Новая книга раскрывает малоизвестные страницы истории Колорадо через редкие карты

Map quest: New book brings centuries-old maps to light in tracing little-known Colorado history P.J. Anderson spent the better part of two years tracking down hundreds of maps long predating Colorado’s statehood in 1876 as part of a mission that took him to private collections, museums and institutions near and far. This included the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “Getting ushered into the back rooms where they keep these original maps, seeing them full size and touching them,” Anderson reminisced. “That was mesmerizing.” He’s hoping to extend the experience to readers of a new, bulky book ー properly sized for the coffee table and for viewing those rare maps brought to light. The book is called “The Mapping of Colorado: From Indigena to Statehood.” It’s the latest from Rhyolite Press in Colorado Springs, where Anderson spent about 50 years practicing law. He worked as El Paso County’s planning director and as a municipal attorney, a job that had him studying maps regarding rights of way and title issues and such. But Anderson’s cartographic and historic interests predate his career, going back to his childhood poring over his father’s collection of “frontier stories” by Louis L’Amour, as he recounts in the preface of “The Mapping of Colorado.” As for his interest in compiling the book, that goes back to his previous title also published by Rhyolite Press: “Cheyenne Mountain: Here’s Looking at You,” about the history of Anderson’s beloved mountain in the Springs. In putting that book together with his son, “we read the journals of Stephen Long and John Frémont and Zebulon Pike,” Anderson said. “They all came right along the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain, and they were coming by maps. And that got us wondering: Who was the first to map Colorado?” In terms of surviving maps made from firsthand observation, Anderson points to Don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco in 1777 ー drawn from the Dominguez-Escalante expedition. In “The Mapping of Colorado,” Anderson describes Miera as a man of small stature who was poor and imprisoned before being tapped for the fateful venture resulting in the map that would go on to influence cartographers of much greater fame and, indeed, the map of Colorado as we know it today. “The Mapping of Colorado” offers many more insights, along with many more maps. Almost 90 have been reproduced in high resolution and presented in a way like never before ー “many of which were previously known only to map collectors,” John Wesley Anderson, another Colorado author of little-known history, said in praise of the book. The unearthed maps “trace the colonization efforts of the Spanish, who named several of Colorado’s mountain ranges and the French, who named many of its important rivers,” the author added. Centuries later came the Great Surveys, including Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden and John Wesley Powell, and later came courses charted for gold seekers and railroads. P.J. Anderson depicts and chronicles those efforts as well, along with wars, treaties and broken promises that defined Colorado beyond the lines drawn. Along the way, Anderson gives “well-deserved credit to Indigenous geographic knowledge” that made all courses possible, Craig Haggit of the Denver Public Library added for the book’s praise. Said Wesley Brown, Colorado’s preeminent cartophile and co-founder of Rocky Mountain Map Society: “The book will serve as a lasting reference.” That’s the hope of Don Kallaus, the book’s publisher. “It’s not the kind of book that you just read and shelve it,” he said. “It’s the kind of book that can be passed down, like an heirloom.” Passed down to generations who might get lost in the maps like Kallaus did as he was bringing them to full view on the pages. “I would find myself looking at a map, then find myself looking on a whole different part of the map, then look up at the clock and be like, Oh, my gosh.” Looking at a 1489 map of the known world said to have been viewed by Christopher Columbus ー the first map shown in “The Mapping of Colorado” ー one might imagine where Colorado is. On Spanish maps through the 1500s, one might imagine the state around sketches of pointy peaks and names of the fabled lost cities of gold. “Teijas” is marked on a 1718 map. On Herman Moll’s 1720 map of North America, a blank space is marked “Parts Unknown” with only “High Mountains” bordering “New Mexico” to the south and “New France” to the east. What picture of Colorado was known before Miera’s map of 1777? The question clearly entices Anderson. He references 1694 journals of Don Diego de Vargas, the Spanish governor, “in which he mentions names of Colorado rivers and mountains in a way that would lead one to believe they were more or less in common use at the time.” But no map is known from the man’s military trek into the San Luis Valley. Neither is any map available from the first recorded French expedition into Colorado, led by brothers Pierre Antoine and Paul Mallet in 1739. The picture of Colorado became clearer following Thomas Jefferson’s declaration in 1804, ahead of the Lewis and Clark expedition: “We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great country; those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin.” Soon after Lewis and Clark was Pike. After his adventures and misadventures around the mapped “Highest Peak” ー insurmountable, Pike famously described his namesake ー came Long’s party across the northeast plains said to be “wholly unfit for cultivation.” Then came Frémont. Before working on a map, “There was a mass of astronomical and other observations to be calculated and discussed,” the legendary “Pathfinder” wrote in his report of the 1842-44 expeditions. Frémont wrote of measuring latitudes and longitudes and “tracing from the sketch books of the lines of the rivers, the forms of the lakes, the contours of the hills.” It was “interesting,” he remarked ー “fixing on a small sheet the results of laborious travel over waste regions, and giving to them an enduring place on the world’s surface.” Previously, maps had depicted the Arkansas and South Platte rivers and Pikes and Longs peaks close together. “Frémont did the most to correct that,” Anderson said. “But from a big-scale perspective, it was the Great Surveys and Ferdinand Hayden.” Hayden’s 1877 triangulation map of the newly designated state was three years in the making, with crisscrossing lines showing point-to-point distances based on astronomical and angular measurements. “It’s just mind-boggling to me,” Anderson said. “Just picture these guys with their mules and their equipment climbing all the fourteeners and triangulating the state.” The guys were young and bearded out of prestigious universities. “And unlike Escalante, who had felt himself armored by his religion, Hayden’s men seemed armored by their absorption in the marvels of science,” Anderson writes. They were only the next to travel with instruments to read the stars and latitudes and longitudes, only the next to brave the wild unknown. From journals of men over the century before, Anderson gathered “common themes:” repairing arms ahead of attacks; repairing packs and tents; rains and floods; food shortages; sickness and death. “But these early explorers’ perseverance and their maps opened up the way to the future state of Colorado,” Anderson writes, “and we are deeply indebted to them.” That might be one takeaway from “The Mapping of Colorado.” A takeaway for Kallaus, a lifelong Coloradan and lover of history: “There’s so much more history in Colorado that we have not uncovered yet. And a lot of that is in these maps that we’ve not really looked at yet, and there’s a lot of maps out there.” Anderson often thinks about one that may or may not be out there. In 1540, Gen. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s party may or may not have touched southeast Colorado, but his expedition included “the earliest known map produced of the American Southwest,” Anderson notes. Diaries indicate a map anyway; its existence is unknown. “That would be something if they could find it someday,” Anderson said. DETAILS For the first printing of “The Mapping of Colorado,” 200 collectors edition copies are complete with commemorative stamps for the state’s birthdays going back to 1876, each postmarked and displayed on the inside cover, along with signatures from the author and publisher. $150 for coffee table-sized book, featuring about 90 rare maps displayed in high resolution and 236 pages of narrated history. Check pjandersonbooks.com for availability, along with Hooked on Books (12 E. Bijou St., 719-419-7660), Dewitt Enterprises “Home of the Secret Bookshop” in Fountain (404 N. Santa Fe Ave.; call for appointment: 719-473-0330) and the History Colorado Center in Denver (1200 Broadway, 302-447-8679).