Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier (review)

2007Book Reviews91 nuevomexicanos, but of what kind? After twenty-five years of research, Lomeli and Colahan have found no extant examples of his other poetry. Part diree features a Spanish version of documents from part two, rendered into modernized spelling. To return to the supposed oppressiveness ofthe Inquisition, it is worth noting that the documentation offers no evidence offormal charges against Quintana for his contrarian ways. A few local Franciscans may have wished for that, but Inquisition officials in Mexico City resisted the measure, preferring instead to issue a warning to cease his wayward behavior. Curiously, if Quintana's ideas about religion and spirituality matched those of his fellow colonists and survived the colonial period, as Lomeli and Colahan suggest, one has to wonder about the Inquisition's ability to control the lives and minds of eighteenth-century New Mexicans. Purdue UniversityCharles Cutter Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier. Edited by Dennis Reinharz and Gerald D. Saxon. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. 224. Acknowledgments, illustrations, maps, color plates, notes, index. ISBN 0292706596. $34.95, cloth.) This handsome collection of essays is based on papers presented in 1 998 at the first biannual Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography at die University ofTexas atArlington that focus on die relationship between cartography and expansion into the American Southwest. Although many groups of explorers entered the region—also considered as the northern frontier of New Spain—the essays in this book pay particular attention to the specially trained soldier-engineers who, sponsored by the ruling governments centered at Mexico City and Washington, D.C, traversed, described, and mapped the area between the Age ofColumbus and the American Civil War. The collection also includes more than sixty reproductions of maps and sketches made by members of the various expeditions that explored the area over the course of three and a half centuries. The volume's first essay, byW. Michael Mathes, traces Spanish maritime charting expeditions ofthe GulfofMexico and the California coast from 1 500 to 1 800. David Buisseret follows with a chapter on Spanish military engineers in the New World before 1750. He points out that a talented group of Italians provided die Spanish monarchs with drawings of maps and plans of fortifications during the sixteendi and seventeenth centuries. In 1 7 1 1 , the new Bourbon rulers of Spain created the Royal Corps of Engineers, laying the foundations for the group of highly trained Spaniards who experdy mapped the region in the late eighteenth century. Dennis Reinhartz examines the efforts of these men, including Nicolas de Lafora, who accompanied the Marqués de Rubí on his expedition through New Mexico and Texas between 1766 and 1768. Ralph E. Ehrenberg picks up the story following the Louisiana Purchase and provides a litany of military expeditions sponsored by die United States government that traversed the Southwest between 1 804, when George Hunter and William Dunbar explored the Ouachita River, and the Pacific Railroad surveys of the early 1850s. Particularly important in these efforts was the 92Southwestern Hutorical QuarterlyJuly 1818 establishment of the Topographical Bureau and Map Depot as a part of Secretary ofWarJohn C. Calhoun's major reorganization of the army. Whereas the first four chapters mainly employ secondary sources to provide a chronological overview of official Spanish and American expeditions into the Southwest, Gerald D. Saxon conducted original research in materials held in UTA's Special Collections to write an essay that demonstrates how Henry Washington Benham, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps ofEngineers, used his skills to help the outnumbered American troops defeat Santa Anna's army at Buena Vista in February 1 847. Along with other engineers, Benham pointed out to commanding generals Zachary Taylor and John E. Wool that the initial American position at Agua Verde was exposed and vulnerable. Therefore, Taylor followed the advice of his engineers and took up a more defensible position, in front of die Hacienda de Buena Vista, just before the arrival of the Mexican troops. Saxon concludes that because of engineers like Benham, the "United States was able to defeat a numerically superior enemy fighting on its own soil" (p. 15 1 ) . Paula Rebert concludes...