In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under
the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area
for what they thought would be a calm summer's work completing a
previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as
one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth
century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors' diary entries, field
notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians
Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey
to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining,
engaging narrative of the team's experiences, contextualized with a
thoughtful introduction and conclusion. Accompanied by the great
photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden's team quickly found
their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers
describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in
rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water.
Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of
prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery-Hispanic
villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and
other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was
glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped
a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant
dispossession from their homeland. Hayden saw his expedition as a
scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description,
cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for
economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this
book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold
beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic
opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey
ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways,
solidifying the idea of "progress"-and government funding of its
pursuit-while also revealing, via Jackson's photographs, a
landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.
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