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2. Contextualizing Arizona’s Cartographic Illustrations, 1912–1962
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
22 two Contextualizing Arizona’s Cartographic Illustrations, 1912–1962 What is a cartographic illustration, and how can contemporary viewers understand the historical landscape more fully by learning to read the language of cartographic illustrations? The makers of cartographic illustrations have called their work by many names: cartographs, cartomaps, pic-tour maps, cartoon maps, picture maps, and illustrated maps, to name but a few. This book uses the term cartographic illustration and the shorter, friendlier word “cartograph” to describe pictorial, narrative, not-to-scale maps intended for popular audiences. Unlike a road map with an illustration on its cover, a cartographic illustration works pictorial and narrative content into the fabric of the map itself. Literally, the illustrations become part of the mapped space. The lessons learned from a close reading of cartographs differ from those learned by reading a road map. The former writes cultural narratives onto pictorial representations of place; the latter serves a practical function as a navigational aid. Both types of map, however, offer users a chance to contextualize the places they visit. They translate the landscape through the lens of human experience. Contemporary viewers can better understand the historical landscape by placing it in context. Cartographs offer a very immediate glimpse into how travelers from days gone by conceptualized and experienced the places they read about and visited. In the case of Arizona, cartographs narrate trips to the Grand Canyon, treks through the desert, and glimpses of a gardenlike wonderland. Cartographs use landscapes as a canvas onto which stories are recorded. After a brief description of late nineteenth-century Arizona maps to provide context, this chapter offers a brief chronological introduction to cartographic illustrations of Contextualizing Arizona’s Cartographic Illustrations • 23 Arizona during its first fifty years of statehood. During this span of time, cartographic illustrations of Arizona helped to standardize the automotive landscape; to boost farm and factory towns; to map the geography of mass tourism; and to transform the landscape into a series of familiar cultural icons. Arizona before Statehood Visual representation during the Victorian period strove to render its subjects both beautiful and comprehensible, and representations of Arizona landscapes were no exception. The dual interest in transcendence and taxonomy informs numerous nineteenth-century treatments of Arizona’s most famous tourism landscape , the Grand Canyon. Clarence Dutton, of the United States Geographical Survey, published his Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District in 1882. Dutton’s maps of the canyon “brought its land forms within the realm of scientific explanation while appreciating its sublime power and beauty.”1 The interplay between beauty and science reveals itself conspicuously at iconographic western sites, such as the Grand Canyon. In the American West of the Victorian period, geologists and surveyors “viewed photography as both accurate, and thus useful, and beautiful, capable of winning the public’s attention.”2 But scientists, of course, were not the only ones to use landscape images as a tool for capturing the national imagination. Advertisements for America’s iconographic southwestern destinations spoke the familiar language of romanticism. As an example, consider an advertisement for the 1901 season of Gates’ Tours, an Ohio-based company that offered “special train de luxe” excursions to several western destinations, including Mexico. The advertisement referred to the “Grand Cañon of Arizona” as the “most wonderful scenic panorama in the West.” The copy offered both scientific and aesthetic detail, describing the canyon as “217 miles long, 13 miles wide, more than a mile deep, and”—perhaps most telling—“painted like a flower.”3 Quantifiable and beautiful, the view from a Gates’ Tours train addressed the Victorian need for both taxonomy and transcendence. The Victorian amalgam of science and aesthetics accommodated vast and iconic Western spaces, of which the canyon was only one. But the search for order embraced more humble vistas, as well. Every hill and dale presented an opportunity for the “transformation of land into landscape.”4 This transformation , geographer Steven Hoelscher argues, relied on a process of selection, exclusion , composition, and meaning-making. Hoelscher discusses how late-Victorian view photographers selected scenes that conformed to socially accepted notions of pleasing terrain, offering a window into untamed, yet essentially safe, landscapes . Such views excluded all traces of Anglo-American work and indigenous peoples, concentrating on upper-class leisure in an environment scrubbed clean [18.116.15.31] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:41 GMT) 24 • Mapping Wonderlands of both the working classes and the nonwhite “others.” View photographers composed their views within a carefully considered...