Mapping Wonderlands: Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912–1962

4. Rewriting Time: Illustrated Cartography and Arizona’s Temporal Landscape

75 four Rewriting Time Illustrated Cartography and Arizona’s Temporal Landscape Many cartographic illustrations of Arizona edit chronology. They rewrite the temporal landscape through a variety of technical mechanisms and toward a variety of conceptual ends. This chapter explores the varying ways in which Arizona cartographs treat time, overdetermining the state’s landscape as a historical (i.e., noncontemporary) space. Four main strategies emerge: (1) utilizing historicist visual styles; (2) compressing the historical narrative; (3) positing an ahistorical or timeless landscape; and (4) truncating the historical narrative by excluding contemporary events and landscape features. This chapter explores each of these four “editorial” strategies in turn. In some instances, cartographs flatten time by manipulating visual style. For instance, the image might represent current events in a distinctly historical visual style, embracing a historicist representational vocabulary. Or they might “quote” from earlier visualizations of the Arizona landscape. One example of this strategy is Larry Toschik’s 1961 Arizona Highways map for the special “Kinoland” issue.1 In this image, Toschik includes a small inset map, dated 1701, which he calls “Kino’s own map of Upper Pimeria Alta. He also depicts a padre and a conquistador as they overlook the Sonoran Desert region—complete with state and country boundaries, American place names, and major highways. Strategies like Toschik’s complicate the question of chronology, offering misleading or contradicting accounts of historical time. Some instances compress time, leveling or flattening the chronological landscape. In these maps, historical events occur in the same physical space as current affairs. Often, such maps use very straightforward visual tactics, simply representing multiple dates within a single picture plane, implying that all events 76 • Mapping Wonderlands occur simultaneously. For instance, George Avey’s cartoon maps for Arizona Highways placed prehistoric Indian life, the Old West of cowboys and Indians, Anglo pioneer days, and twentieth-century industrial development into the same pictorial space/time plane. Conversely, some cartographic illustrations of Arizona depict timeless or ahistorical landscapes. This quality marks many cartographic images that include the trope of the noble savage, and the strategy predates Arizona statehood. “The ‘timeless’ rhetoric and distinctive style of Santa Fe/Harvey discourse are inseparable from the Southwest one experiences today,” claims the introduction to a 1996 museum catalogue of Fred Harvey ephemera, not without justification.2 Timeless cartographic illustrations—Harvey ephemera is but one example— construct an ever-present moment outside of time. They contain few clues useful in establishing a reliable chronology. Such images might hint at an indistinct historical epoch, romantic to the point of unrecognizability. But meaningful information about specific historical events remains absent. Finally, Arizona cartographs manipulate the inclusion and/or exclusion of contemporary landscape features in order to control the temporal implications of the image. These representational inclusions/exclusions offer insight into how maps (and places) were to be read in terms of time. For instance, the Santa Fe–Harvey Company’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition display, “The Painted Desert,” juxtaposed a primitive, native Arizona with a modern, Anglo California.3 Arizona, in comparison to neighboring California, read as quaint, unsophisticated, and wild. At the display, as on the company’s packaged bus tours called Indian Detours, tourists could “catch archeology alive!”4 Unlike California , Arizona could claim both a Spanish heritage and a stunning archeological record of ancient Indian structures, and cartographic illustrators took advantage of both. Historicist Styles and Visual Quotation A number of cartographic illustrations take advantage of the easiest and most direct way to rewrite Arizona as a historical landscape: using a historical style of representation. By quoting from earlier maps and employing intentionally dated illustration techniques, map-makers imply a venerable, perhaps even antiquated, Arizona landscape. At times, image-makers in Arizona, like those in many other times and places, simply reprinted facsimiles of historical documents for the appreciation of tourists and armchair historians. In 1954, for instance, the Tucson publisher Arizona Silhouettes reprinted the 1878 “Map of Arizona Prepared Specially for Hinton’s Hand Book of Arizona.” A note in the bottom left corner specifies that “the original map from which this approximately one-half size copy was made was loaned Rewriting Time • 77 for the purpose by the University of Arizona Library.”5 Thus, the reproduction lays claim to both the accuracy and the historical significance of the original. In 1878, the map offered up-to-date information about the location of mines and mining roads, mills, furnaces, surveyed and...