Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World (review)

This short, richly illustrated book describes the historically undervalued role that natives played in providing geographical intelligence to U.S. colonizers. The author notes that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, James Fremont, Stephen Long, and other expeditionary leaders relied heavily upon topographical information from natives in order to know the direction in which to travel and to draw their own maps. However, none of these leaders highlighted the vital role of native people in furnishing indispensable local knowledge.

In the earliest maps of the eastern Americas, native names abound. The trade-oriented Dutch created highly detailed maps of native communities, as did the fur trading French. John Smith’s famous map of Virginia also provides scores of indigenous names, perhaps to indicate the location of early military allies and enemies. Native informants implicitly played a crucial role in these drawings.

The bulk of the book, however, focuses upon exploration of the American West, based upon expeditionary narratives from leaders and other participants. Sometimes these stories named dozens of native people, whose presence was erased from the map (as with the Lewis and Clark expedition and its famous Map Track). According to a report by a lieutenant in Freemont’s party, a Kiowa native named Tah-Kai-Buhl provided extensive and accurate geographical information about the Red River area, but Fremont’s own memoirs are confused and vague about this point, mentioning only an unnamed Comanche rather than a Kiowa.

Through the accounts of the various expeditions, natives appeared to provide geographical knowledge to colonizers in three manners: first as guides by indicating the correct, or safe, direction to travel; second as informants by orally narrating the relationship between rivers, for example; and third as scene painters by drawing temporary maps (on the ground) and more permanent representations on paper or animal skins. Since cartography specifically relates to creating maps, only the second and third types of encounter fully live up to the title characterization of “cartographic” encounters.

Readers seeking a comprehensive examination of these three key roles of natives in mapping the American West will be disappointed. This book neither intensively discusses areas of specific maps where indigenous contributions were made nor analyzes the relationship between native speech or gesture and colonial writing or drawing. However, this book is intended neither as an exhaustive study nor as a scholarly treatise. Rather, it registers a significant yet often neglected Native American contribution—the importance of indigenous geographical knowledge to mapping the American West—offering examples from well-known expeditions. As such, it will provide a popular, accessible introduction to an often-overlooked issue.