Nouveau plan complet de Paris avec ses fortifications: divisé en 12 arrondissements & 48 sections avec les principaux monuments en elévation, donnant la distance légale en mètres des forts détachés aux murs d'enceinte & aux murs d'octroi indiquant la population & les fêtes patronales des environs de Paris
J.N. Henriot
A. Bes et F. Dubreuil
1855
map
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.
Rand McNally & Co.
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Rand McNally & Co.
1873
English
Historical Map
Scope:
Main map: Dakota Territory (regional)
Insets: city-wide/metropolis
Official railroad map of Dakota issued by the railroad commissioners, November 1st, 1886.
Dakota Territories in 1886; Railroads
Subjects (from Library of Congress):
- Railroads--North Dakota--Maps
- Railroads--South Dakota--Maps
- United States--North Dakota
- United States--South Dakota
Summary (from Library of Congress): Shows relief by hachures, drainage, cities and towns, township and county boundaries, Indians, and the railroads with lines named.
My description: This 1886 Rand McNally map, created by the railroad commission, depicts the Northern Pacific railroad crossing the Dakota territory, along with counties, surveyed and parceled townships, towns, Indian reservations, and rivers. The map-makers preference human-made features, like railroads, and political divisions, like townships and counties, above natural features, of which there are very few designations aside from rivers. On the right side of the map, much more ink covers the page in the form of a township grid that covers the entire Eastern half of the territory. In the Western part of the territory, township grids cover only parts of the territory, principally along the Northern Pacific line and in the Black Hills. This lack of surveying demonstrates that in 1886, the "frontier," or the edge of American civilization, lay somewhere in the middle of the Dakota territory and that railroads were the mechanism by which civilization spread westward, at the expense, of course, of native peoples, whose reservations are indicated by shaded outlines.
The area that Theodore Roosevelt settled in from 1883 to 1886 was at the edge of this frontier and, as it was located along the Northern Pacific line, was an area that was in the process of being settled and surveyed in the 1880s. By comparing this Rand McNally map from 1886 with a U.S. Department of the Interior map from 1882, which is also in my collection, we can see how Medora and the surrounding Little Missouri River basin was surveyed and split into townships in the intervening years. Roosevelt himself commented on how quickly the land went from wild to surveyed. In his 1913 autobiography, he looks back wistfully at what he views as a romantic, virgin period in the American West: “It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the West has gone now, ‘gone, gone with lost Atlantis,’ gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death" (Roosevelt, An Autobiography).
Roosevelt did not view this loss of Atlantis in all negative terms, however. In a subsequent passage, he cast the spread of American civilization in a positive, romanticized light: “It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of our country lies in its being made the country of the small home-maker. The great unfenced ranches, in the days of "free grass," necessarily represented a temporary stage in our history. The large migratory flocks of sheep, each guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were the first enemies of the cattlemen; and owing to the way they ate out the grass and destroyed all other vegetation, these roving sheep bands represented little of permanent good to the country. But the homesteaders, the permanent settlers, the men who took up each his own farm on which he lived and brought up his family, these represented from the National standpoint the most desirable of all possible users of, and dwellers on, the soil. Their advent meant the breaking up of the big ranches; and the change was a National gain, although to some of us an individual loss” (Roosevelt, An Autobiography).
Both passages from Chapter 4, "In Cowboy Land," of Roosevelt's 1913 autobiography, http://www.bartleby.com/55/4.html.
Rand McNally and Company
From Second Annual Report of the Board of Railroad Commissioners of the Territory of Dakota (Grand Forks, Dakota 1886) (HE2709.D2) (From Library of Congress)
Rand McNally and Company, Chicago
1886
70 x 57 cm.
English
Historical map
Digital Id: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4171p.rr002750
Library of Congress Control Number: 98688534
Dakota Territory (regional)
Text Page: St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Ry.
Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway
Full Title: “(Text Page to) St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Ry. Red River Valley Line through the park region ... 2 +87. Matthews, Northrup & Co., Art-Printing Works, Buffalo, N.Y.”
My description: This text page advertisement from the Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway provides timetables and text convincing readers to go West. The railroad company tells readers (in the lower central part of the document) that the company’s lands in North Dakota possess “Several Million Acres of the Finest Soil in Dakota” that are “all for actual settlers…no reservation.” The advertisement asks readers, “Why not accept” a farm of your own “in this great country?” Though this rail-line was not the specific rail-line that took Theodore Roosevelt to the Little Missouri Basin, it gives a clear sense of the excitement surrounding the expansion into the western parts of the Dakota territories. In particular, it captures a “get rich quick!” mentality that caused ranchers and settlers to flood into the Dakotas.
Please note: this text may not, in any traditional sense, be a map. However, the David Rumsey Collection classifies it as a "Timetable Map." Regardless of how we qualify the text, I have included it because it is a valuable resource in forming an understanding of migration and settlement of the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. Additionally, it acts as a useful supplement to the two maps in this collection that were commissioned by railway companies and made by Rand McNally, the first from 1873 and the second from 1886.
St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway Company.
Matthews, Northrup & Co., Buffalo, N.Y.
1887
16 p. on 1 sheet. Color. Includes timetables and text on lands for sale.
Text Page
Timetable Map
Since the resource does not depict a geographic space, it is difficult to assign a geographic scope. The text concerns Minnesota and the Dakota Territory.
Map illustrating the location of Theodore Roosevelt’s ranches
Theodore Roosevelt's Ranches
This undated map, courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, shows ranches along the Little Missouri River during the 1880s. The map contains the following description on the bottom: "Map of part of the Little Missouri River Valley, in Billings County, North Dakota, showing the location of Theodore Roosevelt's Ranches." Roosevelt's two ranches, Chimney Butte to the South of Medora and Elkhorn to the North, are labeled in red text, while ranches not belonging to Roosevelt are labeled in black. The map surrenders some of its value as a result of its unknown date and authorship, but given that the source is provided by the National Park, it maintains its legitimacy as a source. The map combines hand-drawn natural features with a focus on the streams that feed into the Little Missouri, with a superimposed grid that traces surveying designations. Each grid square represents a square mile; groups of 36 squares, or parcels 6 miles by 6 miles, form the township subdivisions that the U.S. Department of the Interior used to survey the land. This information is missing from the map--in fact, there is a rather dismaying lack of a legend--but the system of township surveying matches sources from the same time period, and therefore the assumption of scale seems safe (please see Rand McNally's 1873 map of Dakota or the U.S. Department of the Interior's 1882 map for corroboration).
By using this grid to judge scale, we can get a sense of how much open, uninhabited space there was in the area during Roosevelt's time there. Only four ranches other than Roosevelt's are depicted on the map, spread over a North to South distance of 36 miles. This relatively sparse distribution of ranches along the Little Missouri reflects Roosevelt's description of habitation in the area during his time there. Throughout his writings from the period, he revels in the abundance of open space. In Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, his 1885 book on his time in Dakota, he describes the distribution of ranches: "The land is still in great part unsurveyed, and is hardly anywhere fenced in, the cattle roaming over it at will. The small ranches are often quite close to one another, say within a couple of miles; but the home ranch of a big outfit will not have another building within ten or twenty miles of it, or, indeed, if the country is dry, not within fifty” (Roosevelt, 5).
The map is striking in how vertical it is; it shows the specific watershed of the Little Missouri and little else. But it does not show the entire Little Missouri Basin. The very selective area depicted, along with the red text used for Roosevelt's ranches, suggests that the map was made expressly to indicate Roosevelt's own holdings. This suggests that the map was produced as a retrospective document meant to tell the story of Roosevelt's time there, rather than as an actual artifact from the 1880s.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park - National Park Service
Unknown
English
Map
Accession Number: 474 / 6490f
Scope: local geography. Selective portion of a small river basin.
Routes from London to Europe in 1913
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This network graph has as its nodes points at which passengers would embark or disembark trains or boats on long journeys from London to various European destinations, as advised by the table of quickest routes in the index of <em>Cook's Continental Time Table.</em> One can trace the quickest journey back to London by clicking on any destination and following the arrows. This graph shows how British travellers to Europe did so overwhelmingly via a small number of places -- most notably Paris but also Cologne and Basel ("Bale" in the time table). Thus we can see that France, and the French state as encountered in Paris, was very familiar to British travellers. And while the Rhineland was familiar, Prussia and Berlin were distant and passed through relatively seldom.
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This map shows most of the data points on the network graph on a modern map of Europe, with the size and colour of the dots indicating distance in hours from London as indicated in Cook's Time Table. Regrettably, to allow Google's geotagging feature to work, it uses modern place names and country names. Those points with more than one dot represent multiple routes taking longer or shorter amounts of time. This kind of scale gives one a more meaningful sense of how far different places in Europe were from London, and thus perhaps how distant and foreign they seemed to British people before the First World War.
Compiled from data in <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021229151;view=1up;seq=1"><em>Cook's Continental Time Table, Steamship and Air Services, </em>1913.</a>
2016
Data Visualization
Continental (but neither of these are historical maps)