Miera’s influence was double-edged. The Domínguez-Escalante expedition failed in its goal to find a northern route from New Mexico to California (indeed, had the expedition listened to Miera’s advice to keep pressing west, they may have faced a fate like that of the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada Mountains). Although his map was copied at least four times and circulated throughout the Spanish Empire, it did not open a great new era of Spanish exploration or expansion. However, later cartographers such as Williams Clark and Alexander von Humboldt did use Miera’s map to piece together their own visions of the American West, which in turn influenced an entire generation of Anglo-American explorers, trappers, and settlers. This book, which includes detailed insets of Miera’s maps as well as extensive translations, shows us how this man captured the complexity of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau as never before. But his geography also reinforced false geographical myths, most notably with
In his preface, Kessell states that upon beginning this project, he was not aware to what degree Miera’s map influenced later cartographers of the region. This seems a bit disingenuous. The myth of a nonexistent river flowing to California makes an appearance in most broad histories of nineteenth-century trapping and exploration in the American West. Dale Morgan specifically mentioned Miera’s errors in his history of a real river, The Humboldt: Highroad of the West. Nor does Kessell seem particularly concerned with why Miera would have made the mistakes that he did in his map, or how earlier geographical theorists of northern New Spain had their own ideas about imaginary rivers flowing west to the Pacific. Much of his geographical vision falls into a common misconception that John Logan Allen has called “Pyramidal Height of Land”: the idea that all rivers in the American West simply had to flow to some sort of ocean. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the geographical or cartographi-
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Don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713–1785) was a true Renaissance man of New Spain’s northern frontier: soldier, explorer, public servant, artist, and, perhaps most important, cartographer. In Whither the Waters, New Mexico historian and Miera biographer John Kessell shows us exactly how Miera’s map of the 1776– 1777 Domínguez-Escalante expedition across present-day Colorado, Utah, and Arizona shaped later American exploration and cartography of the Interior West. Miera is, quite simply, a long-overlooked godfather of western cartography.
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Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. xiv + 102 pp. Paper, $29.95.
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By John L. Kessell.
his inclusion of an imaginary river that flowed across the Great American Desert to California. This Río de San Buenaventura, cobbled together from the courses of the Green, Sevier, and much later, the Humboldt River, circulated through the visions of many later explorers and mapmakers. It would have achieved Domínguez and Escalante’s goal of finding an easy route between New Mexico and Monterey, confirmed the hopes of Jefferson, Lewis, and Clark for a transcontinental waterway, and given later nineteenth-century trappers and overlanders a quick passage across the Great Basin. Indeed, although Kessell does not carry his thesis so far, we may even see Miera’s imaginary river as a final echo of Columbus’s hopes for a western water route between Europe and Asia. Miera may very well have killed the old myth of the Northwest Passage across Canada, but he left hope of a continent-spanning waterway very much alive.
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Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Frémont.
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