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Seven u Soldier-Engineers in the Geographic Understanding of the Southwestern Frontier: An Afterthought john r. hébert The preceding pages have provided a wide range of accounts and syntheses regarding the 350-year effort of Spanish and United States soldierengineers to understand and to map the vast and imposing Southwestern region that became parts of the United States and northern Mexico. As noted in Richard Francaviglia’s Introduction, the five essays in this volume are important contributions to both the general history and the cartographic history of the Greater Southwest. This volume’s focus on soldier-engineers is noteworthy. Although other groups of explorers entered the region—for example, missionaries, hunters, gold seekers—the essays in this book have paid particular attention to the activities of a select and, perhaps one should say, elite group, the soldier engineers who entered, traversed, described, and mapped various parts of the region. These specially trained individuals and the expeditions in which they participated provided a more detailed, more precise, and more lasting image of the Southwestern Frontier. Their collective work accounts, in large measure, for our understanding of the European developments in the region from the Spanish first arrival until the eve of the United States’ Civil War. In that long period it is clear that there were several motivations for the numerous expeditions that crossed territory many hundreds of miles north of Mexico City and west of Washington. The justifications for the expeditions included the desire to uncover great riches, or to find a shorter route to the Pacific Ocean, or to advance territorial acquisitions, or to protect territorial interests in the far corners of national empires. In most cases, these expeditions were established by the ruling governments in the two capital cities, Mexico City as the administrative center of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain and later independent Mexico, and Washington 186 u john r. hébert as the center of the government of the relatively young United States of America. A result of these forays into a sparsely populated region (sparse in terms of either Native American or European presence) was the preparation of maps and other more informed geographical data that combined to provide a richer understanding of an area that represented the periphery of both empires. And that periphery could serve simply as a region to pass through to other, more desirable locations, or as a region that would serve as a buffer against European or American rivals. It is interesting that the expeditions of both entities rarely encountered the forces of the other, except when the United States ventured west in a great hurry following the successful purchase of Louisiana in order to uncover what had been acquired and to establish boundaries for its holdings, and in the period that followed when the United States steadily built up antagonisms that resulted in the United States’ War with Mexico from 1846 to 1848. Except for these two periods of the nineteenth century, the activities of each power, Spain and the United States, remained for the most part unopposed by European rivals in the future U.S. Southwest. This statement in no way implies that the Spanish, Mexican, and United States governments and their representatives in the Southwestern Frontier did not encounter various degrees of hostility and negative reaction to their presence from many Native American groups. To lose sight of the Native American populations and their contributions in the understanding of the Southwestern Frontier would create only a partial account of the long history of European presence in the region, but that would be the topic of another work and not this one. Michael Mathes, in his encyclopedic chapter on the initial years of the Spanish presence in and around the Southwestern region, has laid the groundwork for the study of the soldier-engineer’s impact. In the early years of Spain’s presence in the region in the sixteenth century, little came of the activities: individual efforts of Spanish-sponsored official or private expeditions were rightfully proclaimed failures because they resulted in little increase in Spanish interest in the region. One exception to this was the work of missionaries and other religious figures who saw an opportunity to convert numerous souls to Christianity. And following a lull in concerted efforts on the part of Spanish military forces throughout the remainder of the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century, it is really with the arrival of the French on...

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