Behind the illumination of terra incognita: Culture, power and resources in the cartographic history of California, 1541-1903

Cartographic history, as conventionally told, adheres to a rigidly ethnocentric narrative that documents the process whereby selfless map makers assembled and composed the charts necessary to extend the supposed blessings of a modern technological society. This history of mapping in California takes a different tack, employing cartography as a backdrop for studying culture, land, and resource issues. After an introductory appeal for cartography as a vehicle for better incorporating spatial dynamics in historical analysis, chapter two focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth-century appearance of California as an island. In contrast to works that attribute this episode to popular manifestation of a Spanish myth, it argues that the island construct evolved within a highly rational intellectual climate in which European mercantilists sought to control geographic information for the purpose of sustaining trade monopolies. In their reliance on coordinate systems, European practices differed dramatically from those of Native North Americans who also perfected a wide variety of cartographic techniques. Chapter three examines the culture clashes of space and place that followed the Euro-American conquest of California and reveals frontier societies in conflict over land use issues. Land issues are further developed in chapters four and five which investigate the activities of the General Land Office and State Surveyor General in the 1850s. These chapters view land surveying within the context of a nineteenth-century republican society, and illustrate how a strong compulsion to maintain local control of land distribution machinery produced bitter struggles over land use mapping.;A state water plan became William Hammond Hall's principal objective when he assumed the office of State Engineer in 1879. His struggle is the subject of chapter nine. Though the legislature abolished Hall's office after only ten years, the State Engineer's work, like that of the State Geologist, made important contributions to topographic mapping in California. Having failed to achieve perpetuity for two state surveys, on the other hand, advocates of public topographic mapping turned to the federal government for assistance. During the 1890s they launching a campaign that in 1903 produced California's first cooperative mapping contract with the United States Geological Survey. Chapter ten examines this campaign, and argues that the systematic contour method introduced by U.S.G.S. topographers allowed scientists and engineers, for the first time, to conceptualize physical terrains objectively in three dimensions. As such, the new innovation became an indispensable precursor to regional reclamation and management programs.;Chapters six and seven examine the cartographic contributions of transportation and hydrographic engineers in the 1850s. In dealing with the Trans-Sierra and Pacific Railroad Surveys. as well as George Davidson's work with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the chapters reveal how republican localism and laissez faire economic values shaped opposition to public topographic mapping during the second half of the nineteenth century. Advocates of public mapping won a major victory in 1860 with formation of the California State Geological Survey, and chapter eight examines this very important survey, paying particular attention to the work of topographer Charles Hoffman. It argues that termination of the survey stemmed not from the action of influential petroleum investors (as is so often claimed), but from the anti-plutocratic tone of Reconstruction-era politics.