Michael P. Conzen, Diane Dillon, eds. Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West. Chicago: Newberry Library, 2007. Illustrations. 119 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-911028-81-2.

Reviewed by Maria Lane (University of New Mexico)
Published on H-HistGeog (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Arn M. Keeling (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

The View from Chicago

For those who missed seeing the recent Chicago Festival of Maps, this book will have the unfortunate effect of inducing great regret in not having made the trip. Among the dozens of top-notch cartographic exhibits displayed in Chicago from late 2007 into early 2008, one curated by Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon deftly turned visitors’ focus toward the host city’s own influential role in the history of American cartography. Although the title of the exhibit (and of the accompanying catalog here under review) may have implied well-worn territory in the history of cartography, the curators in fact used their map selections and interpretations to present an innovative, critical perspective on American historical geography. Drawing largely from the outstanding collections of the Newberry Library, Conzen and Dillon argue persuasively that Chicago’s mapmaking industry--which rose to national prominence (and dominance) in tandem with the city’s emergence as the hinge of American westward settlement--strongly influenced wider perceptions of the American West and promoted broad support for the nationalistic goal of manifest destiny.

This argument is presented in four main sections, each of which is divided into thematic subsections. After a substantial introductory essay by Conzen, each section and subsection opens with a very brief (one- or two-paragraph) essay providing basic context for the maps that follow. The bulk of the catalog and its text is then devoted to the explication of seventy individual maps of the North American continent and its temporally shifting “West.” Chicago is prioritized throughout, as each section ends with a subsection devoted to Chicago. The final section on “Maps for Business,” for example, is divided into subsections that examine the role cartography played in railroad expansion, real estate speculation, mineral wealth exploitation, and tourism stimulation. It then turns attention to Chicago with a final subsection exploring the way the Windy City’s mapmakers and cartographic firms cornered the market for these commercial maps. Within this format, Conzen and Dillon’s stylish volume effectively organizes readers’ understanding of carefully chosen maps around issues of cartographic production and distribution.

As Conzen’s introductory essay explains, the catalog’s first two sections are designed to focus on “public maps”--those produced by various governments and their agents to define (and control) the American continent and its western region. The first section, “Maps for Empire,” includes public maps produced before American sovereignty, while the second section, “Mapping to Serve the New Nation,” focuses on the post-nationhood period. “Maps for Empire” includes continent-scale maps and detailed maps of individual towns and outposts, as well as larger compilations produced to show the extent of Spanish, French, British, and Russian territorial possessions. Although this section accurately shows how “European governments ... comprehend[ed] the scope of North America and visualize[d] their colonial ambitions,” it is perhaps the least remarkable of the book in that it focuses more on the continent as a whole than on the purported subject of the West (p. 23). Although there is good attention to the Spanish-controlled desert Southwest and the Russian-dominated Pacific Northwest, these maps are included mainly to foreshadow the American state’s conception of itself as a continent-spanning nation. A subsection on “Native American Landscapes” is well intentioned but oddly out of place, including only one European colonial-era map (of the Cherokee nation by a British cartographer).

The second section on public maps, “Mapping to Serve the New Nation,” provides a rather striking contrast to the first, both in its narrative coherence and in its cartographic richness. Consisting mainly of maps the new American government created to understand its western frontier, this section shows quite clearly the government’s push toward manifest destiny through cartography and survey. From the first exploration maps of Lewis and Clark to the scientific surveys of western geology and vegetation, from the early charting of the Pacific coast to the military mapping of lands formerly held by native peoples, and from government sponsorship of maps showing irrigation and mineral potential to the enormous public investment in the rectangular survey, these maps “illustrate the early transformation of the Western public domain into valuable private property” (p. 63). The story illustrated throughout this section is one of relentless expansion through scientific cartography. A concluding subsection on Chicago notes the city’s rising national importance and the way its meteoric growth was recorded in various map series. As the nation’s territorial sovereignty expanded on the government’s maps, the city of Chicago grew with it.

The final two sections focus on “private maps,” or those produced by nongovernmental entities for commercial purposes. A section titled “Mapping for Enlightenment” examines maps produced for sale and distribution to the general public, while the companion section “Maps for Business” is more interested in maps produced to serve business interests directly. “Mapping for Enlightenment” is a fun read, presenting numerous maps and atlases that were mass-marketed for school and home use throughout the nineteenth century. As Conzen and Dillon note, these maps provided little new information in terms of geographic data, but they were revolutionary in their ability to reach large audiences at affordable prices. They were also shamelessly nationalistic, introducing the American West as a “land of promise” and showing the United States as the pinnacle of civilization, ensuring that “the line between educational and persuasive cartography was a fine one” (pp. 77, 73). The rising cartographic importance of Chicago becomes more obvious in this section, as many of the maps produced to chronicle western settlement and promote westward expansion were made in Chicago. From maps that showed routes for emigrants to atlases with detailed maps of midwestern counties and townships, Chicago’s emerging cartographic firms focused on “the new America of the West--a region that lay largely tributary to Chicago” (p. 15).

The final section, titled “Maps for Business,” presents a panoply of cartographic products that were produced to provide direct support for business activity. As Chicago developed into the nation’s railroad hub, it also became an important departure point for westbound businesspeople. As such, Chicago’s mapmakers catered to businesspeople’s need for transportation and real estate maps, to tourists’ need for guides to the new western parks and resorts, and to prospectors’ need for maps that recorded and supported the various western mineral rushes. As Conzen puts it in his opening essay, “Chicago mapmakers played their part in shaping the region’s national image by participating in all the major developments in business cartography that affected the West” (p. 19). The maps themselves show the effects of this participation: a cartographic celebration of national expansion and manifest destiny.

Conzen and Dillon’s argument as a whole is well made and well presented throughout the volume, which is sophisticated in attending to both the production and consumption of maps, inclusive in taking up landscape paintings in addition to what are traditionally considered “maps,” and thorough in its commentary on the ways that various maps helped shape wider perceptions of the American West. The criticisms of this work are few, stemming mainly from the inevitable refusal of such diverse historical materials to fit neatly into modern categories for exhibit or publication. The author-curators acknowledge this difficulty and comment on it throughout, particularly when a map seems out of place in its assigned thematic or temporal location. As an example, Clarence King’s government-sponsored geological survey of 1870 (item 4.9) was deliberately placed in the “Maps for Business” section (rather than in one of the first two sections devoted to public or government-sponsored maps) because the curators determined that its cartographic record of commercial mining operations “was as much a salute to private enterprise as any privately produced map could have been” (p. 18). Such reasonable justifications aside, however, it is inherently difficult to categorize “public or state-sponsored” maps in the service of empire and nation-building as somehow different from “private” cartography for nation-building and business expansion. At some point, it is very difficult to explain how exactly they are different in terms of audience, consumption, and effect. That said, the authors have done a reasonable job of minimizing (or at least explaining) such incongruities for the reader.

In terms of presentation, the layout of the book is quite attractive, but most readers will lament that the maps are invariably too small to see any meaningful detail, even in the insets and enlargements. This flaw certainly signals the authors’ conception of the catalog as a means of presenting critical interpretations of the maps, rather than as a means of merely displaying a colorful catalog. The historical geography community will swallow this decision more easily than the antiquarian and map collecting communities, although the disappointments of the image reproductions will most likely lead to the effect I mentioned at the outset: although the argument of the book is important and well supported by a broad collection of meaningful maps, the reader will certainly come away from this catalog wishing that he/she had actually seen the full exhibit in Chicago.

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Citation: Maria Lane. Review of Conzen, Michael P.; Dillon, Diane, eds, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23983

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