published an expanded topographic manual in 1854 with ten plates, one in color, that went through at least one revision. A graduate of the academy in 1834, Smith served as assistant teacher and professor of drawing at West Point from 1840 to 1855.30 Most of the soldier-engineers who surveyed and mapped the American Southwest trained under one of these two instructors. European cartographic techniques were also assimilated through training manuals and specimen sheets army engineers obtained from their counterparts in England, Germany, Austria, and France. These works included, for example, a bound volume of map samples, lettering styles, and terrain representation, compiled by Austrian topographic engineer Charles Moering in 1835, and one of the earliest chromolithograph maps, a French geology map of the Parisian basin presented to the secretary of war by its publisher in 1843.31 In addition to mastering basic requirements of surveying, mapping, and soldiering, the army topographer posted to the Southwestern Frontier worked in a physical environment that was unlike any that he had encountered east of the Mississippi River. In the woodlands of the Canadian border region or the Old Northwest, for example, soldier-engineers surveyed and mapped relatively small areas in moderate climates, using waterways and canoes for transportation. On the other hand, the West was characterized, as the historian Robert Utley has observed, by ‘‘A new

4.2 Specimen sheet illustrating the depiction of terrain by contour lines and hachures from the army’s first manual on topography. Written and illustrated by Lieutenant Seth Eastman, this manual was used to teach mapmaking to West Point cadets. Seth Eastman’s Treatise on Topographical Drawing (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1837), Plate I. Personal collection of the author.


geography. . . . Vast distances, climatic extremes, and scarcity of such life sustaining resources as water, food, and fuel.’’ 32 In addition, its native inhabitants were mounted, nomadic, and often hostile. Travel was generally by mule, horse, and wagon, and the soldier-engineers were sometimes in the field for months at a time. At least four topographic field parties working in the Southwest lost members through exposure to the elements or Indian attacks. Major Stephen Harriman Long led the first army-sponsored scientific expedition sent to the Southwestern Frontier after the establishment of the Topographical Bureau. A soldier-engineer who was to spend nearly five decades in the army, Long was the most experienced army explorer up to the 1830s. Following a year teaching mathematics at West Point in 1816, he led a series of frontier expeditions extending from British Canada to Spanish Texas.33 From 1819 to 1820, Long’s party explored and mapped the headwaters of the Arkansas, Platte, and Red rivers, the southern Great Plains, and the front wall of the southern Rockies, climbing Pike’s Peak in the process. Long’s western expedition was the first to be led by trained army topographers. In addition to its commanding officer, his party included West Point graduate Lieutenant James D. Graham and Cadet William Swift.34 Astronomical positions were determined by Long and Swift with a sextant and four-foot telescope and were later calculated by Graham. A ‘‘common surveyor’s compass, with a needle six inches long,’’ was used to trace river courses.35 Elevation was initially determined by barometer, but as they were all broken before the party reached the mountains, Swift determined the elevation of Pike’s Peak by triangulation.36 Following his return to Philadelphia in late 1820, Long devoted his time to preparing a map of the expedition while Edwin James, the expedition’s botanist and geologist, prepared Long’s report for publication. With the army still lacking a mechanism for publishing its work, Long’s large manuscript map was printed commercially after being reduced and engraved by James H. Young and George Delleker.37 The official copy, entitled Country drained by the Mississippi, covers the entire United States. It was printed in two sheets because of its size, with the Mississippi River serving as the general dividing line between the two sections. The map was issued in atlas format along with James’ two-volume account by Philadelphia map publishers H. C. Carey and I. Lea in 1823 (see Fig. 4.3). Carey and Lea also issued an unauthorized version of this map one year earlier (1822) with the title Map of Arkansas and Other Territories of the United States Respectfully inscribed to the Hon. J. Calhoun, Secretary of War. Slightly larger in cover-


4.3 Detail of Stephen H. Long’s official map of the Country drained by the Mississippi Western Section (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

age than the western section of the official copy, it appeared in Carey and Lea’s A Complete Historical, Chronological & Geographical American Atlas (Philadelphia, 1822).38 Long’s map popularized the concept of the Great Plains as a desert, a concept that was to have a major impact on the settlement pattern of the region during the first half of the nineteenth century.39 In addition, it depicted for the first time the proper course of the upper Platte, correctly displayed the relative positions of the Canadian and Arkansas rivers, and marked the locations of several major western landmarks that were to serve as early guide points for later explorers and travelers, including Long’s Peak [‘‘Highest Peak’’], just north of present Boulder, Colorado, and Pike’s Peak, named ‘‘James’ Peak’’ on the map in deference to Edwin James, the expedition’s chronicler who was the first to climb the mountain. For the first time on a map of the West, a profile diagram or cross section was included. Appearing only on the official map, it illustrates the vertical elevation of the country along the 38° parallel of latitude. This was the first American western military expedition to include scientists and artists as well as topographic engineers and the first to explicitly link maps, landscape views, and text in its final report. One of


the artists was Samuel Seymour, a Philadelphia resident born in England and trained in the British topographical style.40 Among the engravings accompanying the final report are the first published views of the Rocky Mountains, View of the Rocky Mountains, on the Platte, 50 Miles from their base, and Colorado’s majestic landmark, James Peak [Pike’s Peak]. Patricia Trenton and Peter H. Hassrick in their study of nineteenth century frontier artists of the Rocky Mountains observed that Seymour’s pictorial record of the Long expedition closely parallels descriptions of the same scenes in James’ report, strengthening the power of both forms of description.41 Likewise, Seymour’s landscape views correlate with the pictorial symbols used to depict major landscape features on Long’s map. After Long’s expedition, the War Department’s interest in western exploration diminished as the focus of the nation and the army turned to road, railroad, and harbor improvements in the eastern states. Upon Roberdeau’s death in 1829, he was succeeded by Lieutenant Colonel John James Abert. An early graduate of West Point and one of the first members of the topographical engineers, Abert had a thorough grounding in science through his long association with the Swiss scientist Ferdinand Hassler, founder of the U.S. Coast Survey. He was also a skilled politician who continued to push for improving the status of the topographical engineers.42 In 1831 the Topographical Bureau was made an independent office within the War Department. In response to the Seminole War in Florida and renewed interest in western expansion, Congress elevated the bureau to corps status in 1838 and increased its complement from ten to thirty-six topographical officers, all but eight of whom were West Point graduates.43 A strong advocate for this reorganization was Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, who envisioned an orderly exploration and settlement of the West through the establishment of a chain of interconnected frontier military posts stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico.44 In response to Poinsett’s plan for the West, Abert directed Captain Washington Hood to compile two Map[s] illustrating the plan of the defenses of the Western and Northwestern Frontier, one as proposed by Poinsett December 30, 1837, and one as proposed by General Charles Gratiot October 31, 1837.45 It was during the preparation of these maps that Abert learned about the work of Joseph N. Nicollet, a French scientist who was to have a major impact on the military topographic mapping of the West.46 Formerly an astronomer with the Bureau of Longitude at the French Royal Observatory, Nicollet emigrated to the United States in 1832. After working briefly in Washington, D.C., with Hassler, Nicollet set out to study the geography


of the Mississippi River system with the expressed purpose he suggested of contributing ‘‘to the progressive increase of knowledge in the physical geography of North America.’’ 47 By 1837 he had traveled the length of the Mississippi taking thousands of astronomical and barometric observations, explored the source of the Mississippi River, and had drawn a detailed map of the region. Abert and Poinsett purchased Nicollet’s ‘‘geographical and topographical matter’’ for $2,000, using funds appropriated for their system of frontier forts.48 Impressed with Nicollet’s knowledge of the region, Abert and Poinsett decided to have him lead an expedition to the northern plains under the aegis of the new Corps of Topographical Engineers. With this army-sponsored expedition to the Coteau de Prairies of Dakota Territory, Abert inaugurated the Corps of Topographical Engineers’ scientific mapping of the West. Nicollet’s influential map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River covered an area larger than his native France. It was published separately in three different versions between 1842 and 1845 by order of Congress, a policy the government followed in respect to most subsequent maps the Corps of Topographical Engineers produced.49 Surface relief was conveyed by hachures and spot heights (elevation figures derived from hundreds of barometric readings taken by Nicollet). In addition to his extensive use of the barometer, Nicollet was the first western explorer to incorporate place names based on a systematic analysis of local names (Indian and French). Nicollet’s scientific imprint was stamped on all subsequent military mapping expeditions through the work of his two assistants from the Corps of Topographical Engineers—Lieutenant John C. Frémont and Lieutenant William H. Emory, who were to play leading roles in the mapping of the Southwest.50 Frémont was the first to employ Nicollet’s scientific method. Sponsored by his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of Congress’ most ardent supporters of America’s western destiny, Frémont led five western expeditions from 1842 to 1853. His major contribution was his Map of an Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains . . . and to Oregon & North California, with its distinctive linear image surrounded by large areas of blank space. Like his mentor, Frémont portrayed only the country that he actually traversed, sighted, and measured. The significance of this map was its scientific construction; it was based on a series of astronomical observations that connected the U.S. General Land Office surveys of the Mississippi River Valley with Navy lieutenant Charles Wilkes’ survey of the mouth of the Columbia River. ‘‘This map may have a meagre [sic] and skeleton appearance to the general eye,’’ Fré-


mont noted in his report, ‘‘but [it] is expected to be more valuable to science on that account, being wholly founded upon positive data and actual operations in the field. It fills up the vast geographical chasm between these two remote points and it presents a connected and accurate view of our continent from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean.’’ 51 Frémont was also the first soldier-engineer to explore a segment of the Far Southwest. He circled the Great Basin in 1844, discovering in the process the true nature of its interior drainage, which he portrayed and named for the first time.52 Frémont’s maps were drawn from his computations by Charles Preuss, a talented but melancholy topographer who accompanied the Pathfinder on three of his expeditions. Through the deft use of hachures, Preuss illustrated for the first time in published form some of the most dramatic landscape features for which the West is known today—the Front and Park Ranges of Colorado, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Basin. Preuss was trained as a surveyor in Prussia before being recruited for the U.S. Coast Survey in 1834 by Hassler.53 He was the first of a number of skilled German cartographers to work for the Corps of Topographical Engineers. According to a contemporary, his ‘‘skill in sketching topography in the field and representing it on the map’’ was unsurpassed.54 In 1845, E. Weber and Company, a Baltimore lithographic firm founded by German immigrants, produced Frémont’s fundamental map of the West. The company was to become one of the principal publishers of government reports and maps under the name August Hoen and Company.55 Despite Frémont’s rapid topographic reconnaissance along the southern fringe of the Great Basin, the army’s general staff had little knowledge of southwestern geography on the eve of potential hostilities with the Mexican government over the annexation of Texas. In response to these concerns, Colonel Abert ordered Frémont, who was leading his third western exploring expedition, to send a detachment under the command of lieutenants James W. Abert (Colonel Abert’s son) and William G. Peck to explore and map ‘‘the Southern Rocky Mountain and the region’s [sic] south of the Arkansas River . . . in order that if [military] operations should be required in that country the information obtained may be at command.’’ 56 Instructed in the field use of the sextant and chronometer by Frémont, Abert and Peck set out August 9, 1845, with a force of thirtythree men guided by three experienced mountain men who also served as hunters for the expedition—Thomas Fitzpatrick, John Hatcher (an Indian trader particularly well known to the Kiowa), and Caleb Greenwood. During the ensuing three months the exploring party surveyed and mapped for the first time with scientific instruments some 600 miles of


4.4 Detail of Lieutenants James W. Abert and William G. Peck’s Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains . . . during the year 1845 (SED 438, 29th Cong., 1st Sess.). Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

the Canadian River running through hostile Comanche and Kiowa country in northeastern Arizona, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma.57 Abert and Peck’s Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains was printed and issued by the Senate along with Lieutenant Abert’s official report in 1846 (see Fig. 4.4).58 The original field sketches were probably prepared for publishing by Preuss in the Washington office of the Corps of Topographical Engineers.59 While parts of the map are derivative, Abert and Peck are the first to delineate with some degree of accuracy the Canadian River and its landmarks although they lacked a barometer to determine elevations. They also provide new geographical information on the unexplored region lying between the Arkansas and Canadian rivers, derived principally from ‘‘Comanchee [sic] and Kiowa Indians.’’ The information from Indians was obtained from several sources, including ‘‘Tah-kai-buhl,’’ an elderly Kiowa that Abert and Frémont had met at Bent’s Fort. At one point during the expedition when Abert was confused about a route, he held a council with a Kiowa band: ‘‘We now placed before them a map of the country, which had been made out at Bent’s Fort by Tah-kai-buhl at the suggestion of Mr. Fitzpatrick. Quite a council was called to decide whether or not Buffalo Creek


runs into Red River or in the Goo-al-pa[h], as represented on the map.’’ Tah-kai-buhl’s map was corrected and the relative positions of the various topographical features were preserved in a surprisingly exact manner, when we consider that it covers an area of about 800 miles in length.60 Finally, they were the first soldier-engineers to survey and map a segment of El Llano Estacado, the feared Texas desert prairie.61 In design and format, the map closely follows the Nicollet-Frémont model. Solid, bold lines are used to display streams and landscape features surveyed or observed; geographical information obtained from Indian informants that has not been directly examined is depicted by dotted lines indicating possible but unconfirmed features. Topographic relief is depicted by hachures based on data derived from numerous sketches made in the field, each marked with the appropriate magnetic bearing and hour of the day that they were drawn. Such field sketches, noted Lieutenant Abert, ‘‘present more exact scenographical ideas than any description could possibly convey and will assist in defining the rapid outlines we made of the geological features of this country.’’ 62 In the application of place names, the explorers retained existing local names (primarily Spanish) but also reintroduced appropriate Indian names such as ‘‘Goo-al-pah,’’ the Comanche and Kiowa name for the Canadian River.63 Abert and Peck’s map was enhanced by Lieutenant Abert’s official report with written descriptions of the topography, seven panoramic lithographic views, and a detailed map illustrating the topography near the Raton Pass on the road to Santa Fe. An example is Spanish Peaks, two bold volcanic landmarks of southern Colorado, towering nearly 14,000 feet. They are illustrated on the map by a series of hachures indicating six peaks with the place name ‘‘Spanish Peaks.’’ Lieutenant Abert’s panoramic view of this landmark depicts eight snow-capped peaks with the Indian name in the title, Wah-to-yah [Breasts of the World], or the Spanish Peaks. In his report he describes them ‘‘as the grand peaks of the ‘Wah-toyah,’ which seemed quite near; whilst beyond, in the gray distance, lay a long line of rugged peaks, still marked near their summits with the white lines of snow, which also filled the ravines that descended their side.’’ 64 Lieutenant Abert was an artist and draftsman of some skill, which was honed at West Point under the tutelage of Weir, Eastman, and Smith. He also prepared at least forty watercolor and pencil sketches that were not printed with the official report. Following duty ‘‘preparing maps, &c.’’ in Washington, D.C., he returned to West Point as assistant professor of drawing, from 1848 to 1850.65 Declaration of War with Mexico on May 11, 1846, provided new im-


petus for the military mapping of the American Southwest. Strategic and tactical maps of the region had to be prepared and battle sites recorded. A key figure in this effort was Lieutenant William Emory, Nicollet’s other associate from the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Emory served as head of the topographical office of General Stephen Watts Kearny’s ‘‘Army of the West,’’ a large expeditionary force sent from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to seize New Mexico and then continue westward to San Diego and Los Angeles to take possession of California.66 Well connected politically and professionally through friendship with Jefferson Davis and Alexander Dallas Bache (Emory’s father-in-law and the second director of the United States Coast Survey), Emory was a West Point graduate and an experienced topographical engineer whose contributions to western mapping rivals those of Lewis and Clark and Frémont. At the time of his mission, Emory probably had more knowledge of the Southwest than any other soldier-engineer. On the eve of Texas annexation, Emory prepared for the Senate a Map of Texas and the Countries Adjacent and a treatise on the geography of the region.67 A compilation of existing sources available in Washington, Emory’s map covered the entire Southwest from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast, although the region west of the Rio Grande was largely blank. Nevertheless, it was the most comprehensive image of the Southwest available and Emory carried four copies with him during the Kearny expedition.68 Emory’s topographical unit included his assistant, veteran army topographer Lieutenant William H. Warner, who was responsible for the topographic field sketches from Santa Fé westward, statistician Norman Bestor, itinerant landscape painter John Mix Stanley listed as a ‘‘draughtsman,’’ and eight other assistants and teamsters.69 Abert and Peck accompanied Emory as far as Santa Fé, but both fell ill and remained behind to explore and map the surrounding region. During the course of this wartime expedition, Emory joined the ranks of Lewis and Clark and Frémont by producing the third basic route map of the Transmississippi West based on instrument measurements (see Fig. 4.5). Depicting the route of Kearny’s ‘‘Army of the West’’ from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to San Diego, this map was lithographed separately for Congress by the War Department in 1847 in two different versions under the title Military Reconnaissance of the Arkansas Rio Del Norte and Rio Gila.70 It formed the basis for all subsequent maps of the Southwest for the next decade. Drawn at a scale of one inch to 24 miles, the map measures nearly three by six feet. It was drawn by Joseph Welch, of whom little is known. Emory’s map is similar in form and content to Frémont’s, reflect-


ing the common guidelines that were increasingly being followed by army topographers working at the Corps of Topographical Engineers headquarters in Washington, where these maps were compiled. Only those features along the route of march that Emory actually measured or viewed were delineated, leaving large blank areas to be filled by later surveys. Distance was measured by an odometer attached first on the instrument wagon and later to the wheel of a small mountain howitzer when the wagon’s were abandoned.71 Like Pike and Frémont before him, Emory included an elevation profile of the entire route derived from nearly four hundred separate barometric observations. According to one authority, the mercury barometer used by Emory was the first ‘‘that was carried overland to the Pacific unbroken.’’ 72 The dotted elevation lines, Emory noted on the map, were derived from ‘‘sketches of distance hills [taken] from the trail that were not measured . . . and the heights represented therefore are not to be relied upon.’’ Filling in a large portion of the empty center of the map is a ‘‘Table of Geographical Positions’’ that lists fifty-one camp sites with distances and geographical coordinates, about one site every 40 miles along the 2,000mile route. ‘‘For the information of detachments moving on that route,’’ Emory wrote in his Notes, ‘‘a table of distances has been prepared; which, with the map, (though on rather too small a scale for military purposes,) may enable movements to be made without other guides.’’ The inclusion of this table, one of the first instances on early military maps, also served as a map reliability diagram, providing readers with the data upon which the map was constructed. Longitude was obtained from two box chronometers provided by the chief hydrographer of the navy and latitude from two ‘‘Gambey’s 8 ½ inch sextants.’’ Some twenty-five hundred observations taken by Emory and Warner were used to compute these geographical positions and are listed in the appendices accompanying Emory’s official printed report.73 The location of the observations sites were denoted on the map using the symbol of a star; selected elevations were also printed on the map. Although Emory’s map was limited primarily to his line of march, he incorporated data from several published maps. These included Abert and Peck’s Map of the Territory of New Mexico, based on a two-month survey that took the unescorted topographers into dangerous Navajo country to see the fabled ‘‘Seven Cities of Cibola,’’ first described by Francisco de Coronado three centuries earlier.74 Drawn at a scale of 10 miles to the inch, it is the first detailed map of the Taos, Santa Fé, and Albuquerque region. The mountainous terrain of the area is portrayed by hachures applied


4.5 Detail of Lieutenant William H. Emory’s map of his military reconnaissance with General Stephen Watts Kearny’s ‘‘Army of the West.’’ This was the third fundamental map of the Transmississippi West based on instrument measurements and the first to cover the American Southwest. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

with some skill; their application was based upon topographical sketches prepared in the field by Peck.75 Emory also incorporated a map of the region later designated as the Gadsden Purchase, based on a survey by Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke.76 Commander of the ‘‘Mormon Battalion,’’ Cooke was the first to take wagons across the southwest to San Diego. Later, thousands of emigrants and eventually the railroads followed his route. For his outline of the California coast, Emory used an 1825 Spanish chart furnished him by Wilkes, who had visited the region during his circumnavigation of the globe in 1838–1841. Wilkes was working up his charts in Washington as Emory’s map was being completed.77 The official reports of Emory and Lieutenant Abert were published by the Senate and House of Representatives with black and white lithographs that provided perspective images of the Mexican towns, Indian pueblos, landscape views, and strategic military sites recorded on the maps. Emory’s report was illustrated by Stanley, who had gone to the West in 1842 for the express purpose of painting Native Americans, first to Fort Gibson in present Oklahoma and eventually to Santa Fé. He participated


in a number of army expeditions and became a leading Western artist.78 The lithographic reproductions of his field drawings consist primarily of views along the Gila River in Arizona. Abert’s report of his survey of New Mexico contains twenty-four black and white lithographic views printed by C. B. Graham and represents a pioneering contribution to Southwestern archaeology and history.79 These include the first views of Santa Fé and Ácoma Pueblo, now considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States, dating back to 1075 a.d. While these lithographs do not approach the quality of those published in later reports issued by the army, they provide some of the first views of Southwestern landscapes prepared by trained illustrators and military observers. Following the cessation of hostilities with Mexico in 1848, more than one million square miles were added to the southwestern United States in the present states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and Utah and parts of New Mexico, mostly uncharted and inhabited by large numbers of native peoples. At the same time, the discovery of gold in California created a further need for a suitable transportation and communication network in the southwest. In response to these requirements, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers undertook a number of wagon road surveys from 1848 to 1852 that helped fill in some of the blank spots on Emory’s map. These efforts commenced in West Texas, with eventually more than ten separate wagon roads surveyed and mapped throughout the state. They were consolidated by Colonel Joseph E. Johnston in a map printed for Congress in 1850.80 James Hervey Simpson conducted the first wagon survey in New Mexico territory. Another product of West Point and the Corps of Topographical Engineers, Simpson was a veteran of the Seminole Wars in Florida, scientifically curious and an experienced topographer. During the decade prior to the Civil War, he probably explored and surveyed more of the Southwest than any other soldier-engineer.81 His earliest map of the region was made in 1849 when he was assigned to map a wagon road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fé, a route that would serve as a southern alternative to the Santa Fé Trail.82 The survey was carried out in conjunction with a military escort commanded by Captain Randolph B. Marcy for a train of emigrants bound for the newly discovered gold fields of California.83 This wagon road map was issued in four sections, designed for ease of use by emigrants and military units. Distances were determined by an odometer. Frémont’s cartographer, Charles Preuss, used a similar format for a road map of the Oregon Trail that he compiled for Congress in 1846 and was widely distributed to the forty-niners. Each sheet measures


13 × 22 inches and contains information essential to wagon trains, such as the location of day-to-day camp sites along the trail from Fort Smith, prominent landmarks, and the availability of wood, water, and grass. In order to meet a tight deadline imposed by his military superiors in Washington, Simpson hired two stranded and unemployed civilians to assist him in the preparation of the Santa Fé road map—Edward (Ned) and Richard Kern.84 The two brothers were gifted scientific illustrators and artists from Philadelphia who were to make four significant maps of the Southwest for the army. Trained in topographic mapping by Frémont, whom he accompanied during the latter’s second transcontinental crossing in 1845, Edward carried on the French mapping tradition introduced by Nicollet and Hassler. Three years later, Edward, Richard, and a third brother, Benjamin, a physician, accompanied Frémont’s ill-fated fourth expedition, which ended in disaster in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado during the winter of 1848–1849. One-third of the exploring party died of starvation and exposure, and Benjamin was murdered by Utes in search of revenge for an earlier army attack upon them. Following their ordeal in the mountains and blaming Frémont for the debacle, the two surviving Kern brothers left the Frémont exploring party for Taos and then Santa Fé. Richard would die five years later at the hands of a band of marauding American Indians while surveying in the Rocky Mountains with another party of soldier-engineers. Shortly after Simpson and the Kern brothers completed Simpson’s wagon road map in the summer of 1849, the trio joined a punitive expedition against hostile Navajos. Led by Colonel John M. Washington, commander of the Ninth Military Department and military governor of New Mexico, this assignment took them on a 590-mile journey deep into the Navajos’ tribal stronghold of Canyon de Chelly. Simpson had been directed to accompany Washington ‘‘to make a survey of the country as the movement of troops would permit.’’ 85 He hired the Kern brothers to assist him. Edward was responsible for preparing the field maps and final office copy that portrayed for the first time the Navajo country of northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona.86 Richard served as the expedition’s primary artist and prepared the majority of the seventy-two lithographs that appear in Simpson’s official report. At Canyon de Chelly, Simpson and the Kerns mapped and described all of the principal ruins, including Casa Blanca (see Fig. 4.6). Unable to return to the City of Washington to prepare their map and drawings for publication, Simpson and the Kern brothers completed the work in Santa Fé, ‘‘ransacking . . . almost every store in the place’’ to


4.6 Map detail of Canyon de Chelly from Lieutenant James Simpson and Edward Kern’s map of the Navajo Country of New Mexico and Arizona prepared during Colonel John M. Washington’s punitive expedition in 1849. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

find suitable drawing paper.87 The map and lithographs, including two chromolithographs, perhaps the first to appear in an official government report, were published by Peter S. Duval, a French lithographer who emigrated to Philadelphia in the 1830s.88 A pioneer in color printing and the use of the rotary steam press, Duval would go on to print a number of maps of the Southwest for the army. Three thousand copies of Simpson’s report and map were issued by the government in 1850, followed by a private printing in 1852. Taken together, the map and illustrations provided the first scientific record of the canyons, mesas, and unexplored Indian ruins of the Navajo country (see Fig. 4.7). During the ensuing two years Richard Kern was rehired by the army to survey routes and prepare maps of the region. In March 1850, he accompanied Captain Henry Bethel Judd of the Third Artillery on a reconnaissance of the Rio Pecos region, producing a manuscript map of the eastern half of New Mexico based on a compass survey with distances estimated.89 The following year he revised Edward Kern’s map of the Navajo country under the direction of 2nd Lieutenant John G. Parke, a young, inexperienced topographical engineer, who had replaced Simpson as topographical offi-

4.7 Lithograph view of ancient Pueblo ruins in Canyon de Chelly based on a drawing made by Richard H. Kern Sept. 8, 1849, during Colonel John M. Washington’s punitive expedition to Navajo Country. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.


cer for the Ninth Military Department. Parke, who would later serve with distinction as a Union corps commander during the Civil War, was delighted to have the assistance of the experienced surveyor and draftsman.90 The two next prepared their Map of the Territory of New Mexico, with Kern serving as cartographer and Parke assisting in the compilation of the data.91 The manuscript was completed on April 24, 1851. In preparing this map, the topographers drew upon the earlier surveys of Abert, Peck, Emory, Frémont, and Simpson. They also included information obtained from Kern’s personal trips and from trappers, including a map drawn by Old Bill Williams, the venerable mountain man who guided the Frémont party through the San Juan Mountains and was killed along with Richard’s brother Benjamin. The original map was drawn at a scale of one inch to 10 miles and measured nearly 6 × 7 feet. Reduced for publication in the Washington headquarters of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, the final map (Fig. 4.8) was printed at a scale of one inch to 26 miles and measures 24 × 33 inches. It provided the most comprehensive understanding to date of the geography of the region between the Pecos River in Texas and the Colorado River on the Arizona-California border. ‘‘No one else could have done this [map],’’ Kern wrote a friend, ‘‘for none other possessed the data.’’ 92 The New York publishers J & D Majors printed 3,750 copies in June 1852, which were widely distributed to frontier commanders in New Mexico and Texas.93 Richard Kern’s final map of the Southwest was a map of Reconnaissance of the Zuni, Little Colorado, and Colorado Rivers.94 At the suggestion of Simpson, the War Department dispatched a reconnaissance party under the command of Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves of the Corps of Topographical Engineers to search for a route to California along the Zuni and Colorado rivers and across the Mojave Desert.95 Sitgreaves was assisted by Parke, who was undertaking his first field expedition. Guided by mountain man Antoine Leroux and his personal servant, a Crow, the 51-man surveying party and military escort covered 658 miles from Santa Fé to Camp Yuma on the lower Colorado during the period August 13– November 19,1851.96 It was one of the most difficult military mapping expeditions carried out by the Southwestern Frontier army. Surviving Indian attacks, long waterless stretches, near starvation and scurvy, the party lost two men and most of their pack animals were slaughtered for sustenance. During the expedition, Kern was responsible for all phases of mapmaking. He calculated latitude and longitude at the base camps, determined courses, distances, and elevations, and sketched field maps, although he ceased these activities for a period of time when the party focused on sur-

4.8 Lieutenant John G. Parke and Richard Kern’s published map of the Territory of New Mexico, 1851. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.


vival rather than documentation.97 While the Sitgreaves expedition failed in its objective to locate a wagon road, it was the first to survey and map, however tentatively and inaccurately, the San Francisco Mountains and the high tablelands of central Arizona as well as the lower course of the Colorado River.98 Once again, Kern’s map was enhanced by his separate detailed drawings of the mountains, valleys, and camping sites along the route. Lithographed with Sitgreaves’ report, the drawings provided military commanders, government officials, and scientists with perspectives of important terrain features that Kern was unable to totally replicate on his map. Valley of the Little Colorado River and San Francisco Mountain and View of Cañon near Camp 39 [Sycamore Canyon], for example, display in dramatic, documentary fashion the towering elevations and deep chasms of the mountainous region, while Mountain Pass, Near Camp 31 succinctly illustrates the barren, desolate, and parched nature of the high, dry tablelands.99 During this period, the army prepared three other important military maps of the region, all under the direction of Captain Randolph B. Marcy.100 The first is titled Topographical Map of the Road from Fort Smith, Arks. to Santa Fe, N. M. and From Dona Ana N. M. to Fort Smith.101 It was prepared following Marcy’s expedition along the route from Fort Smith to Santa Fé with Simpson in 1849. Marcy’s map, much more comprehensive than Simpson’s wagon road map, covers some 2,000 miles of previously unexplored area stretching from El Paso through central Texas to Fort Smith. It portrays for the first time the southern region of the Llano Estacado, through which Marcy was guided by a Comanche (‘‘Manuel el Comanche’’). An ‘‘ocean of sand,’’ Marcy called it.102 Marcy also depicts a Comanche trail across the Llano with the notation ‘‘Said to be good route for wagons with water daily.’’ In 1852, Marcy mapped the headwaters of the Red River, a feat that had eluded a long line of military topographers stretching back to Thomas Freeman.103 He was assisted by Captain George B. McClellan, later commander of the Army of the Potomac and unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1861. McClellan was responsible for the taking the astronomical observations.104 Surveying equipment consisted of a sextant, a ‘‘pocket lever watch’’ which was faulty and led to some errors in longitude, an odometer, and a barometer. Five Delaware and Shawnee guides led the 66man party during its three months in the field. The ability of his guides to follow trails greatly impressed Marcy. ‘‘These faculties appear to be intuitive,’’ he observed, ‘‘and confined exclusively to the Indian.’’ 105 Marcy and McClellan’s official report contains sixty-six plates but, unlike the pano-


ramic views by Abert, Stanley, and the Kern brothers, these are romantic and scenic rather than descriptive and documentary. Drawn by New York lithographers Ackerman and H. Lawrence from narrative descriptions and field sketches by an unknown artist, they add little geographic or topographic information to the map or report. Marcy’s final map was a composite of his surveys and the expeditions of Emory and Sitgreaves. Measuring 28 × 60 inches, it covers the entire Southwest from the Mississippi River to the Colorado River.106 By 1853 western territorial expansion was essentially completed, and the American public demanded a railroad line that would link the Mississippi Valley with the Pacific coast. In response, Congress directed army topographical engineers to undertake a feasibility study of several proposed routes. To carry out this program, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis established a separate administrative unit within the army accountable directly to him.107 Named the Office of Pacific Railroad Explorations and Surveys, it was initially headed by Emory and later by Captain Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. Emory developed most of the procedures and directives for field operations and office work. While the routes selected reflected sectional political interests rather than practical considerations, their distribution ensured that much of the West would be surveyed and mapped. These routes included a northern route following the 47th and 49th parallels from Minnesota Territory to Puget Sound, Washington; a central route extending from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to California through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada; and two southwestern routes, one stretching from Fort Smith, Arkansas, westward along the 35th parallel to Los Angeles through present Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and Arizona, and one from east Texas westward along the 32nd parallel near the Mexican border to San Diego. The latter route was added later at the insistence of Southern congressmen who hoped to expand slavery and southern commerce westward to the Pacific coast. In addition, several surveys running parallel to the Pacific coast were undertaken in California, Oregon, and Washington. This effort culminated in a massive thirteen-volume work entitled Reports of Exploration and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.108 Volume 11 was devoted exclusively to maps. Published by the Senate and the House of Representatives between 1855 and 1861, this set constitutes the most important single contemporary source of knowledge on western geography and cartography for the midnineteenth century. An earlier three-volume octavo preliminary edition, with one volume devoted to maps, was issued in 1855.109


Six Pacific Railroad Survey field parties mapped portions of the Southwest from July 1853 to August 1855. The route following the 35th parallel was surveyed by Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple from July 13, 1853, to March 22, 1854 (Fig. 4.9).110 Whipple was a veteran army topographer and West Point graduate whose experience included working with Emory on the Canadian and Mexican boundary surveys of the United States from 1844 to 1853.111 He was assisted by Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, a recent graduate of West Point. Rounding out the mapping team were railroad engineer Albert H. Campbell, principal assistant, and six assistant surveyors and astronomers, several of whom had worked for Whipple on the Mexican Boundary Survey.112 While primarily a mapping expedition, Whipple’s party included a large civilian scientific corps selected by the Smithsonian Institution. These included John Milton Bigelow (botanist and surgeon), Caleb B. Kennerly (naturalist and physician), Jules Marcou (geologist), and Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen (artist). Their guides were Leroux and José Manuel Savedra, both of whom had some firsthand knowledge of the region. Leroux had served in a similar capacity for Cooke and Sitgreaves and had assisted Richard Kern in the preparation of his Map of the Territory of New Mexico while Savedra had participated in a Hopi raid against the Mohaves some years earlier. In addition, Whipple carried with him the earlier reports and maps of Abert, Simpson, and Marcy. For the critical region of present-day northern Arizona, he also had a tracing of Kern’s map of the Sitgreaves expedition, since neither the report nor map had yet been published.113 Whipple, like explorers before him, also relied upon local inhabitants for interpreters and guides. These included a young Mexican slave boy captured and raised by Comanches and owned by the trader Jesse Chisholm.114 Whipple’s mapping and scientific party was escorted by a company of about one hundred soldiers led by lieutenants John M. Jones and John C. Tidball. Latitude and longitude were determined primarily with a sextant and four chronometers, but an astronomical transit was also used at fourteen primary sites, which provided more accurate readings. Elevation was measured by barometers especially constructed for the expedition. Ives also determined magnetic declination at fourteen camp sites using a ‘‘magnetic inclination and intensity instrument.’’ Originally constructed in England for the use of Colonel James Graham on the northeastern boundary survey, this device was later used by Whipple and Emory during their work with the Mexican boundary survey. Whipple borrowed it from the Interior Department in order to contribute to a national magnetic data bank that was emerging from the work of Emory and Graham. During the nine months


in the field, Whipple and Ives determined some four thousand astronomical observations at 154 camp sites.115 According to Whipple, two complete sets of field sketches were made at each camp site, ‘‘one exhibiting the general features of the country, and the other the special topography in the vicinity of the route traversed.’’ 116 From these field sketches the soldier-engineers prepared a series of detailed topographical maps on a scale of nearly one inch to the mile. The large-scale field maps were then used to prepare office copies in Washington by Anton Schimmelfinnig and Maurice von Hippel, two German draftsmen employed by the Corps of Topographical Engineers.117 A preliminary copy of the map and profile was printed by Sarony in New York for inclusion in the three-volume edition of the Pacific Railroad Report published for Congress in 1855.118 Because of the hurried nature of the printing, this map contained many mistakes, particularly with regard to the placement of longitude west of Albuquerque. An extensively revised edition of the Whipple map, beautifully engraved, was printed in 1856 by the Washington engraver Selmar Siebert.119 Both the preliminary and final printings were done on two large sheets because of the enormous size of the map. The first covers the route from Fort Smith to the Rio Grande, the second extends from the Rio Grande to San Diego. The final printing includes three inset maps. Sketch of the Rio Pecos at Anton Chico is particularly interesting because it is printed at the same scale (1:60,000) as the sketch maps prepared in the field and contour lines rather than hachures are used to depict terrain, a device seldom used by the Corps of Topographical Engineers since Roberdeau’s early tests in 1823. Three expeditions were involved in mapping the 32nd parallel route. The segment from the Pima and Maricopa villages on the Gila (near present Phoenix) to the Rio Grande near El Paso was resurveyed twice by veteran topographer Parke, with Henry Custer in 1854 and with Campbell the following year.120 The route from the Rio Grande to Fort Washita on the Red River was mapped in 1854 by Captain John Pope, who later conducted artesian drilling operations on the Llano Estacado to prove his contention that the Staked Plain could be crossed by a railroad. Geographical positions were determined with a sextant and chronometer, distance along the traverse by an odometer, ‘‘which had been carefully compared with the measurements by the chain,’’ and direction by compass. Elevations were determined by measuring angles with a theodolite, a method, noted Pope, that ‘‘is unusual in the survey of lines so extended, and is a much more detailed and tedious process than that usually employed.’’ 121 The mapping of the Southwest by the Office of Pacific Railroad Ex-


4.9 Detail of Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple’s published map of his reconnaissance and survey for a Pacific Railroad route along the 35th Parallel from the Mississippi River valley to Los Angeles, 1853–1854. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

plorations and Surveys was completed by two expeditions carried out in southern California. In 1853 Lieutenant Robert S. Williamson and Parke located and mapped mountain passes in the Sierra Nevadas for the 35th and 32nd parallel routes.122 A year later Parke and Campbell traced a route west of the Coast Range from San Francisco to Los Angeles.123 Like the maps printed for Whipple, the resulting maps and profiles produced by Parke, Pope, and Williamson were also issued in preliminary editions in 1855 and revised editions at reduced scales in 1856–1857.124 In some instances, the two editions vary considerably. Parke’s 1855 map of the Gila River route, for example, which was constructed by Custer ‘‘simply from bearings taken by a prismatic compass, and distances along the route measured by a viameter [odometer],’’ was substantially improved following Parke’s second expedition, which included a sextant for determining latitude. During the second expedition Parke also mapped the range of mountains to the north of the first traverse using ‘‘a nearly continuous system of compass triangulations from peak to peak.’’ 125 The most experienced cartographer on these expeditions was Preuss, who was making


his fourth western mapping trip. He served as ‘‘draughtsman’’ with Williamson and Parke. In a passage relating to the mapping of Tejon Pass, Williamson provides a firsthand account of the processes involved in topographic field work: ‘‘Mr. [Isaac William] Smith took charge of the leveling party, while I, with Mr. Preuss, were working with chain, compass and the barometer. Mr. Preuss made sketches of the hills and ravines on either side, so that his notes, in connexion [sic] with my compass bearings, would afford the means of making an accurate topographical map of the pass.’’ 126 Preuss died before the publication of the maps, but the engraved maps of Tejon Pass and the Sierra Nevadas reflect his influence.127 Terrain is depicted by a combination of hachures and form lines. In addition to topographic maps, the Pacific Railroad Survey reports included two types of special purpose maps. Whipple’s report on Indian tribes contains woodcuts of three Indian maps, further explicit evidence that Indian maps were an important source of geographic and topographic information for soldier-engineers on the Southwestern Frontier. These include ‘‘a tracing upon the ground [of the Rio Colorado] by a Yuma (Cuchan) Indian, giving the names and positions of various tribes as indicated by him’’; a map of the Río Colorado traced by a Paiute; and one showing the positions of the Pueblos in New Mexico.128 Twelve pioneering hand-colored geologic maps and cross sections of the traverse routes were compiled by Thomas Antisell with the Parke expedition, by French geologist Jules Marcou with Whipple, and by William Blake, a protégé of James Hall, who was with Williamson.129 Appearing in 1856, these were the first printed maps of the Southwest to depict rock formations derived from fossil-based stratigraphic methods. The most significant was Geological Map of the Route explored by Lieut. A. W. Whipple . . . near the Parallel of 35° North Latitude from the Mississippi River to the Pacific and its accompanying geological cross section of the same traverse. It was completed by Blake from notes left behind by Marcou, who had returned to Paris unexpectedly. This map and profile unfortunately quickly became embroiled in an international controversy that eventually included James Hall, one of America’s leading geologists and author of the first comprehensive geological map of the West (1857–1858).130 Once again, landscape views were used to add three-dimensional visual form to the survey projected upon the map. Whipple’s report, for example, includes 87 full-page color lithographs and black and white woodcuts. The majority were drawn by Möllhausen, a German artist and naturalist sent to America by Humboldt to record the American West for science and the German public. Möllhausen’s skill as a topographic artist was shaped by


Duke Paul of Württemberg, a major general in the Prussian army whom he accompanied on a trip along the Oregon Trail in 1851.131 Tidball contributed at least five lithographic views, Campbell three, and Whipple one.132 Williamson’s report contains 26 lithographs and 59 wood engravings by Charles Koppel and Blake.133 Most of the drawings are closely integrated with text and map.134 In addition to depicting landscape features, several drawings illustrate the surveyors and mapmakers at work. Koppel’s Entrance of Livermore’s Pass, for example, shows men determining the course of the traverse using a prismatic compass on a small tripod.135 Campbell’s Valley of the Gila & Sierra de Las Estrellas from the Maricopa Wells portrays an instrument wagon and a surveyor sketching or writing his report. Like the maps, the color lithographs were printed by three different engraving firms: Sarony, Major, and Knapp, New York; T. Sinclair, Philadelphia; and A. Hoen, Baltimore. The final contribution of the Office of Pacific Railroad Surveys to geographic and topographic knowledge of the Southwest was its Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean,136 compiled under the direction of Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren from guidelines prepared by Emory (Fig. 4.10).137 A West Point graduate and topographical engineer, Warren spent nearly three years in the effort. First published in 1857 and revised in 1858, this map represents the earliest comprehensive topographic treatment of the entire West based on field surveys. A third revision was issued under Edward Freyhold’s name and published by Julius Bien in 1868. Measuring 45 × 42 inches, it depicts information one might expect to find on a military map that could be used for strategic as well as commercial purposes. These include existing and projected roads, military forts and towns, and the hunting grounds of western Indians. Terrain features were depicted by hachures, originally inked by Edward Freyhold and Friedrich von Egloffstein, a Prussian-trained topographer who had served as chief topographer for the central route of the Pacific Railroad Surveys. Immensely popular, it was widely copied by commercial publishers and used by the military as its principal base map of the West for several decades. While the primary data used to compile this map were derived from the Pacific Railroad surveys of 1853 to 1855, Warren incorporated detailed information from more than forty western military and government surveys, dating from the time of Lewis and Clark to the General Land Office surveys of the late 1850s. An accompanying 105-page memoir by Warren described each of these expeditions, with his assessment as to their merit, along with a description of the method used in the map’s compilation.138


4.10 Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren’s master map of the West. Published in 1857 by the Office of Pacific Railroad Surveys, it was based on more than 40 army exploratory expeditions spanning some 50 years. Congressional Serial Set Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

In keeping with the general policy established by Nicollet, Frémont, and Emory, areas lacking information were left blank and areas where data was available but its reliability questionable were depicted with faint lines. The southwestern portion of Warren’s map reflects the surveys and maps prepared by the soldier-engineers already discussed. Warren found that the most accurate were Emory’s Mexican boundary survey and Parke’s surveys in California and along the 32nd parallel. The first edition of Warren’s map incorporated data from Whipple’s 1855 preliminary map, which contained errors in nearly all of its longitude positions. These were corrected in time for Warren’s 1858 revised edition. The survey that Warren found most difficult to plot on his master map was prepared by McClellan during the Marcy expedition. McClellan placed the eastern front of the


Llano Estacado and the sources of the Red River from 10 to 100 miles too far west depending upon the critic.139 Following the publication of Warren’s comprehensive map, two major areas of the West remained unexplored and unmapped—the Colorado Plateau and the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in the northern Rocky Mountains. In an effort to map the Colorado Plateau, the Corps of Topographical Engineers sent out a small expedition in 1858 under the command of Ives, who had assisted Whipple on the 35th parallel survey. Ives was accompanied by the Egloffstein and Möllhausen.140 The exploring party navigated the lower Colorado River by boat and traversed the Colorado Plateau region. In the course of this expedition, its members became the first Anglo-Americans to reach the floor of the Grand Canyon (which they called the ‘‘Big Canyon’’). Captured in a famous lithographic drawing by Egloffstein, this event has been characterized by Western historian William Goetzmann as ‘‘a sublime moment in the history of American exploration.’’ 141 Writing years later, Möllhausen remembered that ‘‘The view left us speechless, and with feelings of admiring veneration we strode further until our feet rested on sand dampened through the river’s volition.’’ 142 A second expedition soon followed to extend the mapping of the Colorado Plateau. It was led by Captain John N. Macomb, who surveyed the confluence of the San Juan, Grand, and Colorado rivers. One of the most enduring products of these two expeditions are three innovative shaded relief maps that portrayed for the first time in a realistic manner the maze of canyons, tablelands, mesas, and domes that characterize the Colorado River region.143 They were constructed by Egloffstein using an engraving technique and a mathematical and artistic framework of his design that provided the impression ‘‘of a small plaster model of the country, with the light falling upon it at a particular angle.’’ Egloffstein conceived of this idea while he was preparing topographic field sketches with the Ives expedition and observed the play of light and shadows on the mountains and valleys of northern Arizona.144 The first map engraved in this manner was Map [of the] Rio Colorado of the West (five sections on two sheets), which was based on topographic field drawings prepared by Egloffstein during the Ives expedition (see detail, Plate 8).145 Impressed with the results obtained for Ives, Macomb petitioned his superiors to contract with Egloffstein to engrave his Map of Explorations and Surveys in New Mexico and Utah in the same manner.146 Topographic data for this map was derived from sketch maps of the route prepared by Charles H. Dimmock, a civilian topographer with the Macomb survey. In drawing the raised relief portions of his maps, Egloffstein used specimen photographs


of different plaster of Paris models of mountains as guides for applying the proper tone of shading to illustrate different terrain elevations. ‘‘Instead of injuring the eyesight of the draftsman and engraver, as the drawing of fine hachures inevitably does by the other modes,’’ Egloffstein noted, ‘‘this style leads to the free use of the estompe [stump] for drawing, and the aquantinta style for engraving purposes.’’ 147 While Ives incorrectly credited this technique to the French, Egloffstein acknowledges his debt to Humboldt and the Prussian Army engineer F. Chauvin.148 Disabled during the Civil War as regimental commander, Egloffstein entered the printing business in New York City and is credited with inventing the halftone printing process.149 The two expeditions led by Ives and Macomb were the last western mapping expeditions undertaken by Corps of Topographical Engineers, which was disbanded in 1863 and merged with the Corps of Engineers as the requirements of the Civil War took precedent over western exploration and mapping. In a little more than five decades a small number of soldier-engineers and civilian draftsmen and artists greatly expanded the army’s geographic and topographic knowledge of the American Southwest. During this period they participated in some thirty-five exploratory field surveys and prepared a series fundamental and interrelated maps, topographic drawings, and textual reports published by Congress for wide distribution. The surveys were led by soldier-engineers trained in the French scientific method and English/American topographic traditions at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. This was reinforced through field techniques introduced by Nicollet and promoted by Frémont and Emory. The field maps, topographic drawings, and final office copies were primarily prepared and engraved under army contract by skilled civilian draftsmen and artists, the majority of whom were foreign born. Their work laid the foundation for the post–Civil War geographic and geologic surveys of the Southwest.

notes The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of James Flatness, Ronald Grim, Robert Locke, and Edward Redmond of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 1. Col. John J. Abert to W. L. Marcy, Secretary of War, ‘‘Report of the Chief, Topographical Engineers,’’ Nov. 17, 1848 (HED 1, 30th Cong., 2nd sess.) (Serial 537), p. 325.

114 u ralph e. ehrenberg This report is reproduced in Adrian George Traas, From The Golden Gate to Mexico City: The U.S. Army Topographical Engineers in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington, DC: Office of History, Corps of Engineers and Center of Military History, 1993), 320. 2. The maps are reproduced in Gary E. Moulton, ed., Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). See also Herman R. Friis, ‘‘Cartographic and Geographic Activities of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,’’ Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 44 (November, 1954): 338–351; Gary E. Moulton, ‘‘Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Cartographers on the Columbia River,’’ in William F. Willingham and Leonoor Swets Ingraham, eds., Enlightenment Science in the Pacific Northwest: The Lewis and Clark Expedition (Portland, OR: Dynagraphics, 1984), 19– 25; ‘‘A Special Cartographic Issue: The Maps of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,’’ We Proceeded On: The Official Publication of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc., 9 (March 1983). 3. John Francis McDermott, ed., ‘‘The Western Journals of Dr. George Hunter, 1796–1805,’’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 53 (1963): 72–80; Gary S. Dunbar, ‘‘William Dunbar,’’ Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, 19 (2000): 27–36. 4. An account of this expedition along with an introduction is found in Dan L. Flores, ed., Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); Joseph A. Stout Jr., ‘‘Thomas Freeman,’’ American National Biography, 8 (1999): 449– 450. 5. Ralph Ehrenberg, ‘‘Nicholas King: First Surveyor of the City of Washington, 1803–1812,’’ Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C. (1969– 1970), 31–65. 6. King’s manuscript maps are filed in the National Archives and Records Administration, Cartographic Archives Division, Records of the Corps of Engineers, Headquarters Map File (hereafter RG 77, NARA), M33 and M35. King’s map of the Washita River is reproduced in McDermott, ‘‘The Western Journals,’’ 72–80. A redrawing of King’s original map of the Red River is found in Flores, Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration, 92–93. 7. Samuel Latham Mitchell, ‘‘An Account of a journey up the Washita (or Ouachita) River, in Louisiana, performed by William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter,’’ The Medical Repository, 9 (1806): 307. 8. Pike’s map of the Mississippi River and his journal are reproduced in Donald Jackson, Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike With Letters and Related Documents (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), vol. 1, following p. 68 and plates 50–59. Pike’s original map, drawn by Antoine Nau, was redrawn by Nicholas King and engraved by Francis Shallus in 1806. 9. James Wilkinson to Pike, June 24, 1806, in Jackson, Journals of Pike, 286. 10. While in Chihuahua, Pike was quartered with Juan Pedro Walker, an ensign in the Spanish cavalry who served as Pike’s translator. A native of New Orleans, Walker

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 115 had assisted Andrew Ellicott in surveying the southern boundary between the United States and Spain from 1796 to 1800. Before learning that Walker had become a Spanish national, Jefferson proposed that Walker accompany Dunbar on his exploration of the Red River. Walker prepared several manuscript maps of the American Southwest, including one that incorporated information obtained from Pike. Jackson, Journals of Pike, 1:413–414, 422; Carl Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West: From Lewis and Clark to Fremont, 1804–1845, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1958), 1:131 and 2:64–68. 11. Jackson, Journals of Pike, 1:451–462; Wheat, Mapping, 2:16–27 (the maps are reproduced following p. 24). Pike’s original field maps were found in Mexico City by Western historian Herbert Eugene Bolton and returned to the United States in 1910. They are now housed in Pike Papers, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, NARA, and reproduced in Jackson, Journals of Pike, vol. 2, plates 9–32. 12. Isaac Roberdeau and John Anderson to the Secretary of War, January 15, 1816, ‘‘Memoir,’’ Bulky File, Box 26, File 207, RG 77, NARA; Henry P. Beers, ‘‘A History of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, 1813–1863,’’ The Military Engineer, 35 (June–July, 1942): 287–291, 348–352; and Edward Burr, Historical Sketch of the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, 1775–1865, The Engineer Paper School, United States Army, Occasional Paper 71 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1939), 35–37. 13. Roberdeau Buchanan, Genealogy of the Roberdeau Family (Washington, DC: Joseph L. Pearson, 1876), 113; Dictionary of American Biography, 15:646–647; Pamela Scott, ‘‘Isaac Roberdeau,’’ American National Biography, 18 (1999): 590–592. 14. Garry David Ryan, War Department Topographical Bureau, 1831–1836: An Administrative History (University of Michigan Dissertation Services, 1968), 29; General Simon Bernard to Isaac Roberdeau, January 10, 1824, manuscript copy in Isaac Roberdeau, ‘‘Report respecting the United States Topographical Engineers, from the establishment of that branch of the Army in March 1813,’’ Bulky File, Box, 14, RG 77, NARA. 15. Herman R. Friis, ‘‘Highlights of the History of the Use of Conventionalized Symbols and Signs on Large-scale Nautical Charts of the United States Government,’’ Bulletin de L’Institut Océanographique Fondation Albert I er, Prince De Monaco, 2 (1968): 229. General Bernard was one of several French military engineers appointed to high position in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by a president and Congress concerned with America’s lack of coastal defenses following its second war with England. His appointment, however, was unpopular within the Corps of Engineers and resulted in the resignations of the chief and assistant chief of engineers, along with four other high ranking officers. See Burr, Historical Sketch, 23, and Ryan, War Department Topographical Bureau, 35. 16. See, for example, Henry S. Tanner, ‘‘Geographical Memoir,’’ A New American Atlas (Philadelphia, 1823), 12. 17. Gouverneur K. Warren, ‘‘Memoir to Accompany the Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. . . . ,’’ in Reports of Explorations and Surveys To Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for

116 u ralph e. ehrenberg a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, 1853–56 (SED 78, 36th Cong. 2nd sess., 1861) (Serial 768), or (HED 91, 36th Cong. 2nd Sess., 1861) (Serial 801), vol. 11, pp. 22–23; Wheat, Mapping, 66–67. Roberdeau’s map is filed as AMA 6, RG 77, NARA, and reprinted at a reduced size in Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ plate II. 18. For a complete list of Army sponsored topographic expeditions from 1804 to 1879, see Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 23–86, and George M. Wheeler, Report Upon the Third International Geographical Congress and Exhibition at Venice, Italy, 1881 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1885), 465–466. The standard works on the subject of army topographical engineers are William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959); William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966); W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1952), and, for the post–Civil War period, Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962). A well-illustrated popular account of the army’s role in western exploration is Herman J. Viola, Exploring the West (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987). 19. Untitled Instructions for Young Officers, Letters Received, B1114–1830, RG 77, NARA, pp. 1–3. 20. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 23–86; Untitled Instructions for Young Officers, 9. 21. Quoted in Robert V. Hine, Edward Kern and American Expansion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 17. 22. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 68; Gerald Thompson, Edward F. Beale and the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 105–110. 23. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 46; Henry Gannett, ‘‘The Mother Maps of the United States,’’ National Geographic 4 (1892): 104; and Rollie Schafer, ‘‘Finding the Way and Fixing the Boundary: The Science and Art of Western Map Making, As Exemplified by William H. Emory and His Colleagues of the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers’’ (presented at A Sesquicentennial Mexican War Symposium, October 2– 3, 1997, Fort Gibson, Oklahoma), 2–5. The latter is available on the Internet at URL www.topogs.org/Finding.htm. 24. William Couper, Claudius Crozet: Soldier-Scholar-Educator-Engineer (1789– 1864) (Charlottesville, VA: Historical Publishing Co., 1936), 7–8; Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 14–15. The French influence was commented upon by the German geographer Johann C. Kohl during his visit to West Point: ‘‘I was struck by the fact that all the examples and models for the use of the pupils are from France, and I was told that in the method of teaching drawing, as well as in other branches of instruction, wherever the system is not an original American one, it is taken from the French.’’ Kohl, Travels in Canada and Through the States of New York and Pennsylvania (London, 1861), 15. 25. Quoted in John Francis McDermott, Seth Eastman: Pictorial Historian of the Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 12.

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 117 26. The Centennial of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, 1802–1902, The West Point Military Library series (New York: Greenwood Press, 1970), 1:291–292; James L. Morrison Jr., ‘‘The Best School in the World’’: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866, 162. 27. Marilyn Anne Kindred, The Army Officer Corps and the Arts: Artistic Patronage and Practice in America, 1820–85 (University Microfilms International, 1981), 87; Michael Bell, Image of Canada (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1972), 124–128; Peggy and Harold Samuels, Samuels’ Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1885), 517–518. 28. All British officer-cadets attending the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich beginning in the 1790s were taught landscape drawing under the direction of some of England’s leading watercolorists, including Paul and Thomas Sandby, and many used this art form to record their work and travels in Canada and India. Kindred, Army Officer Corps, 6. 29. Seth Eastman, Treatise on Topographical Drawing (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1837), iii–iv. Eastman was an accomplished artist and illustrator as well as soldier. He is best known for his paintings of Indians and their way of life during frontier assignments in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Florida. In 1849, he illustrated his wife’s book, Mary Eastman, Dahcotah: Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (New York, 1849), which furnished the inspiration for Longfellow’s poem ‘‘Song of Hiawatha’’ (1855). Later, working with Edward Kern, he illustrated Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s six-volume work Historical and Statistical Information Respecting . . . the Indian Treaties of the United States (Washington, DC, 1851–57). See McDermott, ‘‘The Western Journals,’’ 23, 41, and William H. Goetzmann et al., The West as Romantic Horizon (Omaha, NE: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981), 43. 30. Richard S. Smith, A Manual of Topographical Drawing (New York: John Wiley, 1854; 2nd ed., 1869), 62. Smith later became a professor of mathematics, engineering, and drawing and ended his career at the U.S. Naval Academy. George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point (New York, 1868), 1:458. 31. Untitled bound atlas presented to Col. William Turnbull, Dec. 18, 1846, by Captain Charles Moering, Vienna, Cartographic Archives Division, Misc. 45, RG 77, NARA; Ralph Ehrenberg, The Earth Revealed: Aspects of Geologic Mapping. Catalog of the Exhibition (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, 1989), 18–19. 32. Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1846–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 6. 33. Roger L. Nichols and Patrick L. Halley, Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1980), 23–26; Richard G. Wood, Stephen Harriman Long, 1784–1864: Army Engineer, Explorer, Inventor (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966), 26–57. 34. Graham went on to a distinguished career as an Army astronomer and surveyor, serving on many national and state commissions to establish boundaries, including

118 u ralph e. ehrenberg the U.S. and Texas (1839–1840), U.S. and British Canada (1840–1847), the Mason and Dixon Line (1849–1850), and U.S. and Mexico (1850–1851). Swift had entered West Point at the age of twelve in 1813 and graduated during the expedition. After a thirtyyear army career spent mostly as a topographical engineer assigned to coast survey work and internal improvement, he became a railroad executive. Dictionary of American Biography, 7:476 and 18:249–250. 35. Edwin James (comp.), Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819 and '20, by Order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Sec’y of War; Under the Command of Major Stephen H. Long (Philadelphia; H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823), 1:iv–v. 36. Swift calculated that the summit at Pike’s Peak was 8,500 feet high from his point of observation, which he guessed to be about 3,000 feet above sea level. Using a barometer in 1843, Captain John C. Frémont determined that Swift’s point of observation was 6,000 feet above sea level, for a total elevation of 14,500 feet. The actual height is 14,110 feet. See Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 23–24; Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (1955), 883. 37. It appears that Long prepared two large manuscript maps: (1) A map now lost that was drawn on eight large sheets at a scale of 25 miles to the inch was described by Henry Schenck Tanner in 1823 as ‘‘executed in a style of neatness seldom surpassed’’ (Tanner, ‘‘Geographical Memoir,’’ 7–8) and (2) ‘‘This Map of the Country situated between the Meridian of Washington City and the Rocky Mountains exhibiting the route of the late Exploring Expedition commanded by Maj. Long . . . ,’’ drawn at a scale of 36 miles to the inch and measuring 54 ½ × 48 ¾ inches. The latter map is filed as US 62, RG 77, NARA and described and reproduced in Herman R. Friis, ‘‘Stephen H. Long’s Unpublished Manuscript Map of the United States Compiled in 1820–1822(?),’’ California Geographer (1967): 75–87. 38. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 23–24; Wheat, Mapping, 2:77–81, 226. 39. G. Malcolm Lewis, ‘‘Early American Exploration and the Cis-Rocky Mountain Desert, 1803–1823,’’ Great Plains Journal 5 (Fall 1965), 6. Another view of the lasting impact of Long’s concept of the ‘‘Great American Desert’’ is found in Martyn J. Bowden, ‘‘The Great American Desert and the American Frontier, 1800–1882: Popular Images of the Plains and Phases in the Westward Movement,’’ in Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth–Century Social History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 48–79. 40. John Francis McDermott, ‘‘Samuel Seymour: Pioneer Artist of the Plains and the Rockies,’’ Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institutions, 1950 (Washington, DC:, GPO, 1951), 497–498. 41. Patricia Trenton and Peter H. Hassrick, The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 20–30. 42. Mary M. Thomas, ‘‘John James Abert,’’ American National Biography, 1 (1999): 42–43. 43. Beers, ‘‘A History of Topographical Engineers,’’ 289–291. 44. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 10.

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 119 45. Wheat, Mapping, 2:161, 247; Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 37. 46. John J. Abert, Chief of Engineers, Topographical Bureau, Letters Sent, M506, RG 77, NARA: Abert to Joseph N. Nicollet, December 28, 1837; Abert to Nicollet, January 11. 1818; Abert to Joel R. Poinsett, January 17, 1838. These letters are also found in Edmund C. Bray and Martha Coleman Bray, Joseph N. Nicollet on the Plains and Prairies: The Expeditions of 1838–39 With Journals, Letters, and Notes on the Dakota Indians (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1976), 212–216. 47. Joseph N. Nicollet, Report Intended to Illustrate a Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River (26th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Doc. No. 237) (Washington, DC, 1843), 3. 48. Martha Coleman Bray, Joseph Nicollet and His Map (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1980), 196. 49. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 39–42; Dale Morgan, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont: Map Portfolio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970). A full-size facsimile of the 1843 edition is found in Morgan’s Map Portfolio, Map 1. 50. Frémont was Nicollet’s assistant in the field during the 1838 and 1839 seasons and, when Nicollet fell ill, completed the compilation of the original map published in 1842 at a scale of 1:600,000. Emory reduced and compiled the copy published by the Senate at a scale of 1:200,000 in 1843 and by the House of Representatives in 1845. Later, Frémont and Emory were to become bitter antagonists in part over Frémont’s use of one of Emory’s maps without proper acknowledgement. Bray, Joseph Nicollet and His Map, 263–271; Morgan, Expeditions of Frémont: Map Portfolio, 7–10; Mary Lee Spence, ed., The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, vol. 3, Travels from 1848–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 496. 51. John C. Frémont, Report of The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–'44 (Washington, DC: House of Representatives, 1845), 3. 52. Morgan, Expeditions of Frémont: Map Portfolio, 13; John C. Frémont, Geographical Memoir Upon Upper California in Illustration of his Map of Oregon and California, reprinted with Introductions by Allan Nevins and Dale L. Morgan (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1964), 7–12. 53. Erwin G. and Elisabeth K. Gudde, trans. and eds., Charles Preuss: Exploring with Frémont (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), xxii. 54. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 83. 55. Wolfgang L. G. Joerg, ‘‘August Hoen,’’ Dictionary of American Biography, 9:107–108; Walter W. Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 300. 56. Quoted in Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 117. 57. While Abert and Peck’s expedition was constantly followed by Indians, they were not attacked probably because Hatcher and Greenwood were adopted members of the Kiowa tribe. While the Kiowa and Comanche were deadly enemies of Texans, they apparently were less hostile to Americans at this particular time. This is corroborated by an amusing story reported by Abert. According to a Kiowa informant, the

120 u ralph e. ehrenberg Kiowa had planned to attack the surveying party, which they believed were ‘‘ ‘their enemies the Texans.’ ’’ [The Kiowa] ‘‘had remained near our camp [one] night in order to satisfy themselves,’’ Abert noted. ‘‘One of them had crawled in the shadow of the ravine to within ten feet of our tent, where he lay quietly [observing one of our sentries]. Determined to improve so fine an opportunity of revenging himself on one whom he considered as an enemy, he fitted his arrow to the bow string and drew it to the head; but, he added, ‘Here my heart whispered to me that he might be an American, and I did not shoot.’ ’’ Quoted in James W. Abert, Through the Country of the Comanche Indians in the Fall of the Year 1845: The Journal of a U.S. Army Expedition Led by Lieutenant James W. Abert of the Topographical Engineers, Artist Extraordinary Whose Paintings of Indians and Their Wild West Illustrate This Book, ed. John Galvin (San Francisco: John Howell, 1970), 38. 58. James W. Abert and William G. Peck, ‘‘Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Southern Rocky Mountains made under the orders of Captain J. C. Fremont U.S. Topographical Engineers and conducted by Lieut. J. W. Abert, assisted by Lieut. W. G. Peck, U.S. T. E. during the year 1845.’’ (SED 438, 29th Cong., 1st sess.) (Serial 477). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 50–51; Wheat, Mapping, 2:194; Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 136. Reduced reproductions are found in Wheat, Mapping, vol. 2, facing p. 193, and Galvin, ed., Through the Country of the Comanche Indians, facing p. 68. 59. Wheat, Mapping, 2:194. Two manuscript versions of this map are filed as Misc. 21–1 and Misc. 21–2, RG 77, NARA. 60. Abert and Peck, ‘‘Map Showing the Route . . . ,’’ notes; Galvin, ed., Through the Country, 2, 47. Eyewitness accounts of contemporary reports describing the preparation of Indian maps and their value to nineteenth-century travelers and soldiers on the Southwestern Frontier are rare, but several have been reported. See John C. Ewers, ‘‘The Making and Use of Maps by Plains Indian Warriors,’’ By Valor and Arms: The Journal of American Military History, 3 (1977): 40–42. 61. John Miller Morris, El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536–1860 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1997), 259. 62. Galvin, ed., Through the Country, 14. 63. Ibid., 17. 64. Trenton and Hassrick, The Rocky Mountains, 46, plate 18; Galvin, ed., Through the Country, 12; David J. Weber, Richard H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in the Far Southwest 1848–1853 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), 223. 65. Cullum, Biographical Register, 1:71. 66. Emory’s role with the Army of the West is treated in the following recent works: Norman J. Thrower, ‘‘William H. Emory and the Mapping of the American Southwest Borderlands,’’ Terrae Incognitae: The Journal for the History of Discoveries 22 (1990): 67–88; Traas, From the Golden Gate, 63–84; and L. David Norris, James C. Milligan, and Odie B. Frank, William H. Emory, Soldier-Scientist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 35–64.

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 121 67. William H. Emory, ‘‘Map of Texas and the Countries Adjacent, Compiled in the Bureau of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, From the Best Authorities, for the State Department, Under the direction of Colonel J. J. Abert, Chief of the Corps’’ (Washington, DC: W. J. Stone, 1844); William H. Emory, ‘‘Memoir to Accompany the Map of Texas,’’ Public Documents printed by order of the Senate of the United States, vol. 5, no. 341 (Washington, DC, 1844), 55–63; Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 43; Wheat, Mapping, 190, 262–263, map reproduced opposite p. 184; Martin and Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 153, map reproduced as plate 33. 68. William H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance [sic], from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, Including Parts of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers (House Exec. Doc 41, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 1848) (Serial), 8–9; Traas, ‘‘Geographical Memoir,’’ 67 n. 6. 69. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, 10, 45; Traas, ‘‘Geographical Memoir,’’ 74. William H. Warner graduated from West Point in 1836 and served in the Corps of Topographical Engineers from 1838 until his death in 1849. He was killed during an Indian attack while surveying and mapping mountain passes in the Sierra Nevada during the Pacific Railroad Surveys. Cullum, Biographical Register, 1:498–499. 70. William H. Emory, ‘‘Military Reconnaissance of the Arkansas, Rio Del Norte and Rio Gila by W. H. Emory, Lieut. Top. Engrs. Assisted from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fé by Lieuts. J. W. Abert and W. G. Peck, and from Santa Fé to San Diego on the Pacific by Lieut. W. H. Warner and Mr. Norman Bestor, Made in 1846–7, with the advance guard of the ‘Army of the West.’ Under Command of Brig. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny. Constructed under the orders of Col. J. J. Abert, Ch. Corps Top. Engrs. 1847. Drawn by Joseph Welch.’’ (Baltimore: E. Weber, 1847). A similar version was issued by C. B. Graham, Lithographers, Washington. The map is described in Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 51–52; Wheat, Mapping, 3:6–7; and Thrower, ‘‘William H. Emory,’’ 82–87. Portions of it are reproduced in Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, facing p. 4, and in Thrower, ‘‘William H. Emory,’’ 83, 86. 71. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, 56. 72. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 51. 73. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, 8, 11. The Chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers was so impressed by Emory’s official report that he recommended it as a model for later expedition leaders. In instructions to Capt. Howard Stansbury on April 11, 1849, for example, Colonel Abert wrote: ‘‘A good example of the report which will be expected on this subject, will be found in the report of Major Emory of his route to California.’’ Brigham D. Madsen, Exploring the Great Salt Lake: The Stansbury Expedition of 1849–50 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), 6. 74. James W. Abert and William G. Peck, ‘‘Map of the Territory of New Mexico, made by order of Brig. Gen. S. W. Kearny, under instructions from Lieut. W. H. Emory, U.S. T. E. by Lieut’s J. W. Abert and W. G. Peck, U.S. T. E. 1846–7’’ (Washington: War Department and C. B. Graham’s Lith.). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 52–53; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, p. 5, map reproduced facing p. 3. 75. Examples of sketch maps of Taos prepared by Peck are filed with Emory to

122 u ralph e. ehrenberg Abert, Sept. 25, 1846, Letters Received, Topographical Engineers, RG 77, NARA. See Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 145. 76. ‘‘Sketch of part of the march & wagon road of Lt. Colonel Cooke, from Santa Fe to the Pacific Ocean, 1846–7’’ (Philadelphia: P. S. Duval, Lithy.). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 53; Wheat, Mapping, 3:5–6. 77. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, 114; Ralph Ehrenberg, John A. Wolter, and Charles A. Burroughs, ‘‘Surveying and Charting the Pacific Basin,’’ Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis (eds.), Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 174. 78. Stanley’s career is discussed in Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850–1900 (New York: Bonanza Books, 1953), 1–21, and in Trenton and Hassrick, The Rocky Mountains, 78–85. 79. James W. Abert, A Report and Map of the Examination of New Mexico, in the year 1846–47, while attached to the command of General Kearny (SED 23, 30th Cong., 1st sess.) (Serial 517) (Washington: C. B. Graham Printers, 1849). 80. Robert Sidney Martin, ‘‘United States Army Mapping in Texas, 1848–50,’’ in Dennis Reinhartz and Charles C. Colby, The Mapping of the American Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 37–56. 81. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 403. 82. James H. Simpson, ‘‘Map of Route Pursued bv U.S. Troops from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fé, New Mexico, via South Side of Canadian River in the 1849. Whilst serving as an Escort to a party of California Emigrants. Escort commanded and location and construction of road erected by Capt. R. B. Marcy 5th Inf. . . . Exploration and Survey of the route by 1st Lieut. James H. Simpson, Corps U.S. Topl. Engrs.’’ (SED 12, 31 Cong., 1st sess.) (Baltimore: E. Weber, 1850) (Serial 554). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 54; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, pp. 11–12, sheet 4 reproduced facing p. 8. 83. W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952, 1965), 24–26. 84. Hine, Edward Kern, 71. 85. Quoted in David J. Weber, Richard H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in the Far Southwest, 1848–1853 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1985), 75. 86. James H. Simpson, ‘‘Map of the Route pursued in 1849 by the U.S. Troops, under the command of Bvt. Lieut. Col. Jno. M Washington, Governor of New Mexico, in an expedition against the Navajos Indians . . .’’ (Philadelphia: P. S. Duval’s Steam Press, 1850) (SED 64, 31st Cong., 1st sess.) (Serial 562); Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 55; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, pp. 16–17, map reproduced facing p. 9. 87. James H. Simpson, Journal of a military reconnaissance from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Navaho country, made with the troops under the command of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel John M. Washington, chief of the 9th military department, and governor of New Mexico, in 1849, April 11, 1850 (SED 64, 31st Cong., 1st sess.) (Serial 562), 57. 88. Walter W. Ristow, ‘‘Lithography and Maps, 1796–1850,’’ in David Woodward, Five Centuries of Map Printing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 109–

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 123 110; Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Chromolithography, 1840–1900: Pictures for a 19th–Century America (Boston: David R. Godine, 1979), 23–27. 89. Richard H. Kern, ‘‘Map of a Military Reconnaissance of the Rio Pecos (as far as the Bosque Grande) under the Command of Bvt. Capt. Henry B. Judd, Third Art’y by order of Bvt. Col. John Munroe, Commanding 9th Mil. Dept. Surveyed & Drawn by Richard Kern. Santa Fe, N. M. 1850,’’ manuscript map filed as US 148, RG 77, NARA. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 60; Wheat, Mapping, 3:17–18; Weber, Richard H. Kern, 125–127. A facsimile is reproduced in Frank McNitt, ‘‘Fort Sumner: A Study in Origins,’’ New Mexico Historical Review, 45 (April 1970), between pp. 104 and 105. 90. Wheat, Mapping, 3:18–19; Weber, Richard H. Kern, 130; William Marvel, ‘‘John Grubb Parke,’’ American National Biography, 17 (1999): 11–12. 91. John G. Parke and Richard H. Kern, ‘‘Map of the Territory of New Mexico. Compiled by Bvt. 2nd Lt. Jno. G. Parke, U.S. T. E. assisted by Mr. Richard H. Kern by order of Bvt. Col. Jno. Munroe, U.S. A. [Army]. Comdg. 9th Mil. Dept., drawn by R. H. Kern. Santa Fé, N. M. 1851.’’ (New York City: J & D Major [engraver]). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 60; Wheat, Mapping, 3:19–22, 311; Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 248– 249; Weber, Richard H. Kern, 130–134. Reproduced in Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, facing p. 11. 92. [R. Kern] to ‘‘My Dear Friend,’’ September 20, 1851, Zuni, Private Collection of Fred W. Cron and Helen Cron. Quoted in Weber, Richard H. Kern, 131. 93. J. J. Abert to J & D Major, Engraver, New York, June 9, 1852, Letters Sent, Topographical Bureau, RG 77, NARA. 94. Lorenzo Sitgreaves, ‘‘Reconnaissance of the Zuni, Little Colorado, and Colorado Rivers. Made in 1851 under the direction of Col. J. J. Abert, Chief of Corps Topographical Engineers by Bvt. Capt. L. Sitgreaves, T. E. Assisted by Lieut. J. G. Parke, T. E., and Mr. R. H. Kern. Drawn by R. H. Kern. 1852’’ (New York City: Ackerman, Lith., 1852) (SED 59, 32nd Cong., 2nd sess.) (Serial 668). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 61; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, pp. 22–24, map reproduced facing p. 10. 95. Lorenzo Sitgreaves, Report of an expedition down the Zuñi and Colorado rivers (Washington, 1853) (SED 59, 32nd Cong., 2nd sess.) (Serial 668). Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 244–249; Andrew Wallace, ‘‘Across Arizona to the Big Colorado: The Sitgreaves Expedition of 1851,’’ Arizona and the West: A Quarterly Journal of History, 26 (1984): 325–364. 96. A noted trapper and guide and wealthy landowner, Leroux was born in St. Louis to French–Canadian and Hispanic parents. He settled in New Mexico about 1822, later marrying an heiress of a large Mexican land grant. Following the Sitgreaves survey, he continued to guide government expeditions until his death in Taos in 1861. Forbes Parkhill, ‘‘Antoine Leroux,’’ in Leroy R. Hafen, ed., The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (Glendale, CA, 1966), vol. 4. 97. Weber, Richard H. Kern, 162–163, 168; Wallace, ‘‘Across Arizona,’’ 359. 98. Some of the inaccuracies associated with this expedition were due to damage to the box chronometer, which stopped because of the ‘‘roughness’’ of the travel. Sitgreaves, Report of an expedition, 11; Wallace, ‘‘Across Arizona,’’ 363–364.

124 u ralph e. ehrenberg 99. These lithographs are reproduced in Weber, Richard H. Kern, figs. 86, 90, and 96. 100. Marcy graduated from West Point in 1832. He spent many years as an infantry officer on the frontier and publishing several popular books on his experiences, including The Prairie Traveler (1859) and Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (1865). He rose to the rank of general, and died in 1887. ‘‘Randolph Barnes Marcy,’’ Dictionary of American Biography, 12:274. 101. Randolph B. Marcy, ‘‘Topographical Map of the Road From Fort Smith, Arks. to Santa Fe, N. M. and From Dona Ana N. M. to Fort Smith. Made by order of Bvt. Brig. Genl. M. Arbuckle, U.S.A. [Army] by Capt. R. B. Marcy, 5th U.S. Inf.,’’ (Philadelphia: P. S. Duval’s Steam Lith. Press, 1850) (HED 45, 31st Cong., 1st sess.). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 55–56; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, pp. 11–13, map reproduced facing p. 12. 102. Quoted in Morris, El Llano Estacado, 162. 103. Randolph B. Marcy, ‘‘Map of the Country Upon Upper Red River.’’ Explored in 1852 by Capt. R. B. Marcy 5th U.S. Infy. Assisted by Bvt. Capt. G. B. McClellan U.S. Engr. Under Orders from the Headquarters of the Army.’’ (SED 54, 3rd Cong., 2nd sess.) (Serial 666). Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 62; Michael Tate, ‘‘Randolph B. Marcy, First Explorer of the Wichitas,’’ Great Plains Journal, 15 (Spring 1976): 81–113, map reproduced between pp. 92 and 96. 104. McClellan participated in a number of topographical explorations during the 1850s and after the Civil War became president of a railroad company. In 1860 he married Marcy’s eldest daughter. Tate, ‘‘Randolph B. Marcy,’’ 109; ‘‘George Brinton McClellan,’’ Dictionary of American Biography, 11:581–585. 105. Randolph B. Marcy, Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana, in the Year 1852 . . . (Unnumbered HED, 33rd Cong., 1st sess.) (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 32. Also quoted in Morris, El Llano Estacado, 276. 106. Randolph B. Marcy, ‘‘Map of the Country Between the Frontiers of Arkansas and New Mexico embracing the section explored in 1849, 50, 51, & 52. By Capt. R. B. Marcy, 5th U.S. Infy. Under orders from the War Department. Also a continuation of the emigrant road from Fort Smith and Fulton down the Valley of the Gila’’ (New York: Ackerman Lith., 1853) (SED 54, 32nd Cong., 2nd sess.) (Serial 666). Wheat, Mapping, vol. 3, pp. 15–16, section of map reproduced facing p. 13. 107. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 281; Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 266–273. 108. War Department, Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, 1853–56 (Washington: 13 volumes by various publishers, 1855–1861) (hereafter cited as Pacific Railroad Reports). 109. Report of the Secretary of War on the Several Pacific Railroad Explorations (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1855) (HED Doc. 29, 33rd Cong., 1st sess.) (Serial 739) (hereafter cited as Preliminary Pacific Railroad Reports). 110. Amiel W. Whipple, ‘‘Part I. Report of Explorations for a Railway Route, near the Thirty-fifth Parallel of North Latitude, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 125 Ocean: By Lieutenant A. W. Whipple, Corps of Topographical Engineers, Assisted by Lieutenant J. C. Ives, Corps of Topographical Engineers,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 3. Whipple’s itinerary has been edited and annotated by Grant Foreman in A Pathfinder in the Southwest: The Itinerary of Lieutenant A. W. Whipple during His Explorations for a Railway Route from Fort Smith to Los Angeles in the Year 1853–54 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941). Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 287–288; David Conrad, ‘‘The Whipple Expedition in Arizona, 1853–1854,’’ Arizona and the West, 11 (Spring 1969): 147–178. 111. Promoted to major general during the Civil War, Whipple was mortally wounded by a sniper at the battle of Chancellorsville. Francis R. Stoddard, ‘‘Amiel Weeks Whipple,’’ Chronicles of Oklahoma, 28 (Spring, 1950): 227–229. 112. Albert H. Campbell was a civilian railroad engineer and mapmaker who was born in 1826 in Charleston, Virginia (later West Virginia). A graduate of Brown University, he was appointed general superintendent of the newly established Pacific Wagon Roads Office in 1857. During the Civil War he headed Robert E. Lee’s Confederate mapping bureau in Richmond. Jackson, Journals of Pike, 178, 218–220; Albert H. Campbell, ‘‘The Lost Civil War Maps of the Confederacy,’’ The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 35 (1888): 479–481; James L. Nichols, ‘‘Confederate Map Supply,’’ Military Engineer (1954), 29; Richard W. Stephenson, Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1989), 6. 113. Wallace, ‘‘Across Arizona,’’ 363 n. 90. 114. Whipple, ‘‘Part I. Report of Explorations,’’ 16–22; Mary McDougall Gordon, Through Indian Country to California. John P. Sherburne’s Diary of the Whipple Expedition, 1853–1854 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 264. 115. Whipple, ‘‘Part I. Report of Explorations,’’ 53–57, Appendix D and E, Pacific Railroad Reports, 4:70–75. 116. Amiel W. Whipple, ‘‘Part II. Report on The Topographical Features and Character of the Country,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, 3:54. 117. Little is known about either one of these draftsmen. Von Hippel was a surveyor with Emory’s Mexican Boundary Survey. Schimmelfennig is especially intriguing to the history of cartography since he carried out several early experiments using photography for map reproduction. See, for example, Henry L. Abbot to Alex Schimmelfennig, Aug 3, 1858, Office Explorations and Surveys, Southern Boundary, Kansas, No. 22, RG 77, NARA. 118. Amiel W. Whipple, ‘‘Reconnaissance and Survey of a railway Route from Mississippi River near 35th Parallel North Lat. To Pacific Ocean Made Under the Direction of the Secry of War by Lieut. A. W. Whipple T. Eng. Assisted by Lieut. J. C. Ives Top. Eng. And A. H. Campbell Civ. Eng. 1853–4 (New York: Sarony & Company, 1855), Preliminary Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 3. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 72–74; Wheat, Mapping, 4:20, 212–213. 119. Amiel W. Whipple, ‘‘Explorations and surveys for a Rail Road Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean War Department Route near the 35th Parallel

126 u ralph e. ehrenberg Map No. 1. From Fort Smith to the Rio Grande from explorations and surveys made under the direction of the Hon. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War by Lieut. A. W. Whipple. Topogl. Engrs. And Lieut. J. C. Ives, Topogl. Engrs,’’ and ‘‘Map No. 2. From the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean.’’ in Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 11. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 72–74; Wheat, Mapping, vol. 4, pp. 77–79, Map No. 2, reproduced facing p. 80. 120. Custer was an experienced Swiss topographer. He later served with Parke on the survey of the Northwest Boundary between the United States and Canada and with Clarence King’s Geological and Geographical Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel in the late 1860s. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 435, 439; Bartlett, Great Surveys, 147. 121. John Pope, ‘‘Report of Exploration of a Route for the Pacific Railroad, near the Thirty-Second Parallel of North Latitude, from the Red River to the Rio Grande,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, 2:2. 122. An 1848 graduate of West Point, Williamson spent most of his military career in the Far West following service as the chief topographical engineer of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. In 1866 he provided critical support to the establishment of Clarence King’s army-sponsored Fortieth Parallel Survey that paved the way for the post–Civil War scientific surveys of the West that led to the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879. Cullum, Biographical Register, 210; Bartlett, Great Surveys, 143–144. 123. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 292–295; Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 74–77. 124. John G. Parke, ‘‘Route of a survey from the Pimas Villages on the Rio-Gila to Mesilla on the Rio-Bravo-del-Norte . . . Drawn by H. Custer,’’ (1855); Parke, ‘‘Map No. 1 From San Francisco Bay to the Plains of Los Angeles . . . drawn by H. Custer’’; Parke, ‘‘Map No. 2 From the Pimas Villagers to Fort Fillmore . . . drawn by H. Custer’’; John Pope, ‘‘Map of the survey of a route . . . between the Rio Grande & Red River,’’ (1855); Robert S. Williamson, ‘‘General Map of a survey of California. . . . Drawn by Charles Preuss,’’ (1855); Williamson, ‘‘General Map of Explorations and Surveys in California’’; Williamson, ‘‘Map of Passes in the Sierra Nevada from Walker’s Pass to the Coast Range;’’ Williamson, ‘‘Map and Profile of the Cañada de las Uvas’’; Williamson, ‘‘Map and Profile of the Tejon Pass.’’ Wheat, Mapping, 4:(Parke) 23, 80–81, 205–206; (Pope) 24, 82, 207, 219; (Williamson) 28, 79–80, 213–215. 125. John G. Parke, ‘‘Report of Explorations for That Portion of a Railroad Route, near the Thirty-Second Parallel of North Latitude Lying between Dona Ana, on the Rio Grande, and Pimas Villages, on the Gila,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 2, part 5, p. 15; John G. Parke, ‘‘Report of Explorations for Railroad Routes From San Francisco Bay to Los Angeles, California, West of the Coast Range, and From The Pimas Villages on the Gila to the Rio Grande, Near the 32nd Parallel of North Latitude,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, 7:4; Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 76, 91. 126. This same passage also alludes to a pioneering experiment that Williamson was conducting concerning the relative merits of determining elevation by spirit–level versus barometer. Robert S. Williamson, ‘‘Report of Explorations in California for

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 127 Railroad Routes, to connect with the Routes Near the 35th and 32d Parallels of North Latitude,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, 5:22; Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 74. 127. Preuss became ill and despondent following his return to Washington after the Williamson expedition and died by his own hand on September 1, 1854. Gudde and Gudde, Charles Preuss, xxix. 128. A. Whipple, Thomas Ewbank, and William W. Turner, ‘‘Report Upon The Indian Tribes,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, 3:10, 16; these maps are described and reproduced in Rainer Vollmar, Indianische Karten Nord Amerikas (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1981), 121–123. 129. (1) Antisell: ‘‘Geological Plan & Section From the Rio Grande to the Pimas Villages,’’ Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 7; (2) Marcou: ‘‘Geological Section from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean,’’ Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 3; (3) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean,’’ Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 3; (4) Blake, ‘‘Geological Section from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean,’’ Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 3; (5) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of the Route explored by Capt. Jno. Pope . . . From the Red River to the Rio Grande,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 2; (6) Blake, ‘‘Geological Section of the Route explored by Capt. Jno. Pope . . . From the Red River to the Rio Grande,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 2; (7) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of the Vicinity of San Francisco,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5; (8) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of the Tejon Pass and Cañada de las Uvas,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5; (9) Blake, ‘‘Geological Section of the Coast Mountains and Sierra Nevada,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5; (10) Blake, ‘‘Geological Section of the Sierra Nevada at the Teton Pass,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5; (11) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of a Part of the State of California,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5; (12) Blake, ‘‘Geological Map of the Country between San Diego and the Colorado River,’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5. 130. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 323–326; Ehrenberg, The Earth Revealed, 25; Clifford M. Nelson, ‘‘Toward a Reliable Geologic Map of the United States, 1803– 1893,’’ in Edward C. Carter II, Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 60–64. Pope noted that Blake’s ‘‘Geological Map of the Route explored by Capt. Jno. Pope . . . From the Red River to the Rio Grande’’ (Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 2) contained ‘‘many errors’’ due to Marcou’s negligence. Initially, the French geologist was to have prepared this map based on mineral specimens collected in the field by Pope. When Marcou left unexpectedly for Paris, he took the specimens with him. When they were finally returned to Pope, they were ‘‘in a confused condition . . . with many of the labels displaced’’ (Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 2, ‘‘Pope Report,’’ note following p. 185). 131. Ben W. Huseman, Wild River, Timeless Canyons: Balduin Möllhausen’s Watercolors of the Colorado (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1995), 12. 132. Tidball was another West Point alumnus trained by Weir and Smith. He went on to have a distinguished military career as an artillery office, rising to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War. Best remembered as the person who initiated the military custom of sounding ‘‘Taps’’ at a soldier’s burial, he

128 u ralph e. ehrenberg was also somewhat of a jokester, entertaining Mohaves by magically removing and replacing his dentures. ‘‘John Caldwell Tidball,’’ Dictionary of American Biography, 18:529–530; Gordon, Through Indian Country, 263–264. 133. Koppel was the official artist on the Williamson expedition. Little is known about him. His drawing of Los Angeles is probably the first printed view of that city. Williamson, Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5, part 1, facing p. 35; Taft, Artists and Illustrators, 266; Ron Tyler, Prints of the West (Golden, CT: Fulcrum, 1994), 95. 134. See particularly Whipple’s Cañon of Bill Williams’ Fork, Möllhausen’s Lava Bluffs of the Hawilhamook, and Whipple’s Valley of the Mojave in Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 3, part 1, p. 108, and part 4, pp. 50, 52–53. 135. Williamson, Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 5, part 1, p. 12 and facing p. 12. 136. Gouverneur K. Warren, ‘‘Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean ordered by the Hon. Jeff ’n Davis. Secretary of War. To accompany the Reports of the Explorations for a Railroad Route Made in accordance with the 10th and 11th sections of the Army Appropriation Act of March 3rd. 1853.’’ Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. 11. Wheat, Mapping, 4:84–85, 227; the 1857 edition is reproduced following p. 84. 137. William H. Emory to George M. Wheeler, May 21, 1874, General Record Division, GR 2382–1874, RG 77, NARA. 138. Warren, ‘‘Memoir.’’ 139. Warren, ‘‘Memoir,’’ 92–95; Morris, El Llano Estacado, 277, 390 n. 27. 140. An 1852 graduate of West Point, Ives also served as an engineer and architect on the Washington National Monument in the nation’s capital and as astronomer and surveyor on the California boundary survey before joining the Confederate Army, serving first as Robert E. Lee’s chief engineer and later as aide-de-camp to Jefferson Davis. Because he had been born and raised in the North, Ives was suspected by some Southerners as being a Union spy. He died in 1868. ‘‘Joseph Christmas Ives,’’ Dictionary of American Biography, 9:520–521; Hudson Strobe, ed., Jefferson Davis Private Letters, 1823–1889 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 300–301. 141. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 390. 142. Quoted in David H. Miller, ‘‘The Ives Expedition Revisited: Overland into Grand Canyon,’’ Journal of Arizona History, 13 (Autumn 1992): 187. 143. Charles Seavey, ‘‘Exploration and Mapping of the Grand Canyon, 1859–1903, Bulletin: Special Libraries Association: Geography and Map Division, 119 (1980), 4–15; J. B. Krygier, ‘‘Envisioning the American West: Maps, the Representational Barrage of 19th-Century Expedition Reports, and the Production of Scientific Knowledge,’’ Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 24 (January, 1997): 42–46. 144. Joseph C. Ives, ‘‘Remarks Upon the Construction of the Maps,’’ Report Upon the Colorado River of the West, Explored in 1857 and 1858, under the Direction of the Office of Explorations and Surveys, Corps of Topographical Engineers (HED 14, 36th Cong., 1st sess, 1861), Appendix D, unnumbered. 145. Joseph C. Ives, ‘‘Map . . . Rio Colorado of the West, explored by 1st Lieut. Joseph C. Ives, Topl. Engrs. Under the direction of the Office of Explorations and

U.S. Army Military Mapping u 129 Surveys, A. A. Humphreys, Capt. Topl. Engrs. In Charge . . . 1858, drawn by Frhr. F. W. v. Egloffstein,’’ in Ives, Report (1861). Reproduced in Wheat, Mapping, following p. 98. 146. John N. Macomb, ‘‘Map of Explorations and Surveys in New Mexico and Utah made under the direction of the Secretary of War by Capt. J. N. Macomb Topl. Engrs. Assisted by C. H. Dimmock, E. Engr. 1860’’ (New York City: Geographical Institute, Baron R. W. Von Egloffstein, 1864) in John N. Macomb, Report of the Exploring Expedition from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Junction of the Grand and Green Rivers of the Great Colorado of the West in 1859 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Engineer Department, 1876); and John N. Macomb to Captain Andrew A. Humphreys, Oct. 1, 1860, Entry 359, Box 2, Macomb 46, RG 77, NARA. 147. F. W. Egloffstein, ‘‘Explanatory Remarks,’’ New Style of Topographical Drawing, Derived from Late Experiments with the Photograph and Daguerreotype, From Mountain Models (Washington, DC: Privately published, January, 1857), 1 p. with Specimen of Topography, Papers of J. J. Young, RG 316, Cartographic Branch, NARA. 148. Ives, ‘‘Remarks Upon the Construction of the Maps’’; Egloffstein, ‘‘Explanatory Remarks.’’ 149. S. Horgan, ‘‘General von Egloffstein, the Inventor of Half-Tone,’’ The International Annual of Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin and American Process Year Book, 9 (1897): 201–204; D. Hanson, ‘‘Baron Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein: Inventor of the First Commercial Halftone Process in America,’’ Printing History, 15 (1993): 12–24.

Five u

Henry Washington Benham: A U.S. Army Engineer’s View of the U.S.-Mexican War gerald d. saxon

The night of February 22, 1847, was cold and miserable on the broken plains of Mexico some six miles south of Saltillo, the provincial capital of Coahuila. An intermittent rain fell, and the chilling temperatures braced the armies in the field. Henry Washington Benham, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was anxious and excited at the same time. He and 4,600 other U.S. soldiers under the command of generals Zachary Taylor and John E. Wool shivered in their positions. Campfires were prohibited because the Mexican army, estimated at the time to be 25,000 strong under the command of Generalissimo Santa Anna, was within a few hundred yards of the Americans. Just a few hours before, there had been a brief skirmish on the extreme left, or east, of the American position, as a Mexican division ascended a steep mountain spur but retreated under the deadly fire of the U.S. troops. As night fell, Benham and his comrades-in-arms expected a memorable fight once the sun came up on the morning of the twenty-third. His heart raced in anticipation. After all, this is what he had trained for at West Point a decade ago, and now he had an opportunity to prove himself in battle. A career soldier, Benham reflected on how his life prior to this fateful night prepared him for this moment. Benham was one of just a few engineers attached to Taylor’s army in northern Mexico during the U.S.-Mexican War. Henry Washington Benham was born on April 8, 1813, in Connecticut, the son of Jared Benham Jr. and Rebecca Hill Benham (Fig. 5.1). Benham’s family was among the first families that settled in Boston in 1630 and in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1639. Like his father, Henry set his sights on a military career. He entered Yale College as a freshman in August 1832 and left in May 1833 to attend West Point.1 At the military academy Benham excelled. Administered by the Corps of Engineers, West Point at this

Henry Washington Benham u 131

time was essentially an engineering school with an emphasis on the practical. Its curriculum stressed math, science, civil and military engineering, tactics, drawing, and horseback riding, all skills that Benham would later use in the Mexican War. As a cadet, Benham was introduced to and indoctrinated with the philosophy of Dennis Hart Mahan, a West Point graduate in 1824 and a professor there for forty years afterwards. Mahan was the academy’s best-known professor. He taught that successful tactics in the field were based on ‘‘speed’’ and ‘‘celerity’’ and that accurate ‘‘information’’ about the terrain and the enemy were important elements of military success. Mahan also was the author of a ground-breaking book titled An Elementary Course of Civil Engineering (1837), which became the standard text on this subject for fifty years. The book, and Mahan’s classes, covered building materials, masonry, framing, bridges, roads, canals, and sea fortifications. As a cadet, Benham worked hard and graduated first in his class, on July 1, 1837. He entered the Corps of Engineers as brevet second lieutenant.2 In some ways the Corps of Engineers was the envy of the army, taking the very best students from West Point into their ranks and stationing them at bases, forts, harbors, and fortifications throughout the country. Except for an occasional surveying expedition and projects relating to railroads, canals, and road construction, Corps engineers spent most of their time in and around cities—cushy assignments by army standards.3 A year after Benham’s graduation from West Point, Congress enacted legislation creating an independent Corps of Topographical Engineers, giving the ‘‘Topogs,’’ as they were called, equal status to the Corps of Engineers. Before this, the Topogs had been administered by and subordinate to the Corps of Engineers. The split allowed the Corps of Engineers to deal with military engineering works authorized by Congress, such as the building and repairing of forts and coastal fortifications. The Topogs were free to concentrate on civil engineering works, especially the improvement of rivers and harbors, the surveying and mapping of the American West, the laying out of roads, and the charting of national boundaries. William Goetzmann referred to the Topogs as a ‘‘central institution of Manifest Destiny’’ in the years before the Civil War. It was they who served as instruments of American nationalism and expansionism, projecting American power and presence into the West. Members of both the Corps of Engineers and the Topogs saw service during the Mexican War.4 Before the outbreak of the War with Mexico, Benham had a string of assignments typical of a young engineering graduate just out of West Point. He served as assistant engineer for the improvement of the Savan-

5.1 Henry Washington Benham, carte de visite, Henry W. Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


nah River in Georgia in 1837 and 1838 and was promoted to first lieutenant as a result of his work. He then was transferred to Florida, where he was superintending engineer of the repairs on Fort Marion and the St. Augustine seawall until 1844. From 1844 to 1846 he helped to repair Annapolis harbor and forts Mifflin, McHenry, Madison, and Washington. In late 1846, some seven months after war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, Benham received orders to join General Zachary Taylor’s army, which at the time was in northern Mexico near Saltillo. Benham became Taylor’s assistant engineer, junior in rank to Brevet Major Joseph K. Mansfield, also a member of the Corps of Engineers. Though Benham thought the conflagration with Mexico was a ‘‘Southern War’’ waged principally to protect and expand slavery, he was eager to join the battle (see Plate 9).5 Benham landed in Texas in late January 1847, where he found General Winfield Scott and his staff organizing the regular troops for a bold invasion of the Mexican coast at Veracruz. This invasion was to be, if necessary, the first step toward taking Mexico City, the national capital. President James Polk’s strategy from the beginning of the war was simple. He wanted a war just long enough for the United States to gain California and force Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as its northeastern boundary. He did not want a long, drawn-out conflict that could enhance the military reputations of his two generals, Taylor and Scott, both Whigs. Consequently, Polk prosecuted the war with a hope of achieving a ‘‘negotiated peace.’’ So, to save American lives and to avoid overly injuring Mexican pride, Polk first pursued limited military objectives. He hoped that by occupying the northernmost Mexican provinces, he could force Mexico to the bargaining table. Thus, at the war’s outset he sent Colonel Stephen W. Kearny and the Army of the West from Missouri to Santa Fe and on to California, General John E. Wool and his force to Chihuahua, and Taylor and his army to Monterrey and Saltillo, Coahuila. By the end of 1846, the U.S. Army occupied northern Mexico, but a proud Mexican nation refused to surrender. It was at this point that Polk approved Scott’s coastal invasion and a march to Mexico City. He wanted to bring Mexico to its knees. It is also at this point that Benham left Texas for Taylor’s camp.6 Benham was placed in charge of the supply trains used to ferry men and supplies from Camargo to Monterrey and ultimately to Taylor’s encampment. It took each train a week to make the trip, and the trains each included forty to sixty wagons. Benham brought the last train in before the Battle of Buena Vista (Fig. 5.2). One of Benham’s passengers on the

134 u gerald d. saxon

5.2 W. Kemble, Map of the Country Near Buena Vista, Mexico (New York: Harper and Brothers, n.d.). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

final leg of the journey was Josiah Gregg, famous mountain man, author of the popular book Commerce of the Prairies, and eyewitness to the battle that would later occur.7 Benham reached headquarters camp at Agua Nueva, some twenty miles south of Saltillo, during the first week of February and there joined Taylor’s staff. What he found was an army depleted of its regulars. In fact, General Scott had siphoned off more than 9,000 regular troops from Taylor in preparation for the attack on Veracruz, leaving Taylor with approximately 4,600 men, mostly volunteers. While Scott knew that Santa Anna was raising an army in San Luis Potosí, he guessed that the generalissmo would use the army to contest the planned invasion of Veracruz and Mexico City. Scott guessed wrong—at least initially. Santa Anna had captured U.S. Army dispatches and knew of Scott’s invasion, but he also knew of Taylor’s weakened army. Needing a quick victory over the gringos to solidify his recent elevation to the Mexican presidency, Santa Anna


gambled and decided to attack Taylor. With close to 20,000 Mexican troops against less than 5,000 Americans, the Napoleon of the West figured he could defeat Taylor, rally Mexicans to his cause, and then turn and face Scott.8 Though Santa Anna knew much about the U.S. troop deployment, Taylor did not know the whereabouts and the size of Santa Anna’s force. In addition, Taylor and his staff had only sketchy information about the surrounding terrain. To remedy this lack of reliable information, Taylor and his second in command, General Wool, ordered the engineers and the topographical engineers to conduct a number of reconnaissances of the region between Saltillo to the north and Encarnación, thirty miles south of Agua Nueva. Not surprisingly, the U.S. army did not have a reliable map of northern Mexico. (In fact, the only maps of Mexico available at the beginning of the war were William Emory’s 1844 map of Texas, Josiah Gregg’s map of Northern Texas and the Indian Territory, George Wilkins Kendall’s map that accompanied his book on the Santa Fe Expedition, and a Henry S. Tanner map dated 1839.) What the engineers and other scouts discovered was that Agua Nueva was in an exposed and not easily defensible position. The camp was on the eastern end of a valley that extended far to the west and where the last running water could be found between Saltillo and San Luis Potosí, approximately 150 miles to the southeast. Benham observed that the mountains around Agua Nueva ‘‘were passable in every direction, and that the camps in this valley were in a most dangerous position, where a largely superior force, such as we had full reason to believe was being organized in our front, could pour down upon us and overwhelm us.’’ Like Scott, Taylor did not expect Santa Anna to march north through the bleak, desert lands separating San Luis Potosí and Agua Nueva, but, to be safe, he dispatched numerous scouting expeditions to locate the Mexican forces.9 On February 20, one of these expeditions, led by Texas Ranger Ben McCullough, discovered Santa Anna’s huge army at Encarnación to the south, and it was moving north along the Saltillo to San Luis Potosí road. Early on February 21, General Taylor ordered an evacuation of Agua Nueva and a retreat—though Taylor would not have called it this—to a more defensible position recommended by Wool and the engineers, some fourteen miles north. The position was just in front of the Hacienda de Buena Vista in an area the Mexicans called La Angostura (‘‘The Narrows’’). Benham later wrote that ‘‘no one could pass, with any military eye, without selecting it as an admirable defensive point.’’ Benham, always the engineer, went on to observe that ‘‘the ground on which we found ourselves’’ was


one of the most broken and difficult positions on which any battle had ever been fought. It was situated in the valley, about one-third the distance from Saltillo, twelve miles, to the ranch of La Encantada . . . , a valley of perhaps two miles in width at each extremity, narrowed at Buena Vista to near half that distance. The east side on our left, at about one thousand yards, was bounded by the Sierra or mountain range, thirty-five hundred feet or more in height, and the right at six hundred yards by ‘‘lomitas,’’ or little hills, of some two hundred to four hundred feet, just beyond which were the higher mountains. On our left, as the road ran nearly through the middle of the valley, there was a sort of elevated plain, with cross valleys formed by the rains and floods of ages, of fifty to one hundred feet depression; while on our right was a lower steppe, or valley of bottom land, with recent deep gullies, or ‘‘canons’’ [cañons], with precipitous sides, from ten to twenty or thirty feet deep.

In short, this area, with its rough and jagged topography, gave the vastly outnumbered American force at least a fighting chance against the numerically superior Mexicans.10 Once at Buena Vista, General Wool halted his troops and made camp while Taylor proceeded to Saltillo. On the morning of February 22, General Taylor arranged for a garrison of six hundred men to guard the city and protect the rear of the army at Buena Vista. There had been widespread rumors that General José Vincente Miñón, with a force of a couple thousand Mexican cavalry, was in the vicinity of Saltillo. Also that morning, Taylor ordered Benham and his superior, Major Mansfield, to take a squadron of dragoons and proceed south of Agua Nueva towards Encarnación and reconnoiter the passes for the Mexican advance. As Benham later wrote, he and Mansfield left camp at around ‘‘eight a.m.’’ and ‘‘rode leisurely along, reconnoitering, taking the bearings, . . . and sketching the obstacles, cross gullies, and hills on our route, till, on nearing the hacienda of Buena Vista, about nine a.m., we met a dragoon on a gallop, with dispatches in his hand, who called out to us, ‘The enemy are in sight.’ ’’ Benham and Mansfield spurred their horses to Wool’s camp and found it in great alarm. Observing from one of the spurs to the right of Wool’s camp and to the left of Captain Washington’s battery then moving into position, Benham was shocked to see 1,800 Mexican cavalry forming a line within a half mile of the Americans. Benham admitted later that had the Mexican cavalry quickly attacked the ‘‘disordered camp of volunteers,’’ then there would have been few Americans left ‘‘to tell the tale.’’ 11 Santa Anna was able to surprise the American forces because he had


pushed his men mercilessly. After the battle, the Americans learned that Santa Anna had left Encarnación on February 21 in hopes of catching the U.S. forces on the plains near Agua Nueva. He pushed them thirty-five miles north in twenty-four hours only to find that the U.S. troops had slipped away. On February 22, he decided to pursue the Americans who, he thought, were in a pell-mell retreat. Not giving his men the opportunity to rest and eat, Santa Anna ordered an advance to Buena Vista fourteen miles away. The Mexican general ignored the reports of his own engineers and outriders that the U.S. troops were at the narrows in a defensive position (see Plate 10). Santa Anna was confident that his superior numbers would crush the American volunteers, regardless of the terrain and their position. The vanguard of the Mexican army—the cavalry—reached Buena Vista on the morning of February 22, and it was they who surprised Benham and the others.12 Santa Anna reached the narrows later in the day, surveyed the situation, and devised his battle plan. His strategy would involve a feint and a flanking move. He knew that General Taylor did not have enough men to cover the entire plateau in strength. The heaviest part of the American force was concentrated either on the road or on the bluffs overlooking the road, leaving the base of the mountains on the American left unguarded. By hurling a strong diversionary attack against the battery at the pass, the Mexicans might keep these men pinned to the center and the American right, while flankers worked past the American left, skirted the base of the hills to the far ravines, and came down on Buena Vista from behind. Santa Anna also sent orders to General Miñón to attack the Americans from the rear.13 Before Santa Anna ordered an attack, he did offer Taylor surrender terms. At 2:00 p.m. on the twenty-second, the Mexican general sent a rider under a flag of truce to General Taylor with the following message: ‘‘You are surrounded by twenty thousand men, and cannot in any human probability, avoid suffering a route [rout] and being cut to pieces with your troops. But, as you deserve from me consideration and particular esteem, I wish to save you from a catastrophe; and for that purpose I give you notice, in order that you may surrender at discretion, under the assurance that you will be treated with the consideration belonging to the Mexican character.’’ According to Benham, Taylor’s response was simple and to the point: ‘‘I have the honor respectfully to decline your proposition.’’ Benham spent the afternoon and evening commanding an outlook station, with a small picket. The station was well in advance of most of the U.S. positions— approximately one thousand yards, Benham estimated—and was on one


5.3 Thomas B. Linnard, Plan of the Battle of Buena-Vista, Fought February 22nd and 23d 1847. Surveyed by Capt. Linnard & Liets. Pope & Franklin. Corps. T. Engineers. Drawn by T. B. Linnard. Corps. of T. E. (Philadelphia: P. S. Duval, 1847). Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

of the spurs that overlooked the road. Benham’s orders were to report to Taylor the numbers and kinds of troops that the Mexicans were moving into place. During the day, the young lieutenant counted forty pieces of artillery, eighteen to twenty infantry regiments, and sixteen regiments of cavalry drawn up in two lines on dress parade that afternoon. Benham estimated that there were twenty-five thousand Mexican troops on the field, though we now know that estimate was too high. The ‘‘Plan of the Battle of Buena-Vista Fought February 22nd and 23rd, 1847,’’ drawn and surveyed by the topographical engineers after the battle (Fig. 5.3), places the number between twenty and twenty-four thousand.14 Benham observed that the U.S. Army numbered approximately 4,600 men, including three batteries of sixteen six-pounder pieces in all and 260 men of the regular artillery, two squadrons of regular dragoons (numbering 200), and fifteen companies (some 800 men) of ‘‘poorly disciplined’’ vol-


unteer cavalry from Kentucky and Arkansas, most of whom were mounted on mules, since they had sold their horses to the artillery in anticipation of being mustered out and returning home. Taylor and Wool also had six regiments of volunteer infantry, some 3,400 men, who were, to quote Benham, ‘‘good, bad, indifferent, as to discipline.’’ Benham’s numbers did not include the troops Taylor had left in and around Saltillo. By any estimate, however, the Americans were vastly out numbered.15 The only fighting on February 22 occurred late in the afternoon when the Mexicans sent a division up the steep mountain spur on the east or left of the U.S. position. Brisk fighting resulted. Benham later reported that ‘‘this contest of musketry, almost among the clouds, continued for some two hours, with no result whatever, other than the loss of some four hundred to five hundred [Mexican] men killed and wounded, as acknowledged by the Mexicans, and but five slightly wounded on our part.’’ After night fell the Mexicans withdrew from the foothills of the mountains and fighting ceased. Benham then moved his lookout and pickets further south to be closer to the Mexican position. In the move, Benham captured a Mexican who was attempting to secure the same knoll as a surveillance position. Benham and his picket were now only two hundred yards away from the advance guard of the Mexican army. It was here that Benham spent a fitful, rainy night atop a spur overlooking Santa Anna’s army, and it was here that Benham waited for sunrise and all hell to break lose on February 23.16 Dawn broke on the twenty-third clear and crisp. Benham and both armies could now see a considerable distance as the clouds disintegrated into white puffs, and the rain-soaked air revealed a beautiful morning. At 7:00 a.m. Benham saw a ‘‘large and brilliant group of [Mexican] officers’’ come out some four hundred yards from him to survey the Americans’ defensive positions. General Santa Anna himself was in the group. After a brief observation the officers retired and quickly began forming their infantry columns for an attack up the main road on the American right. Santa Anna was initiating his battle plan, intending this attack up the road to be a diversionary measure. Washington’s battery repulsed the Mexicans, and the Battle of Buena Vista had begun. Benham saw the attack and rushed the information to General Taylor’s tent, but Taylor was not there. He had gone to Saltillo the night before to shore up its defenses and to ensure that the rear of the American position at Buena Vista was protected. Benham conveyed the information to the general’s staff, mounted his horse again, and bolted off, encountering Taylor on his way back from Saltillo.17 On the eve of the battle, Wool had organized the U.S. defenses in a mas-


terly way, allowing the terrain to dictate his positions. Like Santa Anna, Wool believed that there were three avenues of approach for the Mexican forces. The first was the main road. The road was the easiest to defend because at the narrows the valley was only forty feet wide, limited on the east by steep bluffs and on the west by a small river sliced up by gullies so steep as to make the movement of artillery impossible. To defend the road, Wool placed three guns of Washington’s battery on the west side of the road, protected by two volunteer regiments on hills and bluffs across the road. The second avenue of approach was, as John Eisenhower has said, the most dangerous. It was a broad plain standing some fifty feet above the road and accessible to artillery and cavalry by way of a gully about a mile and a half east of the narrows. This plain, called the ‘‘plateau’’ by Benham and others, was protected by three regiments. The third avenue available to Santa Anna was a ridge which led around the Americans’ extreme left straight to Buena Vista in the American rear. This ridge beyond the plateau was relatively narrow and long enough to require a journey of about four miles over mountainous terrain for an attacking force. Wool did not believe the approach constituted a threat so he did not garrison it at the outset. Benham reported that initially the bulk of the remaining infantry regiments was kept under cover in the rear to serve as reinforcements where needed.18 Santa Anna’s attack up the road at the narrows was intended to divert American attention from the main attack, which occurred simultaneously on the plateau. While the advance at the narrows was repulsed, the Mexicans had better success on the plateau in the U.S. center. Here the gringo defenses gave way when Colonel William A. Bowles of the Second Indiana Regiment, Company B, ordered a retreat, leaving Wool’s left flank exposed. Benham and other officers tried to rally the men but had limited success. Benham observed that Bowles’s retreat ‘‘opened our center’’ and spurred the Mexicans to continue the attack. Benham reported, ‘‘The enemy in heavy force then gained the plain, and the whole front, [and] also that left half of the battlefield. . . . They soon afterwards brought up a heavy battery, whose fire covered and commanded nearly the whole of this plateau.’’ While Wool reported to Taylor that he thought their army was whipped, Taylor calmly ordered the American center to be reinforced with artillery, dragoons, and volunteers, including Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi Rifles. The reinforcements stopped the hemorrhaging in the center.19 With the Americans shoring up the center, Santa Anna sent his uncommitted division along the third avenue—the mountain ridge on Taylor’s extreme left, which, if successful, would envelop the Americans on


the plateau from three sides. Taylor saw this and immediately sent troops to intercept, stripping from his center to meet the Mexican threat on the left. The Mississippi Rifles, Captain James Henry Lane’s Third Indiana Regiment, and Captain Braxton Bragg’s artillery met the Mexican charge and repulsed it. The Mexican lines crumbled under the wilting fire, and the American left was safe for the moment. The Mexicans retreated into an adjacent ravine at the base of the mountains. At this same time, Santa Anna ordered a flanking move by his cavalry along the mountains in order to attack the American rear at Buena Vista. This attack was also repulsed, in this case, by U.S. dragoons, Arkansas cavalry, and artillery. A sudden downpour drenched the battlefield at this time, bringing hostilities to a halt and giving the Mexicans time to withdraw from the ravine. It was about midday according to Benham.20 Benham had spent most of the morning and early afternoon by Taylor’s side or conveying orders to the American forces and their officers. He was wounded slightly when a musketball ricocheted off of his pistol and hit him, with little force. His wound did not slow him down, however. He also joined the action when the situation called for it, as when he tried to rally the retreating Indianans or when he had to secure fresh horses for an artillery team commanded by Lieutenant Charles L. Kilburn at around noon. Shortly after the rainstorm, Taylor sent Benham to the top of a knoll just in the rear of the American center to reconnoiter. Benham sent word to Taylor that the Mexicans appeared to be retiring in large numbers, but they still held in force the American left and the front of the Americans’ original position on the plateau. Taylor, sensing that the Mexican army was now vulnerable, ordered an attack with fifteen hundred men (the Illinois and Kentucky regiments) and three pieces of artillery (under the command of a Lieutenant O’Brien). The Mexicans, seeing the small size of the American forces, rallied. As the American soldiers advanced, an immense force of some five- to seven-thousand Mexicans came out of a ravine only fifty to eighty yards in front of the surprised Americans, outflanking them in two directions. The Americans retreated in haste, but many were cut to pieces by Mexican infantry and cavalry.21 The Americans were in dire straits, rushing pell-mell into the ravines and being cut down by Mexicans in hot pursuit. Many officers stayed behind, and paid for this bravery with their lives. Taylor’s luck continued to hold, thanks to the quick response of his artillery. As the remnants of the American infantry fled down the plateau, Washington’s battery, now redeployed with the help of Benham and in position, opened fire on the pursuing Mexicans. Bragg and Sherman’s guns wheeled around in support,


firing hot canisters into the Mexican army, breaking its momentum. It was during the artillery battle that Taylor turned to Bragg and uttered his famous line, ‘‘A little more grape, Capt. Bragg,’’ a line Taylor repeatedly used during his campaign for the presidency after the war. The heated battle was stopped late in the afternoon as another violent shower moved into the area. After the rain stopped, Taylor sent Benham to a spur overlooking the road to reconnoiter the Mexicans’ movements. No other action occurred on February 23 as the sun went down on the war-scarred battlefield.22 At the end of the day Taylor’s battered army held the field, but the force was in desperate condition. The men were exhausted, ammunition was low, and the army had suffered 673 causalities and close to 1,500 desertions, according to Benham’s account. To reinforce his depleted army, Taylor traveled to Saltillo and moved six companies to Buena Vista. Unbeknownst to Taylor during the furious battle, General Miñon had made a halfhearted attempt to come down out of the mountains near Saltillo and attack the American rear. Miñon’s cavalry, however, was driven off by the U.S. artillery left in the Coahuilan provincial capital—the American general was expecting another attack on February 24. In addition, reinforcements from Monterrey also joined the U.S. army that evening, bringing with them additional supplies. By the morning of the twentyfourth, American troop strength was back at the level of the previous day. While Taylor rode to Saltillo, Benham tried to get some rest during the bitter cold evening. He would not get any sleep for the second night in a row. When daylight approached, Benham began strengthening the breastworks near Washington’s battery. Just fifteen minutes after daybreak, however, reports came back to generals Taylor and Wool that Santa Anna and the entire Mexican army, excepting the wounded who the Mexican general left on the field, had retreated under the cover of night and were headed back in the direction of San Luis Potosí. According to Benham, Wool rushed up to Taylor, embraced him with both arms, and exclaimed, ‘‘My God, sir, you are the greatest man in the country: you will be President of the United States!’’ Shouts of ‘‘Victory, Victory, Victory’’ came from the exhausted but happy American troops when they heard the news. Santa Anna had decided that he did not have enough supplies on hand for another day of fighting and, as a consequence, moved south. He had lost eighteen hundred killed, three hundred captured, and six hundred severely wounded.23 Taylor ordered Benham and McCullough’s cavalry to follow the road south to Encantada to try and gather intelligence on the Mexicans, but they found nothing but ‘‘the dead and wounded, . . . a few stragglers,


with the debris of . . . camp-equipage as our spoils of war.’’ The Mexican army had marched to Agua Nueva and had no intentions of engaging Taylor again. Though Santa Anna claimed victory in spite of his retreat, the truth is that Buena Vista marked an unqualified victory for Taylor and his mostly volunteer force. While Santa Anna kept much of his army intact to fight another day, the next time against Winfield Scott attacking from the coast, Taylor’s war in Mexico was essentially over. Now he, his army, and Benham settled in to hold the territory they had conquered.24 Benham believed that, after the victory at Buena Vista and with the shift in U.S. strategy away from northern Mexico to an all-out assault on Mexico City via Veracruz, he would be reassigned either back to the States or to General Scott’s command. This was not to be. Indeed, after the fateful battle on February 23, Benham served eighteen more months in Mexico. Like the other engineers attached to Taylor and Wool’s army, Benham focused on more mundane assignments for the duration of the war. As he later wrote Senator S. D. Hubbard, in early 1849, he oftentimes conducted ‘‘detailed reconnaissances’’ of the most advanced positions of the army. And to use Benham’s words, he ‘‘made maps of the Enemy’s country 100 miles farther than any other Engineer officer on the Northern line.’’ In fact, it was during this period that he produced the cartographic material that can now be found in his collection at UTA.25 The first is a manuscript ‘‘itinerary’’ map ‘‘of the march of Maj Genl. Z. Taylor, from Victoria to Agua Nueva,’’ drawn by ‘‘Bvt. Major Mansfield,’’ Benham’s superior officer on Taylor’s staff (Fig. 5.4). The map was prepared after a reconnaissance that began in mid-January and ended in early February. The map in the Benham papers was copied from the original by Benham on March 5, 1847, just a couple of weeks after Buena Vista. The map, in the centuries old itinerary format, depicts towns, cities, ranches, churches and other cultural features, as well as natural features such as rivers, streams, hills, and mountains. It also records the miles between these various features. The map is on heavy tracing paper and measures 28 × 10.5 inches. Maps like this were critically important to General Taylor because reliable information on the geography and topography of the region was virtually unknown to the U.S. Army. Maps of this kind also allowed the commanding generals to plot strategy, plan troop movements, and devise contingencies. In short, this map is an excellent example of an itinerary map produced for military purposes.26 The second map is the most detailed and refined map in the Benham papers. Its title is Reconnaissance of the Route from Monterey to Saltillo and Mazapil. Surveyed and drawn by Captain H. W. Benham, Corps of Engi-

5.4 Itinerary of the march of Maj. Genl. Z. Taylor from Victoria to Agua Nueva, by Bvt. Maj. Mansfield, Corps of Engineers, Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


5.5 Reconnaissance of the Route from Monterey to Saltillo and Mazapil. Surveyed and drawn by Captain H. W. Benham, Corps of Engineers from Feb. 1847 to May 1847. Original sent to Engrs. Dept., Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

neers from Feb. 1847 to May 1847 (Fig. 5.5). This map is a copy of the original, which was sent to the chief engineer in Washington, D.C. The map is large, measuring 29 × 24 inches, and is on a clothlike paper. The map is replete with the kinds of information that engineers were trained to see and record, including the placement of towns, cities, roads, and other


manmade features and the location of physical features, like mountains, passes, streams, and rivers. Benham used a prismatic compass to plot the courses on the map, and he estimated distances, as the map notes, ‘‘by the walk of horse averaged in going and returning.’’ Tables flank both the left and right edges of the map, giving information on Mexico demanded by his superiors in Washington. These tables record Mexican towns, cities, and settlements, as well as mileage between them, their populations, and their commercial products or distinguishing cultural or physical characteristics.27 Interestingly, the map plots eight battlegrounds in the region, including that of Monterrey in September 1846, one for the ‘‘fight between Mexicans and Indians in 1841,’’ another locating the site where the forces of Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo defeated the Spanish under Antonio Cordero in 1810, and, of course, Buena Vista. The latitudes and elevations Benham used on the map were furnished by Josiah Gregg from his notes. Gregg accompanied Benham to the Saltillo area and was an eyewitness to the Battle of Buena Vista. Unlike the itinerary map (Fig. 5.5), this map had little field application. Rather Benham produced the map to satisfy the chief engineer’s and Washington’s craving for detailed information on Mexico.28 The third map is another copy map rendered by Benham (Fig. 5.6). The original, drawn in December 1847 by Lieutenant Abner Doubleday (the founder of baseball) of the First Artillery, depicts Saltillo, Mexico, the provincial capital. This manuscript map is on heavy tracing paper and is outlined in black ink. It measures 23 × 18 inches and depicts significant buildings, plazas, roads, and other features. Benham took Doubleday’s town map and copied it sometime in 1848. The map shows fairly prominently the American defensive fortifications erected in January, February, and March 1847. These positions straddle the main road leading south out of the city to Buena Vista and beyond. Sites ‘‘B’’ and ‘‘C’’ on the map show defenses laid out and prepared by Benham shortly after the defeat of Santa Anna’s army. The map is oriented with north at the bottom and was probably copied for Benham’s personal use after the war or, again, to satisfy Washington’s orders to prepare maps of Mexico.29 The fourth is another manuscript map in Benham’s hand, produced as a result of a reconnaissance he undertook in mid-August 1847. Entitled Sketch of the Country Between Agua Nueva to la Punta and Encarnacion and Back; Also Monterey to Saltillo, the map (Fig. 5.7) is on brown paper and measures 26 × 13 inches. The map is oriented with north at the bottom and is a relatively crude production with the settlement of Agua Nueva in the center, ‘‘Encarnacion’’ at top left, and ‘‘la Punta’’ at the top right. The


5.6 Saltillo, Mexico, Copy of Lt. Benham, U. S. Engrs. from a minutely detailed map. Surveyed and drawn by Lt. A. Doubleday. 1st Art. USA, Dec. 1847, Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

scale is four miles to one inch, and Benham includes estimated distances between the Mexican towns and settlements marked on the map. Unlike most of the other maps in the collection, this one is obviously incomplete. A number of pencil annotations on the map mark former battles that had taken place in the area, as well as mule paths and roads between settlements. While the map legend notes mileage between Saltillo and Buena Vista as being five miles, neither location is labeled on the map. Also, there is an attached piece of paper at the bottom of the map which crudely details


5.7 Sketch of Country Between Agua Nueva to la Punta and Encarnación and Back; Also Monterey to Saltillo, August 14, 15, and 16, 1847, Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

the road between Monterrey (at the lower left of the attachment) south to near Saltillo, though, again, Saltillo is not labeled. The reconnaissances Benham made after Buena Vista were intended to provide intelligence on any suspicious Mexican military movements and to compile and amass accurate and reliable cartographic information on Mexico. The informa-


tion on this map, I suspect, was used later by Benham in making his other map productions, though this is only speculation on my part.30 The last map from the Benham papers (Fig. 5.8) depicts the same basic area as the preceding map but was originally drawn by Major Mansfield on February 27, 1847, just four days after Buena Vista. The map is entitled Reconnaissance of Roads about Agua Nueva and is on heavy tracing paper. Oriented with north to the left, the map has a scale of one inch to one mile, limiting its coverage to about one-fourth of the territory covered by the map Benham had drawn of the same area. Mansfield’s map, however, has a definite military purpose. It displays the wagon roads and trails emanating from Agua Nueva, which is prominently shown in the map’s center. It also shows General Taylor’s and General Wool’s pickets and advanced pickets around Agua Nueva as well as mountains, passes, woods, and other natural features of the region. After Santa Anna’s retreat from the narrows on February 24, General Taylor and the army followed the Mexicans south to Agua Nueva, which was where the U.S. Army had been encamped before the battle. This map shows the U.S. camps and positions after the army returned to the plains just west of Agua Nueva. There is no indication as to when Benham copied the map.31 Benham’s final months in Mexico with the occupying army were uneventful as he made numerous reconnaissances and transferred what he discovered to maps. He secretly wished to go home. He got his wish in August 1848, when he received orders to return to the Northeast, some three months after Mexico ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, formally ending the war. Benham was the last engineer to leave war-torn Mexico late in the summer of 1848. Benham had been one of forty-four engineers who participated in the war with Mexico, nineteen of whom were from the Corps of Engineers and twenty-five from the Corps of Topographical Engineers. This number, however, does not reflect the enlisted members of the engineering corps that served during the war, though they numbered no more than seventy-five troops.32 A. D. Bache, superintendent of the Coast Survey, once said of Benham that he was a man of ‘‘excellent judgment’’ and ‘‘great kindness,’’ with a mind that ‘‘embraces systematic arrangements.’’ Benham also was meticulous, hardworking, refined, and intellectually gifted, as evidenced by his success at West Point and with the Corps of Engineers. While he could be vain and egotistical, he never allowed his feelings to interfere with his commitment to the military.33 Benham brought all of these qualities to his service during the U.S. war with Mexico. As an engineer in the war, Benham’s responsibilities, as well

5.8 Reconnaissance of Roads about Agua Nueva by Maj. Mansfield, Corps of Engrs., Feb. 27, 1847. Copy of Lt. Benham, U. S. Engrs., Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.


as those of the other engineers, were essentially fourfold. First, he served in a staff position conducting dangerous reconnaissances, participating in reconnoitering expeditions in advance of the U.S. army, conveying information to and from the officers in the field, evaluating local terrain and providing input to the staff on strategy, and serving as a courier for the generals’ orders. Second, as a military officer, he also led troops in battle, rallied soldiers when necessary, commanded American pickets and scouts, ferried supply wagons between various points, and oversaw the construction and repair of defenses, breastworks, roads, and bridges. Third, he conducted surveys of the region and, in so doing, identified and recorded information on Mexican towns and their characteristics, charted roads, bridges, passes, and water supplies, and repored detailed intelligence on northern Mexico to the Corps’ office in Washington, D.C. Finally, Benham worked as a mapmaker, sometimes creating original maps to meet the needs of his superiors for accurate and detailed information on Mexico and other times copying maps made by others to meet a military need in the field. Benham and the other engineers with Taylor were clearly in a support position, but a support position that had a direct impact on the success of the army. Indeed, it was the engineers who helped the officers select Buena Vista as the best location to meet the Mexican army, and the American success of February 22–23 was in no small part attributable to the terrain on which they fought. As Benham sat shivering on one of the mountain spurs on the night of February 22, he could not imagine what would occur the following day and what the impact of victory would be. As an engineer he carried out his duties under intense enemy fire the next day and in sometimes dangerous situations for the eighteen months to follow. General Wool commented that Benham was ‘‘gallant and efficient at all times,’’ while Taylor reported that he performed admirably. Henry Washington Benham, a U.S. Army engineer in the Mexican War, received his first taste of battle in Mexico, and he responded bravely and competently, upholding the traditions of the Corps of Engineers. It was because of men like him—engineers like him—that the United States was able to defeat a numerically superior enemy fighting on its own soil.34

notes 1. Shirley R. Rodnitzky, ‘‘Guide to the Henry W. Benham Family Papers, 1813– 1954, bulk 1836–1915,’’ March 1997, 3–4, Holding File, Henry W. Benham Family Papers, Special Collections, UTA Libraries. Sources do not agree on Benham’s birth

152 u gerald d. saxon date and location. Most sources give his birth year as 1813 and the location of his birth as Connecticut. As Rodnitzky points out in the ‘‘Guide’’ to the Benham papers, however, a document in the papers copied for the New England Historic Genealogical Society states that he was born on April 8, 1814, in Quebec, L.C. Another document, copied from Appleton’s Universal Cyclopaedia, states that he was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1816. A biographical sketch by Lt. R. W. Crawford in 1915 states that he was born there in June 1813. See ‘‘Guide,’’ p. 4. 2. ‘‘Memorandum Record of Services of Henry Washington Benham,’’ n.d., n.p., in Henry W. Benham Family Papers, AR 388, Box 1, Folder 4; James L. Morrison Jr., ‘‘The Best School in the World’’: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 8, 23–26, 160–163; Thomas J. Fleming, West Point: The Men and Times of the United States Military Academy (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1969), 111–112; William H. Goetzmann, Army Explorations in the American West, 1838–1863 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1991), 14–15. 3. Morrison, ‘‘The Best School in the World,’’ 8. 4. Adrian G. Traas, From the Golden Gate to Mexico City: The U.S. Army Topographical Engineers in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington, DC: Office of History, Corps of Engineers and Center of Military History, 1993), ii–viii, 1–16; Goetzmann, Army Explorations in the American West, 4–12. For a brief history of the Corps of Engineers, see Edward Burr, Historical Sketch of the Corps of Engineers U.S. Army (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939). 5. ‘‘Memorandum Record of Services’’; ‘‘Recollections of Mexico and the Battle of Buena Vista, by an Engineer Officer,’’ Old and New, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1871), 644–646, found in Benham Papers, Box 1, Folder 25. 6. John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War With Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Random House, 1989), xx–xi. 7. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ 647–648; Maurice Garland Fulton (ed.), Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg: Excursions in Mexico and California, 1847–1850 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), 33. 8. David Lavender, Climax at Buena Vista: The American Campaigns in Northern Mexico, 1846–47 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1966), 163–173. An excellent Mexican source is CLJ Aniversario de la Batalla de La Angostura, Antologia II (Saltillo: Secretaria de Educación Publica de Coahuila, 1998). 9. George Wilkins Kendall, The War Between the United States and Mexico Illustrated (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1851), 11–12; Eisenhower, So Far from God, 176–181; Lavender, Climax at Buena Vista, 169–178; James Henry Carleton, The Battle of Buena Vista, With the Operations of the ‘‘Army of Occupation’’ for One Month (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848), 3–25. 10. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ 652–654. 11. Ibid., 652–653. 12. Lavender, Climax at Buena Vista, 177–180; Carleton, The Battle of Buena Vista, 26–28. 13. Ibid.

Henry Washington Benham u 153 14. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico and Buena Vista,’’ 654–656; Carleton, The Battle of Buena Vista, 36–37; ‘‘Plan of the Battle of Buena-Vista Fought February 22nd and 23rd, 1847,’’ surveyed by Capt. Linnard and Lts. Pope and Franklin, drawn by Lt. Sitgreaves, New York, n.d. 15. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ 654–656. 16. Ibid., 656. 17. Ibid., no. II, 45–46. 18. Ibid., 46; Eisenhower, So Far from God, 183–185. 19. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ no. II, 46–49. 20. Ibid., 47–51; Lavender, Climax at Buena Vista, 194–204. 21. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ no. II, 52–54. 22. Ibid., 52–56. 23. Ibid., 55–57; Eisenhower, So Far from God, 190–191; Carleton, Battle of Buena Vista, 129–130. 24. ‘‘Recollections of Mexico,’’ no. II, 56–57. 25. Benham to Hon. S. D. Hubbard, January 29, 1849; Appeal to the President of the U.S. from Benham with Precedent Cases, Boston, November 24, 1851, both found in Benham Papers, Box 1, Folder 11. 26. [Manuscript Map], ‘‘Itinerary of the march of Maj. Genl. Z. Taylor. from Victoria to Agua Nueva,’’ by Bvt. Maj. Mansfield, Corps of Engineers, Benham Papers, Map Annex, 108/1. 27. [Manuscript Map], ‘‘Reconnaissance of the Route from Monterey to Saltillo and Mazapil. Surveyed and drawn by Captain H. W. Benham, Corps of Engineers from Feb. 1847 to May 1847. Original sent to Engrs. Dept.’’ Benham Papers, Map Annex, 108/1. 28. Ibid. 29. [Manuscript Map], ‘‘Saltillo, Mexico, Copy of Lt. Benham, U.S. Engrs. from a minutely detailed map. Surveyed and drawn by Lt. A. Doubleday. 1st Art. USA, Dec. 1847.’’ Benham Papers, Map Annex, 108/1; Special Orders 291, March 15, 1847, Headquarters Buena Vista, by order of General Wool, Benham Papers, Box 1, Folder 8. 30. [Manuscript Map], ‘‘Sketch of Country Between Agua Nueva to la Punta and Encarnacion and Back; Also Monterey to Saltillo,’’ August 14, 15, and 16, 1847. Benham Papers, Map Annex, 108/1. 31. [Manuscript Map], ‘‘Reconnaissance of Roads about Agua Nueva by Maj. Mansfield, Corps of Engrs., Feb. 27, 1847. Copy of Lt. Benham, U. S. Engrs.’’ Benham Papers, Map Annex, 108/1. 32. Wildurr Willing, ‘‘The Engineers and the Mexican War,’’ Professional Memoirs, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, and Engineer Department at Large (Washington, DC, 1915), p. 333; Gustavus U. Smith, Company ‘‘A,’’ Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., 1846–48 in the Mexican War (Battalion Press, 1896), 7–10, 13–15; The History of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, January 1986), 69. 33. A. D. Bache to Jefferson Davis, April 3, 1854, Benham Papers, Box 1, Folder 2.

154 u gerald d. saxon After the war in Mexico, the Corps assigned Benham to New York, where he served for a year as superintending engineer in charge of the repairs of the defenses at New York harbor. Despite his return to familiar surroundings and normalcy, he could not get the Mexican War out of his mind. Indeed, he strongly believed that he had not received the promotions he deserved as a result of his war service. Shortly after the war came to an end, Benham began a letter-writing campaign aimed at rectifying this situation. In letters to senators, army officials, the secretary of war, and even the President of the United States, Benham outlined his war record and argued that he should have received at least two brevets for the service he rendered in Mexico. (A brevet is an honorary rank bestowed upon an officer as a reward for good service or heroism in battle.) Usually an officer with a brevet, although permitted to use the higher title, did not draw any more pay. What rankled Benham was that while in Mexico and, in his words, because of the deaths of other engineers, he was promoted to captain, a grade to which three months after the war he was brevetted for his bravery at Buena Vista. Benham cited many examples of officers junior to him and without his field experience who had received brevets to major and lieutenant colonel. Benham’s arguments fell on deaf ears. It seems the army was reluctant to confer two brevets for actions, no matter how brave, that occurred on one day. Benham would have to wait until the Civil War before he would receive his second brevet. Benham went on to enjoy a long and notable military career after the U.S.-Mexican War. In the 1850s he served as superintending engineer for seacoast defense projects from New York to Florida. He was also assistant in charge of the U.S. Survey Office in Washington, DC, under Professor A. D. Bache. In this capacity, he traveled to Europe where he served from 1853 to 1856. During the Civil War, he fought for the Northern cause, distinguishing himself in several actions in West Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. He received four brevets for his war service, attaining the rank of brevet major general of both the U.S. Volunteers and the regular army at the close of the war. Moreover, he invented a method of laying pontoon bridges by simultaneous bays, which greatly quickened the construction of pontoon bridges and accelerated the movement of troops. He also invented a portable picket shovel which was considered of great value to the efficiency of the army. After the Civil War he received a commission as colonel in the Corps of Engineers and returned to duty on Atlantic Coast defenses. He retired from service in June 1882. Benham died in New York City on June 1, 1884, at the age of seventy-one. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth, two daughters, and a son. He had spent close to fifty years in military service. Sources for the above information include Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 17–18, and from the Benham Papers, Benham to Hubbard, January 29, 1849; Appeal to the President, November 24, 1851; ‘‘Memorandum Record of Services,’’ n.p.; ‘‘Estate Records for Henry W. Benham,’’ n.d., in Box 2, Folder 19; ‘‘Brief Record of Services, Commendations and Promotions of Bvt. Maj. Genl.

Henry Washington Benham u 155 H. Benham, Senior Colonel of Engineers, U.S. Army,’’ n.d., pp. A–D, 1–13, Box 1, Folder 3. 34. ‘‘Extract from Report of Maj. Gen. Z. Taylor of the Battles of Buena Vista, Feb. 22 and 23, 1847,’’ prepared March 6, 1847, Agua Nueva, Mexico, in Benham Papers, Box 1, Folder 2; Burr, Historical Sketch of the Corps of Engineers, 26–31.

Six u

Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados: Unknown Works and Forgotten Engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission paul a rebert ‘‘It is a pity that the works on our boundary line with the United States remain unknown and forgotten—that nothing is published about them, when both for their extent and their accuracy, they are among the best works that the country owes to our engineers, and could be of great benefit to geographic science.’’ 1 In 1881, such was the lament of Manuel Orozco y Berra—geographer, map collector, and one of Mexico’s early national historians. Some twenty-five years had passed since the boundary between the United States and Mexico was established, yet the Mexican engineers had received little recognition for their accomplishment. Since Orozco y Berra’s time, the Mexican Boundary Commission and its works have continued to be neglected. Mexican historians have been understandably unenthusiastic about the boundary survey as a topic, for the boundary was a consequence of defeat in war and its survey effected the transfer of a large portion of Mexico’s territory to the United States. The Mexican boundary surveyors have not been celebrated as have the U.S. boundary-makers.2 U.S. authors have tended to emphasize the work of the U.S. Boundary Commission, using its records as their sources—records that generally ignore the Mexican Commission or criticize its efforts. For example, the most important primary source on the U.S. survey, the final report by U.S. Boundary Commissioner William H. Emory, dismissed the Mexican Commission efforts at the very outset. Emory wrote that the role of the Mexican engineers was simply to observe and accept the U.S. engineers’ work, because, he said, although the Mexican Commission was ‘‘composed of well educated and scientific men, their instruments were radically defective.’’ 3 Emory’s early judgment has often served as a basis for evaluation of the work of the Mexican Commission.4

Unknown Works and Forgotten Engineers u 157

The Mexican work on the boundary line need not remain unknown and forgotten, however, for records have been preserved. Especially valuable are the contributions of Manuel Orozco y Berra. A scholar whose fortunes fluctuated with the turbulent politics of nineteenth-century Mexico, Orozco y Berra held various positions in Mexico City, including director of the National Archives and professor of geography and history at the Military School, and he produced many publications on various topics in Mexican history.5 In a work that he completed near the end of his life, the Notes for the History of Geography in Mexico, Orozco y Berra included an account of the U.S.-Mexico boundary survey. Based on the engineers’ reports and on discussions with several members of the commission he knew personally, his account also reproduced some of the commission’s primary records.6 The history of cartography was one of Orozco y Berra’s principal interests, particularly for the study of the geography of Mexico. He wished to form a collection of maps that would demonstrate the progress of geographical knowledge of the country, but finding it impossible to assemble the maps himself, he instead conceived the idea of compiling a bibliography of all the existing maps that illustrated the history of Mexico. He combed the libraries and archives of Mexico City, examining and listing maps.7 Among the thousands of maps he found were the U.S.-Mexico boundary maps. These, together with many other maps Orozco y Berra studied, are preserved today in a map archive named in his honor, the Mapoteca ‘‘Manuel Orozco y Berra,’’ in Mexico City. Contrary to the often perceived view of the boundary survey as an achievement of the U.S. Commission alone, Orozco y Berra’s account, the engineers’ reports, and the Mexican Boundary Commission’s maps support each other. Together they present a picture of the extensive accomplishments of the Mexican Commission in surveying and mapping the boundary.

b o u n da r y t r e at i e s a n d b o u n da r y c om m i s s ion s The dividing line between the territories of Mexico and the United States was established as a result of the U.S.-Mexican War, brought to an end by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. The treaty directed that the international border was to commence in the Gulf of Mexico and

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follow the middle of the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as the Río Bravo) until it reached the boundary of New Mexico. It followed the southern boundary of New Mexico, as represented on the Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico by John Disturnell, to its western end, then turned northward until it intersected the southernmost branch of the Gila River. From there, the boundary followed the Gila River to its confluence with the Colorado River, then struck a straight line to a point on the Pacific coast. The point on the coast was specified as one marine league south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego, as shown on a plan drawn by Don Juan Pantoja y Arriaga in 1782. A tracing of Pantoja’s map and of Disturnell’s map were attached to the treaty and became integral parts of it.8 The treaty provided that the U.S. and Mexican governments were to appoint boundary commissions, which began the task of locating the boundary on the ground in 1849. During the survey, the commissions found that errors in Disturnell’s map made unclear the location of the line running west from the Río Bravo. As they attempted to interpret Disturnell’s map, the commissioners agreed upon a boundary connecting the Río Bravo and the Río Gila, following a line westward from the Río Bravo along the 32°22' parallel, that became known as the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise. Disputes over the Compromise finally resulted in the collapse of the survey provided for under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Territory south of the Gila River that now forms part of the United States was later purchased from Mexico as part of the Treaty of 1853, usually known in the United States as the Gadsden Treaty and in Mexico as the Tratado de La Mesilla. The new treaty resolved the impasse over the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise, replacing the Gila River and the southern boundary of New Mexico as shown on Disturnell’s map with a boundary that followed specified mathematical lines.9 Portions of the line defined in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been surveyed and marked when the new delimitation of the Treaty of 1853 was ratified and new commissions were appointed to continue the demarcation. In October 1855, the field work of the U.S.-Mexico boundary survey was completed; but in addition to surveying and marking the boundary, the two treaties required that the commissions make maps of their operations. The calculations from survey data, maps, and final reports were finished about two years later, the Mexican Commission and the U.S. Commission each producing a complete set of official boundary maps. Each country’s maps, made only in manuscript, consisted of fifty-four sectional


maps, most at a scale of 1:60,000, and four general maps at a scale of 1:600,000. The U.S. and Mexican maps were made in similar formats, consistent throughout the series, and were numbered consecutively from east to west, beginning with No. 1 on the Gulf Coast.10 Unlike the U.S. Boundary Commission, which had a broad mandate to explore and gather scientific information about the new territory acquired from Mexico, the Mexican Commission devoted itself entirely to the mission of demarcating and mapping the boundary. The Mexican Commission was much smaller than the U.S. Commission, and less troubled by the personal bickering, political partisanship, and conflicts between military and civilian personnel that disrupted the U.S. Commission. Most of the appointees were military engineers and many were carried over from one commission to the next. The Mexican Boundary Commission continued a long tradition of soldier-engineers and surveying and mapping activities in colonial New Spain. All of its engineers were educated at either the Colegio de Minería or the Colegio Militar in Mexico City. The Colegio de Minería, a school of science and mathematics founded at the end of the eighteenth century, was especially known for its close ties with Alexander von Humboldt, who had established himself at the school during his stay in Mexico in 1803–1804. The Colegio Militar, located in Chapultepec Castle, was founded shortly after Mexican independence and included a corps of engineers. Several of the members of the boundary commission were students or teachers in the engineer school during the U.S.-Mexican War and defended Chapultepec when it became the last stronghold in the defense of Mexico City against U.S. forces.11 The Mexican Commission was reorganized four times during the course of the survey. In his history, Orozco y Berra named the commissions by number in order of their appointment, a method of designation that will be followed here. The first commission was appointed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and according to the directives of the treaty, traveled to San Diego to mark the California line. The second commission worked from a base in the town of Paso del Norte (present Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua) and surveyed both the land boundary to the west and the river boundary on the Río Bravo. The third commission was organized in response to the Treaty of 1853 and worked from Paso and along other sections of the line. The fourth commission was appointed to produce the official boundary maps, using the data gathered by the three field commissions.

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t h e f i r s t c om m i s s ion Following the requirements of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the first commission was headed by two officials, a commissioner and a surveyor. As commissioner, Mexico appointed an army engineer with a long and distinguished career in surveying and mapping, General Pedro García Conde, to direct the Mexican surveys and engage in diplomacy with U.S. boundary officials. Later, García Conde continued as head of the second commission, but he fell ill and died during service in the field. The position of surveyor was held by a civilian engineer, José Salazar Ylarregui. Despite his official title, most of the work that he performed in the field was astronomy. Upon García Conde’s passing, Salazar became the Boundary Commissioner for Mexico. Salazar’s part in the Mexican Commission was a heroic one, similar to that of Emory for the United States, staying with the commission from beginning to end and pressing to complete the work. Later in life, however, Salazar fell into political disgrace with the collapse of Maximilian’s empire, in which he had held prominent positions. In addition to the commissioner and surveyor, four engineers and an interpreter were appointed to assist the work. They included First Engineer Francisco Jiménez; Francisco Martínez de Chavero, who was Salazar’s principal assistant in the California survey; Agustín García Conde, son of the commissioner; Second Engineer Ricardo Ramírez; and, as translator and interpreter, Felipe de Iturbide.12 In San Diego, members of the Mexican and U.S. commissions met to plan their work. The commissions agreed that each party would pursue its own methods, working at its own pace, and that they would meet to agree upon the results. The two official surveyors, Salazar and U.S. surveyor A. B. Gray, drew up a plan outlining their main tasks. They would begin by establishing three points that defined the course of the boundary: the southernmost point of the port of San Diego and the two end points of the straight line between the coast and the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers. Salazar documented the work of the Mexican Commission in California, and his own work in particular, in a diary which became one of the earliest publications of either the U.S. or the Mexican commission. He wrote that his first step was to extend a network of triangles around the southern end of San Diego Bay, and he prepared a map of his survey, which he published in the diary. Meanwhile, Gray conducted a survey of the bay on his own. Salazar and Gray then compared their separate efforts against Pantoja’s map and agreed upon an interpretation of the southern-


most point of the day. They continued their separate efforts in measuring out the length of a marine league from the southernmost point of the bay to the position of the initial point on the coast. With little difference between the two surveyors’ measurements, the commissions confirmed a position for the initial point monument.13 While the topographical work was in progress, engineers Chavero, Jiménez, and Agustín García Conde made observations for latitude and longitude at the Mexican Commission’s astronomical station. It was in relation to the astronomical work that Emory’s criticism of the Mexican Commission’s instruments surfaced and induced his opinion that the Mexican engineers would be unable to carry out surveys of their own. The instruments that the Mexican astronomers had brought to California were undoubtedly flawed: Salazar criticized them in his report. He told how the Mexican government had ordered fine instruments from the workshops of the best instrument makers of London and Paris, and how the instruments were inspected and approved in Paris before they were shipped to Mexico, but the engineers of the boundary commission were disappointed when inferior instruments were delivered instead. ‘‘Unfortunately,’’ Salazar meditated, ‘‘the hand of fate, which touches whatever is Mexican, reached out to the instruments in Paris.’’ 14 Apparently a substitution of lower-quality instruments had been made before shipment. Without time or money to buy new instruments before the survey began, the boundary commission borrowed instruments, many of which were as inadequate as the new ones, from the Colegio Militar and the Colegio de Minería. Nevertheless, when the Mexican engineers’ calculations for the position of the initial point were compared to those of the U.S. Commission, the differences were small enough that Salazar felt he could discard one or two of the Mexican engineers’ most extreme observations.15 Thus the Mexican Commission in California did accept some of the results of the U.S. Commission’s work, as Emory said, but it was not the outcome of Mexican engineers standing by as observers. Later, the engineers of the second and third commissions were able to acquire additional, better instruments and to rely entirely upon their own survey results. The results of the Mexican Commission’s work at San Diego were the basis for sheet No. 54 in the set of official boundary maps, the map that was surveyed first thus becoming last in the numbered series. It showed the southern end of San Diego Bay, the initial point on the Pacific (Fig. 6.1), and the boundary line that Salazar and Chavero and other engineers later extended eastward. In the map title, the names of Salazar and Chavero

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6.1 Detail of map No. 54, showing the initial point on the Pacific coast. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

were given as the surveyors of the boundary line, crediting their work of 1850.16 While the Mexican Commission was engaged on the coast, a U.S. party mapped the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers, locating the third essential point that defined the California line. Later García Conde and Salazar inspected and approved the U.S. engineers’ work, but the Mexican Commission remained at the Río Gila to complete its own survey and astronomical determinations. Salazar included a map in his diary showing the results of the Mexican Commission’s work at the confluence; the boundary in this area was later modified, however, by the Treaty of 1853.17 The demarcation of the azimuth line connecting the Pacific coast and the Colorado River was delegated to one engineer from each commission, Ricardo Ramírez for Mexico and Edmund Hardcastle for the United States, who remained in California with a few assistants while the commissions disbanded. In the joint journal of their operations, Ramírez and Hardcastle reported their cooperative effort.18 They agreed that Hardcastle should ‘‘run the line,’’ locating the course of the azimuth, while Ramírez would measure distances between the monuments along the line. Working together, the engineers placed permanent markers at designated


positions. After enduring may hardships in carrying out the work, they closed the California survey at the end of July 1851. Although the Mexican Commission had acquired a great deal of geographical information through its work in California, it did not attempt to compile its own final maps of the azimuth line. Maps No. 46 through No. 52, showing the California boundary, were copied from U.S. maps. The titles stated that the maps were copies but recognized Ramírez and Hardcastle for running and marking the line. In contrast, the U.S. maps the Mexican Commission copied from gave credit to Hardcastle alone. The U.S. map credits were meant to recognize a reconnaissance that Hardcastle had conducted to gather topographical information, but along much of the line the maps presented little topographical detail, showing only the boundary and its coordinates of latitude and longitude. They were drawn at a scale of 1:30,000, a larger scale than most of the sectional maps, because the U.S. Commission began production of the California maps before an agreement on the map format had been reached between the commissioners.

t h e s e c on d c om m i s s ion While Ramírez and Hardcastle stayed behind in California, a new, larger boundary commission was organized in Mexico City, again headed by García Conde. Salazar still held the official position of surveyor, and Jiménez and Agustín García Conde were first engineers. New members of the commission included Juan Espejo, a second engineer; and Manuel Alemán, Agustín Díaz, and Luis Díaz, who each had the title of agregado, or ‘‘assistant.’’ Alemán was an astronomer, whereas Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz, who were brothers, both pursued careers as topographers. Under García Conde’s direction, the second commission surveyed the Río Gila and the boundary west from Paso, as defined in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise. Jiménez led the small party that worked on the Río Gila, Espejo surveyed the western end of the 32°22' parallel and the meridian connecting it with a branch of the Gila, and Salazar located the Bartlett-García Conde initial point on the Río Bravo and surveyed the eastern end of the 32°22' parallel. All of this work was nullified by the Treaty of 1853.19 In December 1851, while the Mexican Commission was at work on the Compromise line, Commissioner García Conde died and Salazar was appointed as interim commissioner. Salazar turned to work on the Río Bravo,

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6.2 Detail of map No. 29, showing Socorro and San Elizario. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

although the unstable government in Mexico City provided him with few resources. He assigned Agustín Díaz, with his brother Luis as assistant, to work upriver from the town of San Ignacio, some fifty miles below Paso, continuing to the Bartlett-García Conde initial point on the 32°22' parallel. The surveys between San Ignacio and Paso became the bases for final boundary maps No. 28 and No. 29. The Díaz surveys between Paso and the 32°22' parallel could not be used for the final maps once the Treaty of 1853 moved the initial point on the Río Bravo southward from the BartlettGarcía Conde Compromise line. In his report on the survey, Díaz noted that Salazar’s instructions emphasized the construction of a topographic map by means of triangulation.20 The surveys and the maps that resulted from them were very detailed, especially in showing the towns, cultivated fields, and system of acequias that bordered the Río Bravo. Salazar gave special instructions to investigate the river where it branched near Isleta, Socorro, and San Elizario, a well-established agricultural district (Fig. 6.2). Díaz found that the Río Bravo flowed southwest of the towns, while the old channels of the river on the northeast contained very little water. The boundary, located


in the deepest channel of the river, would therefore place the towns on the U.S. side of the line, even though the settlements had long been Mexican. The U.S. Commission meanwhile pressed downriver with surveys to Presidio del Norte, at the confluence of the Río Conchos and the Río Bravo. Salazar lacked the means to support astronomical surveys beyond Paso but made plans to carry out a survey to Presidio del Norte himself, without funds or assistants. In early 1853, he performed a reconnaissance, making astronomical observations for latitude and calculating chronometric longitudes.21 Evidence of Salazar’s reconnaissance appeared on the Mexican Commission’s final maps No. 23 through No. 27. The maps contained special notes, called ‘‘determinations by Salazar,’’ giving positions of latitude for stations marked on the maps. They were otherwise copies of the maps made by the U.S. Commission; their titles stated that they were ‘‘copied in 1857’’ but also noted that the maps were ‘‘reconnoitered astronomically and topographically in 1853 by José Salazar Ylarregui, Surveyor and Interim Commissioner of Mexico.’’ Salazar’s station at the presidio of Pilares, with a note stating his latitude determination for the station, identifies map No. 25 as a product of Salazar’s reconnaissance (Fig. 6.3). It was also a copy of U.S. map No. 25. The U.S. maps that the Mexican maps were copied from were apparently made without knowledge of Salazar’s reconnaissance, because the positions given as Salazar’s determinations in the notes on the maps are different than the locations of the stations relative to the map’s graticule. Pilares was a typical example, being located on the map about two minutes south of the position given in the note. On U.S. map No. 25, a handwritten note, initialed by Commissioner Emory, explained that the parallels on the map should be corrected in order to align Pilares with Salazar’s position.22 While Salazar was at work on the Río Bravo below Paso, he appointed a party to survey the desembocadura, the river’s outlet into the Gulf of Mexico. The party was led by Francisco Jiménez, who was assisted in the astronomical work by Manuel Alemán, with Agustín and Luis Díaz in charge of the topographical surveys. Jiménez afterward reported on some of the issues in the demarcation of the boundary on the lower river, and map No. 1 of the final boundary maps showed the results of their work at the desembocadura (see Fig. 6.4). Using new astronomical instruments, Jiménez and Alemán made observations for two months at Matamoros, fixing a position which Jiménez regarded as the most reliable determination made by the Mexican Commission on the river. Matamoros appeared at the western edge of map

6.3 Detail of map No. 25, showing Pilares and the Nota giving Salazar’s latitude determination. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

6.4 Map No. 1, showing the mouth of the Río Bravo and lower river. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.


No. 1, where the neat line was broken in order to extend the map image to include the town. At the desembocadura the astronomers also carried out observations for two months, and their station was marked on the map with a dot near the mouth of the river.23 Map No. 1 also represented the results of formal agreements made between Jiménez, as principal engineer of the Mexican Commission, and representatives of the U.S. Commission. Jiménez approved the location of the deepest channel of the river and the positions on each side of the channel where boundary monuments would be placed.24 The Mexican monument was shown as a labeled point, and the deepest channel was drawn as a dashed-and-dotted line on the map. The location of the deepest channel was provided by the Díaz topographical survey, completed some three months ahead of the U.S. survey, and the positions of the monuments were determined in relationship to that channel. A number of field maps of the topographical survey by Agustín and Luis Díaz have been preserved.25 They were drawn in ink on paper at scales of either 1:20,000 or 1:50,000, and some were arranged in sets of two or three contiguous sheets that portrayed a specified reach of the Río Bravo. Plate 11 shows a detail from one of the sheets in a set of three field maps that made up the series, ‘‘From Matamoros to the Mouth.’’ In the detail, the Río Bravo may be seen outlined in black, while the triangulation along the banks of the river by which the principal channel was located was drawn in red. The astronomers’ observatory and the monument at the mouth of the river were shown, as well as a village on the Mexican side of the desembocadura and the roads bordering both banks of the river. In addition to their work at the desembocadura, the astronomers carried their survey upriver as far as Laredo. They established secondary positions with portable instruments, and related their stations to the triangulation executed by the topographers, who also extended their net between the Gulf of Mexico and Laredo. Another group of field maps, with the general title, ‘‘Río Bravo from Laredo to Guerrero,’’ depicted surveys between Laredo and the town of Guerrero, near the mouth of the Río Salado, and included both large- and small-scale sheets. Some of these bear the names of Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz and the date of the survey in their titles (Fig. 6.5). The area of Laredo, originally settled by Spanish colonists in the mideighteenth century, included a cluster of communities on both sides of the Río Bravo. On the Mexican side were Villa de Monterey Laredo and the Presidio de Nuevo Laredo, where Jiménez and Alemán carried out astronomical observations for a month to determine latitude and longitude.

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6.5 Detail (title) of field map by Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz, Río Bravo. Plano de la parte comprendida entre Laredo y Guerrero . . . No. I. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

Their observatory was incorporated into the topographers’ net of triangles, as shown on their field map (Plate 12, at lower left). The information gathered in the field work at Laredo was later used in the compilation of final boundary map No. 8, which credited the astronomical and topographical surveys of Jiménez, Alemán, Agustín Díaz, and Luis Díaz. Evidently, not all of map No. 8 was an original compilation, however, as the representation of the Río Bravo above Laredo appears to have been copied from the U.S. map. Also copied from U.S. maps were Mexican map No. 9 and other Mexican maps of the Río Bravo above Laredo, which credited U.S. surveys in their titles and stated that the maps were copied. Since the reports and field maps of the Mexican engineers indicated that Laredo was the end point of their surveys, they thus provided an explanation for the copied portion of map No. 8 of the Río Bravo above the vicinity of Laredo, and for several copied sheets beginning with map No. 9.26 The final maps of the Río Bravo between Laredo and the desembocadura, maps No. 1 through No. 8, were based on the astronomical surveys by Jiménez and Alemán and the topographical surveys of Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz (Fig. 6.6). The Mexican engineers were credited in all of the map titles. The maps that resulted were very detailed in their por-


trayal of the boundary river and the surrounding countryside. The course of the river, with its small islands, and the settlements, ranches, and roads were carefully recorded. The islands in the river were especially thoroughly surveyed; in addition to locating their positions in the triangulation net, Agustín Díaz also made soundings from a small boat in the adjacent river channels. The results of his surveys were shown in the final maps by dashed lines that designated the deepest channel forming the boundary around each island. The island boundaries displayed on the maps accorded with the observations given in the report he prepared on the river survey.27

t h e t h i r d c om m i s s ion While work on the lower Río Bravo proceeded, the Treaty of 1853 was being negotiated in order to settle the dispute over the location of the boundary running westward from El Paso. Agustín Díaz, alone on the Río Bravo in spring 1854, was the last engineer from either commission to carry

6.6 Detail of map No. 2, showing the Río Bravo just above Matamoros. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

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out surveys under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When he returned to Mexico City, he became a member of the new commission that was about to leave for the border under the recently settled Treaty of 1853. For the third commission, Salazar was again named commissioner, the position now combined with the function of the official surveyor. The engineers were about equally divided between experienced veterans of the survey and new appointees. The commission was large enough that it was divided into three sections, each to travel to a different area and survey a separate part of the boundary. One section was to complete the survey of the Río Bravo, another was to survey the land boundary westward from Paso, and the third section was to survey the land boundary eastward from the end of the California line at the Colorado River. The commission again received little financial support, however, due to continuing disruptions in the Mexican government. One of the three sections, the sección del Río Bravo, was made up of three new engineers—Manuel Fernández Leal, Francisco Herrera, and Miguel Iglesias—who were to complete the survey of the river between Paso and Laredo. They began at Presidio del Norte, where Salazar’s earlier reconnaissance had ended, and carried triangulation surveys across rugged country dominated by the Apaches and Comanches, as far as the town of San Carlos, Chihuahua, near the canyons of the Big Bend. Their resources exhausted, they then returned to Paso. A few field maps and a table of triangulation data published by Orozco y Berra have survived to testify to the engineers’ achievement.28 The field map titled No. I. Croquis de la confluencia de los rios Bravo del Norte y Conchos, levantado por los ingenieros de la Comision de Limites, M. Fernandez, Francisco Herrera y M. Iglesias (No. I. Sketch of the confluence of the Bravo del Norte and Conchos rivers, surveyed by the engineers of the Boundary Commission, M. Fernández, Francisco Herrera, and M. Iglesias) exhibited the engineers’ survey of the confluence of the Río Conchos and the Río Bravo near Presidio del Norte (Fig. 6.7). It was dated 1855 and the scale was given as 1:25,000. The drawing paper was printed with a graduated circle, over which the topographical features were drawn in black ink and the triangulation net in red. In the final maps, the survey of the confluence became part of map No. 22, where the topographical information contributed by Fernández, Herrera, and Iglesias was combined with Salazar’s astronomical positions. In addition to map No. 22, the surveys of the three engineers also provided the information for final map No. 21, showing the Río Bravo in its narrow canyon. The second section of the Mexican Commission, the sección del norte,


6.7 Field map by Manuel Fernández Leal, Francisco Herrera, and Miguel Iglesias, No. I. Croquis de la confluencia de los rios Bravo del Norte y Conchos. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

was composed of Salazar and two new engineers, Ignacio Molina and Antonio Contreras. They met with the U.S. Commission in Paso in order to establish the new initial point on the Río Bravo and survey the new boundary that would replace the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise line. According to the Treaty of 1853, the boundary left the Río Bravo at the parallel of 31°47' N, ran due west for one hundred miles, then turned south to the parallel of 31°20', and followed that parallel to the 111° meridian. Both the sección del norte and the U.S. Commission made astronomical observations to locate the position of the new initial point where the 31°47' parallel crossed the Río Bravo, and they averaged their results to determine the position. The resulting final map of the Mexican Commission, No. 29, showed the new initial point but was largely based on surveys done earlier. Throughout 1851 and 1852, Mexican engineers had carried out astronomical observations at Paso, making their observatory near the cathedral one of the most well-established positions of the survey. The depiction of the

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Río Bravo in map No. 29 was derived from the survey done by Agustín and Luis Díaz in 1852. The representation of the line running west from the Río Bravo, however, depended on surveys made in 1855. After the surveys at the initial point had been completed, the U.S. Commission was ready to move west to continue the survey of the parallel, but Salazar, lacking a sufficient field party and an escort, could not leave Paso del Norte. The U.S. Commission alone therefore ran the line on the 31°47' and 31°20' parallels and the meridian connecting them, while Salazar agreed to adopt the line. The sección del norte remained behind and constructed permanent monuments at sites that had been agreed upon near the Río Bravo. Salazar later directed a separate survey westward from Paso—a survey that generally has been overlooked, perhaps because it was executed after the commissioners had already formally accepted the U.S. demarcation of the line. Its purpose was to verify or correct the U.S. astronomical determinations and to mark the line with more monuments. The Mexican Commission’s efforts ranged from astronomical reconnaissance to full triangulation surveys.29 Engineers Molina and Contreras, accompanied by craftsmen and laborers who built permanent monuments, carried out a triangulation of the 31°47' parallel, working eastward from the end of the parallel toward Paso. Fernández and Herrera of the sección del Río Bravo left their work on the river to survey the meridian between the 31°47' and 31°20' parallels. They began from a baseline located halfway between the parallels, and linked up their triangulation with the Molina-Contreras survey. The engineers prepared a field map, titled Croquis de la parte de la línea comprendida entre los paralelos 31°47' y 31°20', Comision de Límites, Ano de 1855 (Sketch of the part of the line comprised between the 31°47' and 31°20' parallels, Boundary Commission, Year of 1855), which showed the meridian line connecting the ends of the two parallels (Fig. 6.8).30 The topography was drawn in strong, black ink outlines; faint lines that were sketched in pencil and erased provide evidence of the triangulation lines or sight lines that were the map’s foundation. Final maps No. 30 through No. 33, representing the 31°47' parallel and the meridian one hundred miles west of the initial point, were drawn from the Mexican Commission’s independent surveys. Map No. 32, for example, showing the junction of the 31°47' parallel and the meridian line, recognized the surveys of 1855 by Fernández and Herrera and by Molina and Contreras in the title panel. It also attributed the astronomical part to Salazar. Orozco y Berra explained that Salazar, assisted by Engineer


6.8 Field map by the Comisión de Límites, Croquis de la parte de la línea comprendida entre los paralelos 31°47' y 31° 20'. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

Iglesias, astronomically determined the positions of the end points of the parallels and meridian and traced the direction of the tangent to the 31°47' parallel.31 Iglesias also assisted Salazar in making astronomical determinations on the 31°20' parallel, where no triangulation was attempted. Time ran out for the Mexican Commission’s separate survey of the 31°20' parallel when the field work of the joint commission had been completed and the U.S. Commission was leaving the boundary. The 31°20' parallel was displayed on Mexico’s final maps No. 34 through No. 37, which were copied from U.S. maps, and credited the U.S. survey in their titles. However, the titles also noted (except on map No. 37) that the maps were astronomically reconnoitered by Salazar. At the end of December 1855, the engineers working on the parallels were reunited and closed the Mexican Commission’s field work. The third section of the Mexican Commission, known as the sección de Sonora, was responsible for the survey of the Colorado River and the

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line between the 111° meridian and the river. Their assignment included some of the most difficult terrain on the boundary. From the 111° meridian, the boundary ran in a straight line across the Sonoran Desert to a point on the Río Colorado twenty miles below its junction with the Gila, then up the middle of the Colorado until it intersected the California boundary. The point to be established where the Sonoran Desert azimuth line crossed the Río Colorado was called the initial point on the Colorado. Both the Mexican and U.S. boundary commissions sent parties to the Colorado River in 1854 to survey the river and to work eastward from the initial point on the Colorado. The sección de Sonora was led by Francisco Jiménez and included engineers Manuel Alemán and Agustín Díaz. Luis Díaz traveled to the northern border with the sección de Sonora, but being in poor health because of an illness he had contracted earlier in the survey, he remained behind in the town of Altar, Sonora, to draft maps while the rest of the section continued on to the Río Colorado. For the United States, a party under the direction of Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler of the Corps of Topographical Engineers arrived on the Colorado and began work some four months before the Mexican party reached the river. Jiménez later wrote a lengthy report on the activities of the sección de Sonora, in which he described the efforts he directed to quickly catch up with U.S. operations. When he arrived at the Río Colorado and found that Michler had already determined the location of the initial point, Jiménez agreed to adopt the position, contingent upon the Mexican section’s determination of its latitude and longitude. Jiménez and Alemán at once made astronomical observations and calculations in order to test the distance between Michler’s initial point and the confluence of the Colorado and the Gila. The position proved satisfactory, and Michler and Jiménez proceeded to consult and cooperate extensively in the establishment of the initial point on the Colorado (Fig. 6.9). Agustín Díaz with his military assistants independently carried out a topographical survey of the river which, two months later, enabled Jiménez to verify the position of the initial point. The results of the triangulation diverged so little from the position that he and Michler had established that Jiménez felt entirely satisfied with the work.32 Later, in the final map series, the initial point appeared on map No. 44, which also showed a portion of the Colorado River survey (see Fig. 6.9). Agustín Díaz wrote a report in which he described the topographical work and presented the data he collected. Díaz’s operations included a triangulation from the junction of the Río Gila and Río Colorado to the initial point on the Colorado, measurement of rhumbs and distances to deter-


6.9 Detail of map No. 44, showing the initial point on the Colorado. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

mine the course of the river between the two points, and observation of the principal topographic features.33 Final map No. 45 as well as No. 44 recorded the Colorado River boundary, with a continuous representation on the two sheets. Map No. 44 also showed the beginning of the azimuth line across the Sonoran Desert. After completing the river survey, Jiménez and Michler attempted to continue the line eastward across the desert, but were deterred by lack of water, so they decided to attempt the azimuth line survey from its eastern end, and journeyed by way of the Gila River to the 111° meridian. There they found that the U.S. party under Commissioner Emory had arrived ahead of them, having just completed the survey of the 31°20' parallel. Emory’s party had already determined the intersection of the parallel with the 111° meridian, the starting point of the azimuth line. Emory explained to Jiménez that Salazar had agreed to adopt the line fixed by the U.S. Commission, including the position of the 111° meridian, and that he and Michler should therefore begin their survey from the point established by Emory’s party.34 Emory furthermore opposed Jiménez and Michler’s plans for a full triangulation of the line, compelling an agreement that would prohibit it. Since resources for independent topographical operations were not avail-

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able, Díaz proposed that the engineers use the method of intersection to delineate the topography while the line was being run. The Jiménez and Michler parties then worked together to survey the azimuth line, following the Díaz plan. Surveyors from the U.S. party occupied stations on the line in alternation with Díaz, who had two soldiers and two servants to assist him, aligning the boundary and reading angles between stations on the line and selected natural features. Meanwhile, Jiménez and Alemán astronomically determined a point on the boundary about halfway to the Río Colorado, which Emory agreed to adopt. The Mexican Commission’s large astronomical instruments were carried across the desert from the Río Bravo in carts.35 Michler’s account of the azimuth-line survey was sketchy, but the reports by Jiménez and Díaz described the survey as a joint operation, a full collaboration between the Mexican and U.S. parties.36 After the line had been run and the astronomy completed, at Jiménez’s suggestion, the two parties settled for a month in the town of Magdalena, Sonora, where they completed their calculations and field maps. Although Salazar’s work on the parallels west of Paso was concluded later, Jiménez and Michler officially closed the field work of the U.S.-Mexico boundary survey in October 1855. The final maps of the conjoint surveys consisted of eight sheets in both the Mexican and U.S. map series, beginning with map No. 38 at the 111° meridian, and ending with map No. 45 on the Río Colorado. The maps were compiled and drawn independently by the two commissions, but both the Mexican and U.S. maps credited members of both commissions for the survey. The titles on the Mexican maps, in English translation, stated, ‘‘For the Mexican Commission: in the astronomical part, First Engineer Francisco Jiménez and Captain of Engineers Manuel Alemán; triangulation and topography, Captain of Engineers Agustín Díaz. For the Commission of the United States: Lieutenant of Engineers N. Michler aided by Engineer A. Schott.’’

t h e f o u rt h c om m i s s ion Before they left the field, commissioners Salazar and Emory planned for the boundary commissions to reconvene in the city of Washington, where they would produce the authoritative maps required by the boundary treaties. The U.S. Boundary Commission had already established an office


in Washington, where several employees had been working at the reduction of astronomical data, map compilation, and map drafting since the first information from the California survey became available. Work on the U.S. Commission’s final maps was therefore well advanced by the time the field work was completed. Although the Mexican engineers made many field maps during the survey, they apparently did not begin work on the final maps before meeting with the U.S. Commission in Washington. In anticipation of the Mexican Commission’s arrival, the U.S. Commission moved its Washington office into larger quarters where both commissions could be accommodated. When the Mexican engineers reached Washington in June 1856 and occupied the office space that had been prepared for them, the building then became the office of the joint commission. Arriving as members of Mexico’s fourth commission were Commissioner José Salazar Ylarregui, First Engineer Francisco Jiménez, Second Engineers Agustín Díaz, Luis Díaz, and Manuel Alemán, and Assistant Ignacio Molina; all had been members of the third commission and had returned to Mexico City from the boundary before traveling together to Washington. Two new assistants who joined the fourth commission with appointments as drafters or illustrators were Julio Pinal and Antonio Espinosa y Cervantes.37 At the office of the joint commission, commissioners Salazar and Emory met to discuss the mapping enterprise and outline its objectives. They affirmed that the maps of the boundary should be made in two scales, a large-scale series of detailed maps and a small-scale set of general maps, and that one copy of all the maps should be made by each commission. The finished maps were to be approved and signed by the commissioners, and their respective governments would each receive one set of maps. This was the plan that the commissions fulfilled, producing the maps that are now preserved in the Mexican and U.S. archives.38 The fourth commission remained in Washington for over a year. The Mexican engineers worked at the same tasks that continued to occupy the employees of the U.S. office—making calculations from astronomical observations, compiling rough maps, and drawing finished maps. The Mexican Commission also made copies of the U.S. Commission’s maps for some sections of the boundary. Although Jiménez noted that he and Alemán performed all of the mathematical calculations, there is little surviving testimony from the other engineers regarding their map making activities.39 Most of the finished U.S. maps were signed by the artists who drew them, but only one map of the Mexican Commission was signed. On

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6.10 Detail of map No. 14, showing the drafter’s signature. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

map No. 14, just inside the neat line at the bottom right-hand corner, the name of Antonio Espinosa y Cervantes appears in lettering so tiny it must be read with a magnifying glass (Fig. 6.10). The computers, topographers, and artists of both the Mexican and U.S. Commissions finished their manuscript boundary maps in fall 1857. Carrying out their official duties, commissioners Salazar and Emory met to examine and compare the maps made by the two commissions. They found that the maps agreed and expressed their approval by signing each of the maps, thus certifying the maps as legal evidence of the boundary, to be retained by the governments of each nation.40 The boundary was accepted as established by both Mexico and the United States, and the fourth commission returned to Mexico City to deliver the boundary commission records and official maps to the minister of relations. In time, the boundary documents found their way to various archives of the Mexican government as other events claimed the engineers’ attention and the boundary-makers and their achievements faded from memory.41

t h e ac c om p l i s h m e n t s of t h e m e x ic a n b o u n da r y c om m i s s ion The forgotten engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission may be discovered through their masterwork, the U.S.-Mexico boundary maps of


1857. The maps record the names of nearly all the engineers who participated in the surveying and mapping of the boundary, and note their contributions to the work. Together with the field maps and the engineers’ reports, including those preserved by Orozco y Berra, the boundary maps also provide a clear record of the Mexican Commission’s accomplishments in the field work. Nevertheless, the maps also reflect the incompleteness of the Mexican survey. Although the boundary commission itself was efficiently organized and the engineers highly competent, the deteriorating political situation in Mexico during the course of the survey resulted in loss of financial support and the inability of the commission to complete surveys of the entire boundary. Because the Mexican Commission conducted no field work in some areas, maps of those sections of the boundary therefore had to be made as copies of U.S. maps. Several groups of maps, composed of sheets that are related to each other according to the participation of the Mexican engineers in field work and map production, make up the Mexican Commission’s set of official boundary maps. Accounting for the role of the Mexican engineers in collecting the information needed to construct each map, and considering whether each map was copied from a map of the U.S. Commission or compiled independently, the final maps of the Mexican Commission may be placed into five categories. The categories include: (1) copied maps of U.S. surveys, (2) copied maps of U.S. surveys with Mexican reconnaissances, (3) copied maps of conjoint surveys, (4) original maps of conjoint surveys, and (5) original maps of Mexican surveys. Copied maps of U.S. surveys consisted mainly of maps of the Río Bravo. The Mexican engineers did not attempt field work in the river’s most difficult canyon country. Copied maps included No. 9 through No. 20, which showed the boundary on the Río Bravo from just above Laredo through the Big Bend to San Carlos. Also, map No. 37, showing the 31°20' parallel in the area around the Santa Cruz River, was copied from the U.S. map. A number of the Mexican maps were copied from U.S. maps but included additional information from Mexican reconnaissance surveys. Salazar carried out an astronomical reconnaissance of the Río Bravo from just above Presidio del Norte to just below San Ignacio, a section of the river shown on maps No. 23 through No. 27. Salazar’s latitude determinations were added as notes on the maps, and became corrections to the positions shown on the U.S. maps as well as the Mexican maps. Mexican maps No. 34 through No. 36 were also copied from the U.S. maps but recorded Salazar’s reconnaissance surveys; these sheets covered most of the 31°20'

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parallel, from approximately the turning point at the meridian one hundred miles west of Paso to the San Pedro River. Several maps were copied by the Mexican Commission from U.S. maps that were actually surveyed conjointly by U.S. and Mexican parties. These included maps No. 46 through No. 52 of the California line. The information for the California maps was provided by Mexican engineer Ricardo Ramírez and U.S. topographical engineer Edmund Hardcastle, who united their small parties to run and mark the azimuth line in a single survey. The U.S. and Mexican engineers cooperated even more fully in the field work that established the Sonoran Desert azimuth line. Parties from both commissions participated in astronomical determinations, shared operations to locate the azimuth and gather topographical data, and assisted in building monuments on the line. Each commission produced its own maps acknowledging the conjoint survey. These included Mexican maps No. 38 through No. 45, showing the boundary between the 111° meridian and the Colorado River. Maps made by the Mexican Commission based entirely on Mexican surveys included parts of the Río Bravo and sections of the boundary where turning points determined the direction of the line. Maps No. 1 through No. 8 showed the Río Bravo between its mouth and Laredo. Maps No. 21 and No. 22 showed the Río Bravo just west of the Big Bend, between San Carlos and the Río Conchos. Maps No. 28 through No. 33 showed the boundary on the Río Bravo from San Ignacio through Paso del Norte, the land boundary running westward on the 31°47' parallel to the meridian one hundred miles west of Paso, and the line south on the meridian to the 31°20' parallel. Finally, maps No. 53 and No. 54 showed the line running eastward from the initial point on the Pacific. Using data from the Mexican astronomers’ extensive observations and the Mexican topographers’ painstaking triangulation surveys, the Mexican Commission’s original maps of Mexican surveys included some of the most detailed and beautiful maps of the borderlands made by either commission. First Engineer of the Mexican Boundary Commission Francisco Jiménez attributed the commission’s success to the scientific abilities and commitment of its forgotten engineers. ‘‘I had not more than one, sole, favorable circumstance to which I owe the success of the operations,’’ he said; ‘‘this circumstance was having had placed at my service individuals who were much practiced in science and who were animated by the sole desire to carry out the delineation of the boundary at whatever cost in sacrifices.’’ 42 Manuel Orozco y Berra, in recording the Mexican engi-


neers’ efforts, hoped, he said, ‘‘to at least save them from the oblivion that always weighs upon our scientific works.’’ 43 With justifiable pride, Orozco y Berra commended the engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission, for they had faithfully fulfilled their charge, conducted themselves ‘‘with dignity before the Americans, and upheld well both the national honor and the scientific reputation of Mexico.’’ 44

notes 1. My free translation of ‘‘Tales son . . . los trabajos emprendidos á lo largo de nuestra línea divisoria con los Estados-Unidos, que así por su extension como por su exactitud, pueden ser colocados entre los mejores que el país debe á nuestros ingenieros. Es lástima que aun no se publique nada relativo á ellos, y que permanezcan desconocidos y olvidados, cuando podrian ser de gran provecho para la ciencia geográfica.’’ Manuel Orozco y Berra, Apuntes para la historia de la geografía en México (Mexico City: Francisco Diaz de Leon, 1881), 496. Map titles given in Spanish in this chapter also reproduce the orthography of the source materials. 2. Some works by Mexican authors on the U.S.–Mexico boundary survey include Alberto Maria Carreño, México y los Estados Unidos de America: Apuntaciones para la historia del acrecentamiento territorial de los Estados Unidos a costa de México desde la epoca colonial hasta nuestros días (Mexico City: Imprenta Victoria, 1922); Humberto Escoto Ochoa, Integración y desintegración de nuestra frontera norte (Mexico City, 1949); César Sepúlveda, La frontera norte de México: historia, conflictos, 1762–1975 (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1976); and Luis G. Zorrilla, Historia de las relaciones entre México y los Estados Unidos de América, 1800–1958, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1965– 1966). Some standard works by U.S. authors include Odie B. Faulk, Too Far North . . . Too Far South (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1967); William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Amon Carter Museum, 1968); and Carl Irving Wheat, From the Mexican War to the Boundary Surveys, 1846–1854, vol. 3 of Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540–1861 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1959). 3. William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Made Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1857, H. Ex. Doc. 135 (reprint, Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1987), 1:5. 4. The disregard of the Mexican Commission in the historiography of the boundary survey is discussed by Harry P. Hewitt, ‘‘ ‘El deseo de cubrir el honor nacional’: Francisco Jiménez and the Survey of the Mexico–United States Boundary, 1849–1857,’’ in La ciudad y el campo en la historia de México: Memoria de la VII reunión de historiadores mexicanos y norteamericanos, Oaxaca, Oax., 1985 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional

182 u paula rebert Autónoma de México, 1992), 2:709–711. See also Harry P. Hewitt, ‘‘The Mexican Boundary Survey Team: Pedro García Conde in California,’’ Western Historical Quarterly 21 (1990): 171–173. 5. Jesús S. Soto, Biografía de Don Manuel Orozco y Berra (México City, 1935), 56–61, 63–69. 6. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 434–498. 7. Manuel Orozco y Berra, Materiales para una cartografía mexicana (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1871). 8. Charles I. Bevans (comp.), Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1968–76), 9:794–795; J. Disturnell, Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico, segun lo organizado y definido por las varias actas del Congreso de dicha República: y construido por las mejores autoridades [map], rev. ed. [7th], 1 in = about 70 mi. (New York: J. Disturnell, 1847), Treaty Series No. 207, Government Documents Having General Legal Effect, Record Group 11, National Archives, Washington DC; Juan Pantoja, ‘‘Plano del puerto de S. Diego’’ [ms. tracing of map], Copies of Maps Filed with the Treaty of 1848, Entry 414, Preliminary Inventory 170, Records Relating to International Boundaries, Record Group 76, National Archives, Washington, DC. 9. Bevans, Treaties, 9:813. 10. For a cartobibliography and descriptions of the official boundary maps, see Paula Rebert, ‘‘The United States-Mexico Boundary: Manuscript Maps of 1857,’’ Bulletin, Special Libraries Association, Geography and Map Division, no. 186 (Summer 1997), 2–35. 11. Honored for their service in the defense of Chapultepec were future boundary commission members Francisco Jiménez, Manuel Alemán, Agustín Díaz, and Luis Díaz. The four engineers were to work together in surveys of several sections of the boundary. See Miguel A. Sánchez Lamego, El Colegio Militar y la defensa de Chapultepec en septiembre de 1847 (Mexico City, 1947), 44, 68. 12. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 435–436. 13. José Salazar Ylarregui, Datos de los trabajos astronómicos y topográficos, dispuestos en forma de diario, practicados durante el año de 1849 y principios de 1850 por la Comisión de Límites Mexicana en la línea que divide esta República de la de los Estados-Unidos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Juan R. Navarro, 1850), 17–22; Journal of U.S. Surveyor A. B. Gray, 7–11, Journal and Letters of Surveyors, 1849, Entry 429, Preliminary Inventory 170, Records Relating to International Boundaries, Record Group 76, National Archives, Washington, DC. 14. Salazar Ylarregui, Datos de los trabajos, 9 (my translation). 15. Ibid., 22. 16. For all of the official boundary maps made by the Mexican Commission, see [Comisión de Límites Mexicana], ‘‘Línea divisoria entre México y Los Estados Unidos’’ [ms. maps], [1857], Límites, México–Estados Unidos, Carpetas 1–4, Mapoteca ‘‘Manuel Orozco y Berra,’’ Mexico City. 17. Salazar Ylarregui, Datos de los trabajos, 24–30. 18. Edmund L. F. Hardcastle, Minutes of the Meetings Between Capt. E. L. F.

Unknown Works and Forgotten Engineers u 183 Hardcastle of the United States and Ricardo Ramírez of Mexico for the Purpose of Locating the Monuments Marking the Boundary Between the Two Countries, 1851, Mar. 19–July 30, Folder No. 59, Henderson Collection, MSA SC 501, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis. 19. International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico, Memoria documentada del juicio de arbitraje del Chamizal celebrado en virtud de la convención de junio 24 de 1910 (Mexico City: Artes Gráficas, Granja Experimental de Zoquipa, 1911), 2:159–162. 20. Agustín Díaz, ‘‘Memoria de D. Agustín Díaz,’’ in International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico, Memoria documentada del juicio de arbitraje del Chamizal celebrado en virtud de la convención de junio 24 de 1910 (Mexico City: Artes Gráficas, Granja Experimental de Zoquipa, 1911), 2:195–197. 21. Francisco Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria de los trabajos científicos practicados bajo la dirección de Francisco Jiménez, 1er Ingeniero de la Comisión de Límites Mexicana conforme a las Instrucciones del Señor Comisionado Don José Salazar Ilarregui, a quien se hace entrega de ellos,’’ 1857, 93, Special Collections, University Library, University of Texas at El Paso. 22. For the boundary maps of the U.S. Commission, see [U.S. Boundary Commission], ‘‘Boundary Between the United States & Mexico’’ [ms. maps], [1857], Map Records, n.d., Entry 417, Preliminary Inventory 170, Records Relating to International Boundaries, Record Group 76, National Archives, Washington, DC. 23. Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria,’’ 95–96. 24. Ibid., 238–246. 25. [Agustín Díaz and Luis Díaz], Río Bravo [ms. maps], 17 sheets, scale varies, 1853, Número de Control 1125, Colección ‘‘Manuel Orozco y Berra,’’ Entidad Federativa, Parciales 721, Mapoteca ‘‘Manuel Orozco y Berra,’’ Mexico City. 26. Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria,’’ 113–114, 116. 27. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 445–451. 28. [Comisión de Límites Mexicana], [Field Maps] [ms. maps], 7 sheets, scale varies, 1855, Número de control 1124, Colección Orozco y Berra—General, Mapoteca ‘‘Manuel Orozco y Berra,’’ Mexico City; Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 465–468. 29. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 468–482. 30. [Comisión de Límites Mexicana], [Field Maps], Número de Control 1124. 31. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 469–470. 32. Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria,’’ 181–184, 261–262. 33. Agustín Díaz, ‘‘Memoria sobre los trabajos topográficos que de orden del 1 er Ingo de la Comisión D. Francisco Jiménez, practicó el 2o Ingo de la misma, D. Agustin Díaz, en la porción del lindero boreal de la República Mexicana, que abraza una parte del curso del Río Colorado y la línea geodésica que va del punto inicial en dicho río (20 millas inglesas abajo de su confluencia con el Gila) a la intersección del meridiano 111° de longitud oeste de Greenwich y el paralelo 31°20' de latitud norte, año de 1855,’’ 1857, pp. 30–33, Special Collections, University Library, University of Texas at El Paso. 34. Emory, Report, 29–30. Later surveys found that Emory’s position at the 31°20'

184 u paula rebert parallel and 111° meridian was located too far west and south. See Samuel Whittemore Boggs, ‘‘Monument No. 127 (Old Emory Monument No. 27), Intended to Be in North Latitude 31°20' and West Longitude 111°,’’ in Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, ed. Hunter Miller (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1942), 6:393; and Horacio Herrera, ‘‘Estudio sobre el límite internacional terrestre de los Estados Unidos de Norte América con la República Mexicana,’’ Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística 65 (1948): 169–187. 35. Agustín Díaz, ‘‘Memoria sobre los trabajos topográficos,’’ 7–9; Jiménez, ‘‘Diario– memoria,’’ 213. 36. For a discussion of the primary sources on the azimuth-line survey, and an outline of the events of the survey, see Joseph Richard Werne, ‘‘Major Emory and Captain Jiménez: Running the Gadsden Line,’’ Journal of the Southwest 29 (1987): 203–221. 37. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 495–496; Carreño, México y los Estados Unidos, 282. 38. Emory, Report, 33, 38. 39. Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria,’’ 230–231. 40. The Commissioners broached doubts about only one map, U.S. map No. 29. 41. Herbert E. Bolton, Guide to Materials for the History of the United States in the Principal Archives of Mexico (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1913; reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1977), 228–230, 364–365. 42. Jiménez, ‘‘Diario–memoria,’’ 1–2 (my translation). 43. Orozco y Berra, Geografía en México, 465 (my translation). 44. Ibid., 482 (my translation).

Seven u

Soldier-Engineers in the Geographic Understanding of the Southwestern Frontier: An Afterthought john r . hébert

The preceding pages have provided a wide range of accounts and syntheses regarding the 350-year effort of Spanish and United States soldierengineers to understand and to map the vast and imposing Southwestern region that became parts of the United States and northern Mexico. As noted in Richard Francaviglia’s Introduction, the five essays in this volume are important contributions to both the general history and the cartographic history of the Greater Southwest. This volume’s focus on soldier-engineers is noteworthy. Although other groups of explorers entered the region—for example, missionaries, hunters, gold seekers—the essays in this book have paid particular attention to the activities of a select and, perhaps one should say, elite group, the soldier engineers who entered, traversed, described, and mapped various parts of the region. These specially trained individuals and the expeditions in which they participated provided a more detailed, more precise, and more lasting image of the Southwestern Frontier. Their collective work accounts, in large measure, for our understanding of the European developments in the region from the Spanish first arrival until the eve of the United States’ Civil War. In that long period it is clear that there were several motivations for the numerous expeditions that crossed territory many hundreds of miles north of Mexico City and west of Washington. The justifications for the expeditions included the desire to uncover great riches, or to find a shorter route to the Pacific Ocean, or to advance territorial acquisitions, or to protect territorial interests in the far corners of national empires. In most cases, these expeditions were established by the ruling governments in the two capital cities, Mexico City as the administrative center of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain and later independent Mexico, and Washington

186 u john r . hébert

as the center of the government of the relatively young United States of America. A result of these forays into a sparsely populated region (sparse in terms of either Native American or European presence) was the preparation of maps and other more informed geographical data that combined to provide a richer understanding of an area that represented the periphery of both empires. And that periphery could serve simply as a region to pass through to other, more desirable locations, or as a region that would serve as a buffer against European or American rivals. It is interesting that the expeditions of both entities rarely encountered the forces of the other, except when the United States ventured west in a great hurry following the successful purchase of Louisiana in order to uncover what had been acquired and to establish boundaries for its holdings, and in the period that followed when the United States steadily built up antagonisms that resulted in the United States’ War with Mexico from 1846 to 1848. Except for these two periods of the nineteenth century, the activities of each power, Spain and the United States, remained for the most part unopposed by European rivals in the future U.S. Southwest. This statement in no way implies that the Spanish, Mexican, and United States governments and their representatives in the Southwestern Frontier did not encounter various degrees of hostility and negative reaction to their presence from many Native American groups. To lose sight of the Native American populations and their contributions in the understanding of the Southwestern Frontier would create only a partial account of the long history of European presence in the region, but that would be the topic of another work and not this one. Michael Mathes, in his encyclopedic chapter on the initial years of the Spanish presence in and around the Southwestern region, has laid the groundwork for the study of the soldier-engineer’s impact. In the early years of Spain’s presence in the region in the sixteenth century, little came of the activities: individual efforts of Spanish-sponsored official or private expeditions were rightfully proclaimed failures because they resulted in little increase in Spanish interest in the region. One exception to this was the work of missionaries and other religious figures who saw an opportunity to convert numerous souls to Christianity. And following a lull in concerted efforts on the part of Spanish military forces throughout the remainder of the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century, it is really with the arrival of the French on the northeastern flank of New Spain that the official military response and, with it, specific cartographic efforts resumed. It is in the late seventeenth century that Spain reawakened to the

Soldier-Engineers and Geographic Understanding u 187

region’s importance to its vital interests as it learned of La Salle’s attempt to settle on the Gulf Coast in the 1680s. The French threat to Spanish hegemony in the region and Spanish-held mineral sites elicited varied responses, with more concern expressed in Mexico City than in the region itself. La Salle’s venture, followed by French forays from Natchitoches on the Red River, compelled the viceroyalty of New Spain to exert renewed energy to protect its possessions, as a series of defensive sites were planned and presidios were constructed and occupied across the reaches of the eventual U.S. Southwest. In that early eighteenth century period, as David Buisseret tells us, plans and maps for settlement sites and cartographic descriptions of the region were prepared by military engineers who learned their craft in established schools in Spain and other locations in Europe. With the French an active Spanish opponent, Spain maintained vigilance throughout the eighteenth century, in spite of the implications of the Bourbon Family Compact at the outset of the century and the transfer of French territory west of the Mississippi River to Spain following the disastrous Seven Years War. Spain’s concern is reflected in its mapping efforts. Most remarkable, as Dennis Reinhartz reports in his chapter, was the famous surveying work of the Marques de Rubí, who from 1766 to 1768, with the aid of mapmakers José de Urrutia and Nicolas de La Fora, covered more than six thousand miles in order to conduct a mind-boggling and successful effort to map the entirety of the Southwest (northern New Spain) from the Colorado River in Arizona to the Red River in Louisiana. Part of that mission was to determine the preparedness of the military posts (presidios) in the provincias internas and to establish a ‘‘fall back’’ zone, a line of defense, for the viceroyalty of New Spain on its northern frontier. From this venture emerged one of the most thorough cartographic records of the current states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as current northern Mexico. Spanish efforts returned to a defensive posture again in the first two decades of the nineteenth century as the new focus of attention was no longer Great Britain or France but the new upstart nation, the United States. Driven by its own desire to claim and to understand the far reaches of its Louisiana Purchase territories, the United States unleashed a whole array of surveying and mapping expeditions to push the frontier of the new republic. And eventually that course of activity became a collision course with Mexico, which swept Spain from its territories only to confront a new aggressive neighbor to the north. What has been the result of this 350-year effort to map the Southwest?

188 u john r . hébert

What distinguished the work of the soldier-engineer from the other, nonmilitary efforts of the missionaries, adventurers, and civil administrators in the region? Is there something special that war accomplished through the professional efforts of Spanish and American soldiers? As one reads the preceding essays, it is apparent that the work of the soldier-engineer is usually identified with the determination of the state to place more control over its far-reaching lands. Spain, when threatened by French encroachments, British presence, or Native American unrest, sent its military to the region to reestablish control. And in reestablishing that control it carefully mapped what it controlled and laid plans to ensure that that control persisted. In addition to area and route maps, plans for presidio and town construction surfaced. In that same manner, the interest of the United States in the Southwestern Frontier gained momentum when the purchase of the Louisiana Territory occurred, and President Thomas Jefferson sent out expeditions to gather information about the new region in order to discover its resources and to propose its outer limits. While we have grown accustomed to the glamour accorded the Lewis and Clark expedition, it must be recalled that a whole spate of significant studies and expeditions were underway, as John Sibley in Natchitoches reported his knowledge of the Southwestern Frontier and Zebulon Pike ventured into the Southwest on the very limits of Spanish territory. Other expeditions looked for mineral wealth in Arkansas and the extent of navigation on the Red and Arkansas rivers. Of course, the United States engaged in firsthand exploration since the results of much of the previous Spanish mapping efforts had remained in manuscript form and were closely guarded as national intelligence. As outlined in Ralph Ehrenberg’s essay, a litany of military expeditions, with set purposes in mind, crossed first into the upper Great Plains and finally into the Southwestern Frontier. Undoubtedly one of the first U.S. ventures occurred between 1825 and 1827, following the Senate’s passage of Thomas Hart Benton’s bill to have a road surveyed, marked, and ultimately patrolled by military forces from Fort Osage, near present-day Kansas City, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The intentions of the road were clear, since the Santa Fe Trail had already come into existence and trade from the Mississippi-Missouri river region was making its way across the plains to Spanish and Mexican communities. Senator Benton wanted to trade his region’s mules and cotton for Mexican silver and possibly access to the Gulf of California. The venture did not totally succeed because the road would cross over into Mexican territory and Mexico would not agree to participation in the international expedition. Nevertheless, the maps

Soldier-Engineers and Geographic Understanding u 189

prepared as part of the venture were used by later military engineers, for maps of Texas in 1844 and for materials related to the War with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, as told by particular examples in the chapters by Ralph Ehrenberg and Gerald Saxon. The U.S.-Mexican War itself brought on efforts to further map the Southwestern Frontier as the United States continued to seek viable ports on the Pacific Ocean and logical pathways for railroads that would link the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Ultimately, as well documented by Paula Rebert, the work of soldier-engineers was instrumental in fixing the boundary that would separate Mexico from the United States following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the conclusion of the war. So how then does the work of the soldier-engineers differ from other mapping efforts? Is it in the determination of the sponsors of the efforts, the expeditions, to more fully define territorial holdings and to more effectively hold onto those lands? In the examples of the Spanish, Mexican, and United States’ efforts throughout the 350 years described above, it is evident that that was a deciding factor. Furthermore, since the mapping output following these expeditions was produced at a high level of government involvement, these materials take on an authority far beyond the informative trapper manuscript map or missionary’s rendering of trails and caminos. Ultimately, it could be said that the activities of the soldierengineers resulted in prolonged interest in the Southwestern Frontier and the production of technically prepared maps and reports that contributed to future decisions over national interests in the region.


Contributors

dav i d b u i s s e r e t is the Jenkins and Virginia Garrett Endowed Chair in Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington. A prolific scholar, Buisseret is author of many books, including From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps (1993), Historic Illinois from the Air (1993), and Mapmaker’s Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (2003).

ra l p h e . e h r e n b e r g is chief emeritus of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress and an authority on the cartographic history of the United States. His publications include Pattern and Process: Research in Historical Geography (1975), The Mapping of America, with Seymour Schwartz (1980, 2001), and Library of Congress Geography and Maps: An Illustrated Guide (1996). r ic h a r d v. f ra n c av ig l i a is director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington. Francaviglia is a cultural geographer whose published works include The Shape of Texas: Maps as Metaphors (1995), The Cast Iron Forest: A Natural and Cultural History of the North American Cross Timbers (2000), and Believing in Place: A Spiritual Geography of the Great Basin (2003). joh n r . h é b e rt is chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Hébert has written extensively on the Spanish borderlands and the colonial cartography of Spain and France. His publications include 1492: An Ongoing Voyage (1992) and Virginia in Maps: Four

192 u mapping and empire

Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (2000), and he served as consulting editor for Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps (2003).

w. m ic h a e l m at h e s is a retired historian living in West Texas. His work on the cartographic history of California and Baja California is well known and includes Vizcáino and Spanish Expansion in the Pacific Ocean, 1580–1630 (1968), First from the Gulf to the Pacific: The Diary of the Kino-Atondo Peninsular Expedition (1969), and Spanish Approaches to the Island of California, 1628–1632 (1975). pau l a r e b e rt is an independent scholar living in New Mexico. Her Ph.D. in cartographic history is from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Rebert has lectured and published widely on the cartographic consequences of the U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848. Rebert’s most recent work is La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849–1857 (2001). de n n i s r e i n h a rt z is a professor of history and Russian at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he specializes in the history of cartography and Russian and Eastern European history. His publications include The Mapping of the American Southwest, with Charles Colley (1987), The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle (1997), and The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest, with Gerald D. Saxon (1998).

g e ra l d d . s axon is dean of libraries at the University of Texas at Arlington and former head of the library’s Special Collections, which includes the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library. He has published widely in Texas history and cartographic history, including WPA Dallas Guide and History (1992), The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest, with Dennis Reinhartz (1998), and as editor of George Wilkins Kendall’s Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, with William Taylor (2004).

Index

Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abert, James W., 92–94, 95, 97, 105, 106, 119–120n.57; Map of the Territory of New Mexico, 96, 98, 102; Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 93, 93, 94 Abert, John James, 80, 90, 91, 92 Academy of Mathematics, Madrid, 47–48, 49 Agnese, Battista, 7, 9, 23 Aguirre, Juan Bautista, 30, 31 Ahumada y Villalón de las Amarillas, Agustín de, 61 Alaminos, Antón de, 4–5 Alarcón, Hernando de, 22, 23 Alarcón, Martín de, 53 Alcalá Galiano, Dionisio, 33, 34 Alemán, Manuel, 163, 165, 167–168, 174, 176, 177, 182n.11 Alta California, 57, 71, 72 Alvarez, Juan, 4, 5 Alvarez Barreiro, Francisco, 15, 45, 53–54, 67; Plano Corográfico e Hydrográphico de las Provincias de el Nuevo México . . . , 54, 54 Alvarez de Pineda, Alonso, 5–6, 7; Gulf of Mexico, 6, 6

Alzate y Ramírez, José Antonio, 13, 15– 16; Nuevo Mapa Geographico de la America Septentrional, 28, 75 American cartography: and expeditions, 80, 83–84, 88–93, 99, 102, 104, 107– 113, 185, 186, 189; and Lewis and Clark expedition, 80, 95, 110, 188; standards for, 82, 83, 86 American expansion: and Louisiana Purchase, xviii, 19, 80, 187; and railroads, 105; and Spain, xviii, 19, 187; and U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, 131 American frontier forts, 90–91 American settlement, 89, 90 American soldier-engineers: equipment of, 84–85, 88, 92–93, 96, 104, 106; and Native Americans, 83, 85, 88, 99, 102, 104, 119–120n.57; surveying and mapping duties, 82; and Topographical Bureau and Map Depot, 82–84, 88, 90; topographic surveying methods of, 85, 88, 91, 96, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113; training of, 83, 85–86, 90, 92, 94, 116n.24; and U.S.–Mexican War, 131, 149; working conditions of, 86, 88. See also

194 u mapping and empire U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers American West: and American military mapping, 80, 82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91; and Emory, 95, 105; and Frémont, 92; and Hall, 109; and Office of Pacific Railroad Explorations and Surveys, 105–111; Poinsett’s plan for, 90; topographic master map of, 83; and U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, 131 Americas: and charting of Gulf of Mexico, 4; European rivalry in, 57, 58; and Spanish geographiccartographic secrecy, 2–3 Anián, straits of, 23, 24, 26, 33, 72 Antillón, Isidoro de, La America Septentrional . . . , 34 Antonelli, Baustista: Map of Cartagena, 46, 47; maps of, 46–47, 54; in New World, 47, 48; and Spanish forts, xvii Anza, Juan Bautista de, 27, 71 Apache Indians, 57, 68, 69, 73, 170 Arizona, 98, 99, 104, 112, 187 Arkansas River, 81, 88, 89, 93, 188 Army of the West, 95, 133 Arriola, Andrés de, 13–14 Ascención, Antonio de la, 25, 26 Atondo y Antillón, Isidro de, 27 August Hoen and Company, 92, 110 Ayala, Juan Manuel de, 30, 31 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 95, 149, 154n.33 Balthasar, Juan Antonio, Vista de las missiones en Sonora y sus contronos, 65–66, 66 Bartlett-García Conde Compromise, 158, 163, 164, 171 Battle of Buena Vista: and Benham, xix, 130, 133, 135–136, 137–143, 151; and Gregg, 146; map of, 134; and Santa Anna, 130, 134–137, 139–141, 142,

146, 149; as Taylor’s victory, 143; and Wool, 130, 133, 135, 136, 139–140, 142, 149 Benham, Henry Washington: and Agua Nueva, 135, 136, 149; and Battle of Buena Vista, xix, 130, 133, 135–136, 137–143, 151; birth of, 130, 151–152n.1; and Bowles’ retreat, 140; cartographic material of, 143, 145–149, 151; military career of, 130–131, 133, 149, 151, 154n.33; portrait of, 132; Reconnaissance of the Route from Monterey to Saltillo and Mazapil, 143, 145– 146, 145; report on fighting, 139; and Santa Anna’s troops, 142–143; Sketch of Country Between Agua Nueva to la Punta and Encarnación and Back . . . , 147–149, 148; and topography at Buena Vista, 135–136; and troop casualties, 142; and troop estimates, 138–139; wounding of, 141 Benton, Thomas Hart, 91, 188 Bernard, Simon, 83, 85, 115n.15 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de, 14 Bisente, Juan, 13, 15 Blake, William, 110; Geological Map of the Route explored by Lieut. A. W. Whipple . . . , 109 Bodega y Quadra, Juan Francisco de la, 30, 31 Bolaños, Francisco de, 25, 26 Boot, Adrian, 49–50; Plan geográfica de México su comarca, 50; View of the Town of Veracruz and Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, 50, 50 Bourbon Dynasty, 60, 187 Bragg, Braxton, 141–142 British Columbia, 32, 33 Buisseret, David, xvii, 187 California: annexation of, 98; and U.S.– Mexican border, 160, 161, 162–163,

Index u 195 174, 177, 180; and U.S.–Mexican War, 133 Californias: Alta California, 57, 71, 72; Baja California, 20; maps of, 21–28 Camacho, Pedro, 4, 5 Campbell, Albert H., 106, 107, 110, 125n.112; Valley of the Gila & Sierra de Las Estrellas from the Maricopa Wells, 110 Canadian River, 89, 93, 94 Canary Islands, 45–46, 54 Cañizares, José, 30–31 Cardona, Nicolás de, 11, 26 Carey, H. C., 88–89 Carlos III (king of Spain), 2, 66 Carlos V (Holy Roman emperor), 7, 21, 45 Carta esférica de las costas y golfo de Californias . . . , 34 Cartagena, 46 Carta general para las navegaciones a la India Oriental por el Mar del Sur y el grande océano . . . , 34 Carta Reducida del Oceano Asiático, ó Mar del Sur, 92 Casa de Contratación, Seville, 1, 2, 25, 58 Cavendish, Thomas, 3, 24 Central American cartography, 45 Charles V. See Carlos V (Holy Roman emperor) Chavero, Francisco Martínez de, 160, 161–162 Chichimec Indians, 64–65 Chisholm, Jesse, 106 Clark, William, 80, 83, 95 Colegio de Minería, Mexico City, 159, 161 Colegio de San Telmo, Seville, 1–2 Colegio Miltar, Mexico City, 159, 161 Colorado Plateau, 112 Colorado River, 102, 104, 112, 158, 160, 162, 170, 173–175

Columbia River, 91 Columbus, Christopher, xvii, 4 Comanche Indians, 57, 58, 71–72, 93, 94, 104, 119n.57, 170 Consag, Fernando, S.J., 27 Contarini, Giovanni Matteo, 4 Contreras, Antonio, 171, 172 Cook, James, 3, 30, 31, 34 Cooke, Philip St. George, 97, 106 Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de, 9, 22, 96 Coronelli, Vincenzo, 14, 58 Corral, Miguel del, 17, 18 Cortés, Fernando, 5, 6, 7, 21–22, 64 Costansó, Miguel, 29, 30, 45, 68 Croix, Teodoro de, 68–69, 72–73 Cruillas, Marqués de, 66 Cruz Cano, Juan de la, Mapa Marítimo del Golfo de Mexico e Islas de la America, 16 Cuba, 4, 5, 8, 46 Custer, Henry, 107, 108, 126n.120 Custis, Peter, 80–81 D’Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon, 16 Davis, Jefferson, 95, 105, 140 Delaware Indians, 104 Delisle, Guillaume, 14, 15; Carte de la Louisiane, 15, 16, 16; Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi . . . , 58, 59; Carte du Mexique et de la Floride, 15 Delisle, Nicolas, 14 Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas, Carte Génerale des Découvertes de L’Amiral de Fonte, 28 Díaz, Agustín, 163–165, 167–170, 172, 174–176, 177; detail of field map, 167, 168 Díaz, Luis, 163–165, 167, 168, 172, 174, 177, 182n.11; detail of field map, 167, 168

196 u mapping and empire Diderot, Denis, 27 Dimmock, Charles H., 112–113 Dirección de Hidrográfía, Carta Particular de las Cóstas Selentrionales del Seno Mexicano . . . , 20 Disturnell, John, Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico, xix, 158 Domínguez, Antanasio, 72 Dorantes, Andrés, 8 Doubleday, Abner, Saltillo, Mexico, 146, 147 Doz, Vicente, 17, 19 Drake, Francis, 3, 10, 24, 25, 46, 47, 54 Dudley, Robert, Carta Particolare della Baia de Messico con la Costa, 9, 9 Dutch expansion, and Spain, 11, 46 Duval, Peter S., 100 Duval, Pierre, 9 Eastman, Seth, 94, 117n.29; Treatise on Topographical Drawing, 86, 87 Egloffstein, Friedrich von, 110, 112; Map of Explorations and Surveys in New Mexico and Utah, 112–113; Map [of the] Rio Colorado of the West, 112 Ehrenberg, Ralph, xviii, 188, 189 Eliza, Francisco, 32–33 Emory, William H.: Map of Texas and the Countries Adjacent, 95, 135; Military Reconnaissance of the Arkansas Rio Del Norte and Rio Gila, 95–97, 97; and Nicollet, 91, 119n.50; surveys of, xix, 102, 105; techniques of, 75, 111, 113; and U.S.–Mexican border, 106, 111, 156, 160, 161, 165, 175, 176– 177; and U.S.–Mexican War, 95; and Warren, 110 England: attacks on San Juan de Ulúa, 46; cartography of, 18, 58, 60, 86, 90; defenses of, 45; expansion of, xviii, 10, 11, 30, 31, 32, 188; and Florida, 17, 18; and New Spain, 18; and Pacific

coast of North America, 30; and Spain, 3, 32, 33, 45, 57, 188 Enríquez Barroto, Juan, 12, 13 Escandón, José de, 17, 63 Espinosa y Cervantes, Antonio, 177, 178 Evia, José de, 18–19 Felipe III (king of Spain), 25 Felipe V (king of Spain), 15 Fer, Nicolas de, 14, 15; Cette Carte de Californie et du Noveau Mexique, 27 Ferdinand VI (king of Spain), 61 Fernández Leal, Manuel, 170, 172; field map, 170, 171 Ferrelo de Lavantisa, Bartolomé, 22–23 Fidalgo, Salvador, 32, 33 Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 92, 93 Florida: and Alvarez de Pineda, 5–6; and England, 17, 18; and Enríquez Barroto, 12; and Gulf of Mexico, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10; maps of, 17; and Seven Years’ War, 17; and Spain, 18, 19 Fort Saint-Louis, 11, 12, 13 France: alliance with Spain, 15, 19; defenses of, 44–45; expansion of, xviii, 10, 11, 12, 13, 52, 186–187, 188; Italian cities devastated by, 44; and Louisiana, 15, 19, 61; and Mississippi River, 11, 13, 14–15, 52; and Pacific coast, 31; and Seven Years’ War, 17; and Spanish colonies in New World, 57; and Spanish expansion, 3; warfare with Spain, 45, 47, 50 Franciscan missions, 10, 27 Franck, Jaime, 51–52 Franquelin, Jean-Baptiste, 14 Freeman, Thomas, 80–81, 104 Frémont, John C.: and Kern, 99; and Kiowa Indians, 93; Map of an Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains . . . , 91–92; and Nicollet, 91, 119n.50; surveys of, 84, 102;

Index u 197 techniques of, 75, 94, 96, 111, 113, 118n.36 French cartography: and Bureau of Maps and Plans, 14; French military topographic tradition, 85, 99, 113, 116n.24; and Gauld, 18; and Gulf of Mexico, 11, 14, 15, 16; and Mississippi River, 11, 14–15; and Pacific coast, 34; and Spanish northern borderlands, 58 Gadsden Purchase, 97 Garay, Francisco de, 5, 6–7 Garcés, Francisco Hermenegildo, 27 García Conde, Agustín, 160, 161, 163 García Conde, Pedro, 160, 162, 163 Garrett, Virginia, xv–xvi Gastaldi, Giacomo, 23; Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova, 10 German cartography, 92 Gila River, 108, 158, 160, 162, 163, 174, 175 Gimbrede, Thomas, 85 Goetzmann, William, 112, 131 Gómez, Alonso, 24 Gómez Raposo, Luis, 12 González, Joseph, 27 Graham, James D., 88, 106, 117–118n.34 Grand Canyon, 112 Gray, A. B., 160–161 Great Basin, 72, 92 Great Britain. See England Great Plains, 88, 89, 188 Greenwood, Caleb, 92, 119n.57 Gregg, Josiah, 134, 135, 146 Grijalva, Hernando de, 21 Grijalva, Juan de, 5, 7 Gulf of California, 11, 20, 25, 26, 188 Gulf of Campeche, 5, 51, 52 Gulf of Mexico: and Alvarez de Pineda, 5–6; coastline of, 4, 16, 17–18; and Evia, 18–19; and French cartography, 11, 14, 15, 16; and La Salle, 11–12, 13,

14; and Louisiana Purchase, 19; maps of, 6, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15; and Soto, 8–9; Spanish charting of, 4–20 Gutiérrez, Diego, 9 Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de, 7, 21 Haiti, 11, 14 Hardcastle, Edmund, 162–163, 180 Haro, Francisco José de: Este Mapa comprende todas las billas y lugares de españoles haci como Missiones de indios y presidios en la Provincia Nuevo Santander . . . , 65; Mapa General Ychonographico de la nueba Colonia Santander . . . , 62–63, 62, 64, 65; and Native Americans, 64–65 Hassler, Ferdinand, 90, 92, 99 Hatcher, John, 92, 119n.57 Hébert, John, xx Hennepin, Louis, 14, 58 Hernández de Córdoba, Francisco, 4–5 Herrera, Antonio de, 23–24 Herrera, Francisco, 170, 172; field map, 170, 171 Herrera y Sotomayor, José de, 52 Herrera y Sotomayor, Juan de, 52 Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de, Descripción del Destricto del Avdienciade Nueva España, 58, 59 Holland, 49 Hood, Washington, Map[s] illustrating the plan of the defenses of the Western and Northwestern Frontier, 90 Huastecan Indians, 6, 7 Hubbard, S. D., 143 Humboldt, Alexander von, 75, 82, 83, 109, 113, 159; Carte general du Ryoaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, 82 Iberville, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’, 3, 14–15 Iglesias, Miguel, 170, 173; field map, 170, 171

198 u mapping and empire indigenous peoples: of Canary Islands, 45. See also Native Americans Italian soldier-engineers, 44, 45 Iturbide, Agustín de, 19 Iturbide, Felipe de, 160 Ives, Joseph Christmas, 106–107, 112, 113, 128n.140 Jamaica, 5, 6, 7 James, Edwin, 88, 89 Janssonius, Joannes, 24, 26 Jefferson, Thomas, xviii, 80–81, 188 Jiménez, Francisco, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167–168, 174–176, 177, 180, 182n.11 Joliet, Louis, 11, 14 Jones, Oakah L., Jr., 72, 73, 75 Karankawa Indians, 12 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 95, 133 Kemble, W., Map of the Country Near Buena Vista, Mexico, 134 Kennerly, Caleb B., 106 Kern, Benjamin, 99, 102 Kern, Edward (Ned), 99, 105; Canyon de Chelly map detail, 99–100, 100 Kern, Richard, 99, 100, 105, 106; Map of the Territory of New Mexico, 102, 103, 106; Reconnaissance of the Zuni, Little Colorado, and Colorado Rivers, 102, 104; view of ancient Pueblo ruins in Canyon de Chelly, 100, 101 Khol, Johann C., 116n.24 Kilburn, Charles L., 141 Kindred, Marilyn Anne, 85–86 King, Nicholas, 81, 82; Map of the Red River in Louisiana, 81; Map of the Washita River in Louisiana . . . , 81 Kino, Eusebio Francisco, S.J., Passage par Terre a la Californie, 27 Kiowa Indians, 93, 94, 119–120n.57 Koppel, Charles, 110; Entrance of Livermore’s Pass, 110

Lafora, Nicolás de, 17, 45, 66–67, 68, 187; Mapa de la Frontera del Vireinato de Nueva España . . . , 67 La Pérouse, Jean François Galaup de, 31, 34 La Salle, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 3, 11–12, 13, 14, 52, 58, 187 La Torre, Martín de, 51; Project for the Fortification of Campeche, 51, 52 Lea, I., 88–89 L’Enfant, Charles, 82–83 León, Alonso de, 12, 13 Leroux, Antoine, 102, 106, 123n.96 Lewis, Meriwether, 80, 95 Lewis and Clark expedition, xviii, 80, 95, 110, 188 Linnard, Thomas B., Plan of the Battle of Buena-Vista . . . , 138, 138 Llano Estacado, 94, 104, 107, 112 Long, Stephen Harriman, 88, 118n.37; Country drained by the Mississippi, 88–90, 89; Map of Arkansas and Other Territories . . . , 88–89 Long’s Peak, 89 López, Tomás, 34; Mapa Marítimo del Golfo de Mexico e Islas de la America, 16; Provincias de la Nueva Viscaya Culiacan y Cinaloa . . . , 74, 75 López de Gamarra, Francisco, 12–13 López de Gómara, Francisco, 23 López de Haro, Gonzalo, 31, 32 López de la Cámara Alta, Agustín, 62, 65 Louis XIV (king of France), 11, 58 Louisiana: and France, 15, 19, 61; Spanish occupation of, 57, 61, 71 Louisiana Purchase: and American expansion, xviii, 19, 80, 187; and mapping expeditions, 80, 186, 187 Low Countries, 3, 11 Lucio, Marcos, 50–51; Proposed New Fortification for Veracruz, 51, 51

Index u 199 Macomb, John N., 112, 113 Mansfield, Joseph K., 133, 136, 143; Itinerary of the march of Maj. Genl. Z. Taylor from Victoria to Agua Nueva, 143, 144; Reconnaissance of Roads about Agua Nueva, 149, 150 Mapa de América, 34 Mapa del territorio conprendido entre la Provincia de Nuevo Mexico y el fuerte de Natchitoches y Texas, 70–71, 71 Marcou, Jules, 106, 109, 127n.130 Marcy, Randolph B., 98, 104–105, 106, 111; Topographical Map of the Road from Fort Smith, Arks. To Santa Fe, N. M. and from Dona Ana N.M. to Fort Smith, 104 Marquette, Jacques, 11 Martínez, Enrico, 26, 49 Martínez, Esteban José, 30, 31 Martínez Zayas, Juan, 31, 33, 34 Mathes, W. Michael, xvi–xvii, 186 Maurelle de la Rua, Francisco Antonio, 30, 31 Maximilian (emperor of Mexico), 160 Maya, 4–5, 8 McClellan, George B., 104–105, 111–112, 124n.104 McCullough, Ben, 135, 142 Mercator, Gerard, 9, 23 Mexican Boundary Commission: accomplishments of, xix–xx, 157, 178– 181; agreements with U.S. Boundary Commission, 167; and Emory, 156; field maps of, 167, 168, 170, 171, 177, 179; first commission, 159, 160–163; fourth commission, 159, 176–178; instruments of, 161, 176; meetings with U.S. Boundary Commission, 171, 176–178; and Mexican soldierengineers, 156, 157, 159, 161; official boundary maps of, 158–159, 177–180; second commission, 159, 163–169; third commission, 159, 169–176; and

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 158, 160, 163, 170 Mexican soldier-engineers, 156, 157, 159, 161 Mexican Wars of Independence (1810– 1821), 19 Mexico: independence of, 19, 73, 187; maps of, 135, 187; political situation of, 157, 179 Mexico City, 49, 52, 133, 134, 159 Michler, Nathaniel, 174–176 Miera y Pacheco, Bernardo de, 72; Plano Geográfico . . . , 72 military engineers. See soldier-engineers Ministerio de Marina, Spain, 2, 34 Miñón, José Vicente, 136, 137, 142 Mississippi River, 6, 11, 13, 14–15, 52, 81, 90–92 Mississippi Valley, 19 Mojave Desert, 102 Molina, Ignacio, 171, 172, 177 Moll, Herman: Map of North America (‘‘Beaver Map’’), 60, 60; Map of North America (‘‘Codfish Map’’), 58 Möllhausen, Heinrich Balduin, 106, 109–110, 112 Mondofía, Esteban, 31, 32 Montejo, Francisco de, 8 Montejo, Francisco de (cousin), 8 Montejo, Francisco de (son), 8 Monterrey, Gaspar de Zúniga y Acevedo, Conde de, 25 Morfí, Juan Agustín de, 69; Derrotero . . . , 69–70, 70 Morgana, Juan de, 24–25 Napoleon Bonaparte, 19, 85 Narváez, José María, 31, 32 Narváez, Pánfilo de, 7–8 Native Americans: and California, 25, 27; contribution to understanding of Southwest, 186; as guides for American soldier-engineers, 83, 85, 104;

200 u mapping and empire maps of, 94, 109, 120n.60; and military’s role in European expansion, xvi; and place names, 91, 94; in Spanish northern borderlands, 57, 64–65, 68, 69; and Stanley, 97; as threat to American soldier-engineers, 88, 99, 102, 119–120n.57; and Whipple, 109 Navajos (Dinè), 57, 99 Nevada, 98 New France, 3, 12 New Mexico: annexation of, 98; maps of, 72, 96–97, 99, 100, 102, 109, 187; and trade, 71; and United States expansion, xviii; and U.S.–Mexican border, 158 New Spain: colonies in Antilles, 1, 4; Cortés as captain general of, 7, 21; defense of, 18, 57–58; maps of, 13, 53; Spanish soldier-engineers of, 159. See also Spanish northern borderlands New World: and Castile, 1; northern frontier of, 57; route to, 45; Spanish soldier-engineers in, 45–54, 55n.2. See also New Spain Nicollet, Joseph N., 90, 94, 95, 99, 111, 113; Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River, 91 Nootka Convention of 1790, 32–33 Nootka Sound, 32, 33, 57 North America, maps of, 23–24 North Pole, maps of, 23 Nuevo Santander, maps of, 16–17, 62–65 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, 8 Office of Pacific Railroad Explorations and Surveys, 105–110 Oregon Trail, 98 Orozco y Berra, Manuel, 156, 157, 159, 170, 172–173, 179, 180–181; detail of map No. 2, 168, 169; detail of map No. 14, 177–178, 178; detail of map No. 25, 165, 166; detail of map No. 29, 164, 164; detail of map No. 44, 174,

175, 175; detail of map No. 54, 161, 162; field map by the Comisión de Límites, 172, 173; Map No. 1, 165, 166, 167 Ortelius, Abraham, 9, 23, 24 Ouachita River, 80 Pacific coast of North America: and Aleutian Islands, 32, 34; and Cortés, 21–22; and England, 30; and maps of Californias, 21–28, 31; and place names, 23, 25–26, 27, 30, 32, 34; and Spanish cartography, 20–35; topography of, 20–21 Pacific Ocean, 23, 25 Padrón cartográfico, 2 Pagazuartundúa, Juan de, Nuevo Mapa geográfico . . . , 73 Paiute Indians, 109 Pantoja y Arriaga, Juan, 31, 32, 33, 158, 160 Parke, John G., 100, 102, 107, 108, 109, 111; Map of the Territory of New Mexico, 102, 103 Pasqual, Juan, 25 Pawnee Indians, 57 Peck, William G., 92–93, 95, 119– 120n.57; Map of the Territory of New Mexico, 96, 97, 102; Map Showing the Route pursued by the Exploring Expedition to New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 93, 93, 94 Pérez, Juan, 29, 30, 31 Pericú Indians, 21 Pez, Andrés de, 12–13 Philip II (king of Spain), 45, 47–48, 49, 54 Philip V (king of Spain), 60 Philippine Islands, 24–25, 26 Pike, Zebulon Montgomery, 75, 81, 83, 96, 114–115n.10, 188; Chart of the Internal Part of Louisiana, 81–82 Pike’s Peak, 88, 89, 118n.36

Index u 201 place names: and liturgical calendar, 2; and Native Americans, 91, 94; and Pacific coast, 23, 25–26, 27, 30, 32, 34; and possession, 1 Platte River, 88, 89 Poinsett, Joel R., 90, 91 Polk, James, 133 Ponce de León, Juan, 4, 7 Pope, John, 107, 108, 127n.130 Portolá, Gaspar de, 27, 29, 30 Preuss, Charles, 92, 93, 98, 108–109, 127n.127 railroads, 105–110, 189 Ramírez, Ricardo, 160, 162–163, 180 Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, 3 Real Consejo de Indias, 2, 3 Rebert, Paula, xix, 189 Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias of 1681, 2, 3 Rector, William, 83; Sketch [Map] of the Western part of the Continent of North America . . . , 83, 84 Red River, 80, 81, 88, 104, 112, 187, 188 Reglamentos of 1729, 67 Reglamentos of 1772, 67, 68 Reinhartz, Dennis, xviii, 187 Río Bravo (Rio Grande), 163, 164, 165, 170, 171–172, 179 Río Conchos, 165, 170, 180 Rio Grande (Río Bravo), xix, 15, 133, 158, 164 Rivas, Martín de, 12, 13 Rivera, Pedro de, 15, 53 Rivera y Villalón, Pedro de, 67 Roberdeau, Daniel, 82 Roberdeau, Isaac, 82–83, 90, 107; Sketch [Map] of the Western part of the Continent of North America . . . , 83, 84 Rocha y Figueroa, Gerónimo de la: Mapa de la Frontera para elestablecimiento de la Linea de Presidios . . . , 72–73; Mapa del Terreno

que ha de vatir la Expedición que deve executarse contra los Apaches . . . , 73 Rocky Mountains, 88, 90 Rojas, Cristóbal de, Plan of Panamá and Environs, 48–49, 49 Royal Corps of Engineers (Spain), 60–62, 66, 73 Royal Military Academy of Mathematics, Barcelona, 61 Rubí, Cayetano María Pignatelli Rubí Corbera y San Climent, Marqués de, 17, 66–67, 68, 73, 187 Rudolf II (Holy Roman emperor), 45 Russia, xviii, 30, 31, 32, 34, 57 Russian-American Company, 34 Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de, 15, 58 Salazar Ylarregui, José, 160–165, 170, 171, 172–173, 177, 179 Sándoval, Gonzalo de, 7, 21 San Juan de Ulúa, 10, 11, 19, 46, 48, 50 Sanson d’Abbeville, Nicolas, 9, 26 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 130, 134–137, 139–141, 142, 146, 149 Santa Cruz, Alonso de, 8–9, 23 Santa Fe Expedition, 135 Santa Fe Trail, 188 Saxon, Gerald, xix, 189 Scherer, Heinrich, S.J., Delineatio Nova et Vera Partis Australis Novi Mexici cum Australi parte Insulae Californiae, 27 Schimmelfinnig, Anton, 107, 125n.117 Scott, Winfield, xix, 133, 134, 135, 143 Seminole Wars, 90, 98 Sergas de Esplandián, 21 Serrantes, Antonio, 31, 32 Servicio Hidrográfico, Plano del Puerto de San Diego: Plano del Puerto de San Blas, 34, 35 Seven Years’ War, 17, 60, 61, 187 Seymour, Samuel, 90; View of the Rocky Mountains . . . , 90

202 u mapping and empire Shawnee Indians, 104 Sibley, John, 188 Sierra Nevadas, 92, 109 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 13, 15, 51 Simpson, James Hervey, 98–99, 102, 104, 106; Canyon de Chelly map detail, 99–100, 100 Sitgreaves, Lorenzo, 102, 104, 105, 106 Smith, Richard Somers, 86, 94 soldier-engineers: Dutch soldierengineers, 49; history of, 44; Italian soldier-engineers, 44, 45; Mexican soldier-engineers, 156, 157, 159, 161; other mapping work compared to, 185, 188, 189. See also American soldier-engineers; Spanish soldierengineers Sonoran Desert, 174, 175, 180 Soto, Hernando de, 8–9, 14 Southwest, the: and American soldierengineers, 88, 91, 92, 95, 113; and Emory, 95–98; Native Americans’ contribution to understanding of, 186; and railroad surveys, 105–106; and Simpson, 98–99 Spain: alliance with France, 15, 19; defense of New Spain, 57–58; and England, 3, 32, 33, 45, 57, 188; expansion of, 1, 28, 30–31, 32; and expansion of other powers, xviii, 32; and Florida, 18, 19; and French expansion, xviii, 11, 12, 52, 186–187, 188; hegemony of, 1, 18, 19, 25, 187; mapping of coasts, xvii; maritime charting expeditions, 2, 3–4; and Pike’s arrest, 81; and Seven Years’ War, 17; and U.S. expansion, xviii, 19, 187; warfare with France, 45, 47, 50 Spanish cartography: and charting of Gulf of Mexico, 4–20; and charting Pacific coast of North America, 20–35; and geographic-cartographic

secrecy, xviii, 2–3, 4, 58, 73, 75, 188; and lack of published maps, 2–3, 58, 75; licensing of cartographers, 2; navigational purposes of, 3–4, 185; and Royal Corps of Engineers, 60– 62, 66, 73, 75; and Spanish northern borderlands, 61, 62–63, 67, 69–70, 73, 75; standards for cosmographers, 1–2 Spanish colonies in New World. See New Spain Spanish forts, xvii, 2, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 46–48, 51–52 Spanish Louisiana, 57, 61, 71 Spanish missions, 10, 27, 65 Spanish northern borderlands: and Croix, 68–69, 72–73; defensive reorganization of, 61, 65, 66–67, 73, 187; English threats to, 58, 60, 62; and expeditions and inspections, 66– 73, 185, 186, 189; French threats to, 58; imperial neglect of, 57–58; and Native Americans, 57, 64–65, 68, 69; and Royal Corps of Engineers, 60–62, 66, 73, 75 Spanish settlements: and Gulf of Mexico, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16–17; and maps of Spanish northern borderlands, 63, 65; and Pacific coast, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30–31; and Philippine Islands, 24–25, 26 Spanish soldier-engineers: and bastionned traces, 44–45; cartography of, 49, 54, 73, 187; civil engineering service of, 48, 49, 53; as corporate entity in Spanish army, 52–53, 60; duties of, 44, 49, 53, 54, 188; in New World, 45–54, 55n.2; and Spanish northern borderlands, 61–63, 73; and town plans, 46–47; training for, 47–48, 61 Spanoqui [Spanochi], Tiburcio, Drawing for a Fort at the Mouth of the Strait of Magellan, 47, 48

Index u 203 Stanley, John Mix, 95, 97–98, 105 Strait of Magellan, proposed fort for, 47, 48 Swift, William, 88, 118nn.34,36 Tah-kai-buhl (Kiowa), 93–94 Taylor, Zachary: and Benham, xix, 133, 134, 137–138, 139, 141, 142, 151; and Bragg, 141–142; maps used by, 143; and Saltillo, 136, 139, 142; and Santa Anna, 135, 137, 142, 149; strategy of, 140–141; and troop strength, 139, 142; and U.S.–Mexican War, 130 Tenochtitlan, 5, 6 Texas: annexation of, 92, 95; and France, 13; and La Salle, 11; maps of, 15, 17–18, 63, 98, 187, 189; San Antonio de Béxar as capital of, 69, 77n.30; Spanish occupation of, 57 Tidball, John C., 106, 110, 127–128n.132 Tienda del Cuervo, José, 61–62 Tobar, José de, 31, 32, 33 Tonti, Henri, 11, 13, 14 Torquemada, Juan de, Monarquía Indiana, 26 Torriani, Leonardo, 45–46 trade, 24, 71 Transmississippi West, 95, 97 Tratado de La Mesilla, 158 Treaty of 1853, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), xix, 149, 157–159, 160, 163, 170, 189 Treaty of Paris (1763), 17 Treaty of San Ildefonso (1796), 19 Troncoso, Diego, Californias: Antigua y Nueva, 31 Ugarte y Liaño, Tomás de, 19 Ulloa, Francisco de, 22 Urrutia, José de, 17, 45, 67–68, 187 Urrutia y de las Cases, José Ramón de, 61

U.S. Army: Corps of Discovery, 80; and map publishing, 83, 88, 100; Topographical Bureau and Map Depot, 82–84, 88, 90 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: and Benham, 130–131, 149, 151, 154n.33; and Bernard, 85, 115n.15; Corps of Topographical Engineers’ merger with, 82, 113; and U.S.–Mexican War, 149 U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers: and Emory, 95, 96, 98, 121n.73; function of, 131; and Ives, 112, 113; and map publishing, 91, 92, 93, 102; and U.S. Boundary Commission, 174; and U.S.–Mexican War, 149; and Whipple, 107 U.S. Boundary Commission: agreements with Mexican Boundary Commission, 167; and California, 160, 162, 163; and Colorado River, 174; disruptions of, 159; and Emory, 156, 160; meetings with Mexican Boundary Commission, 171, 176–178; official boundary maps of, 158–159, 177–178; and Río Conchos and Río Bravo confluence, 165; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 158 U.S. Coast Survey, 90, 92 U.S. General Land Office, 91, 110 U.S. Geological Survey, 83 U.S.–Mexican border: and California, 160, 161, 162–163, 174, 177, 180; and Emory, 106, 111, 156, 160, 161, 165, 175, 176–177; and New Mexico, 158; and Orozco y Berra, 156; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, xix, 157–159. See also Mexican Boundary Commission; U.S. Boundary Commission U.S.–Mexican War (1846–1848): and American soldier-engineers, 131, 149; antagonisms resulting in, 186;

204 u mapping and empire and Battle of Buena Vista, 133–143, 149, 151; cessation of, 98; defense of Chapultepec, 159; strategy for, 133, 143; and U.S.–Mexican border, 157; use of maps during, xviii–xix, 94–95, 189 U.S. Military Academy, West Point, 85–86, 90, 94, 113, 116n.24, 130–131 U.S. War Department, 81, 83, 90, 95, 105 Utah, 98 Ute Indians, 72, 99 Utley, Robert, 86, 88 Valdés, Cayetano, 33, 34 Vancouver, George, 33, 34 Vancouver Island, 30, 32, 57 Vaugondy, Robert de, Carte de la Californie, 27, 29 Vélez de Escalante, Silvestre, 72 Veracruz, 5, 10, 18, 19, 46, 50, 51 Verboom, Jorge Próspero, Marqués de, 52 Viage de las Goletas Sutil y Mexicana, 33 Victoria, Guadalupe, 19, 34 Villalba y Angulo, Juan de, 66 Villaseñor y Sánchez Joseph Antonio de, 16 Vizcaíno, Sebastián, 25, 26, 28, 30 Von Hippel, Maurice, 107, 125n.117 wagon road maps, 98–99, 104 Walker, Juan Pedro, 114–115n.10 War of 1812, 82

War of Jenkins’ Ear, 62 War of Spanish Succession, 14, 15, 17, 60 Warner, William H., 95, 96, 121n.69 Warren, Gouverneur K., Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, 110–112, 111 Washington (captain), 136, 140, 141, 142 Washington, John M., 99 Weir, Robert W., 85, 94 Whipple, Amiel Weeks, 106–107, 109, 110, 111; detail of survey for Pacific Railroad route, 106, 108; Sketch of the Rio Pecos at Anton Chico, 107 Wilkes, Charles, 91, 97 Wilkinson, James, 81–82 Williamson, Robert S., 108, 109, 110, 126nn.122,126 Wool, John E., 130, 133, 135, 136, 139– 140, 142, 149, 151 Wytfliet, Cornelius, 9 Ximénez, Fortún, 21 Yaqui Indians, 68 Ybarbo, Antonio Gil, 17–18 Yellowstone River, 112 Young, James H., 88 Yucatán, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 17 Yuma (Cuchan) Indians, 109 Zuni River, 102

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