Pike's Survey of the Upper Mississippi River

General James Wilkinson, then governor of Upper Louisiana, chose Pike to lead an exploratory expedition along the Mississippi River north of St. Louis. Although instructed to chart the river and observe its natural resources and places suitable for military and commercial establishments, Pike also attempted to locate the river's headwaters. Leaving St. Louis in August 1805, he ascended the river as far as Leech Lake in Minnesota, missing its source by more than 50 miles. Upon Pike's return to St. Louis in April 1806, Anthony Nau compiled a large, four-sheet manuscript map of the Upper Mississippi River, based on Pike's field notes and sketch maps.

Searching for the source of the Mississippi River

In the summer of 1805, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike extended his orders to include a search for the source of the Mississippi River. After spending the winter in present-day Minnesota, Pike and his party returned to St. Louis in April 1806, just months before his more momentous venture up the Arkansas River.Pike's journal is open to September 23,1805, when Pike reached the Rock River in northwestern Illinois and encountered the Sauk tribe and their chief Black Hawk.

Pike's Field Notes

This small notebook, which was among the papers confiscated from Zebulon Pike during his captivity in Mexico in 1807 and returned to the State Department in 1910, includes sketch maps and field observations from 1805-1807. It includes data from his expeditions along the upper Mississippi and into the Spanish borderlands. On the pages displayed above, dated September 8 through September 25, 1805, Pike recorded distances and observations as his party traveled along the Mississippi River. The entries conclude when the expedition reached the Falls of St. Anthony in present-day Minneapolis.

Up the Arkansas River to the Rocky Mountains

Suspected of spying, Pike and his party were intercepted and detained by Spanish authorities in Colorado. In this letter to Secretary of State James Madison, President Jefferson urges him to deny that Pike had any role as a spy and explain that he was under orders to explore the watersheds of the Arkansas and Red Rivers. The president suggested that the Spanish forces who escorted him through Texas to Natchitoches, Louisiana, be reimbursed from the War Department funds.

The "Santa Fe Trail"

This small sketch map, with west located at the top, is reportedly the first American map depicting the Santa Fe Trail. Although the map is in Pike's hand, it does not depict the route he traversed but was probably prepared as a reference map showing a 1797 trek by three French traders, operating out of the St. Louis area, from the juncture of the Platte and Missouri Rivers to Santa Fe (identified as St. Affee at the top of the page). When Pike was detained in February of 1807, this map was confiscated by Spanish authorities who suspected that it depicted a military route to their settlement.

Freeman's Survey of the Red River, 1806

In 1806, despite the threat of Spanish opposition, surveyor and astronomer Thomas Freeman and naturalist Peter Custis, set out to explore the Red River, the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Their objective was to locate the river's source, thought to be in the vicinity of the Spanish outpost of Santa Fe. After traveling approximately 600 miles, the small party was confronted by Spanish troops and the mission was aborted. The expedition's route is recorded on this manuscript map. The area explored by Freeman, in present-day Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, was also incorporated into Zebulon Pike's official report map published in 1810.

Surveying the Spanish Southwest

After exploring the region adjacent to the peak that bears his name in Colorado, Pike traced the north fork of the Arkansas and searched for the Red River's source. Ill-prepared for harsh winter weather, Pike and his men built a small stockade on the upper Rio Grande. Here they were captured by the Spanish in February 1807 and taken to Santa Fe and on to Chihuahua, Mexico. Pike was eventually released, but his notes and documents were confiscated. His 1810 published Account was largely created from memory. Although the text is poorly written and disorganized, it gave the public its first detailed knowledge of settlements and southwestern lands beyond the Spanish border.

Pike's Published Maps of the Spanish Borderlands

The most notable features on this pair of maps are the principal rivers of the southern plains. While a dashed line highlighted in red shows the route followed by Pike's party, this is actually a composite map incorporating information from the earlier explorations of the Red, Ouachita, and Arkansas Rivers by Thomas Freeman, William Dunbar, and Lieutenant James Wilkinson. Pike also locates the "Highest Peak," later known as Pike's Peak, which he describes at the common source of western rivers.

Louisiana Boundary

Baron Alexander von Humboldt, whose explorations of South America, Mexico, and the North American Southwest were later published in thirty volumes, regularly corresponded with Thomas Jefferson about his findings. In this exchange of letters, Humboldt complained that Arrowsmith and Zebulon Pike had used his maps of Spanish America without permission or attribution. Jefferson responded, "That their Arrowsmith should have stolen your Map of Mexico, is in the piratical spirit of his country" and sought von Humboldt's forgiveness for Pike borrowing information in his report.

Maps of Long's Explorations

These companion maps, both included in the published account of Long's 1819-1820 Scientific Expedition, delineate the expedition's route from St. Louis up the Missouri and Platte Rivers to the Rocky Mountains. Much of the information for the eastern half of the map (above left) was borrowed from commercial sources. The western half, based on Long's own explorations and earlier surveys, corrected many geographical errors made by previous expeditions. Boldly blazoned, however, on the southern plains is Long's faulty characterization,"Great American Desert."

Exploration and Science

Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was appointed to the 1819-1820 Long expedition as the official naturalist. Out of his observations and those of his contemporaries, Say produced a three-volume masterwork entitled American Entomology: or Descriptions of Insects of North America (1824-1828). The illustrations were drawn by Say himself, or by the expedition's assistant naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale. Say, who also drew information from other expeditions to the South, the Rocky Mountains, the Minnesota River Basin, and Mexico, did much to advance the understanding of the continent's natural world.

First Western Expedition by Steamboat

Major Stephen Long led the first western exploration expedition to utilize a steamboat as its main means of transportation. Titian Peale, an artist and assistant naturalist on the Long expedition, recorded in his journal that the party left St. Louis by the steamboat "Western Engineer" on June 21, 1819. The steamboat failed to provide reliable transportation. After wintering near Council Bluffs, north of present-day Omaha, Nebraska, the expedition explored the Platte and Arkansas Rivers on horseback.

"Western Engineer"

Major Long helped design the steamboat "Western Engineer," which was built at Pittsburgh for the first exploration of western rivers by steamboat. This side wheel steamboat proved unsuitable for the expedition because it was underpowered, drew too much draft, and relied on unfiltered river water for steam that continually clogged the engines. In this delicate riverscape, Titian Peale sketched the steamboat on the wide Missouri River. The steamboat was abandoned at Ft. Lisa about 600 miles above St. Louis on the Missouri River. The expedition proceeded on horseback to explore the Platte and Arkansas rivers.

Titian Peale, Assistant Naturalist

Although the Long expedition was chronically ill-equipped and, because of harsh conditions, had to abandon exploring the headwaters of the Arkansas River, the party did gather valuable data on the natural history and ethnography of the region. Titian Peale made 122 sketches on the expedition and collected birds, reptiles, mammals, and fish specimens along with Indian artifacts to add to the Peale Museum collections, which was under the direction of his father Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. The sketches shown above are typical of those made by Peale--small scale for easy portability and carefully rendered using a fine brush or pen.

Account of the Long Expedition

One-time scenic designer, Samuel Seymour was recruited as the official artist of the Long expedition. Its official report, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, reproduces eight landscape views of the more that 150 sketches Seymour made while on the expedition. His "View of the Chasm through which the Platte issues from the Rocky Mountains"(above right) is considered the first published image of the Rockies made from direct observation. The report was compiled by Edwin James, the expedition's botanist and geologist.

The Prairie

The Prairie is one of five novels that make up James Fenimore Cooper's enduring Leatherstocking Tales. In this third novel of the Cooper series, protagonist Leatherstocking, despondent over the destruction of the forests, escapes to the Great Plains. Cooper's vivid descriptions of the central plains were deeply influenced by the published report of the Long expedition. This inspirational role was true of other expeditions. Publication of the actual experiences of nineteenth-century explorers consistently inspired writers and fueled the public's imagination.

Missionary Map of the Pacific Northwest

Father de Smet, representing a long tradition of missionary explorers, was an indefatigable traveler and a keen observer of the Indian peoples and physical geography of the West. In 1851, de Smet prepared this manuscript map of the Upper Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region. Tribal chiefs, Indian agents, military officers, and fur traders contributed to its contents. It is the most detailed and accurate record of the locations of mountain ranges, rivers, forts, and major trails of this region prior to the western railway surveys. Overlaying the map's physical features are boundary lines intended to define tribal lands and limit tribal rivalries.

Winter Count

Chief Battiste Good, a Brulé Dakota (Sioux) made this copy of a Sioux winter count in 1907 while living on the Rosebud Agency, South Dakota. Winter counts were used to mark significant events. A circle of lodges represents a cycle of year. Individual events are depicted by buffalo hunts, fights with neighboring tribes, famines, and other particular occurrences. There are no discernible depictions to mark the passage of the Corps of Discovery or any of the other official expeditions that would have traveled through the region. But depictions of forts, encounters with missionaries, and fur trading ventures are marked throughout the calendar.

House of Representatives Geographer

David Burr, geographer to the House of Representatives, was one of the most accomplished, early nineteenth-century American cartographers. In addition to government maps, he produced a large body of commercial maps and atlases, including this map of the United States, which is heavily dependent in its depiction of the West on geographic information provided by the St. Louis fur trade entrepreneur and Missouri Congressman William H. Ashley. In particular, Burr utilized the geographic knowledge and mapping of fur trader Jedediah Smith. The map specifically shows Smith's 1826-1827 and 1827-1829 expeditions.

Basin of the Columbia and Snake Rivers

Born in France but educated at the U. S. Military Academy, Captain Benjamin Bonneville, while on leave from the U.S. Army, led a fur trapping expedition into the Oregon Country in 1832. He spent the next three years dispatching parties of trappers. There is conjecture that Bonneville was also acting as a government agent gathering intelligence on the natural resources and British activities in the West. This is one of two maps published in an account by author Washington Irving based on Bonneville's experience with the fur trade. The map accurately depicts the drainage basin of the Columbia/Snake system and the other major rivers of the Northwest.

The Fur Trade Popularized

Captain Benjamin Bonneville sold the story of his adventures in the fur trade to Washington Irving, who, in 1837, turned it into a narrative entitled The Rocky Mountains, or, Scenes, Incidents and Adventures in the Far West. The two-volume publication was enormously popular and among the most important literary descriptions of the Rockies and the West prior to the reports of the government sponsored expeditions of the 1840s and 1850s.

Map of Indian Tribal Distributions

Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under presidents Jefferson and Madison, also became an authority on North American Indian languages. From the time of his meeting with Alexander von Humboldt, when the German geographer visited Jefferson in 1804, Gallatin developed an interest in native languages and continued to collect information about tribal distributions throughout his career. In 1836 at age 75, he compiled this map depicting ten major ethno-linguistic families to accompany the publication of his findings on the classification of North American Indian languages. The map also incorporates information gleaned from the explorations of the fur trapper Jedediah Smith.

Crossing the Sierra Nevada to California

Considered one of the great rarities of Western Americana, the narrative of Zenas Leonard vividly chronicles his 1831-1833 travels through the Rocky Mountains, trapping beaver with one of several rival fur companies, as well as his amazing adventures with Joseph R. Walker's expedition to California. Leonard captures the Walker party's struggle to survive on the crest of the Sierra during the brutal winter of 1833 and the thrill of finding Yosemite Valley and a southern pass through the Sierra Nevada. Leonard's account was originally serialized in his hometown newspaper, the Clearfield Democratic Banner.

Fur Traders

Artist Alfred Jacob Miller accompanied British Captain William Drummond Stewart on a hunting expedition to the Northern Rockies in1837, attending a fur trappers' rendezvous on Wyoming's Green River. Miller returned to his home in New Orleans to turn the sketches he had made in the field into a series of paintings of western scenes, particularly of landscapes, hunting and trapping scenes, and Indian life. For the next thirty years, Miller would parlay his brief western experience into a career as one of the most prominent nineteenth-century painters of the American West.

Wilkes' Map of the Pacific Northwest

The U.S. Exploring Expedition, a squadron of five ships commanded by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., set sail in1838 on a four-year scientific expedition to collect scientific specimens from Antarctic waters, the Fiji and Hawaiian Islands, and the western coast of North America. Reaching North America in 1841, they spent considerable time in Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay. The resulting map of the Oregon Territory, which was published with Wilkes's official 1845 report, displays the region's relief, drainage, and Indian tribes. It also includes a large inset of the Columbia River from its mouth to the Snake River.

Charting the Oregon Waterways

Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes led his five-vessel fleet across the bar of the Columbia River on August 6, 1841, near the end of a four-year surveying expedition. Wilkes surveyed and charted 1600 miles of the coast of Antarctica, hundreds of Pacific islands, and nearly 800 miles of coastline and Oregon waterways. Wilkes and the United States government were very concerned with establishing a boundary claim to counter those of Great Britain in the American northwest. In the journal displayed above, Wilkes records the expedition's approach to the mouth of Columbia River.

American Claims to Oregon Territory

Lieutenant Charles Wilkes stressed the importance of exploration for American claims to the northwest coast in this letter to the Secretary of the Navy, Abel Upshur. Establishing a boundary claim to counter those of Great Britain in the American northwest was of great concern to the U.S. government. Wilkes sought "as much knowledge of this country as possible, being well aware of the importance of accurate information for the government in regard to the value of the country, pending the settlement of the boundary question." Britain and the United States settled the Oregon boundary issue by treaty in1846.

Narrative of the Wilkes Expedition

While anchored at Astoria in August 1841, the expedition visited the primeval pine forest along the Columbia River. As this illustration shows, the party marveled at the gigantic growth that produced trees more than thirty-nine feet in circumference and an estimated 250 feet high. The official government edition of Wilkes's Narrative was published in 1845 in a limited edition of 100 sets, 63 of which were given to states and foreign nations and 25 were destroyed by fire. The scientific data collected by nine expedition naturalists was published from 1846 to 1874 in twenty-one limited-edition folio volumes that included illustrations and atlases.

Sutter's Fort

Titian Peale, who had been on the Long expedition, was also a member of the Wilkes-led Exploring Expedition. As on the Long expedition, Peale kept a journal in addition to his duties as artist-naturalist. When Peale and his party reach the prosperous ranch of Captain Sutter in California, Peale wrote: "The Mexican government have made a conditional grant of 30 square leagues of land to Capt. Sutter, a Swiss gentleman, for the purpose of Settling this portion of California. He commenced about two years since, and is now building extensive corrals and houses of adobes, by Indian labor for which he pays in goods." Peale also captured Sutter's "Fort" in the watercolor above.

Plants Collected

William Dunlop Brackenridge served as horticulturist and Titian Peale as artist-naturalist for the U.S. Exploring Expedition. The two naturalists, along with mineralogist James Dana, formed an expedition party sent inland to investigate the interior geography and resources of Oregon and California. Wilkes's expedition returned to Washington, D.C., with tens of thousands of natural history specimens and ethnographic artifacts gathered in South America, the Pacific Islands, the Far East, and the Pacific Northwest and California. The bulk of the scientific specimens collected on the four-year voyage became the foundation for the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.

Botanical Specimens

The specimens displayed above were obtained on Frémont's third expedition to survey from the central Rockies, through the Great Salt Lake region, and to the Sierra Nevada. Despite the turbulence of the Mexican War, Frémont was able to reach California and obtain a few botanical specimens to add to those collected on his previous two expeditions. Calycodemia fremontii and Scutellaria antirrhinoides, on display above, were both obtained in California.

Landmark Map of the West

In 1842 and again in 1843-1844, John C. Frémont led expeditions to survey the route of the Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to the Columbia River. On his return in 1844, Frémont traveled into Mexican-held California and then headed east completing a 6,500-mile circuit of the West. Charles Preuss, the expedition's cartographer, prepared this map, depicting only geographic information collected during the expedition. Originally published with Fremont's 1845 report, the map was the first reliable depiction of the emigrants' route through the West since it was based on scientific measurements of latitude and longitude.

Heights of Mountains

Frémont, himself more adventurer than scientist, was accompanied by the German surveyor and cartographer Charles Preuss, who not only created new surveys of the Great Basin, central Oregon and western Nevada but also collected plant and mineral specimens, and sketched landscapes. He drew this profile of Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens with the Columbia River from the trail along the Deschutes River and recorded various "Hights [sic] of Mountains" in his field notebook displayed above. Preuss and Frémont were among the earliest Euro-Americans to view the Great Salt Lake and Lake Tahoe.

Report of the Expedition

Considered one of the most influential accounts of the American Far West, John C. Frémont's Report of his expeditions was published in more than two-dozen editions in the first fifteen years. The popularity of his Report is due in large part to the literary skill of his wife Jesse (1824-1918), the daughter of expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton. This view of the dividing ridge of the Sierras, February 14, 1844, drawn shortly before Frémont's descent into the Sacramento Valley, documents the party's daring winter crossing guided by the mountaineer Kit Carson.

William Clark's Certificates

John C. Frémont's second exploratory expedition to the northwest was barely underway when a group of Sioux Indians arrived in camp with certificates given them by William Clark. Theodore Talbot, a civilian and the son of former U.S. Senator Isham Talbot of Kentucky, made note of this occurrence in his journal. This second Frémont expedition was designed to map an overland route to Oregon through the South or Frémont Pass that would link up to the work of the Charles Wilkes' expedition on the Columbia River and largely replace the Missouri River route of Lewis and Clark.

John C. Frémont for President

In 1856, capitalizing on his popularity, John C. Frémont (1813-1890) ran as the newly formed Republican party's first presidential candidate. In this image, intended to adorn a campaign banner or poster, Frémont is shown on a mountain peak, planting the American flag. This scene was intended as a reminder to the public of Frémont's famous exploring expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in 1842 and 1843. Frémont lost the election to James Buchanan (1791-1868) by a margin of 174 to 114 electoral votes.

Surveying and Mapping the Southwestern Boundary

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, ending the Mexican War (1848), defined but did not actually demarcate the 2,000-mile boundary between the United States and Mexico. However, a joint commission was formed in 1849 to carry out this task. A series of four maps, which were issued separately, depict the boundary and the adjacent topography. Shown here is the western portion of the boundary running along the southern extent of present-day California and Arizona.

Report of the Mexican Boundary Commission

The actual surveying of the southwestern boundary line and the preparation of the resulting reports and maps were assigned to members of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, primarily under the direction of William H. Emory. The United States and Mexican Boundary Survey was completed in 1855, but the published reports were not issued until 1859. The three-volumes included numerous landscape and ethnographic illustrations, as well as accounts of the geology, botany, and zoology along the surveyed line.

Surveying and Mapping the Northwestern Boundary

The boundary of the western United States with the British possessions in Canada was defined by two treaties, with the 49^th parallel designated in 1818 as the boundary from the Great Lakes to the Continental Divide and in 1846, the remaining segment from the Rocky Mountains to the Puget Sound, also utilizing the 49^th parallel. The survey of the latter segment was not begun until 1856. Shown here is a photo-lithographed copy of the first sheet of that series, depicting the rugged terrain traversed by the survey party in present-day southeastern British Columbia and northwestern Montana.

Landscape Views along the Northwest Boundary

James Alden accompanied the U.S. survey team as their official artist and produced a series of sixty-six watercolor landscape views in the vicinity of the 49^th parallel. As these three views illustrate, this series of dramatic drawings depicts the region's rugged topography, the survey camps, and the actual marking of the boundary with stone monuments and the cutting of a swath of trees along the surveyed line. These images were never converted to lithographic plates because the results of the survey were not published.

Early Western Survey Photographs

The British team used photographers to document the progress of the boundary line, geographic features, native life, and U.S. military posts and camps. In hindsight their commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Hawkins, thought the photographic equipment hindered the team's progress, and the attachment of a sketch artist would have been more useful. By the next decade the inclusion of photographers on scientific and government-sponsored surveys would be seen as critical to the mission. The images from this survey are among the earliest surviving photographs of the West and the first photographic documentation of the Pacific Northwest.

Specimens from the Mexican Boundary Survey

The study of North American botany during the mid-nineteenth century was done primarily under the aegis of U.S. government expeditions. In this period the survey teams, like the one that accompanied the Mexican Boundary Survey, became more complex and included multiple specialists in the fields of geology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany. John Torrey (1796-1873), a renowned American botanist who had been associated with the Long, Wilkes, and Frémont expeditions, described the botanical specimens new to science in "Botany of the Boundary," included in the survey's official report.

Transcontinental Railroad Proposals

This map is one of the earliest promotional maps for a transcontinental railroad presented to the U. S. Congress. It depicts three routes, one of which was advocated by Asa Whitney, a successful New York dry goods merchant. In the 1830s, he became active in the China trade, envisioning an overland route as part of this Far Eastern trade connection. He planned to construct a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Columbia River, financed through the sale of public lands on either side of the right-of-way. Sectional controversy over the selection of the route's eastern and western termini eventually killed Whitney's project.

Published Reports from the Pacific Railroad Surveys

The final reports of Pacific Railroad Surveys were published in a comprehensive thirteen-volume set between 1855 and 1861. Together they provided the most important contemporary source on the geography of the western U.S. during the middle of the nineteenth century. The cost of publication was over $1,000,000, more than twice the cost of the surveys themselves. The volume on display documents Isaac Stevens' survey of the northern route along the 47^th and 49^th parallels. The plate shown in this case depicts the customary distribution of goods and gifts to the Assiniboine Indians at Fort Union in present-day western North Dakota.

Artist, Map Maker, and Interpreter

German-born Gustavus Sohon was one of eleven artists employed by the Pacific Railroad Surveys. In 1852, ten years after arriving in the U.S., he enlisted in the army and was eventually assigned to Isaac Stevens' surveying party as an artist, explorer, cartographer, and interpreter of Indian languages. Displayed here are two Sohon landscape sketches made along the northern railroad route--a study of Fort Vancouver, originally a Hudson's Bay Company outpost on the Columbia River, and a detailed pencil sketch of Couer d'Alene Mission, now the oldest standing structure in Idaho.

Endorsing a Transcontinental Railroad Route

Proponents of southern, central, and northern transcontinental railroad routes battled to a stalemate in the forums of public opinion and national politics. Preliminary surveys were done on four proposed routes prior to the Civil War, but rival companies and regional tensions over the expansion of slavery prevented a final decision. With the South's withdrawal from the United States, Congress approved a central route, not the one surveyed, from Omaha to Sacramento in 1862.On display is a speech by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, an ardent advocate for the central route with a terminus in St. Louis.

Warren's Map of the West

Lt. G.K. Warren, a West Point graduate and a member of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, produced the Pacific Railroad Survey's most important cartographic product--a large, composite map of the territory west of the Mississippi River. This remarkable map not only shows the routes of the transcontinental railroad surveys but also provides a detailed summary of prior explorations dating back to Lewis and Clark. Warren's map of the West was relatively complete with the delineation of the region's major drainage systems and mountain chains, laying the groundwork for the construction of a national network of railroads.

Compiling the Map

In compiling his map, G.K.Warren carefully evaluated all the available data and incorporated the most reliable information, particularly that based on scientific instrumentation and careful analysis by past explorations, including those led by Lewis and Clark, Pike, Long, Wilkes, Frémont, and Emory. Warren provided a detailed record of his methodology in a lengthy "Memoir," in which he listed, for example, the longitude of a variety of locations (the accuracy of which had long been problematic) and identified the source for each determination.

Westward the Course of Empire

The subtitle of this popular Currier & Ives print comes from the sixth stanza of Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley's 1726 poem "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," in which he views America as the grand culmination of the progress of civilization. It was a popular theme in the mid-nineteenth century as Americans pushed westward. In this image, the town church and school represent the civilizing forces in the newly cleared landscape. The smoke of the locomotive acts as both a barrier and a foil to the American Indians riding horseback on the plains.

Politics, Profits, and the Transcontinental Railroad

In 1862, the U.S. Congress approved the central route from Omaha to Sacramento for the construction of a transcontinental railroad by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad Companies. The government subsidized the construction by providing huge land grants along the railroad right-of- way. When completed, the two rail lines met at Promontory on the north side of Great Salt Lake, celebrated with the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869.

Union Pacific Railroad

A.J. Russell began his photographic career documenting the railroad activities during the Civil War. In 1865, Russell went West and photographed the construction of the track beds and the laying of the rails for the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1996, Canadian photographer Mark Ruwedel positioned his camera in the same spot where Russell made his image of the Green River Valley in Wyoming. The immutable Citadel Rock dominates the background of both images as does the railroad bridge on the right of the picture frame, but in Ruwedel's photograph houses and telephone poles now dot the middle ground.

"Path Finder" George B. McClellan

George McClellan, later to gain fame as a commander of Union forces during the Civil War, was a member of Issac Steven's party, which surveyed the northernmost route along the 47^th and 49^th parallels of the Pacific Railroad Surveys. The sketch of McClellan as "Path Finder" was made by J.F. Minter, a fellow engineer on the survey, as the party explored the Cascades and the Columbia River plateau in central Washington state. McClellan's journal of field notes, kept from May 20 through December 15, 1853, is also on display.

Mapping the West

It would take another fifty years after Lewis and Clark to complete the cartographic image of the West we know today. This presentation shows the routes of the various expeditions from Lewis and Clark to the railroad surveys. Each path is represented by a different color. The maps shown can be found within this exhibition.

"We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great country: those who come after us will . . . fill up the canvas we begin." --Thomas Jefferson, 1805