While I greatly enjoyed Susan Schulten’s article “Mapping American History” in the edited volume Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, I couldn’t help but ask the question “Where are the Spaniards?” in the discussion of 18th and early 19th century maps of North America.

By this I don’t so much mean Spanish maps–Schulten states that she uses a selection of maps–but, rather, Spanish cartographic knowledge, particularly of what was then the northern reaches of Spain’s North American claims, what today is the U.S. Southwest. In particular, I’m thinking of the 1804 Aaron Arrowsmith and Samuel Lewis map that shows a much smaller distance between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean; as Schulten says, “Stepping back, one notices that the entire continent is foreshortened, which might indicate the persistent hope that a waterway existed from the headwaters of the Missouri to the Pacific” (178). Surely, there existed European knowledge (not to mention, Native American knowledge) of the region, enough for a cartographer to know that, indeed, the Rockies are not that close to the Pacific?

That then had me wondering about exchange of cartographic knowledge between the Spanish Empire and others. In its early days, the Spanish Empire considered maps of its empire a state secret (as Nate and I discussed in previous blog comments). So did this lack of geographic knowledge stem from the Spanish Empire keeping its maps a secret? Did U.S.-Americans have that little knowledge of the northern reaches of New Spain, much of which was Native American territory but in which the Spanish crown had missions, towns, and forts?

But then, browsing through other maps of North America from before 1804 on both the Library of Congress’s maps site and David Rumsey Maps, I saw several that more accurately depicted that distance. Of particular interest was this one, printed by the same Aaron Alexander nine years before, showing vast blank spaces through North America, but a more accurate distance between the Rockies and the Pacific.

This 1795 map led me to question whether the 1804 map Schulten cites is more of an aberration than a typical one. Schulten says of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s impact on cartographic knowledge, “As a result, the continent widened” (179). While she, in part, is referring to the idea that the Rockies were just one range, and saying that Lewis and Clark disproved that idea, at the same time she suggests that the Lewis and Clark expedition brought knowledge that North America was wider than previously thought. But that assertion is based on the 1804 map. Do these other maps change that argument, though? Even without Spanish geographic knowledge, did early U.S.-Americans know that their continent really wasn’t as narrow as the 1804 Arrowsmith map makes it out to be? Answering those questions would require further research, but it did have me curious. What do others think?

Addendum: This week I commented on Michael’s map assignment blog post.

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