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102 five Crowded Spaces “How We Filled in the Map” Unlike popular destinations in many other places, Arizona’s tourist wonderlands remained remote and difficult to reach well into the twentieth century. This chapter argues that cartographic illustrators faced particular challenges in depicting Arizona’s tourist landscapes favorably. Sparsely populated, largely rural, and easily perceived as “empty” to tourists accustomed to the greener landscapes of coastal and middle America, Arizona seemed to require cartographic embellishment. In response to this need, the state’s early cartographic illustrators developed a standardized vocabulary of routes and sites. Furthermore, they developed a schema for distributing these evenly throughout the terrain. Later map-makers, less invested in Arizona’s identity as a tourist destination, followed the pattern laid out by their predecessors. Therefore, as a general rule, Arizona appears very crowded on cartographic ephemera for tourists. The image samples in this chapter illustrate the varied approaches that cartographic illustrators took to crowd Arizona. While portions of the Arizona landscape laid claim to an identity wrapped up in empty wilderness and the persistence of the western frontier, most representations of the state in its entirety stressed the density of the built environment— transportation networks, residential communities, tourist sites, educational and civic institutions, and so forth. Often, these representations stressed the evolution of the landscape from empty frontier to bustling metropolis. Artist and essayist William Fox probes this tension between emptiness and infrastructure, exploring the contemporary desert Southwest and the ways in which the desert environment has been conceptualized as a “void,” a place empty of human activity. “I am preoccupied,” he writes, “with our opposing needs to preserve this void for Crowded Spaces • 103 the sake of our national imagination, versus attempting to colonize it with overlayers of maps, roads, and signs.”1 The representational preoccupation with colonization , so to speak, played itself out over Arizona’s first fifty years of statehood, but never so clearly as in a series of maps drawn by Bill Steele for Arizona Days and Ways, the Sunday supplement to the Arizona Republic (see figures 5.1a–c). Steele’s maps did not appear until 1975, but they warrant a brief analysis nevertheless, as they provide excellent context for what came before them. They summarize Arizona’s preceding decades of cartographic illustration, quite explicitly putting forth what might be called—with a nod toward Turnerian histories of westward expansion—the “crowded desert thesis.” Steele’s three-map series spread across two facing pages in Arizona Days and Ways, an oversized newsprint magazine. It ran under the synoptic title “How We Have Filled in the Map” and featured three different temporal views of Arizona: 1776, 1876, and 1976.2 The maps reveal a highly intentional narrative construction centered on how Arizona’s density increased over time. Arizona in 1776 consisted of numerous and widely dispersed Indian tribes, represented on the map with icons resembling the characteristic domestic architecture of each. Pueblos mark the territory of the Hopi, for instance, and hogans that of the Western Apaches. Steele limits the Spanish presence to identically styled mission icons at San Xavier and Tumacacori and a dotted line representing the Spanish Trail. He depicts Tumacacori as larger than San Xavier, an inaccurate spatial relationship that nevertheless implies the latter’s greater importance as a national monument. His Spanish Trail runs from Tubac, labeled by name and marked with a circle, to the California border, roughly at Yuma (which is unmarked). Numerous saguaro dot the southern half of the state, and four rivers crisscross the whole: the Colorado, Gila, Salt, and Bill Williams. Though the map marks the (Mogollon) Rim, it fails even to hint at the Grand Canyon. In the 1876 map, the Grand Canyon remains conspicuously absent. Indian populations limit themselves politely to the White Mountain Apache, Colorado River, and Navajo Reservations, their boundaries marked with dotted lines. Meanwhile, the US military operates out of Camps Apache, Bowie, Grant, Lowell, McDowell, Mohave, and Thomas. Black circles with pendant flags indicate these fortifications. On the civic front, white dots mark the cities of Florence, Hardyville, Phoenix, Prescott, Tucson, Wickenburg, and Yuma, and a black circle marks Tubac. Dashed lines indicate the boundaries of Maricopa, Mohave, Pima, Pinal, and Yavapi Counties. Instead of the Spanish Trail, the 1876 map traces the geographically similar route of an anonymous stage line. Mountains and rivers remain on the map, but cactus and the Mogollon Rim disappear completely. Finally, the 1876 version of Arizona features livestock icons, indicating the development...

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