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Book Review
| Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier. Edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xx + 204 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $34.95.)
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In publishing 1998's First Biennial Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography, the University of Texas Press begins another sequence of proceedings to complement its Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures and other series. Mapping and Empire, introduced by Richard Francaviglia, contains chronologically arranged papers by Michael Mathes, David Buissert, Dennis Reinhartz, Ralph Ehrenberg, Gerald Saxon, and Paula Rebert, followed by John Hébert's "Afterthought." Four of these eight authors are on the staff at Texas-Arlington, whose collections and studies in the history of cartography the Garrett family have long supported. |
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Demonstrating the significance of mapping, for national expansion and defense, of areas, boundaries, coasts, routes, and sites by Spanish, Mexican, and American military engineers in North America's Greater Southwest forms the common goal of Mapping and Empire. The volume's initial three papers evaluate Spanish efforts between 1500 and 1825. Mathes assesses Spanish charting activities during this interval (on 43 pages, including endnotes) and adds an appendix of 156 maps for the Gulf and Pacific Coasts. Buissert (13 pp.) analyzes the mapping of the interior by Spanish engineers to 1750, and Reinhartz (23 pp.) continues the evaluation of their efforts in the "northern borderlands" to 1800. |
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The book's second group of three papers looks at mapping by American and Mexican military engineers from the Hunter-Dunbar expedition to the international-boundary and Pacific Railroad surveys. Ehrenberg (50 pp.) assays U. S. antebellum mapping in the Southwest, a lode heavily mined by historians since the 1940s, but he adds new ore while summarizing the contributions of the Topographical and other Army Engineers. Saxon (26 pp.) highlights the work of little-known Lieutenant Henry Benham (1813–1884) as Zachary Taylor's assistant engineer in the Buena Vista campaign, part of Benham's forty-five years with the Corps of Engineers and the Coast Survey. Rebert (29 pp.), in appraising the contributions of the four Mexican Commissions to fixing their Republic's boundary with the United States during 1849–1857, summarizes and extends her 2001 definitive overview of the joint efforts required to establish La Gran Línea. |
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Mapping and Empire, well-edited and handsomely produced, includes twelve color plates and fifty-two black-and-white illustrations. The volume contains only a few minor aberrations, among them confusion between biennial (p. xiii) and biannual (p. xv), misnaming Clarence King's U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (p. 126, note 120), and an ethnic pejorative (p. 140). An additional article would have filled the gap in the book by evaluating the work in peace and war during 1821–1861 by Mexican military engineers trained at the Collegios Minerí and Militar. Mapping and Empire is an insightful and important contribution to our knowledge of how the Southwest became better mapped and assessed prior to the American Civil War. |
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| Clifford M. Nelson
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| U. S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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