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Mapping the Four Corners: Narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875
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By Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xvii + 284 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
In that banner year of 1776, the first recorded Europeans—part of a small, ill-advised, illplanned, and ill-provisioned party—managed to track and map an irregular 1,700-mile oval around the Four Corners of today’s New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah (then part of Spanish New Mexico). A mere ninety-nine years later, in 1875, came the well-advised, meticulously planned, and abundantly provisioned Hayden Survey. Although the authors of the present volume have no reason to mention the Domínguez-Escalante “expedition” of 1776 and its cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the contrast is stark. Not only had the sovereignty of this vast region changed, but also the occasional New Mexican traders to the Ute Indians had given rise to a tsunami of Anglo settlers, miners, and ranchers that threatened the very existence of the Ute people. One thing hadn’t changed; there was little water. Masterfully compiled and interpreted, this documentary chronicle focuses on the 1875 summer field session of the larger U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories, 1867–1879, directed by Ferdinand V. Hayden. The ultimate goal of the so-called Hayden Survey, really a series of civilian scientific surveys that vied for federal funding with the conventional, less scientific military surveys of the time, was “to produce a series of thematic maps giving visual expression to the region’s economic potential—geology, natural resources, topography—everything that settlers, miners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers would need for an orderly, efficient, and profitable development of the region” (15).
After a festive parade of men and mules down Denver’s main street on June 7, 1875, this particular Hayden survey broke “into small field groups, each with a topographer and geologist working in tandem, supported by two or three packers and a cook” (16). Map 1 details how widely five of the “divisions” dispersed into New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but mostly into Colorado. Creatively chosen primary sources— newspaper articles by “guest” journalists, along with correspondence, diary entries, field notes, and memoirs—sweep the reader along with these “men creating maps while experiencing a hearty adventure” (xiii). Perhaps the best remembered of Hayden’s illustrious subordinates in the field that summer (while Hayden himself delayed in Washington, D.C., directing the operation from there) was William Henry Jackson who led the “Photographic Division.” Jackson had worked for Hayden before, most notably in Yellowstone. His was the only division not assigned to a specified geographical area. He was to go wherever to get spectacular photos of the Colorado Rockies, for which he packed a 20 by 24 inch camera, glass plates, and portable dark room. Nothing furthered Hayden’s purposes more than breathtaking graphic imagery. In the field, while members of the various divisions climbed crests, set up tripod and plane table, sketched prominent features, noted bearings, and applied triangulation, they always had to find water and hope not to arouse local Native peoples. A real scare occurred in mid-August 1875. The Western or Grand River Division under Henry Gannett and the Primary Triangulation Division led by James Terry Gardner, while traveling between the La Sal and Abajo Mountains in Utah (both of which appear on Miera’s map of 1777), actually engaged in a two-day running firefight with a band of Utes. To enable their escape, the intruders jettisoned much of their gear. “What we saved,” wrote Cuthbert Mills, “were the
