Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Winter 1984

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1984, pp. 5-28.

Comments

Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

During the great drive of the American people to the Pacific, the vast area lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains was, for the better part of the nineteenth century, a zone of passage rather than a region of settlement. "Crossing the plains" became an epithet for what, to many, was a tedious but necessary part of a long journey to the dramatic Rockies, the exotic Southwest, or the bucolic Pacific Coast. In the romanticism that gripped America during the years between the opening of the nineteenth century and the Civil War, the supposedly featureless plains were largely devoid of the symbols that lured Americans both spiritually and physically-to other areas. Yet, unappealing as the plains may have been, they had to be crossed in the migration toward the Pacific. Among all the regions of western North America, the plains were unique in the extent to which they were traveled and mapped long before they were settled permanently by an American population.

It was even longer before the plains were understood; the fact that they were mapped and traveled does not suggest that they were known in any proper sense of the word. Although much progress was made in the mapping of the region between 1800 and 1860, there was little understanding of the plains environment at the time of settlement following the Civil War. The settlers themselves were uncertain about what the plains really were, perhaps because the great empty spaces presented too few visual images that were familiar or concrete. Where there is little to focus on, the mind's eye may behold a great deal and, not knowing what it sees, see only what it knows.

Such was the case with the many and varied groups who mapped the plains prior to the Civil War. The visual images of the plains that were recorded on the maps tended to support the preconceptions of the cartographers as they focused on those things that were of critical interest to them. Each of the groups who were eventually responsible for the mapping of the plains-trappers and travelers, merchants and missionaries, soldiers and surveyors-were charting not always what they found, but sometimes what they wanted to find. Their work was a mapping of the geography of hope and expectation rather than the geography of reality-a mapping of patterns of promise.

1800-1810: EARLY EXPLORATION AND MAPS OF THE PLAINS

As the nineteenth century opened, maps of the plains were based almost entirely on imagination and conjecture. Knowledge of the area was sketchy, at best, and on most maps of the period the great vastness of the plains was exaggerated. This is particularly ,true of the products of commercial cartog~aphers, the primary source of geographic information on the plains in the early 1800s. In a classic sample of this type of cartography the Philadelphia engraver Samuel Lewis shows the plains as an immense open region stretching from the Mississippi to a range of mountains near the Pacific Coast (fig. 1). A few major streams of the plains are shown on this map, but they are sadly out of place and their courses are mostly imaginary. During the decade from 1800 to 1810, exploration was the primary agency by which some of those misconceptions began to be swept away.

Two major "official" explorations into the plains took place during the first decade of the century: Lieutenant Zebulon Pike's journey to the upper Arkansas and the expedition of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the Missouri and thence to the Pacific and back. Pike was sent west by General James Wilkinson, governor of Louisiana Territory, to explore the country of the plains tribes and to investigate the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers. His trek in the summer of 1806 led him from St. Louis up the Missouri to the Osage River and on to the Kansas River, the Arkansas, and the Rockies. In a vain hope of locating the source of the Arkansas, Pike wandered into the tortured terrain of the southern Rockies, where he was captured by a Spanish patrol. Taken first to Santa Fe and then Chihuahua, he eventually made his way back across Texas to Natchitoches.

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