Special Collection’s
Maps of the American West

"Mapping is fundamental to the process of lending order to the world."
                                                                                 Robert Rundstrom

"A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.'  It says,
'I am the earth in the palm of your hand.  Without me, you are alone and lost.'"
                                                                                Beryl Markham

"Old maps are slippery witnesses.  But where would historians be without them?"
                                                                                J. H. Parry

The seven maps that make up this Special Collections on-line exhibit represent only a small portion of the collection awaiting students interested in the mapping of the trans-Mississippi West.  These maps are artifacts of a time when much of what would become the American West was terra incognita for virtually all Euro-Americans.  Through the study of these maps students can begin to understand how representations of a geographic void were incrementally transformed into reliable geographic knowledge.  What was once unknown becomes, through the confluence of science and art, a visual image of “what’s out there?”

Too often maps are judged solely on their accuracy.  A good map is an accurate map because it conveys topographical truth.  This kind of judgment puts a premium on correctly reconstructing the past through the outline and shape of a landscape, where all the known features are positioned precisely in space.

But old maps should be considered as more than mirrors of a geographic reality.  As J. B. Harley suggests, “maps redescribe the world - like any other document - in terms of relations of power and of cultural practices, preferences, and priorities.”  Maps understood from this perspective become text.  They have a graphic language waiting to be decoded.  Once decoded, they can reveal the cultural values and ambitions of the societies that created them.  This dual nature of maps, their “slipperiness,” allows historians an opportunity to discover new meanings and hidden agendas between their images and texts.