As I have written before, new cartographic information on maps is often what makes them specially interesting and valuable. The first depiction of a particular place, changing political borders, new discoveries of mountains and rivers, or corrections of previous mistakes are the stuff that make map collectors drool. I am trying to learn more about the geography of the American west and as I now closely study the maps we have in stock I am finding all sorts of fun things I was unaware of before. I plan to write a number of blogs on this subject (as I think it is pretty cool), and today I am going to use the example of four unprepossessing maps of North America from the mid-nineteenth century.






These are quite small maps that probably have been sitting in our map drawers for over a decade, pretty much just ignored. They were all issued in different nineteenth century geographies, the type of geographies that were probably intended for students. They are small maps, are colored only in broad sections by country, and frankly, before I decided to move to Denver, I pretty much thought they were an uninteresting 'much or a muchness.'
I am trying to learn about the history of the mapping of my new home, Denver, which is located between the vast plains and the steep Rocky Mountains. The junction of Cherry Creek and the south branch of the Platte River was a place where Indians and trappers had camped for years and with the discovery of gold there in 1858, several towns soon appeared, which morphed into Denver within a short time. Colorado Territory was formed in 1861 and Denver became a major western town by the 1870s.
The earliest maps of the region around Denver show the Platte River and usually Cherry Creek, though the latter is often not named. Denver is located a bit southeast of Long's Peak and a bit northeast of "Pikes Peak." If you look on a map for the south branch of the Platte River and those two mountains, you can hone in on the location that would eventually become Denver. I started doing this for almost every map we have from the mid-19th century and it was by doing this that I discovered these four geography maps are a lot more interesting than I thought!


The other interesting thing about this map is that it shows the "American Desert." This was a description given in the early nineteenth century to the “high plains” that border the Rocky Mountains to the east. “Desert” was used in the sense, common at the time, of a treeless area unfit for cultivation. Early explorers were unimpressed with the high plains. Zebulon Pike put a legend on his map that the region had “not a stick of timber,” and Stephen Long’s 1823 map labeled the area the “Great American Desert,” the accompanying report from his expedition stating that the region “is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”






While none of these maps has any real significance for map collectors, and none of them are that impressive aesthetically (though they are all pleasant enough in appearance), they become fascinating once you start to look closely. I only studied the immediate Denver area and I am sure that there are other spots around the continent where these maps either show new information or anachronistically ignore major changes. This is just one example of the fun that can be had by studying nineteenth century maps of the American West. I plan to publish some more blogs on similar topics in the not too distant future.
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