Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1984, pp. 3-4.
Abstract
Exploration, no matter how scientifically oriented or technologically involved, has been popularly viewed as mostly romantic adventure. From Renaissance mariners to "right stuff" astronauts, explorers have been remembered more for their experiences than for their accomplishments. Partly to correct this notion, the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sponsored the symposium Mapping the North American Plains in April 1983, to show achievements in cartography on the North American plains from earliest times to the present. Twelve speakers from the United States, Canada, and England presented addresses on a variety of topics within the theme. Four of those essays are printed here; others will be published in future issues of the Great Plains Quarterly.
People's geographic conceptions of the unknown are frequently based on their own geographic experience. So it was with early European visitors to the North American plains. English and French pioneers and explorers carried their mental geographic baggage beyond the mountains and forests of eastern North America and conceived of a region similar to what they knew. Spanish thinkers likewise transferred their knowledge of the southwest and counted the northern regions to be the same. Early probes into the northern plains and nascent theoretical geography began to reshape the images established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these new concepts were the ones that influenced the makers of the first maps of the central and northern plains.
The early maps of the French, Spanish, and British were perimeter pieces that traced the borders of the great interior. The vast middle region of America-the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the western slope of the Rockies- was known only from Indian information. Indian geographic conceptions and accurate knowledge of interior terrain were mistranslated into a compressed area with imaginary rivers and low-lying hills where sweeping mountains should rise. Along the Pacific coast accurate maps based on the coastal voyages of ocean-going traders and explorers gradually became available. The interior remained the terra incognita and would remain a little known or largely misperceived region well into the American period. One purpose of the essays in this issue is to show how mapping the Great Plains aided the understanding process.
John L. Allen's lead article served as the symposium's keynote address. "Patterns of Promise: Mapping the Plains and Prairies, 1800- 1860" is a review of the current state of scholarship on the symposium's general topic during the American period. While covering familiar historic events and the well-known explorations of Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Long, Allen also examines minor explorations, lesser known cartographers, and their mapping achievements. Military explorers, commercial cartographers, scientists, and trained topographical engineers set a pattern of exploration and mapping that gave promise of what was to be found on the great range of middle America. Through it all, Allen finds a thread of continuity: the mapping of the plains "was a mapping of the geography of hope and expectation rather than the geography of reality." Allen's aim is to get at the thought behind the maps and discover the image they presented to. those who viewed them in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln