Public land surveying of the Dakota Territory, 1882 (U.S. Public Survey); Westward Expansion
Full title: “Department Of The Interior General Land Office N.C. McFarland, Commissioner. Territory Of Dakota. 1882. Compiled from the official Records of the General Land Office and other sources by C. Roeser, Principal Draughtsman G.L.O. Photo lith & print by Julius Bien & Co. 16 & 18 Park Place N.Y.” From the David Rumsey Collection Notes: “Printed in color. Scale 18 miles to 1 inch. Shows Surveyor General's Office and Land Offices in color, towns, completed and railroads limits, Indian reservations, military reservations, outline colored county boundaries. Relief shown by hachures. Prime meridians are Greenwich and Washington, D.C.” My description: This map shows the U.S. government’s surveying of the Dakota Territory from 1882, including towns, railroads, military bases, and Indian reservations. The map uses a bright orange-red color to delineate counties, Indian reservations, and other features. The map is especially relevant to my project in that it provides a view into how, just a year before Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the Little Missouri area, much of Dakota was still beyond the bounds of U.S. surveying. This map, unlike the Rand McNally map from 1873, depicts a completed Northern Pacific Railroad line passing through Little Missouri, the outpost town that would come to be called Medora upon the arrival of the Marquis de Mores in 1883. This railroad line was essential for the development of ranching in the Little Missouri Basin because it allowed cattle to be transported eastward from the ranch lands. This map is also notable for its documentation of the presence of Indian reservations. For instance, the “Souix Indian Reservation” occupies a sizeable portion of the area in the Southwest and central parts of the territory, just East of the Black Hills. The reservation is bordered in several places by U.S. military bases. Furthermore, there are relatively few topographical features indicated on the map. The focus is more on human impositions on the land than on natural features themselves.
Rand McNally & Co.'s sectional map of the Dakota and the Black Hills
The Dakota Territories; Railroad networks in major U.S. cities; Westward expansion in the 1870s
Full Title: "Rand McNally & Co.'s sectional map of the Dakota and the Black Hills. Printed expressly for J. Bride & Co.'s Great American 25 Cent package, 767 and 769 Broadway, New York City. A.W. Barber, Del. Rand McNally & Co. Printers, engravers and electrotypers, 79 Madison Street, Chicago. (with 8 insets). (on verso) Rand McNally & Co.'s new railway guide map." From the David Ramsey Collection Notes: “This is one of the earliest Rand McNally maps that we have seen. The date of 1873 is determined from the only date on the map, in the inset map of Cincinnati. Uncolored sectional map with 8 insets: New mining map of Utah, St. Louis, Railroads around Baltimore and Washington, Philadelphia, New York and vicinity, Chicago, Railroad around Cincinnati, 1872-3, Denver. Showing boundaries of township, counties, states and territories, and detail diagram of township numbering system. Includes references, illustrations and advertisements. Relief shown by hachures. Prime meridian is Greenwich.” My description: This map provides a view into the settlement and organization of the Dakota territories. It depicts the division of the territories into townships and counties. The division into townships ceases about halfway across the territories moving East to West, allowing us to see how at this time, in the 1870s, the land in the Western part of the Dakotas had yet to be surveyed and settled. The map also provides extensive information about railway lines in U.S. cities (St. Louis, Baltimore and Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver). The placement of these railway networks next to the map of the Dakota Territories implies an intention on the part of the map-maker to tell a story of how the cities connect, or soon will, to the sparsely populated territories. Indeed, the bottom right (Southeast) corner of the main portion of the map shows a rail line into Yankton, a town in the territories, with a note that says, "Chicago to Yankton, 575 Miles 31 Hours." Finally, the advertisements for revolvers and watches sold by "J. Bride & Co.," a New York retailer, indicate a particular audience for the map: Easterners looking to go West to the Dakota territories. Seeing as Theodore Roosevelt was a New Yorker who did just that, this map seems to speak faithfully to Roosevelt's historical moment.
Scope: Main map: Dakota Territory (regional) Insets: city-wide/metropolis
"This “Guide Map of the City of Detroit for Bicyclists, Showing Pavements” was copyrighted during the bicycle boom of the 1890’s... The map’s title points out its most striking detail: the color-coded mish-mash of various pavement types, ranging from unpaved to wood to brick to asphalt. Even though the League of American Wheelmen had formed over a decade earlier, this map was published in the heyday of the Good Roads movement, when cities across America were responding to cyclists’ demands for better rights-of-way by paving their thoroughfares. While most of Detroit’s streets were paved with wood (tree trunk slices laid out like flat, disc-like cobbles), its large radial avenues and other high-traffic roads had been upgraded to granite or asphalt by 1896... the 1896 bike map includes other notable features that help explain what was important to the city’s Gilded Age cyclists. Along with the numerous freight railway lines (indeed, today’s Dequindre Cut greenway shows up on the map as a railroad track), Detroit’s equally numerous streetcar lines are denoted for cyclists’ convenience. Likewise, the locations of passenger ferry service across the Detroit River are also indicated... outside runs.." http://thehubofdetroit.org/detroit%E2%80%99s-grand-bicycle-map-tradition/
Map of California Roads for Cyclers. This Map Engraved by the California Photo-Eng. Co. Wasp B'ld'g., 513 Market St., S.F. Designed & Drawn by Geo. W. Blum. Edward Denny & Co. 207 Montgomery St. Sole Agents. Published and Copyrighted by Geo. W. Blum, San Francisco, Cal. (with) Inset map of the Los Angeles area. ull color map surrounded by advertisements. Bike paths shown in red and labeled with abbreviations. The first abbreviation of the two tells the road condition. Conditions are: G (good), F (fair), P (poor), and V.P. (very poor). The second abbreviation is for the grade of the road. Grades include: L (level), R (rolling), H (hilly), and M (mountainous). Published In: The Cyclers' Guide and Road Book of California Containing Map of California in relief with principal Roads, Seven Sectional Maps showing all available Roads for Cyclers from Chico to San Diego, and a Map of Golden Gate Park. 1896. Price, One Dollar. Compiled and Published by Geo. W. Blum, 330 Pine St., S.F. Edward Denny & Co., Agents. (on verso) Copyrighted 1895 By Geo. W. Blum, San Francisco, Cal. http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps6082.html
World Map of the Major Tropical Diseases
This map, produced in 1944, shows major “tropical diseases” and where they occur in the world. A stylized image of the vector or symptoms of the disease is drawn over each afflicted region. Along the bottom of the map is a key describing which image refers to which disease, with a short block of text giving more background about each disease below the corresponding image. Interestingly, malaria is the only disease not identified by an image, and instead malarial zones are just colored pink. The map overall creates an almost gruesome image in which the world is covered in insects, pests, and deformed humans. It is a very unconventional way of depicting disease since the area that each image marks and the ranges of diseases are very vague. It would not be very useful for an epidemiologist, but is a striking way of conveying to the viewer the number of diseases that afflict the world and to what extent we possess the ability to treat them. The decision to depict malaria so differently raises an interesting question about perception of that disease in particular.
The World on Mercator's Projection Shewing the Zoogeographical Regions and the Approximate Undulations of the Ocean Bed
This map is the frontispiece of Wallace's book "On the Geographical Distribution of Animals. With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface" (1876). This map shows the 6 regions into which Wallace believed the world could be divided based on the distinct groups of animals living in them. It also draws lines around subdivisions within those regions; Wallace established each of these subdivisions by comparing the ranges of many species and higher-level groups of animals and locating borders past which the ranges of numerous animal groups did not extend. The red lines on this map are not absolute boundaries that no taxonomic groups cross. Many cosmopolitan animal groups live in multiple of these regions, but Wallace thought constructing biogeographical regions was still important because, as the title of his book suggests, a sense of what regions share biota can help scientists figure out historical associations between different landmasses. Biogeography has serious implications for the evolution of both life and earth, and Wallace's evolutionary theories were based on his study of biogeographical ranges. Wallace was not the first to map out biogeographical regions of the world. He built off of the work of earlier natural historians and explorers who had noted distinct floras of plants on different continents and of the ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater who, a few years earlier, had divided the world into six regions based on their passerine birds. However, Wallace, unlike any before him, focused his whole career on studying the distribution of species. This map shows the global scale of the conclusions that he was able to draw with further study building off his experience observing the details of species in the Malay Archipelago.
The geographical distribution of animals; with a study of the relations of living and extinct faunas as elucidating the past changes of the Earth's surface. Vol. 1.
Southern Part of the Malay Archipelago shewing Mr. Wallace's Routes
This map, published in Wallace's book describing his travels in the Malay Archipelago, shows the routes he took around the region while he was visiting the islands and collecting specimens there between 1854 and 1862. His occupation during these years was collecting natural history specimens for sale, but he also made detailed observations of the plants, animals, land, and people there, which made him a foremost expert on the region at the time. Wallace’s work on both evolution and biogeography was based on his detailed observation of species during his travels on the routes shown on this map. While at Sarawak in 1855, he wrote a paper “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species,” which proposed the following law: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre–existing closely allied species.” This proto-evolutionary statement was his explanation for why similar species were endemic to adjacent areas, and was a direct response to diverse groups of species that he found concentrated in the Malay Archipelago. He wrote the paper which earned him the title of co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection on the island of “Jilolo” in 1858. Titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type,” this paper describes the struggle for existence between varieties within a species leading to divergent evolution as better-adapted varieties survive more to reproduce. Wallace famously wrote this paper while suffering from a tropical fever, and his discussion of varieties of species and the pressures to which they are subject was surely grounded in his observation of the lifeforms around him there. This map gives a sense of how extensive Wallace’s travels in the Malay Archipelago were and the number of distinct biotas from different islands he was able to observe as he developed his theories.
The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature.
The Malay Archipelago between the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula and the western tip of New Guinea
Map to Illustrate a Paper on the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, Esq.
This map was published in 1863 in a paper by Wallace on the physical geography of the Malay Archipelago. It is the first map marking Wallace's line, here labelled as dividing the "Indo-Malay Region" from the "Austro-Malay Region". This line proposed by Wallace is the first ever deliberately-charted geographical division based on faunal differences between regions. His reasoning behind drawing a division between the groups of animals living in Asia and Australia at this location is described in an earlier paper "On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago" (1860). There, he discusses how groups of animals common in the northwest Malay islands are not found east of that line, while groups of animals common in Australia are not found west of it. His conclusion is firmly based in the observations he made while studying the species of the region. He wrote that "it is most striking to a naturalist" how groups of birds and mammals common in Java, Sumatra, and Borneo are present in Bali but completely absent in "Lombock," though the habitats of the islands are nearly identical and the waterway between them only 15 miles wide. His writing to support his placement of the line is full of specific descriptions of the ranges of different species; his studies of hundreds of species over the course of his travels enabled him to map out which groups of animals formed distinct faunas and locate the borders between those faunas. Since Wallace's line was first plotted on this map, it has been studied extensively up to today because where the faunas of Australia and Asia meet can inform scientists about the geologic history of the region and the evolutionary history of those animals.
On the physical geography of the Malay Archipelago
The island region between Thailand and the Philippines in the north and northern Australia and New Caledonia in the south