Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement 1524-1890

Compiling maps drawn by Spanish, French and British explorers, as well as documents from the California gold rush, the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Northern Pacific Railroad, this book intelligently chronicles the history of map-making in the Western U.S. Cohen (co-author of Manhattan in Maps) brings together over 65 significant and often beautiful maps--many of which have never been published before--and annotates them with fascinating stories. Besides offering an index of our fluctuating ideas of geography, mineral deposits and demographic distributions over the Western states, many of these maps are simply wonderful to look at, as they are filled with colored borders, rivers and tributaries, as well as mesas and mountains. Among the most gorgeous is a map depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn by One Bull (the Hunkpapa Lakota warrior-artist and nephew of Sitting Bull), and one 1720 map of the Southwest by Spanish military officer Francisco Alvarez Barreiro. This book could fit easily in the library of any geographer or art lover.