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129 six Cartographic Narratives of Place Writing Stories onto Arizona Landscapes Cartographic illustrations of Arizona created specific, well-defined, place-based imaginaries for potential and actual tourists. The “imaginary” of a place consists of the accrued layers of cultural meaning that mask, embellish, or explain its observable physical characteristics. Often narrative in form, the imaginary offers a conceptual synthesis, a holistic and reductive frame for the tourist experience. Like most imaginaries of place, Arizona’s developed over time and in relationship to one another. Broadly speaking, Arizona’s landscape imaginaries narrate the state as a lush garden, an alien desert, and a futuristic metropolis. As we shall see, the garden narrative proved especially captivating and popular. Visual imaginaries of Arizona—as garden, desert, and metropolis—informed the ways in which tourist audiences conceptualized travel through the Arizona landscape. Whether setting off to explore Arizona with an illustrated map in the glove box, or settling into a plush armchair with a cartographic illustration to aid reading and imagination, map users interacted with prefabricated (and often overdetermined ) landscape narratives. Some of these landscape visualizations emerged from commercial and civic tourism promotions at the city and state level. Chambers of commerce, for instance, released numerous place-images into the public sphere. Other imaginaries developed via more diffuse channels. George Avey, best known as the first art director at Arizona Highways, also freelanced for various Arizona companies. For the Valley National Bank, he produced a set of maps promoting sightseeing opportunities in the valley and the state. All of these maps marked the locations of Valley National Bank branch offices, as well as the familiar set of tourist attractions —advertising not just the bank but also the landscape in which its offices were situated. Ruth Taylor, a San Francisco–based cartographic illustrator, of 130 • Mapping Wonderlands course included Arizona in her largest work, the children’s book Our USA: A Gay Geography. The WPA illustrated Arizona in the course of numerous projects , some specific to the area and others national in their scope.1 Yet despite their diverse origins, the majority of Arizona’s cartographic illustrations communicated a similar, and now familiar, narrative of place. In the Garden of Arizona Almost half of Arizona lies within the Sonoran Desert Region, which stretches west to California and south into Baja California and Sonora, Mexico. The region experiences limited annual rainfall, with warm winters and very hot summers. Native plants, mostly in the succulent and thornscrub families, shelter wildlife species suited to a dry, brown climate. Yet, consistently, Arizona sightseeing maps constructed narratives around the idea of the desert as a garden. For twenty-firstcentury viewers accustomed to golf courses, irrigated landscaping, and introduced species, the incongruity of a bright-green desert might go unnoticed. But during the first half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the Arizona desert was brown, and irrigation required concentrated—and expensive—effort. Anglo residents of the Arizona desert invested resources and imagination in an agrarian identity long before statehood in 1912. Historian Charles Colley outlines the ways in which Anglo agriculture developed in the American Southwest. He argues that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a “wideranging effort by American scientists and businessmen to accept and adjust to the realities of a harsh environment.”2 Colley traces the roots of these adjustments to the Spanish introduction of Moorish water law and North African plant species into the region.3 Much of today’s success, he argues, is due to Robert H. Forbes, originally from Illinois, who joined the University of Arizona faculty in 1894. Trained at Harvard in chemistry and agriculture, “Forbes became convinced that the arid Southwest could improve its agricultural production by borrowing heavily from desert countries.”4 While researchers and farmers struggled to change the physical landscape, boosters and civil servants edited the public conception of the American desert. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, Henry Nash Smith explored the earlier rhetorical shift from desert to garden, arguing that for agriculture to be successful in the Midwest and Southwest, “the imaginary figure of the wild horseman of the plains would have to be replaced by that of the stout yeoman who had for so long been the protagonist of the myth of the garden.”5 The American Sahara might have been picturesque, but agriculture held more potential for profit. In 1914, the Arizona Investment and Land Company, a Phoenix-based enterprise, attempted to capitalize on this potential. “Scottsdale,” proclaimed the headline of...

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