Mapping And Imagination In The Great Basin: A Cartographic History

Maps and Meaning

although travelers moving through Salt Lake City’s busy international airport are usually concerned about security screening delays and catching their flights on time, they are also presented with a number of displays and images that highlight the city’s natural setting.Without even gazing out the airport’s windows, the traveler glimpses images of the deserts, mountains, and inland lakes that make this city’s environment so distinctive. These images appear on posters and displays in the airport’s shops and concourses . One in particular—a stunning thirty-foot-wide mural by A. C. Bliss in the airport’s concourse (figure 0.1)—is especially revealing. Called The Discoverers, the mural offers a glimpse westward from theWasatch Mountains down into the sprawling Salt LakeValley. In addition to the mural’s mysterious see-through, line-drawn human figures, two other elements draw viewers’ attention: The mountains themselves are rugged and defined by jagged, vertically oriented lines, while the landscape of the adjacent lowlands is divided horizontally into a series of geometric forms bounded by straight lines. The jaded traveler may at first consider this mural to be civic art with a message—another attempt to promote the city. But it is much more. Looked at more closely, and in historical perspective, The Discoverers is part of a rich tradition of visually portraying the Great Basin. It uses much the same vantage point that artists used in depicting the Mormons’arrival in the Salt LakeValley in 1847. The Discoverers thus fits into a long tradition of art xiii Maps and Meaning i n t ro d u c t i o n history, but it also has a cartographic or maplike quality: it conveys something about the design of the valley’s geographic setting, and also something about the artist’s vision of how nature and humanity are spatially arranged here.1 If The Discoverers had been drawn or painted from a slightly higher perspective, it would qualify as a bird’s-eye view, a type of map that provides the map reader a vista from several hundred feet aloft.2 Bird’s-eye views have expanded our definition of maps, which many people still think must be drawn planimetrically (that is, as if looking straight down toward the mapped location) but may in fact be drawn from any elevated perspective. The Discoverers not only hints at the power of the human mind to define and organize space; it also depicts that layout and thus serves as a map in the broadest sense of the word. This mural-as-map is ultimately cartographic. By cartographic, I refer to the human propensity to perceive order in the landscape, then reflect on that order and depict it in illustrations of all kinds, including traditional maps. Broadly defined, a map is any device that depicts spatial relationships.We can use maps to decipher many things in addition to places: for example, to map genomes in order to determine the genetic makeup of an organism; or map the circulatory system of the human body. Mostly, however, we understand a map to tell us about place, or places. Consider the great variety of place-oriented maps that we experience today. Once on the aircraft, the traveler leaving Salt Lake City (or any other airport, for that matter) may see the plane’s route depicted either on a dropdown TV monitor that shows the flight’s progress, or in the form of a paper map showing the airline’s routes at the back of the flight magazine. Looking at such maps, the traveler flying westward from Salt Lake City will note that his or her airplane soon reaches a large oval-shaped area—a region that is featured on maps in ways that reveal something about its character by suggesting its openness and ruggedness: shaded in earth tones, surrounded by somber mountains, and nearly devoid of cities. This virtually blank area is the Great Basin, and the maps that the traveler sees of it are only the latest in a long series of cartographic products that have depicted—or attempted to depict—the region in ways that reveal something about its character . This book is generally about the process by which maps and related images reveal the character of places.More particularly,it is about how mapmakers have depicted the Great Basin in the tradition of Western, which is to say European and European American, mapmaking. It is also about the xiv mapping and imagination in the...