Hello Interactors,This week I’m coming to you from Kansas City. My plan was to avoid the hot and humid Midwest summer to visit family, but instead I’m battling a heat wave and soon a thunderstorm. It made me wish I’d done a post on weather maps.As a result, this week’s installment is a review of my spring posts on cartography as we approach the last week of the season. Next up is summer and the role the physical environment plays in the interaction of people and place. This spring I’ve chronicled the role various elements of map-making have played in the formation of the United States. Starting with an ancient history of cadastral mapping and how Thomas Jefferson took a page from the Egyptians and the Roman empire, then the progression of organized surveying for land capture across the country, and finally how maps serve as forms of persuasion, manipulation, and control.I’ll be back next week with the final post of the season.Now let’s go…back to April.01 : A Groma from Rome Finds a New HomeHow large scale precision cartography rose and fell with the Roman Empire, disappeared for centuries, and then re-emerged in the rise of a new empire.This post looks behind the origins of the neatly organized geometry that chop most of America into a Cartesian grid. Mapmaking’s history dates back to ancient times – as do the motivations behind them. While maps help us to better understand and interact with the world, they also help establish authority and control.https://interplace.io/p/a-groma-from-rome-finds-a-new-home02 : A Nation SquaredHow Thomas Jefferson's vision of a gridded nation squared with his desire for an interracial slave-free 'Continental America'.Jefferson had appointed Thomas Hutchins to be Geographer of the United States in 1781. In 1784 Jefferson was preparing for expansion west and was combing over Hutchins’ descriptions of what lie west of his beloved Virginia. Jefferson was dubious of Hutchins’ mapping facts and took it up with him in a personal correspondence. What follows is the unfolding of a cartography project of Roman scale. And the birth of an empire.https://interplace.io/p/a-nation-squared03 : Miami Priced, Ohio DicedFrom war veteran cronies scheming a land grab at a bar in Boston to the banks of the Ohio River with the threat of angry native resistors breathing down your neck.Thomas Jefferson had a vision of a neatly portioned empire, just as the globe was neatly partitioned into a grid of latitude and longitude lines. Sure he wanted land for farmers, but he also needed to extract property tax revenue to fill the newly formed government’s coffers that had been emptied by the Revolutionary war. The task of surveying and mapping fell on the shoulders of America’s first and only chief Geographer, Thomas Hutchins. Like most things in colonial America, it wasn’t easy.https://interplace.io/p/miami-priced-ohio-diced04 : Guns, God, and GoldA quest for wealth leads to pain through the crafting of a cartesian plane as war breaks out across the Ohio plains.This is the third in a series on the role surveying and cartography played in the establishment of the United States. It continues further west into Ohio in the lead up to the 1800s. The U.S. government needed money to fulfill their dreams of being a global superpower. And it all hinged on Jefferson’s plan to extract money from neatly surveyed squares of land occupied by sovereign Indigenous nations who had been here for thousands of years. They were not going to give in easily and they never will.https://interplace.io/p/guns-god-and-gold05 : Make Your Own Survey in Under a DayHow Thomas Jefferson’s vision of mapped agrarian squares was realized by farmers dividing their own shares.This wraps up the April series on the role large scale surveying played in determining how people of the United States of America interact with each other and the government. Jefferson had a vision for the country that combined his desire for agrarian expansion west and building an empire. It turned out to be easier for farmers to claim land than he could have imagined. https://interplace.io/p/make-your-own-survey-in-under-a-day06 : You Are What You MapHow triangles, topology, quadrangles, and cartography yield maps that can skew both messages and time.This branches into topography and the role western colonial expansion plays in the creation and articulation of our naturally occurring geography. Most of us are not very skilled at critiquing the role maps have played in shaping how we see the globe and the people on it. However, I’m optimistic that when we do we can better confront the boundaries that maps have created between people and place.https://interplace.io/p/you-are-what-you-map07 : The U.S. Census: Mapping a Sense of UsHow a Swedish Zoologist and the birth of census 'big data' led to American racism at the hands of statisticians and geographers.We’re learning every day just how embedded racism is in the workings of the American polity. This post is critical of America’s cadastral and topographic cartography past. It weaves together European scientific determinism, early ‘big data’ authoritarianism, and White supremist cartography.https://interplace.io/p/the-us-census-mapping-a-sense-of08 : Boomtown MapsA tip on a canoe leads to the rise of a Midwest metropolis as mapping goes social.Most of spring chronicled the spread of cadastral mapping across America. It was all part of Jefferson’s gridded agrarian vision. But by the middle of the 1800s immigrants started flooding in, the industrial age was taking hold, and cities became the thing to map. https://interplace.io/p/boomtown-maps09 : Winning Over the Windy City with WatercolorsShaping a crowded city of crime and pollution with a water soluble solution.Chicago was bursting at the seams at the turn of the century. People were stressed, companies were panicking, and something had to be done. They needed a plan; a map of a 20th century city. They needed someone to draw a picture, ease their minds, and persuade Chicago’s industrial elite.https://interplace.io/p/winning-over-the-windy-city-with10 : Maps as Logos; Atlases that ImposeCountries are branded with maps as their logos while national atlases sell their brand.The shape of national maps are no accident. They’re not even natural. They’ve been created with intent. Yes, they represent political boundaries, but they also sell a brand. Politics is where the brand of a country begins. And maps, like flags, can serve as logos.https://interplace.io/p/maps-as-logos-atlases-that-imposeIf you enjoy Interplace, please tell your friends! And don’t be shy about liking and commenting on my posts or podcasts. If you don’t like what you’re reading or would rather not comment publicly, please drop me a note. I’d love your feedback!Thanks to all of you that have supported me this far. It’s really exciting seeing the number of subscribers grow and the encouragement from many of you. Keep it up, spread the word, and thanks again for the love!Now, let’s check on that thunderstorm.Brad Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,The shape of national maps are no accident. They’re not even natural. They’ve been created with intent. Yes, they represent political boundaries, but they also sell a brand.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…LOCO FOR LOGOSClose your eyes and imagine the shape of the country in which you were born. Now imagine the shape of the Nike swoosh. One we call a map, the other we call a logo. But maps can be logos too.   Logo is a 1937 word most likely derived from an 1840 word, logogram; a sign or character that represents a word – Logo (words) and gram (that which is drawn). Shapes and letters, points and lines  paired with assigned names have been inscribed in our brains throughout our lifetime. Years of repetitive exposure through teachers, textbooks, TV, newspapers, books, magazines, movies, social media, and the internet have bombarded our senses burning images and perceptions into our memory. Companies and governments have spent billions of dollars tp pair particular words with that which is drawn. There’s a reason it’s called branding. These images are emblazoned in your brain, just as a cattle rancher burns an image into the hide of their livestock with a red-hot branding iron. But there’s more to a brand than just the image. Brands are both a symbol, like a word and/or image, that possess a set of associated perceptions. And they are much more difficult to create than a branding iron.I played a small role in building the Microsoft Office brand. You may be more familiar with another set of images I was more closely associated with – icons for Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Because people use, or used, Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint repeatedly, the image of that icon became increasingly imprinted in their memory. The repeated experience of using those applications gradually formed perceptions associated with the icon. Those perceptions were articulated through the media influencing even those people who never used these applications.The first Office logo. It has taken on many different shapes since the puzzle piece. Source: Logopedia. Microsoft made more money selling applications as a bundle than individually. So instead of building iconic brands around each product, they created the Office brand. The first Office logo, was a square puzzle of four interlocking pieces filled with red, green, blue, and yellow. It suggested Office was a collection of interlocking pieces.  Four independent territories that shared a common border, purpose, and ideal. But getting that Office name and associated puzzle image to become recognized and recalled as readily as say, the Word icon, proved, and still proves, to be a monumental task. Many elements are factored in the forming of perceptions. Some elements the company can control, like the design of the product, marketing materials, and advertising. But others are out of their control like individual needs and desires, societal views, media impressions, and even politics.  Politics is where the brand of a country begins. And maps, like flags, can serve as logos. The earliest examples of maps as logos can be found in the imperial maps England produced. They too were puzzle pieces. As Cornell political scientist, Benedict Anderson, wrote in his influential book on nationalism, Imagined Communities:“Its origins were reasonably innocent - the practice of the imperial states of colouring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye. In London's imperial maps, British colonies were usually pink-red, French purple-blue, Dutch yellow-brown, and so on. Dyed this way, each colony. appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this 'jigsaw' effect became normal, each 'piece' could be wholly detached from its geographic context. In its final form all explanatory glosses could be summarily removed: lines of longitude and latitude, place names, signs for rivers, seas, and mountains, neighbours. Pure sign, no longer compass to the world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls.” Territory maps have been created for centuries as a way to demarcate territory for the purpose of ownership and dominion. That was as true for monarchies, as it is for nation-states. Over the last couple months I’ve chronicled the evolution and execution of cadastral and topographic maps across America just as Jefferson had envisioned. Around this time, regions around the world were doing the same. Including Thailand.IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ‘EM, JOIN ‘EMIt wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that Siam, now called Thailand, had a top-down Cartesian style representation of the country and census of its people. Sure they had maps, but they were mostly drawn at eye-level with invented perspectives. Many were dominated by textual descriptions that matched stone markers in the landscape. But having escaped the colonial invasion that neighboring Southeast Asian territories endured, the ruling King knew it was a matter of time before the French or English invaded. This tiny region had a history of kicking Christian missionaries out of their country for fervently converting Buddhists to Christianity. So they took matters into their own hands and hired a British cartographer to begin surveying and mapping territories – mostly for military and census purposes. It gained them a seat at the proverbial international table, staved off colonial invasion, but also aggregated diverse sets of cultures, identities, and languages under a single name affixed within imaginary lines for the purpose of administration, military control, and quasi-legal representation as a Westernized nation-state. As Thai historian Thongchai writes in Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities,“a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent. . . . It had become a real instrument to concretize projections on the earth's surface. A map was now necessary for the new administrative mechanisms and for the troops to back up their claims. . . . The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served.”Soon, like Jefferson and Hamilton a century before, a Department of Interior was created and with it a map-making division. From that point forward, not only could the country defend themselves from European colonizers, they could enter legitimate territorial negotiations with other nation-states. And they could also control the historical narrative of the country, the names of places, and the people that occupied them. In 1892 Thailand’s Minister of Education made geography mandatory.Map of the kingdom of Siam and its dependencies. 1900. James Fitzroy McCarthy. After mapping parts of India, McCarthy was assigned to Siam. He was put in charge of Siam’s Royal Survey Department in 1885. Source: GeographicusWhat were once loose collections of Indigenous tribes and bands with their own languages, cultures, and methods of relating to people and place, were bundled together and sold to the world under a new brand by a King who adopted westernized approaches to place making, land disputes, and military defense. Over time, this reinvention included changing the name of the country from Siam, a name attributed to this region in European maps dating back to the 1600s, to Thailand in 1942 – a seventy year old rebranding project. The only thing left of Siam in western language and culture, that I know of, is the informal name for conjoining siblings - Siamese Twins. One of the forces that accelerated, amplified, and solidified country brands were advances in printing technologies. Territorial names, maps, and their corresponding historical and cultural narratives became the words and symbols that comprised branding elements. Having a tidy, identifiable polygon made of a thick defining line, a perimeter that both divides and unites, offers governments a distinct image – a logo. A symbol that is used, like all logos, to represent a particular system of values, cultures, political structure, and economic systems, all based on a particular historical perspective and narrative as defined by the dominant ruling party. An image so simple, yet powerful, that it need only exist as a single color. Which, in turn, makes it easy and cheap to print in mass quantities and disseminate through mass media. The more the image is exposed, the more recognizable it becomes, and the more easily it is recalled at the mention of it’s name. Just like a logo.Given the efficiency of a logo, they’re easily incorporated into many forms of advertising, propaganda, and education. But it takes more than a single image to communicate the complicated doctrines and causes that stand behind a simple shape. That’s what national atlases are for. ATLAS PLUGGEDAlong with the advances in printing technologies came the proliferation of national atlases. In the History of Cartography, Volume Six, Karen Culcasi positions atlases like this,“…atlases have several roles, but their classic function is as a symbol of nationhood, national unity, and national pride. While the defining criteria are ambiguous, most national atlases are collections of thematic maps of an independent country. In addition to historical maps that narrate the nation-state’s past, they typically include statistical and physical maps as well as general reference maps covering the country section by section at a somewhat larger scale—all of which enhance their power as pedagogical and reference tools for use in homes and classrooms.”The first national atlases most likely emerged out of England in 1579; Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales. It’s a colorful book of maps gilded in gold and commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I to demonstrate British cartography and engraving prowess. It served as the base map for future national atlases of England and an inspiration for others to follow. Soon Scotland, Finland, Canada, and the United States had their own. In the centuries to follow, nation states around the world who gained their independence were quick to follow up with a national atlas. But they aren’t without conflict. One of the most recent notable territorial conflicts is also one of the oldest. Israel and Palestine.Atlas of England and Wales. 1579. Christopher Saxton. Aside from being the first complete atlas of England and Wales, Saxton's book was also an attempt to bring English engraving and cartography to prominence. Source: Royal Collection TrustThe boundary mapping of Israel and Palestine, like other boundaries in the region, continues to be contentious with no apparent conclusion through traditional means. Steeped in thousands of years of ebbing and flowing of ethnic, religious, refugee and natural resource boundaries and interactions its complex reality exceeds the limitations of traditional cartographic conventions.The first internationally recognized boundary in the Middle East was created in 1906 by Great Britain who were governing Egypt at the time. Again, for military purposes, they wanted to control the Suez Canal so the surveyed a border that awarded them the Sinai Peninsula. Then in 1916 the English and French met in secret to create a dividing line between Egypt and Turkey. Egypt went to England and Turkey went to France. Map of Sykes–Picot Agreement. Royal Geographical Society, 1910-15. Signed by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, 8 May 1916. Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia, and areas of control and influence agreed between the British and the French. Source: Wikimedia Commons  That worked so well, that in 1920 they met again to divvy up more land in the middle east. Lebanon and Syria would go to France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia to England. In 1923 the League of Nations declared Palestine a state, an England mandate, and the line originally drawn in 1906 between Palestine and Egypt remained. In 1947, the United Nations recommended a plan to divide Palestine into two “independent Jewish and Arab states.” The Jewish organization that had long been helping resettle the area begrudgingly accepted the proposal, but most of the Arab contingent did not. In 1948 the British mandate expired, hundreds of Palestinians were expelled, 78% of the land was handed to Israel and before the year was up the region had their first Arab-Israeli war. In 1949 a temporary ‘Green Line’ was agreed upon by the Israeli’s and neighboring Arab countries. Its name comes from the green ink used to draw the line. But what I recall is the green line of pine trees that stop at the border between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. These trees have mostly been purchased and planted throughout Israel by the Jewish National Fund – a nonprofit started in 1901 to buy up land in Palestine for Jewish settlement.  This animation shows the degree to which Palestinians have been squeezed by Israel over the years. I discovered this map at the Jewish Voice for Peace website. It was created by Visualizing Palestine. The Green Line lasted until 1967 and the Six-Day War. Israel captured territories that we all know by name, but most couldn’t place on a map: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula (which went back to Egypt in 1979). Contentious struggles continue to this day. The latest 11-day deadly skirmish was over territorial disputes in the Gaza Strip.In 1996 Haifa University Geography professor, Yoram Bar-Gal researched the maps Israeli schools were using to teach kids the area’s geography. He also looked at how the media, Zionist organizations, like the Jewish National Fund, and the Israeli government used maps to ‘assert territorial socialization’. He also looked at textbooks published in Arab countries to educate their kids and citizens. No surprise. What he found is each side uses maps and names that reflect their cultural identity. Maps from the Arab countries called the region Palestine and the Jewish maps called the region Israel. In 2004, the American Jewish Community created a pamphlet targeting textbooks created in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia asking, “How can there be peace in the Middle East if Israel isn’t even on the map?”These maps that each side have created can be construed as propaganda pieces. They each deliberately use names, labels, and language to systematically shape opinions, beliefs, and perceptions. That also sounds like the building of a brand using a map as a logo. Go search for a Palestine necklace with a map and see what you find. Then search for an Israeli necklace with a map. A logo with the same shape, but different meaning.FLEXIBLE, FUZZY, AND FLUIDWhen I was working in Excel on the built-in mapping feature, we had contemplative discussions about how to one day solve this sticky dilemma. Imagine you’re at a conference in Hong Kong presenting to an audience of mixed Asian descent – including Taiwanese. One of your slides includes a map you made in Excel of the population of Taiwan that includes that name on the map. Given China has not recognized Taiwan as a nation, many Chinese in the audience would take offense with how you labeled the map. But if at the last second you decided you should call it China, the Taiwanese in the audience would take offense. Given the presentation is happening in Hong Kong, should the map automatically select the name their government prefers? And what about you? What do you believe? Given this is your work, shouldn’t it reflect your personal belief? Or should it reflect the company you work for. It’s their laptop, their license of the software, and you were paid to make it. There’s no easy answer. An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions. Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae. By looking at commuter patterns the country divides functionally in space according to the clustering of regional labor markets. These create 'megaregion' shapes that don’t conform to traditional territorial state “logo” shapes but perhaps better reflect the reality of the regions.  In 2016 two geography researchers, Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, explored an alternative. They looked at commuting patterns across the United States and with the help of a computer determined regions based on human activity and not historical cadastral demarcations. It revealed familiar and logical grouping and names that anyone familiar with America could understand. But the shapes are counter to what Jefferson could ever have imagined. Still, the resulting shapes, while based on dynamic human patterns, are still fixed regions based on both man and machine interpretation. The authors conclude, “The detection of recognizable communities through this computational analysis suggests that human geography does in fact display statistically-significant patterns of structured regionalization…Such empirical analyses provide a scaffolding on which policymakers can evaluate the appropriate territorial shape and size of districts…Given the massive complexity of the connections inherent in national-scale commuter geography, these analyses should be understood as” providing only a sketchy foreshadowing of possibilities and “must then be subject to functional and practical scrutiny.”This all puts in to question the legitimacy of a nation-state in the first place. Inventing connected lines that make a recognizable shape, giving it a name, deciding who can live within its imaginary border neglects the reality on the ground. Nature doesn’t care about our maps. And, after all, we are part of nature. It is true that every complex system in nature has some organizing mechanism that creates and coordinates order. Just look at our DNA. But territory maps, like logos, have strict guidelines, rules, and laws that defy the fluidity of human behavior, culture, and civilization. Humanity is a puzzle made of pieces that continually change shape and interlock and reject each other in unexpected and surprising ways. It may be impossible to map such a thing. Perhaps traditional cartography, as we know it, is ill-fitted to the task. A convention seeking adaptation. Or maybe collective greed, hatred, delusion, and hubris on the part of some have led us to believe a map can be a logo and that a nation can be a brand.   Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalismibid.Culcasi, Karen. The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century ibid.Dash Nelson G, Rae A (2016) An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Chicago was bursting at the seams at the turn of the century. People were stressed, companies were panicking, and something had to be done. They needed a plan; a map of a 20th century city. They needed someone to draw a picture, ease their minds, and persuade Chicago’s industrial elite. As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE POWER OF THE PENIt wasn’t going to end well. The mechanical engineering class was split in their opinions over elements of a design for a handle bar bracket they were designing. It was getting tense. There was yelling, pointing, and gesturing among the aggressive ones while distracted, despondent doodlers were dawdling in the margins. The instructor, clearly rattled, was vainly refereeing the melee. Then, from the back of the class, came a calm but firm interjection. “Can I make a suggestion?”, a man’s voice said. The class whirled around in their seats. There was another professor seated in the back, but who was he? Last week we left Chicago at the turn of the century. The flood of immigrants from the 1830s to 1900 had led to exponential population growth.  There were nearly 4,000 people living in Chicago in the 1830s and over two million by 1900. It made a lot of people rich, but left many more poor. It was also causing congestion, pollution, and, yes, disillusion. Chicago was not becoming what the city’s elite had imagined. Those who could, escaped to the suburbs proffered. Those who couldn’t, scraped by on whatever was offered. But everyone was frustrated, confused, anxious, and scared. Infamous Chicago organized crime had been building for decades with crooks named Michael ”Hinkey Dink” Kenna, George “Bugs” Moran, and the “Bloody Gennas” – six Sicilian brothers “Bloody” Angelo, Mike “The Devil”, and Pat, Sam, Jim, and Tony – “The Gentlemen.” Railroads were stringing rail lines into the city, boats were crowding the harbors, and the glimmer of automobiles was on the horizon. Companies were booming and competing for rights to increasingly limited public land. The government did their best to mediate and keep the town running, but it was getting heated. Then somebody in the periphery was asked to make a suggestion. As that engineering class was staring down the mysterious man in the back, he continued, “I’m not a mechanical engineer so I’m having trouble understanding what you’re talking about. Would someone kindly draw a picture of this bracket on the whiteboard so I can see what it is you’re arguing about?” All of the students look at each other and then one sheepishly admitted what they were all thinking, “I don’t really know how to draw.” Eventually somebody was delegated to draw a rough sketch of the part. They then circled and labeled the elements they were discussing. The room erupted again in debate. “That’s not what we’re talking about!”, said a boisterous one as they charged the whiteboard. They grabbed another marker and circled and labeled another element. “What are you talking about?”, said another as they leapt from their seat for the board. Soon, all of the students were gathered around the whiteboard, pens in hand, visually negotiating a resolution.  With the power of the pen, and the emergence of an image, comes the persuasion of people. To visualize is to compromise.THE WINDY WHITE CITYSeven years before the 20th century arrived, Chicago hosted the 1892 World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition. Otherwise known as the Chicago World’s Fair. But most people ended up calling it ‘White City’ due to the white neoclassical architecture it featured, but in today’s social context it was ‘White’ for other reasons. For one, it was celebrating the 400 year anniversary of Christopher Columbus “discovering” America. For another, the organizing committee refused to appoint any Black or African-American members. There were Black and African-American exhibits accepted as a consolation, but even though these Americans comprised one tenth of the population at the time, it seemed the organizing committee would rather not hear from them.Authors of “The Reason Why”, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and I. Garland Penn. Source: WikipediaIda B. Wells, a Chicago resident at the time, Frederick Douglass, and Irvine Garland Penn didn’t sit idly by. They produced a pamphlet entitled, The Reason Why: The Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition. It was printed in English, French, and German. The preface reads like this:“TO THE SEEKER AFTER TRUTH:Columbia has bidden the civilized world to join with her in celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and the invitation has been accepted. At Jackson Park are displayed exhibits of her natural resources, and her progress in the arts and sciences, but that which would best illustrate her moral grandeur has been ignored.The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years of freedom as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown the world. The colored people of this great Republic number eight millions – more than one-tenth the whole population of the United States. They were among the earliest settlers of this continent, landing at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 in a slave ship, before the Puritans, who landed at Plymouth in 1620. They have contributed a large share to American prosperity and civilization. The labor of one-half of this country has always been, and is still being done by them. The first credit this country had in its commerce with foreign nations was created by productions resulting from their labor. The wealth created by their industry has afforded to the white people of this country the leisure essential to their great progress in education, art, science, industry and invention.Those visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition who know these facts, especially foreigners will naturally ask: Why are not the colored people, who constitute so large an element of the American population, and who have contributed so large a share to American greatness, more visibly present and better represented in this World's Exposition? Why are they not taking part in this glorious celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of their country? Are they so dull and stupid as to feel no interest in this great event? It is to answer these questions and supply as far as possible our lack of representation at the Exposition that the Afro-American has published this volume.”The white neoclassical architecture is what gave the Chicago World’s Fair the name, “White City”. The landscape architecture was by Frederick Law Olmstead and the architecture by Daniel Burnham. Painting by Nichols, H. D., and L. Prang & Co. "Chicago World's Fair 1893." Print. 1893. Digital Commonwealth The lead architect of the neoclassical “White City” was Daniel Burnham. He was lauded by the White organizing committee for capturing the essence of the American exceptionalism they intended the fair to evangelize. It was the largest exposition to date and drew over 750,000 people on its opening day. So in 1906 when Chicago was fuming in its own waste, clogged with congestion, and stuck with an unclear path forward, a group of industrialists, called the Commercial Club of Chicago (which is still around today), called Burnham to the front of the room to draw them a picture. The project was called the Burnham Plan. Cover page of the Burnham Plan. By Daniel Hudson Burnham; Edward H Bennett; Charles Moore; Commercial Club of Chicago., Public Domain WAR OF WORDS AND WATERCOLORSBurnham had already sketched some ideas of how to improve the city’s waterfront after the World’s Fair had concluded. He also helped other cities like Washington D.C., Cleveland, and San Francisco with their own plans. Some regard him as the father of American city planning. Burnham signed on a partner, Edward H. Bennett who ended up doing much of the coordination. But they also hired a prominent muralist and watercolorist, Jules Guérin. Burnham knew his ideas, along with the ideas of the Commercial Club members, would take some selling to the public, other prominent businessmen, and the city government. He needed more than a sketch, a plan, or even a map. He needed people to be both inspired and consoled. But also persuaded.View, looking west, of the proposed civic center plaza and buildings. The radial projection of roadways is a common theme in idealized Western urban design. Jules Guérin, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsBurnham envisioned a waterfront dedicated to parks and people. Guerin’s bird’s-eye point of view offered an compelling perspective as a painting, but also allowed Burnham to explain and selling his plan. Jules Guérin, via Hidden Architecture. What led to the contention and confusion in that mechanical engineering class wasn’t just differing opinions. That’s what came out in their actions, but what compelled these people to react as they did was more likely anxiety, frustration, confusion, and maybe even fear of being wrong. It’s that same feeling we have when we’re disoriented or lost. There’s a unique image in our head, if we can access it, that will orient us when we’re lost. Every student in that classroom had their own individual image of that bracket in their head. They just needed to access it. But manifesting that image through words can be inadequate and frustrating. Words only get us so far. That’s why images are worth a thousand words. So in our struggle to reason with that feeling inside us we can sometimes lash out, point fingers, blame the environment — and sometimes each other. What an image provides, be it a drawing or a map, is clarity. Certainty. It makes the invisible visible, the impossible possible, and persuadable persuaded. And, yes, it can also be consoling.Jules Guérin was a good choice on the part of Burnham. His serene cityscape watercolors not only represented the rational, orderly, and systematic plan of Burnham, Bennett, and others, but they made Chicago look calm, peaceful, and serene. Maybe even egalitarian. These artistic maps drew inspiration from Europe — especially the Beaux Arts movement of Paris. Georges Eugène Haussmann had executed a similar city plan of Paris fifty years earlier. It was good timing in the lead up to their 1889 World’s Fair and the construction of the Eifel Tower in 1887. Paris was a medieval mess until Napoléon III hired Haussmann to redesign and renovate the city. His work is now synonymous with the allure of Paris. Guérin ended up painting over 150 images that Burnham used for presentations or to be hung in the halls of buildings housing influential commercial and governmental decision makers. His work wasn’t only pleasant to look at, but featured elements that appealed to a wide variety of constituencies. Some paintings included pastoral forests, farms, and open space contrasted with railroad tracks bordering or dividing the natural landscape. Many included high contrast lightly rendered rivers and lakes that featured both boating for pleasure and commerce. There was something for everyone.Guerin used high contrast between water and land to call attention to unique uses of both. By including pastoral landscapes as part of his plan, Burnham was able to persuade rural and urban dwellers and workers. Jules Guérin, via Flickr.But one of the most distinctive elements, is the aerial bird’s eye view. This unique perspective allowed the paintings to be seen as traditional works of art, but also allowed Burnham to sell his vision of an orderly, well structured, architectonic city. Just like the ones in Europe. This style of painting, mapping, and planning of cities came to be known as the City Beautiful movement of urban design and planning that spread across the country.Burnham was a master at leveraging the power of these illusory, artistic, and fanciful maps to persuade. But he wasn’t doing it alone. He had the full backing of the Commercial Club who came with their own ideas. But they weren’t alone either. There were competing visions for the city. One contentious element was the refactoring of Michigan Avenue. Burnham’s plan called for both widening and elevating a portion of the street and connecting the two roads with a double decker bridge. Another group called the Michigan Avenue Improvement Association had a simpler idea. They wanted to widen the street, but keep it at one level connected by a single level bridge. Both groups spent two years drawing pictures, making pamphlets, and arguing. NOTHING NEW SINCE THE GREEKSJust like those students all standing around the whiteboard, with pen in hand, they were debating, negotiating, and persuading with pictures. It’s what that guy in the back of class was looking for. The mysterious observer was the head of the Design Department at Carnegie-Mellon at the time, Dick Buchanan. He’s now at Case Western Reserve. He was curious how the engineering department was teaching their students, so he asked to sit in on a class. Drawing is a part of the foundational curriculum in design schools, but he learned maybe that wasn’t the case in engineering. Mr. Buchanan also knows the power of persuasion. He studied rhetoric in college and understands the power of carefully crafted words and images to persuade.The Burnham plan wasn’t the first to take the approach of top-down patriarchal style city planning. Idealized fantasy cities dot the history of western civilization. In Ancient times, the Greek city of Miletus grew from a planned city map dating back to 450 BCE. Milesian settlers used plans like these throughout present day Turkey. Their grid formations became the basis for the gridded Roman cities that I mentioned in my first post of this spring series on Roman cadastral surveying and mapping. These methods continue to be the dominant form of urban planning today.The grid went dormant in mapping and city structure when the Roman empire fell and throughout medieval times. Just like large scale cadastral mapping, it didn’t reappear until the Renaissance. This time the cartesian arrangement included elements of protection to guard against organized military attacks on monarchies. They were optimized for the interaction of people and place and monetary exchange within their borders and thus took on radial and symmetrical arrangements. Architects and designers like Leonardo da Vinci reached back to 80 BCE and the books Vitruvius wrote on structured, practical, architecture to draw these schemes.  Another influential, though less famous, craftsman, artist, architect, and writer of the Renaissance was a man named Filarete. He wrote a highly influential book on architecture in 1464 called Libro architettonico or “Architectonic book.” Even da Vinci was pulling ideas from his work. His book featured a fictional storyline that included an idealize city called Sforzinda. Including a star shaped diagram of the city plan. Humanism was at the center of Renaissance philosophy so art and design often echoed the proportion and function of humans. This trope is also a nod to Vitruvius and his Vitruvian Man that was popularized by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous 1490 illustration of the man with outstretch arms.Filarete’s city plan for Sforzinda echoes the humanist shape and proportions popularized by da Vinci’s version of Vitruvius’ ancient Vitruvian Man. Source: WikipediaNewcastle University Urban Design Professor, Ali Madanipour writes,“The desired order was to be achieved by a single design for an entire city, anticipating Machiavelli and Descartes who also looked for a single source of order, which politically became manifest in absolute monarchies.”The idealized city Burnham had devised 500 years later drew from these ideas. It had been occurring around Europe throughout the Renaissance and into the Industrial Age. The orderly, industrialized, and mechanized designs of factories, tools, and products were now being applied to cities. Just as monarchies in Europe looked to artists, designers, and craftsman to bring order to the design of their cities and societies, so were industrialists looking to Burnham and others to bring order to Chicago and its people. A plan that was modelled from ancient European history, and the recent history of the Chicago World’s Fair and American exceptionalism.For both the fair and the Burnham plan, it was White men who held dominant roles in public politics and private enterprise that were in charge. They wielded a moral authority that leaned on America’s founding claims of ‘Manifest Destiny’. A moral code summarized in six words, “Is this yours? It’s mine now.” These men also had privileged social status and felt entitled to their benefits, wealth, and rewards even at the detriment of the lives of Black Americans, Indigenous nations, disadvantaged immigrants, and poor White Americans. Fearful that their privilege, status, or wealth may be challenged by growing populations of people different from them, they turned to power, order, and domination. They sought control over the situation. All they needed was someone to draw a picture. A map. A drawing. Something that would ease their mind. So Burnham stood at the head of the class, grabbed some chalk, and before he knew it he had Chicago’s most powerful men drawing pictures of their idealized future.The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.25023/ Madanipour A. (2015) Filarete. In: Sgarbi M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,So far this spring I’ve chronicled the spread of cadastral mapping across America. It was all part of Jefferson’s gridded agrarian vision. But by the middle of the 1800s immigrants started flooding in, the industrial age was taking hold, and cities were the thing to map.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE PREACH AND THE LEECH "This lake was well named; it was but a scum of liquid mud, a foot or more deep, over which our boats were slid, not floated over, men wading each side without firm footing, but often sinking deep into this filthy mire, filled with bloodsuckers, which attached themselves in quantities to their legs. Three days were consumed in passing through this sinkhole of only one or two miles in length."Those are the words of Gurdon S. Hubbard, a fur trader from Vermont. In 1816, at age 18, he begged his parents to leave his job at a local hardware store to join a buddy on a fur trading expedition to Mackinac Island, Michigan. Two years later, in 1818, he found himself on a boat being drug through leech infested mud next the aptly named, Mud Lake – a terminating branch of the Des Plaines river. He was traversing a well known shortcut to Lake Michigan. As his men pulled blood sucking predatory leeches from their legs, he likely would have also been breathing in the odors of a pungent leek that grew along those shores. The Algonquin people called them Checagou.  By the time Hubbard found this shortcut, it had already been named Chicago Portage and had been used for over one hundred years. In 1673, French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette joined French Canadian Louis Jolliet to map the Mississippi river. As they were paddling their way upstream on their return to the Great Lakes, they encountered a Miami tribe by the shore. The Miami tipped them off to a shortcut to Canada. Instead of paddling all the way up to Lake Superior, they told them they could hang a right at the Illinois River and head north through Lake Michigan instead. The Illinois River becomes the Des Plaines River at what is now Joliet, Illinois. The river then opened to an estuary later dubbed Mud Lake near present day Lyons, Illinois – a suburb of Chicago. Thus began a days long slog tugging a boat made from birch logs; a portage to Lake Michigan and beyond.Plodding their way to the mouth of the great lake on the horizon, Jolliet got to thinking about all the fur he could trade now that he knew this shortcut. After all, this portage connected two pivotal North American transportation routes – the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In his journal he wrote, “We could easily sail a ship to Florida…All that needs to be done is to dig a canal through but half a league of prairie from the lower end of Lake Michigan to the River of St. Louis [today’s Illinois River].”Jolliet and Marquette spread the word and soon many others were trading through the Chicago Portage. The first to settle was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and his wife Kitihawa in the 1780s. Jean Baptiste was of French and African descent and Kitihawa was from the local Potawatomi tribe. They were married ceremoniously among her people in the 1770s and then, having converted to Catholicism, were married in 1788 in Cahokia, Illinois in a Catholic ceremony. They, and their two children, went on to build a successful farm and trading post in a well appointed log cabin. They are considered the founders of what we now call the city of Chicago. Jean Baptiste died the year Gurdon Hubbard and his leech bitten crew showed up in 1818.The mouth of the Chicago River was once featured a sandbar. The structure on the left is a U.S. Military post and the house on the right is the home of Kitihawa and Jean Baptiste. The Chicago Portage would have been near the tributary in the upper left corner. Source: Everything Czech. GRID AS YOU GROWThat same year the Illinois General Assembly was formed, the young state’s first government. Hubbard settled in Chicago and eventually became a legislator. He lobbied tirelessly for supplemental funding from the Federal government to build a canal that would replace the pernicious Chicago Portage. It worked. They broke ground with Hubbard wielding the spade, in 1836. By this time Hubbard had also started Chicago’s first stockyard and meat packing plant. He knew, just as Jolliet did over one hundred years before, that Chicago was destined to be an attractive port town; a symbol of growth and prosperity. But neither could have imagined what happened next. It’s hard to believe today.When Hubbard broke ground on the canal, the population was around 4,000 people. Ten years later, in 1850, that number grew nearly eight-fold to 30,000 people. By 1886, around the time Hubbard was buried just north of Chicago at Graceland Cemetery, there were nearly one-million people living in Chicago. Immigrant populations were flooding the city for work, many as laborers on the canal. Land prices were skyrocketing. “In 1832, a small lot on Clark Street sold for $100. Two years later, the same property sold for $3,000. And a year after that, it sold for $15,000. A newspaper reporter wrote, “[E]very man who owned a garden patch stood on his head, [and] imagined himself a millionaire….”It didn’t take long for survey crews to start gridding Chicago into tiny parcels. All spring I’ve been chronicling the spread of large-scale cadastral mapping across the country. While Jefferson’s vision of a gridded country included plats for developing cities, his primary objective was the expansion of land for agrarian purposes. After all, he was a farmer. But urban populations were starting to mushroom in the 1830s as masses of immigrants flooded the country. Especially Chicago. Surveyors got to work dividing plats of land into skinny rectangles packed into gridded squares divided by roads and bounded by the curving shores of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. This 1834 map shows the land surveyed in Chicago from 1830 to 1834. Enough to handle the nearly 4,000 residents and growing. While these two cadastral maps of Chicago are different scales, you can recognize the sprawl in 21 years. Also note the canal construction in 1855 versus the naturally flowing Chicago River in 1834. Source: "Chicago."  Map.  1834.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center.;"New map of Chicago."  Map.  1855.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center,  By 1850 the population was nearing 30,000 and the city needed to expand. By 1855 the population had already jumped to 80,000. That’s 10,000 people a year flooding a few square miles. You can see in the 1855 map above just how much Chicago grew. When the city was founded in the 1830s it was about 2.5 miles square. By 1863 it grew west, south, and north four to six miles in each direction. Urban sprawl started in Chicago almost as soon as it was founded. BILLY AND ANDY RAND MCNALLYThe opening of the Chicago River canal in 1848 and the penetration of rail lines in the 1850s culminated in making Chicago a freight and logistics transportation hub. A system that birthed iconic companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. By 1850 Chicago was the biggest city in the country. The intense growth of the city coincided with increased ethnic diversity, complex urban activity, and a shifting cultural context. It called for new methods of infrastructure management, land use policy, and regulation — but also new maps. Mapping became tools not just for documenting the record, but for managing complexity, decision making, and the risk of calamity.Insurance map of Chicago, 1868-9. D.A. Sanborn, c.e. These are select maps from a book of insurance maps used to assess risk in a growing Chicago city. Two years later came the Great Chicago Fire. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection This 1869 map shows the various insurance schemes spread throughout the city. Among other purposes, it was used to assess fire risk. A need that became abundantly clear two years later when the Great Chicago Fire destroyed nearly three and a half square miles of the city leaving 300 people dead. Advances in printing technology spawned new varieties of publications, including maps. A year after the Great Chicago Fire, a printmaker from Massachusetts, William Rand, and an Irish immigrant, Andrew McNally, printed their first map. Their newly formed business, Rand McNally & Co., started off printing train tickets and schedules for the dizzying strands of trains snaking through the city. Soon Rand McNally became synonymous with ‘map’ in the United States becoming the country’s most dominant mapping company.  An 1878 Rand McNally booklet entitled, “Rand, McNally’s & Co.’s Indexed Map of Illinois.” Its lengthy subtitle reflects how their maps were intent on supporting the expansion of commerce and sprawl. Facing the title page is a list advertising their other publications. Source: David Rumsey Map Collection.ANOTHER SUPER HERO FROM IOWABy 1870 48 percent of Chicago residents were immigrants; more than any other city in the country.  All this urban activity brought prosperity to a rising privileged social elite, but it also brought poverty, destitution, and segregation to the disadvantaged. Last week I talked about the 1890 U.S. census. It was the birth of American ‘Big Data’ tabulated with newly invented punch cards. America’s ‘father of mapmaking’, Henry Gannett, was tasked with charting and mapping the data. It was an impressive feat, that included new methods of modeling and visualizing the growing ethnicities in America. But the analysis included overtones of patriarchy and racist theories. Five years later, out of the slums of Chicago, emerged a more thoughtful, altruistic, yet critical counter maps. In 1895 an all-women boarding house, called the Hull House, went about collecting, analyzing, and mapping socio-demographic data aimed at improving the lives of their immigrant neighbors. One of those women was from my home state of Iowa. Her name is Agnes Sinclair Holbrook. She was born in Marengo, Iowa in 1867 and went on to study at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She studied math, science, and literature earning a bachelor of science degree in 1892. She then moved to Chicago to live with other women like her in the Hull House. This was a home to women with university degrees situated in a poor Chicago neighborhood. The Hull House mission, which came from one of the founders, Jane Addams, was to empower educated women through her “Three R’s”: Residence, Research, and Reform. Instead of distantly studying anonymously surveyed data she encouraged,“close cooperation with the neighborhood people, scientific study of the causes of poverty and dependence, communication of these facts to the public, and persistent pressure for [legislative and social] reform..." Young Agnes Sinclair Holbrook collected and analyzed local data from her resident immigrant community and visualized it on a map. Her intent was to inform and influence local policy but to also lift up, empower, and encourage immigrant women to seek their own opportunities. Below is an example of her work from the 1895 Hull House publication.Nationalities and wages on Chicago’s westside. 1895. Holbrook collected the data and designed this thematic map of the immigrant population in her neighborhood. She’s an unsung pioneer in GIS urban data activism. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map CenterDigitally produced urban maps like Holbrook’s are common place today. We’re practically numbed by their presence as they bob in the rivers of social media feeds. You can bet Agnes Sinclair Holbrook would have thousands of followers if she were alive today. She’d probably also be disappointed in the progress made toward social justice. Holbrook wasn’t a fan of sterile, dispassionate pronouncements. She believed simply stating the facts doesn’t get traction, if you want to make change it must come with the right action. As Holbrook writes in the 1895 publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers,“Merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of disease, and apply, it may be, its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian.” She didn’t stop there. She had a bigger message for America’s powerful, white, male elite. It’s a message that is so relevant today, that we’d be wise to reflect and learn from the socio-political environment of the late 1800s. Here the 28 year old Holbrook states, “The politicians work on the people's feelings, incite them against the men of the other party as their most bitter enemies; and if this doesn't succeed, they go to work deliberately to buy some. Thus adding insult to injury, they go off and set up a Pharisaic cry about the ignorance and corruption of the foreign voters.As everything in the old country has its price, it is not at all surprising that the foreigners believe such to be the case in this also. But Americans are to blame for this; for the better class of citizens, the men who preach so much about corruption in political life, and advocate reforms, never come near these foreign voters. They do not take pains to become acquainted with these recruits to American citizenship; they never come to their political clubs and learn to know them personally; they simply draw their estimates from the most untrustworthy source, the newspapers, and then mercilessly condemn as hopeless.”As Holbrook and the women of Hull House worked to better improve the lives of those in the city, the ‘better class of citizens’ were leaving it. Since the 1850s streetcar suburbs were popping up everywhere to whisk affluent commuters in and out of the city; including one of America’s first planned communities, Riverside, Illinois. It was designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and it provided the bucolic utopia that continues to lure Americans from dense urban cities to this day. By 1873 Chicago had 11 different privately operated streetcar lines serving over 100 communities. Streetcar lines continued to stretch further distances all the way up to the twentieth century when the automobile arrived. This 1889 map shows the extent to which these suburbs dotted the surrounding landscape of Chicago.Guide map of new Chicago and suburbs. 1889. This maps advertises surrounding suburbs connected by private streetcars. It include Lyons, the location of Mud Lake where the Chicago Portage began. These streetcar suburbs are the genesis of the polycentric metropolitan sprawl of modern day Chicago. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Many believe the proliferation of roadways and automobiles created suburban sprawl in Chicago and cities like it. But it was the streetcar suburbs of the 1800s — all crafted by real estate developers looking to cash in on opportunistic land grabs. The roads of Chicago present connect the nodes of Chicago’s past. As you can see on the map, one of those suburban communities is named Lyons. Remember Lyons? That’s where Jolliet and Marquette tugged their canoe through the slough. Then came Mr. Hubbard and the leeches too. Being the parasitic predators they are, they latch on to whatever life they encounter and forcefully, selfishly drain the life from unsuspecting victims. Showing a lack of mercy, they inject an anti-clotting chemical into the victim to prevent them from forging a natural occurring defense. And for every leech you manage to dislodge and dispatch, another appears. Waves of leeches will consume a host leaving only the leeches.As waves of European colonial expansionists and empire builders leeched the lifeblood from unsuspecting Indigenous humans and dignity seeking dreamers they polluted the environment with their oozing industrial excrement. And so as to not wallow in their own toxic waste, they crawled over the masses calling for help, and hopped on a streetcar in search of a pristine, natural, patch of prairie next to a meandering river or lake bordered by the plant the locals called Checagou.The History of the Chicago River. WTTW, Chicago.The History of the Chicago River. WTTW, Chicago.The History of the Chicago River. WTTW, Chicago.WikipediaHull-House maps and papers, a presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago, together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,We’re learning every day just how embedded racism is in the workings of American polity. My recent posts have picked on the history and influence of America’s cadastral and topographic cartography. Today I weave together European scientific determinism, early ‘big data’ authoritarianism, and White supremist cartography.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…CARL IN ALBUS PHYSICUS (CARL THE WHITE SCIENTIST) Our world is filled with data. There’s so much data that we came up with huge word to describe it – Big. Ok, a three letter word that happens means a lot. ‘Big Data’ is a big deal these days. We can’t seem to ever get enough data. More data seems to be more better. Scientists have been collecting, categorizing, and classifying data for hundreds of years. It’s the basis of the scientific method and our appetite for more data doesn’t seem to be waning. One of the most influential scientists in the early days of systematic data collection and classification was the father of taxonomy, Carl von Linné. He wrote in Latin, so he liked to go by Carolus Linnaeus. The word taxonomy has Greek origins: taxis (arrange) nomia (method). The method of arranging. Not to be confused with taxidermy. That’s the arrangement of skin. Linneaus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist who wrote a very popular book called Systema Naturae. The first edition came out in 1735, but the one that really caught steam and spread around the world was the tenth edition in 1758. That was the one where he dedicated five of the over two thousand pages to the following taxonomy of homo sapiens:Homo americanusHomo europaeus Homo asiaticus Homo africanus As you can see, he assigned a geographic association to each name: America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was commonly believed by Christian scientists during these times that humans were shaped by God to fit in their environment; including the shape of their bodies, color of their skin, behavior, and how they governed themselves. As Linneaus often said, "God created, Linnaeus organized." Brad observes that Carl also spoke in the third person. Here’s how he organized and described God’s homo sapiens indigenous to their land: “Americanus: Red, choleric and straight. Straight, black and thick hair; gaping nostrils; [freckled] face; beardless chin. Unyielding, cheerful, free. Paints himself in a maze of red lines. Governed by customary right.Europaeus: White, sanguine, muscular. Plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes. Light, wise, inventor. Protected by tight clothing. Governed by rites.Asiaticus: Sallow, melancholic, stiff. Blackish hair, dark eyes. Stern, haughty, greedy. Protected by loose garments. Governed by opinions.Africanus: Black, phlegmatic, lazy. Dark hair, with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women [with] elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely. Sly, sluggish, neglectful. Anoints himself with fat. Governed by choice [caprice].”Linneaus ended up printing thirty editions of Systema Naturae all the way up to 1793. His geographically assigned taxonomy of humans became the defining standard of how the world came to categorize people. The word used to describe the taxonomy of the physical and behavioral characteristics Linneaus assigned to homo sapiens dates all the way back to the 1500s. That word is ‘race’.  Carl von Linné. Aka Carolus Linneaus. The inventor of taxonomy. Source: Wikipedia BIG DATA, BIG COUNTRY, BIG MAPS, BIG PROBLEMGiven the geographic binding to race, it should come as no surprise that cartographers in Europe and America were quick to map these races. I spent the month of April talking about the history of America’s survey system and the gridding of the land for purposes of taxation and White colonial settlement. It started with Jefferson’s Land Ordinance act of 1785. But another American survey was started in 1790 that has also resulted in the creation of maps. It’s even written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the census survey. Just as America was the first to yank large scale cadastral mapping out of Roman times to build an empire, the U.S. was the first to utilize the census to reapportion government representation as the population grew. The U.S. House of Representatives grew steadily more or less in a straight line from the first census in 1790 to just before 1920. It’s been flat ever since. Despite the fact our population has more than tripled since then. I know big government is very popular these days, but clearly we’re not all duly represented in Washington D.C.Nineteen-twenty also marked the year the sagging line of rural dwellers crossed the climbing line of urban dwellers. Today over eighty percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas and that number is expected to grow exponentially. Another surge in U.S. population occurred in the mid 1800s as land across the country became increasingly easy to settle. As I mentioned in a previous post, a pioneering White settler could approximate a survey of 40 acres of land to call their own in under a day. But the influx of foreigners was troubling to many. The complexion of the country was changing rapidly. By the late 1800s, the census bureau was pressed to not just count but also classify, diagram, and map the myriad of ethnicities flooding the country from Europe and Asia. Many of whom were migrant laborers building the nation’s railroad. Government statisticians scrambled to find ways to accurately define and model the data. As cartography historian Jeremy Crampton notes,“The superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census, economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker, explicitly remodeled its data collection to track what he saw as worrying immigration trends.” You could argue the 1890 census was the beginning of ‘big data’ in America. The eleventh census was the first to be tabulated with punch cards. A gentleman named Herman Hollerith invented the punched card tabulating machine in 1884. He went on to found a company called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Thirteen years later in 1924 it was renamed ‘International Business Machines’ or IBM. One of the many holes in those 1890 punch cards was for ‘race’. The census in America has had a long history of changing ethnic classifications every census or two. The first census in 1790 had three: ‘Free white females and males, other free persons, and slaves.’ In 1820 ‘free people of color’ was added.  Then, in 1850 back to three, but a different three: ‘Black, Mulatto, and White’. And then, in 1890 it was: ‘Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Black, Mulatto, Qaudroon, Octaroon, and White.’ Quadroon and Octaroon were considered one quarter or one eighth African and the rest European blood. All this data needed to be communicated efficiently. Not just to the government, but to teachers too. These census publications play a key role in teaching students across the land a particularly one-sided quantitative narrative of American history. To do so effectively, this big data needed much clarity, so they turned to the people best suited for the job; cartographers.  Not just any cartographer, but the father of American cartography, Henry Gannett. I introduced Gannett in last week’s post. He had pioneered the quadrant topographic survey system and then joined the census for the 1880 survey. He introduced a regional division scheme for the census that corresponded to the newly formed counties thus aligning census data to politics. The revised scheme looked to the past and to the future. It allowed for data to be compared to previous census collections and is still in use today. TAKING STOCK OF AMERICA’S STOCKThe 1890 census was the second survey to include maps and the first to be signed by Gannett. The Library of Congress has Gannett’s entire Statistical Atlas of the United States Based upon the Results of the Eleventh Census online. I highly encourage people to flip through the pages and zoom in on the illustrious maps, diagrams, and charts Gannett and his team prepared. The deep coloration of lithographic pigmentation that comprise the overlapped layering of isarithmic, choropleth, and dasymetric maps saturate the thirsty, bleached white paper making digital cartography look flat and lifeless.This census report is filled with statistical information and analysis. Part one covers gender, ethnicity, race, birth origins, parentage, schools, military, voting, marriage status, and family dwellings. Part two looks at age, school attendance, illiteracy, occupations, and citizenship. Piles of punch cards, mountains of data, and a looming worry that immigrant populations were about to tower over ‘White natives’. Gannett’s team devised a simple diagram to communicate the magnitude of the tower. They made an area chart showing ethnic and racial categories on the horizontal axis and time on the vertical. The category names chosen and listed along the bottom were: ‘Colored’, ‘Native stock’, ‘British’, ‘Irish’, ‘German’, ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Canadian’, ‘Poles’, ‘Hungarian’, ‘Italian’, and ‘Others’. Forming their own sort of taxonomy, they collapsed the European categories into a larger category called, ‘Foreign stock’. A creative area chart that demonstrates not only the growing population of descendants of White Anglo-Saxons (Native stock), but also the the growth of African and Asian Americans (Colored), and Europeans (Foreign stock). Source: Library of Congress.The resulting area chart then compares ‘Foreign stock’ (both newly immigrated and settled), ‘Native stock (these are descendants of original European colonial settlers – mostly British), and ‘Colored’. True Indigenous ‘Native stock’ of this land were not counted in the census until 1860, but only if they had ‘renounced tribal rules’.  The data runs from 1790 at the top (the nation’s first census) to 1890 at the bottom, the date of the eleventh census. The overall shape of the chart is what you’d expect. It’s narrow at the top and grows wider toward the bottom. It takes the shape of a tall, skinny mountain comprised of three distinct bell-bottomed vertical bands. The mountain top includes two of these bands, ‘Native stock’ and ‘Colored’ with ‘Native stock’ dominating. These are descendants of original White colonial settlers and their slaves. The British descendants of my long lost grandpa, Jonas Weed, would have checked the ‘Native stock’ box on their census survey.The ‘Foreign stock’ vertical band doesn’t show up on this mountain of census data until around 1835. My Scottish, Irish, and German descendants would have checked this box. The total number of ‘Foreign stock’ grew exponentially from 1835 to 1890 and this worried the dominant ‘Native stock’. This is why census statisticians modeled the data in a way that Gannett and his team could visualize it. They wanted to get a handle where these folks were settling and in what numbers. So Gannett made maps too.The proportion of ‘Foreign Born’ to the aggregate population of the United States for the 1890 census. The curvilinear regions are good examples of isarithmic mapping. Click the map or source link for a better view. Source: Library of Congress. Some of the concern with immigrants wasn’t just their burgeoning population growth, it was the growing sentiment that they were not as “pure” as the White descendants of the original Anglo-Saxon colonizers. And the pairing of race to cartography and the mass distribution to schools nationwide helped spread this belief. Including the American Geographical Society who had been tasked since 1850 with expanding geographic knowledge across America. Again, Jeremy Crampton writes,“…the American Geographical Society (AGS) played a significant role in promoting racial and eugenicist views. These were often part of a narrative of the threat of immigration from populations considered unhealthy, degenerate, or otherwise undesirable.”The influence continued through to the twentieth century. The 1917 president of the Association of American Geographers was Harvard geographer and climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward. He was also a eugenicist who cofounded the Immigration Restriction League in Boston in 1894. DeCourcy was a Mayflower descendant and he and his cofounders believed southern and eastern European immigrants were inferior to them and their fellow Anglo-Saxons. They believed the increasing presence of these immigrants was a threat to what they considered to be the ‘American way’. Eugenicists seek to rid populations of people they deem physically and mentally unfit, unhealthy, and degenerate so their blood won’t mix with the pure bred White Anglo-Saxons. This was about the time a certain twenty-eight year German soldier, Adolf Hitler, wrote in his diary while recovering from a British mustard gas attack, "When I was confined to bed, the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great. I knew immediately that it would be realized."WRAPPING A RACIAL TRAP INTO A MAP The liberation of racial editorializing of the U.S. census has also being realized. In reading Gannett’s 1890 census survey I am impressed with the objectivity he and his statistician colleagues presented. It’s an impressive undertaking. But I can’t help but notice tinges of racism creeping in – at least by today’s standards. It’s racism nonetheless. Consider the section entitled: Defective, dependent, and delinquent classes. Here’s a section of their analysis of the ‘insane’.“Of the native whites, 14 out of every 10,000 and 39 out of every 10,000 of the foreign born were insane. If these statistics are correct and complete, insanity is less prevalent among the colored and far more prevalent among the foreign born than among the native whites. Diagram 191 illustrates the tendency toward insanity among people of different nationalities. It represents the number of insane person in every 100,000 of those whose parents were born in certain foreign countries.The tendency toward insanity is greatest among the Irish, and next among the Hungarians. It is comparatively small among the Germans and British, and least of all among the Canadians.” O Canada, with glowing hearts we see thee rise. It’s true, I’ve never met more sane people than Canadians. Unlike the 1880 census, where physicians provided reports of the mentally ill, the 1890 did not. As a result the numbers are undercounted relative to 1880, but it begs the question; who supplied the data and how reliable was the source? And did they have a motive?Perhaps not. After all, in reporting on the ‘feeble-minded’ they state ‘Native whites’ are number one. “Of the native whites, the corresponding numbers were 17 (per 100,000), and of the foreign whites 10 (per 100,000), which shows, if the figures are to be trusted, that idiocy is more common among the native whites than among the colored or foreign whites, and least of all among the foreign whites.”A bold admission! But wait, there’s more.“The explanation of this is most probably to be found in the fact that idiocy was more fully reported by the native whites than by these other two classes.”This indeed may be true. Self reporting surveys are notorious error prone. But then that would render all of the census data suspect and not just those data that might make you look feeble minded.As summer approaches and echoes of George Floyd protests still echo across the nation, the section on mortality in the 1890 census reveals some curious facts regarding what were then called ‘negroes’.“[The death rate] of the negroes is the greatest of all. The rural death rate is but 15 (per 1,000), and is greatly exceeded by the urban death rate, which among the whites is 23 (per 1,000) and among the colored 34.5. Diagram 207 shows the death rate of the white and colored in certain southern cities where the negro population is large. From this it appears that while the death rate of the whites ranges from 18-25, that of the colored ranges from 30-42, being in each case nearly double that of the whites. It is probably, however, that this proportion between the two holds in the rural districts, which are better suited to the development of the negro than the environment of large cities.”Distribution of the ‘Colored Population’ for the 1890 census. ‘Colored’, unlike the diagram above, refers to African-American and Black Americans on this map. Ninety percent of their population lived in the south. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center  In a refrain of Linneaus logic, it seems nineteenth century data scientists still believed race was a function of geography. Either it was inconceivable that Black Americans were victims of race violence at the hands of White supremacists who by 1890 would have been more than evident. The KKK emerged out of opposition to reconstruction. While they were suppressed legally by the federal government in the 1870s, these fearful eugenic fascists didn’t just disappear. It’s probable that many of them even found their way into southern urban police departments. There is no mention of lynching whatsoever in the mortality section. Lynching had been occurring since the end of the Civil War and was in full swing by the time the 1890 census would have been conducted. Racial terror is one of the many factors that led to droves of Black Americans migrating north. They were literally running for their lives. It’s easy to cherry-pick examples of racial and ethnic injustices from the annals of history. But it’s even easier to ignore it. Silence, after all, is a form of violence. It’s meaningful to me to know that the people behind those maps that were, and still are, coiled up in tensioned rolls above chalk boards and white boards that adorn our public schools were started by White supremacist eugenicists. And it wasn’t that long ago. My grandparents would have been teenagers when the American Geographical Society was shipping atlases to their one room schools in their freshly surveyed townships in Iowa.And Brad shouldn’t give Linneaus too much grief. His taxonomy invention made Charles Darwin’s life a lot easier. But he made little to no effort to even meet these Black, phlegmatic, lazy, Dark haired, Fat lipped homo sapiens. He never traveled south of the Netherlands and never left Sweden after age 42. He wasn’t a fan of scientists visiting other countries. This quote sums it up in a paradoxically named book Carolus Linnaeus: The Swedish Naturalist and Venerable Traveler. He admonished Swedish scientist who traveled outside of Sweden telling them “[not to] cross the stream for water, and waste... money endeavoring to learn in a foreign country what... might have [been] acquired at home.” Why risk actually observing and interacting with Indigenous Americans, Africans, or Asians? Probably because his tight protective clothing against his White, sanguine, muscular body would cause him to profusely sweat in hot and humid climates. Or perhaps his plentiful yellow hair and blue eyes would wither in the sun. He may have been a light and wise inventor, but curious and introspective he was not.As we continue to amass infinite amounts of data and rely on statistical methods to abstract, and reason away emergent patterns. Calculations so complex that no human can ever understand them. Let’s not loose sight of our humble interactions with people and place.The Linnean Society of LondonThe History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth CenturyWikipediaThe History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth CenturyWikipediaWikipediaCensus of 1890. Library of Congress Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Today we’re branching into topography and the role western colonial expansion plays in the creation and articulation of our naturally occurring geography. Most of us are not very skilled at critiquing the role maps have played in shaping how we see the globe and the people on it. But I’m optimistic that when we do we can better confront the boundaries that maps have created between people and place.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…NAME THAT PLACEI spent last April talking about how the United States was surveyed and diced in little squares that are featured in our maps today. It was a technique ripped out of ancient Rome as a way to rationally quantify space across massive swaths of land. The United States perfected gridded cartesian cadastral cartography, but drawing little lines on paper as a means of assessing, assuming, and asserting control over land had been done for centuries by European colonial settlers around the world – beginning in the Renaissance. Mercator’s map of the world 1569. This projection was deemed the ‘correct’ way to view the world in two dimensions. Most westerners would agree that it is still ‘correct’. Source: WikipediaThe Renaissance accelerated mapping. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names. Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from. Even the name of my home state of Iowa has dubious origins. Sure it’s named after the Indigenous tribe, the Iowa or Ioway, but the Iowa people did not call themselves that. They referred to themselves in their own language as the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je). They settled primarily in the eastern and south eastern part of the land we now call Iowa. Most of them were forced to relocate to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. It’s believed the name Iowa, came from a Sioux word – ayuhwa which means “sleepy ones.” It would be like the south winning the Civil War and then turning around and declaring the region to their north henceforth be referred to as: Yankees. This is a map of the many Indigenous languages overlaid on state boundaries from Minnesota to Wyoming. It shows the fluid and overlapping irregularities of indigenous human interaction contrasted with the rigidity of colonial place making. Source: Native Land Digital Even the word Sioux is a French cheapening of a word from the Ojbiwe people– Nadouessioux (na·towe·ssiw). The Sioux were actually a nation combined of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people. They referred to themselves as Oceti Sakowin (oh-CHEH-tee SHAW-kow-we) or “Seven Council Fires”. They covered the sweeping plains of most of what we now call Minnesota; which stems from the Dakota phrase Mni Sota Makoce – “where the waters reflect the sky”. They extended south to the northwest corner of so-called Iowa and east to the more aptly named state of South Dakota. These people were expelled from Minnesota after the Dakota War of 1862. They continue to suffer today the pains felt by America’s largest mass execution in history at the hands of none other than Abraham Lincoln. Just months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota and Lakota men to be hung. Dissatisfied with the pace and politics of the makeshift trial of 303 Indigenous people, he decided on his own who should live and who should die. On April 23rd, 1863 the United States declared their treaties with the Lakota and Dakota null and void, closed their reservations, and marched them off their land. It took until this year, 2021, for the United States to give a southern sliver of land back to them. And in Northern Minnesota they’re still fighting to protect the water that reflects the sky.MAPS AND MATH FROM A MAN FROM BATH Henry Gannett, the father of American mapmaking. His quadrangle topographic systems was in use through to the end of the nineteenth century. Source: Wikipedia.There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking. Born in Bath, Maine in 1846 he went on to graduate from Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1869. After some time in the field documenting geology from the Great Lakes to the mines of Colorado he returned to Harvard for a degree in mining engineering. He spent a couple years working at the Harvard College Observatory making maps and calculating the building’s precise longitude. He then was hired as the chief astronomer-topographer-geographer by the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories in 1872. A mouthful. Perhaps daunted by such a long name for a department charged with precision and clarity of information, the USGGST was shortened to USGS in 1779 – the U.S. Geological Society. Some claim Gannett lobbied for USGGS in an attempt to maintain the word geographical and not just geological. If so, he was likely outvoted by his boss and prominent geologist, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. His book, The Great West: its Attractions and Resources gives you a clue as to why geologists were maybe more revered than geographers in the late seventeen and eighteen hundreds. After all, there’s gold in them there hills.The study of naturally occurring geometric properties and their spatial relations over a continuous plane is the work of topology. Documenting and surveying those studies is the work of a topographer. And the artifact they generate is called a topographic map. The first large scale topographic mapping project was Cassini’s Geometric Map of France in 1792. Then, in 1802 the British followed with the highly precise topographic map of India. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the earliest surveying and mapping of the British colonies and the United States were funded and controlled by government backed private companies like the Hudson Bay Company in the 1600s and the Ohio Company of Associates in the 1700s. IT’S UP TO YOU TO QUESTION YOUR VIEWThe topographic map of India was also directed by a British colonizing super-spreader the East India Company. They, together with the British government, had been at it for 200 years already. But in the early 1800s they were seeking accuracy. They wanted far more precise control over the Indigenous land, resources, trade, and people. The people of India are second to Africa in genetic diversity and emerged via Africa through the Indus River valley; hence the name India. This massive southeast Asian continent was first named by the Spanish or Portuguese – India is Latin for “Region of the Indus River”. The Great Trigonometrical Survey that was started in 1802 and completed in 1870. The project was funded by the East India Company and accurately details British occupied territories. Source: Wikipedia. The map that the East India Company commissioned in 1802 is called the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Trigonometry had already been awhile. In 140BC its Greek inventor, Hipparchus, used it, as the British did, for spherical trigonometry – the relationship of spherical triangles that emerge when three circles wrapping around a sphere intersect to form a spherical triangle. It’s used to measure the spherical curvature of the earth and was employed with precision by the East India Company using instruments with cool names like theodolite and Zenith sector. What resulted was a map of India featuring a fine-grained triangulated lattice accurately depicting the designated borders of British claimed territories. It was also the first accurate height measurements of Mount Everest, K2, and Kanchenjunga. Those heights were surveyed by Indigenous Tibetan surveyors who were secretly hired and trained by the British. Europeans were not allowed into Tibet at the time, so the surveyors had to pretend they were just hiking. This trigonometrical triangulated technique was the first accurate measure of a section of the longitudinal arc. The same arced sections that defined the curved edges of Henry Gannett’s topographic quadrangle mapping system which he perfected seventy years later on the other side of the globe at an arc distance of roughly 8,448 miles or 13,595 kilometers.Gannett’s career arc makes it easy to see why he figures prominently in American geography. Following is just a sampling of his contributions.He was the first geographer assigned to the census for the country’s tenth census survey. Gannett was responsible for drawing the first census tracts and invented the enumeration of districts based on population and geography. He chaired the Board of Geographic Names and later wrote a book on the history of United States place names. You can read a digitized version online. It includes a surprisingly long list of place names across the country and their origins. He demarcated the first 110,000 miles of national forests and served as Teddy Roosevelt’s research program director for his National Conservation Commission which projected future natural resource use.He helped form the National Geographic Society, Association of American Geographers, and other astronomy and geology clubs.He published two hundred articles on human geography, cartography, and geomorphology all while editing a handful of journals and publishing textbooks.The topographical techniques and programs Gannett pioneered were used all the way to the 1980’s and 90’s as GPS and computers took over. As amazing as his work was, it was no match for satellite imagery, GPS, and computer imaging. The topography he painstakingly surveyed and mapped is now available to anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection.Gannett was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring. Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s what they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew. Sources: Henry Gannett Chapter. The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Monmonier.Wikipedia. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Today I’m wrapping up this April series on the role large scale surveying played in determining how people of the United States of America interact with each other and the government. Jefferson had a vision for the country that combined his desire for agrarian expansion west, tax revenue for building a world dominating military, and his fascination with astronomical, nautical, and terrestrial mapping.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…PLUNDER THE BLUNDERERThe 2020 United States Presidential election had its fair share of electoral college drama, but nothing like the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson was running against the incumbent John Adams to become the first non-Federalist President. It ended in an electoral college tie. To make matters worse, a flaw in the Constitution meant the run-off was between the top two vote getters. Back then, voters could vote for both the position of President and Vice President independently. Jefferson and his Vice Presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, each tied with 73 electoral college votes. Adams only had 65 and his running mate 64.  The decision on who should be president, Jefferson or Burr, fell to the House of Representatives. Hamilton, a Federalist and no friend of Jefferson, detested Burr even more and lobbied in the background with other Federalist representatives to elect Jefferson. It worked. Jefferson became the United States’ third president and the first Democratic-Republican in February of 1801.  Two years later, in 1803, Jefferson turned his attention toward another Federalist – the Surveyor General, Rufus Putnam. I mentioned Putnam in last week’s post when he became the United States’ first Surveyor General in 1796. He was appointed by George Washington under whom he served as Colonel and Chief Engineer in the Revolutionary war. He was also the founder of the Ohio Company of Associates – the ‘associates’ were his Revolutionary War buddies. The land he was asked to survey was the very land from which his company would profit. Jefferson, the mastermind behind the methodical gridding of land for taxation and expansion, wasn’t happy with Putnam’s work. He felt the surveys were rushed, inexact, and that Putnam was passed his prime. At 64 years old, Jefferson found Putnam to be too “set in his ways”. It was time for a new Survey General. Jefferson’s feelings for Putnam are clear in his offer letter to his replacement:“SirYou will be sensible of the reasons why the subject of this letter is desired to be entirely confidential for a time. Mr. Putnam the present Surveyor General in the Northern quarter is totally incompetent to the office he holds. …it has cost Congress a great deal of time…and the removal of the blunderer has been sorely and generally desired……I am happy in possessing satisfactory proof of your being entirely master of this subject, and therefore in proposing to you to undertake the office…it is important to have an immediate change or we shall have the same blunders continued.” Putnam’s replacement would be Jared Mansfield. He was just the man Jefferson needed. Mansfield was a mathematician who was skilled at using astronomy to perfect his surveying. He attended Yale in 1773, but after the death of his father became delinquent. He was accused of stealing books from the Yale library and was expelled. He landed a series of teaching jobs at small grammar schools in Connecticut, but was welcomed back to Yale. In 1787 he was awarded his degree with his original classmates. Jared Mansfield (1759-1830). This portrait is by American painter, Thomas Sully. The painting still hangs at West Point Military Academy today. Source: Richland County HistoryIn 1801 Mansfield published what may be the first piece of original mathematical research from an American in a collection of essays entitled, Mathematical and Physical. It covered topics in algebra, geometry, Newtonian fluxions, and nautical astronomy. The paper caught Jefferson’s attention and he appointed Mansfield to be Professor of Mathematics at West Point Military Academy. Two years later, in July of 1803, he became Surveyor General replacing the ‘blunderer’ Rufus Putnam.Cover and pages from Jared Mansfield’s Essays, Mathematical and Physical. Source: Richland County HistoricalMANSFEILD, MEIGS, AND TIFFIN’S TENSIONFinally Jefferson had a surveyor he could trust. Mansfield set out from New Haven, Connecticut to Marietta, Ohio with a plan. While he knew it was impossible to correct all the errors of previous surveys, he was clear that moving forward all surveys had to be conducted as he instructed. Given his position of Surveyor General also came with the title of Army Lieutenant Colonel, he was in a position to make demands. Eight months later the Congressional Act of March 26, 1804 came into effect. This was not only the first act passed under the direction of Mansfield, but it granted him authority to extend surveying into new territories in “which Indian title had been extinguished or" shall hereafter be extinguished.” (1) It was clear the U.S. Government was intent on grabbing up Indigenous land either by treaty or by force. Section 13 of the Congressional act of 1804 solidifies Mansfield’s authority by making it law.“Sec . 13. And be it further enacted, That whenever any of the public lands shall have been surveyed in the manner directed by law...”.(1) By 1804 Mansfield had documented the prescribed process in his Plan of Instructions for the District Surveyors. This is the first known written account of surveying instructions that eventually became what is known as the Manual of Surveying Instructions. Here you can read an 1855 version of that same manual. And while surveying technology has advanced, even the most recent version from 2009 contains the same purpose, scope, and technique as the original. Mansfield continued as Surveyor General until 1812 executing precision surveys with his team of deputy surveyors. He was replaced by Josiah Meigs, but then Meigs swapped jobs two years later with Edward Tiffin who was the Commissioner of the General Land Office. Tiffin was schooled in medicine and then became a politician, but he turned out to be as skilled at surveying as Mansfield. He remained the Surveyor General for the next 14 years. He expanded on Mansfield’s instructions making them even more accurate and complete. As the U.S. Government continued to gobble up land marching west, Tiffin had a hard time keeping up. Conflicts began to emerge between state and federally operated surveys and confusion and frustration mounted. Chief White Cloud of the Iowa Tribe. Chief White Cloud, or Mahaska, chose to integrate with White settlers building a log home and farming among them in the 1830’s in Southeastern Iowa. He was a symbol of piece and unity among European settlers and Indigenous people. There’s a bronze statue of Mahaska in Oskaloosa, Mahaska County, Iowa. Source: WikipediaTension also continued to grow between Indigenous nations and the United States. Between the country’s founding in 1776 and 1827, the United States instigated, or were involved in, ten different wars against other nations – mostly Indigenous nations. Another eleven were to follow as the Civil War approached. Friction also grew among competing White settlers during the 1820’s marking the end of unity among religious denominations and ethnicities who had banded together to survive. Even those rugged individualist pioneer settlers, many of whom found ways to coexist with Indigenous people, gave in to federal demands for land and were forced to pay taxes. By 1829 Tiffin’s health was suffering and he was asked to step down on May 26, 1829. He passed away a little more than a month later on August 9th in his home in Chillicothe, Ohio. Then, five months later, Jared Mansfield also passed away. Though he was also living in Ohio, he passed away at age 70 during a trip back to his childhood home, New Haven, Connecticut. These two men remain legends of surveying. They contributed the bulk of the intellectual and physical contributions to realizing the vision Jefferson had set for the country 45 years prior.IOWA: A PLACE TO GROWIn 1836 land sales by the United States government reached an all-time high of 25 million dollars, an equivalent of $712M today. States were beginning to fall into debt from infrastructure projects. But it didn’t stop people from continuing to settle land. Instead of waiting for the government to survey ‘newly discovered’ land, settlers invented their own means of squaring a chunk of property. Here’s how one pioneering farmer in my home state of Iowa described it: “The absence of section lines rendered it necessary to take the sun at noon [to find north-south] and at evening [to find east-west] as a guide by which to run these claim lines. So many steps each way [800 double paces by 1,600] counted three hundred and twenty acres, more or less the legal area of a claim. It may readily be supposed that these lines were far from correct, but they answered all the necessary claim purposes for it was understood among the settlers that when land came to be surveyed and entered, all inequalities would be put right [by adding or subtracting land].” A map of Iowa City, Iowa in 1868. This clear shows the cartesian surveying grid imposed on the natural Iowa landscape. Source: ShopifyWhen the U.S. began selling land in quarter acre lots, it became even easier to plat your own land. Squatters would simply head out at noon, take 250 steps toward the sun and jam a stick in the ground. Then, in the evening, as the sun was setting, they’d walk another 250 steps and plant another marker aligned to a point on the horizon where the sun had just dipped down. As Linklater Andro points out in his book, Measuring America:“Even Jefferson would have approved; no system of measurement could have been more transparent, more democratic, more suited to “the calculation of everyone who possesses the first elements of arithmetic.” It was so straightforward that the citizen squatter could operate it as easily as the government surveyor.” (3)With these two points anybody could construct a square that measured 440 yards by 440 yards completing a 40 acre lot. This was the amount of land the government had decided an average family would need to settle. It’s a unit of measurement that came to dictate so much of our economy, culture, and mythology. Growing up in Iowa, ‘Back 40’ was an idiom used to describe the far off corner of farm land; as in, “Where’s Jeff? He’s out plowin’ the Back 40.” The irrigation systems you see flying over America’s farmlands are built to encircle a 40 acre square. “40 acres and a mule” is what General Sherman ordered his army to lend to freed slaves in 1865. And before Zip Codes, mail was delivered to plat numbers inside townships: “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Fifth Principal Meridian.”This is the Orient Township of Adair County, Iowa (T74N R31W) in 1857 and 1904. My parents grew up in Orient in south-central Iowa. Note the addition of the railroad in 1904.Government surveyors found it tedious and cumbersome to measure in relatively small 40 acre increments. But it was so easy, anyone could do it. This clearly accelerated the pace of settlement across the nation. From 1800 to 1830 the U.S. government had gone from selling 300,000 acres a year to over one million. But as those Iowa squatters were counting their steps in the 1830’s things really took off. By 1837 fifty-seven million acres were sold or over eight million acres a year – an eight-fold increase in just seven years.A SQUARE DEALBack in the late 1700’s Alexander Hamilton may have envisioned companies gobbling up large swaths of land for profit, but it was Thomas Jefferson’s vision of ordinary White folks seeking fame, fortune, and farming who were the victors. Both super-speculators and small-town squatters profited from land speculation – or capitalism – as speculation was called in the nineteenth century.(3) And by 1838 there was a new source of money that was more attractive than land for both the U.S. government and would-be capitalists – California gold. Little changed with the United States’ Public Land Surveying System throughout the rest of the 1800s. But the allure of the edge of wilderness continued to beckoned people from foreign lands who had no hope of such claims in their own countries. It wasn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s easy to see how any enterprising individualist would be attracted to the prospect of property under the protection of a burgeoning democratic empire. Not just any empire, but one that made it easy for anyone to map out their own home. Just wander out into a grassy field at lunch time, look to the sky, walk toward the sun, plant a stake, and then do it again at dinner time. That’s all it took to make a square alongside your neighbor’s square. Squares that made a grid across a vast undulating terrain at the cost and pain of the Indigenous nations that remain. A grid that continues to also meticulously measure people, politics, taxes, and grain. This map shows the principal meridians and baselines surveyors measured and documented from coast to coast. Source: Legal Land ConverterC. Albert White. A History of the Rectangular Survey System.From Thomas Jefferson to Jared Mansfield, 21 May 1803. Linklater Andro. Measuring America. 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Hello Interactors,Welcome to the third in a series on the role surveying and cartography played in the establishment of the United States. Today we continue further west into Ohio in the lead up to the 1800s. The U.S. government needed money to fulfill their dreams of being a global superpower. And it all hinged on Jefferson’s plan to extract money from neatly surveyed squares of land occupied by sovereign Indigenous nations who had been here for thousands of years. They were not going to give easily and they never will.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE SEVEN RANGES RAGE ON“Regulating the grants of land appropriated for Military Services, and for the Society of the Brethren, for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.”This is the title of the Land Act of 1796. It was enacted on June 1 of that year, nearly a decade after the United States’ chief Geographer, surveyor, and mapmaker, Thomas Hutchins, had died after surveying the Seven Ranges just west of the Ohio River. The gridding and partitioning of land further west into Ohio continued to progress. The decade leading up to the Land Act was filled with increased Indigenous resistance, botched surveys by scandalous land speculators, and an eager and anxious government who needed money for their military and land from the ‘heathens’. The Seven Ranges did not produce the kind of revenue Congress had anticipated. It was risky business for individual settlers to forge into territories of unhappy native occupants who had no allegiance to Thomas Jefferson’s cartesian adherence. The government was offering land to colonizers for cheap, at one dollar per acre, but you risked your life squatting on land unprotected from Indigenous land and water protectors. So many colonizers just waited for land speculators to buy the land so they could buy it at a discounted price – plus interest. Settlers also had to pay for the survey that proved to the government and their neighbors that it was ‘their’ land. This meant the surveys mapping their plats and townships were sloppily produced or not made at all. A map of Ohio from C. Albert White showing the irregular platting. What started out square and ordered (14 – Original Seven Ranges) became distorted and imprecise. Land companies were in a rush to sell the land and gave little attention to Jefferson’s original intentions of an orderly grid governed by global meridian lines. Source: A History of the Rectangular Survey SystemSometimes land companies would provide squatters security and protection from violence they may encounter. But it was rare. Tribal nations in this area were accustom to dealing with invaders. They had a history of negotiating with both the English and the French prior to the Revolutionary War. The French needed Indigenous allies given they were outnumbered by the British colonizers. At the beginning of the French and Indian War, in 1754, there were nearly two million in the British colonies and only 60,000 among the French colonies. The Indigenous nations would sometimes pit the English and French against each other in hopes of securing and maintaining land for themselves. After the Revolutionary War, there was a third country vying for Indigenous land, the United States. The fight for land with this nation by Indigenous nations continues to this day. You can read more about the Land Back movement and it’s importance to future healthy interactions of people and place here.A FOOLING OF HARD KNOXRecall from a previous post that it was the end of the French and Indian War, in 1763, that Thomas Hutchins was working for the British army. He was surveying and securing land along the Ohio River for the British and allied Indigenous nations. Twenty one years later, in 1781, Hutchins became the chief Geographer for the United States helping Jefferson with the details of the Land Ordinance of 1784. The original plan for the dicing up of American land. And now, after platting the Seven Ranges and Hutchins’ passing in 1789, the Ohio surveying experiment had been overrun by land speculators, squatting settlers, and angered Native nations. But these fierce, proud, intelligent Indigenous nations were once again ready to negotiate alliances with the global super-powers. Including upstarts like the United States.By this time political and military negotiations were led by a White Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant. Brant was born in Ohio to parents that had been raised with the Iroquois in the New York area. He grew up in a multi-cultural world among settling French, Irish, German, English, and his Mohawk people. He was able to speak all the dialects of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and was educated in 1761 at what was to become Dartmouth College. He rose into leadership positions both within his Mohawk tribe and the British Army and was feared by the United States due to his ability to negotiate with the British and the French. He was also a skilled warrior unafraid to fight for the rights of the people he and his parents grew up with. A fight that had already begun. The Northwest American War, also known as the Ohio War, began the year Hutchins’ set out to survey the Seven Ranges in 1785.Joseph Brant. A White Mohawk Chief who’s parents were also raised by and lived with the Mohawk people. His Mohawk name is Thayendanegea, which translates to, "He places two bets together". Source: Wikipedia The allied Indigenous nations were about to do battle with Washington’s newly appointed Secretary of War, Henry Knox. The United States had secured their own Indigenous allies from the south, the Chickasaw and Choctaw. But the United States military was outnumbered. Knox had to recruit Kentucky squatters who were untrained but motivated by the prospect of land and bounty from the brown scalps of Indigenous men, women, and children. The United States was also poor. Proceeds from the land Hutchins had surveyed west of the Ohio River were barely trickling in. But Knox was determined, telling his Commander stationed at a fort in what is now Cincinnati, “…extending a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti (bandits).”The Miamis and Shawnees were able to fool Knox’s first attempts to destroy their villages. They would desert their grounds and then ambush the troops after watching them set fire to their homes. Defeated, Knox went on to recruit 500 more from Kentucky and issued stronger demands to his commanders. They destroyed the Miami’s largest villages and took 40 women and children hostage. They then sent word to villages up the Wabash river to surrender or risk being exterminated. Knox wrote,“Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.”Little Turtle led the Indigenous nation alliance centered out of territory where Fort Defiance was built. He led the Miami and Shawnee in their defeats of Knox. Source: Indiana Historical Society ENTER “MAD ANTHONY” Back in New York, Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton needed a plan. The country continued to bleed money and he needed more land in Ohio to be surveyed and gridded into a ledger so he could balance the governments finances. On July 20, 1790 he established the General Land Office which included the position of Surveyor General.  Hamilton determined 100 acres and upward were to be sold to land companies for 30 cents per acre. The land could be paid for in gold, silver, or public securities – many of which were war credits earned during the revolutionary war. Land could also be sold with a two year credit plus six percent interest. Townships were 10 miles square and the surveys had to be paid for by the land companies or their land-seeking colonial settlers.This was attractive to would-be land owners, many of whom migrated from Europe where they had no hope of ever owning a piece of property. This was a dream come true, if not for the nightmare of violence occurring throughout Ohio. George Washington was recruiting, and Indigenous warriors were killing, mercenaries from Kentucky and Tennessee at a rate of four for every one trained U.S. soldier. But he knew this was the price you pay to become a global power like England, France, or Spain. He knew he needed their land to raise the money necessary to build a stronger army, but no matter the size of troops he was sending in to battle, they were losing terribly. The Indigenous people of Ohio were not going to give in. They never have and they never will.Washington needed a new approach. He pulled Major General “Mad Anthony” Wayne out of retirement in Georgia to lead the “Legion of the United States”. This was the first army organized under the direction of the Congress and Executive branches after the adoption of the Constitution. It demonstrates both a shift in attitude from the state and from George Washington who needed victories over his enemies and their land. “Mad Anthony” was known, even by Washington, to be unreliable making him an odd choice for leading a newly formalized federal army. But he earned that nickname for a reason. He developed a reputation in the Revolutionary War for being temperamental and ruthless. And he was an alcoholic. Washington probably knew he needed a military leader like this to exert monstrous acts of violence on innocent children and women and men of all ages.Wayne and his troops made their way to the northwest corner of Ohio to Fort Defiance in the middle of allied Indigenous nations. He sent word to the Shawnee, “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of your blood.”The Shawnee refused to back down. So on a rainy August 20th, 1794, Wayne ordered his men to destroy their crops, fields, and homes. They proceeded to murder innocent women, children, and old men. After just one hour of “Mad Anthony”, the Shawnee were overwhelmed and were forced to accept defeat. The U.S. soldiers continued destroying crops and homes for three days and fifty miles in their retreat to Fort Defiance. Known as the Battle of Fallen Timbers, this led to the signing of the Treaty of Greenville and it set the tone for the United States’ ‘shock and awe’ approach to military force over sovereign nations – and the displacement and murder of innocent Indigenous people here and abroad. It was enough to earn Wayne his own fort in what is now known at Fort Wayne, Indiana.Anthony Wayne. George Washington pulled him out of retirement to lead U.S. forces in the Northwest Indian War. Source: WikipediaFEASTING ON A BUNCH-OF-GRAPESThe Greenville Treaty opened up ¾ of the what was to become the state of Ohio to white colonial settlers. Hamilton’s newly formed General Land Office and the Surveyor General could now continue the carving up of land into neatly ordered squares. Two years later, the Land Act of 1796 was passed. It was time to divvy up the land for “military purposes” and “for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.”Jefferson’s Land Ordinance called for land to be set aside for veterans of the Revolutionary War. This chunk of curvilinear land in Ohio was called the U.S. Military Reserve. The Land Act also designated land for the “Society of the United Brethren”, also known as the Moravian Church. These are the protestant missionaries I mentioned last week. A band of Moravians had taken in members of a Lenape tribe and moved west to Ohio to escape the warring tensions in the original 13 colonies only to be innocently murdered by a group of U.S. minutemen from Philadelphia dispatched by George Washington.More Moravians had settled in Ohio along the Muskingum River in the middle of the Military Reserve designated in the Land Act. They had converted more Indigenous people to Christianity after the brutal defeat in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The U.S. Government wanted to encourage more conversions, so they granted them land. The Land Act also put into writing very precise methods of surveying, slicing, plotting, and platting by an empowered Survey General. The U.S. Government could no longer rely on land companies and eager, greedy speculators to conduct shoddy surveys. Section 1 of the Act reads as follows (comments and translations provided by C. Albert White):“Sec. 1. A Surveyor General shall be appointed. He shall engage skillful surveyors as his deputies. He shall survey the lands northwest of the Ohio River and above the mouth of the Kentucky River (in Kentucky) in which Indian title has been extinguished (Greenville Treaty). He shall frame regulations and instructions for his deputies and they shall take an oath (to do proper work) and he may remove (fire) them for negligence or misconduct.”America’s first Survey General was none only than Rufus Putnam, one of the co-founders of the Ohio Company of Associates. He was the one I mentioned last week who gathered with his friends at the Bunch-of-Grapes tavern in Boston ten years earlier in 1786 – just one year after Jefferson negotiated the Land Ordinance of 1785. They drafted a plan for how to profit from the settlement in the Ohio territories, sent it to their friends in Congress to enact, and here Putnam was in charge of surveying and platting land ceded by force so that he, his buddies, and the United States could profit. Clear evidence of just how intertwined crony capitalism, cartesian cartography, Christianity, and White supremacy are rooted in the American government and military.Rufus Putnam. He devised a plan with his associates to profit from newly negotiated and conquered land in Ohio. He later served as Survey General. Source: Florida Center for Instructional TechnologyJefferson’s dream was finally coming true. The U.S. government was just hitting its stride. They now had an organized and methodical means of measuring and dissecting land for sale to citizens seeking land settlement and companies seeking financial settlement. All so the United States could amass a larger military as they headed west into the sunset, charting meridians on a map as they marched toward global domination.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. P. 81ibid.ibid.C. Albert White. A History of the Rectangular Survey System. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,This week we continue to explore how maps played a major role in the shaping of America. Thomas Jefferson had a vision of a neatly portioned empire, just as the globe was neatly partitioned into a grid of latitude and longitude lines. Sure he wanted land for farmers, but he also needed to extract property tax revenue to fill the newly formed government’s coffers that had been emptied by the Revolutionary war.The task of surveying and mapping fell on the shoulders of America’s first and only chief Geographer, Thomas Hutchins. Like most things in colonial America, it wasn’t easy.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.Now let’s go…A BUNCH OF GRAPESWhile Thomas Jefferson had grown accustom to the precision of his celestial and nautical instruments, surveying in the rugged American terrain was far from precise. The United States’ first official Geographer, Thomas Hutchins, was venturing into thick woods, mud bogs, and colonies of angry, disenfranchised inhabitants. And his motley crew of eight, out of the planned 13, may not have helped. It was an inauspicious start to Jefferson’s cartographic carving up of a countryside into covenants made of cunningly crafted cartesian corners. Meanwhile, George Washington’s war buddies wanted in on the land Hutchins was about to map out.Hutchins and his men gathered in Pittsburgh in September of 1785 to head west for the Ohio River. As the first government organized and funded survey of public land, they were to map a grid of townships along the Ohio River known as the Seven Ranges. Of the eight men who showed up most were sent by wealthy prospectors, including founders of what was to become a few months later, the Ohio Company. This organization was loosely formed in Boston at the Bunch-of-Grapes tavern by a group of high ranking Revolutionary war veterans. This was more than a tavern. Bunch-of-Grapes was where power-broker backroom deals were made, slaves were traded, and land grabs were orchestrated. These men devised a scheme that would award them land in Ohio. They wrote it up and sent it off to the Confederation Congress who then granted them five percent of the southeastern corner of what was to become the state of Ohio. Many of the men assigned to Hutchins were scouts for these land speculators. They weren’t interested in Jefferson’s plan to modernize and subdivide the country for the purpose of taxation, farming, and community building. Only one of the eight was truly qualified to survey alongside the experienced and capable Hutchins. The following list are the eight of 13 delegates originally intended to represent all of the colonies:Edward Dowse: New Hampshire. He actually wasn’t from New Hampshire, but Massachusetts. After the Revolutionary war he was involved in the East India Company and Chinese trade. He later served as a U.S. Representative. Benjamin Tupper: Massachusetts. This state first appointed Rufus Putnam. Putnam is one of the founders of the Ohio Company. He declined because he had recently accepted the position of Surveyor General for lands in what was to become the state of Maine. Putnam requested that Tupper go in his place. It’s believed Tupper was mostly a scout for the Ohio Company. Isaac Sherman: Connecticut. This post was initially offered to Samuel Parsons, another co-founder of the Ohio Company. So Parsons suggested Sherman. Isaac was the son of a founding father you’ve never heard of, Roger Sherman. He was an attorney about the same age as Benjamin Franklin and the only one to have signed Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Roger had just become the first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, supported Jefferson’s idea of government acquired land as a revenue source, and was keen to settle the Connecticut Western Reserve – a block of land in what is now eastern Ohio. Absalom Martin: New Jersey. Martin indeed was a surveyor and you can find his work archived at the Bureau of Land Management website. He most likely was there working on behalf of John Cleves Symmes. Symmes was a Revolutionary War Colonel and congressional delegate who had sent scouts to the Ohio territory in search of profitable land. He organized a group called the Miami Company. The U.S. Government handed over 200 thousand acres plus a 23 thousand acre township Martin was likely surveying. The Symmes Purchase included a village called Losantiville – later named Cincinnati. This area is also home to a curiously named university that many mistake for being in Florida – Miami University, also known as Miami of Ohio. It was one of the original eight Ivy League schools and is named, like the company, after the Miami Rivers in Ohio.William Morris: New York. Morris was perhaps the one a true surveyor and mathematician at the level of Hutchins. Alexander Parker: Virginia. Parker was a surveyor and woodsman who was comfortable navigating the frontier. James Simpson: Maryland. Simpson was actually from New York and his affiliation or qualifications are not clear. Robert Johnston: Georgia. Hutchins called him “Dr. Johnston”. He was a wealthy man from Maryland, but represented Georgia. MATHEMATICIANS GONE WILDA month prior to this crew assembling, in August 1785, the head of the Survey commission, Andrew Ellicott, hammered a wooded stake on the northwest bank of the Ohio River. It’s roughly where the Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia borders come together at 40° 38’ 27” latitude and 80° 31’ 0” longitude west. This stick in the mud, a point on the globe, was the start of a line from which Hutchins would probe. All for a square, that a surveyor would sign, so a White man could claim, “This land is mine.”  It makes it sound easy, but it was anything but. Hutchins and his crew showed up with little more than compasses, a sextant, and a circumferentor. Also known as a surveyor’s compass, a circumferentor includes sights on the north and south sides of the compass. Looking through the sights, the surveyor lines up a point on the horizon in one direction and then another. They then measure the interior angle between the two. This was commonly put on a tripod with a lead-weighted plumb-line pointing at a reference point of origin marked on the ground in the center of the tripod. This would have been the modern-day version of the ancient Roman groma mentioned in an earlier post. And like the Romans, they also needed a way to measure distance between points. For that they used a Gunter’s chain with poles attached at each end.The opening page to John Love’s book on surveying in rough terrain. It was the primary field guide book for surveying settlers for nearly two hundred years. A circumferentor (surveyor’s compass) and a Gunther’s chain — the two primary instruments for surveying for early American and European colonizers. Source: Washington Map Society.While the Gunter’s chain was invented in England in 1620 by mathematician Edmund Gunter, who also invented what became the slide-rule – a Gunter’s scale, English surveying commonly used different instruments than these. Because much surveying was done unobstructed in fields, heavier and more precise instruments could be wheeled in place for surveying. Often with the assistance of the military. Surveyors in colonial America, however, often found themselves in mosquito infested, dense dark forests that merged with smelly swamps spilling into swift cold waters running through steep, rough, and rugged terrain. It called for improvisation.In Silvio Bedini's book, Thinkers and Tinkers – Early American Men of Science, talks of the ingenuity forged by necessity among the self-taught thinkers and tinkerers of the European colonizers. He mentions in his book the contrast between the surveying context of these two competing and conquering countries:"Land had to be cleared for settlements and roadways and rivers opened up for navigation, and surveying required techniques and instruments quite different from those traditionally used in England where the majority of areas were open."John Love, a British surveyor who surveyed and mapped the Carolina’s in the 1600s, was instrumental in getting would-be colonial surveyors up to speed. In 1687, one hundred years before Hutchins’ and his crew set out for Ohio, Love published a book called, Geodaesia: or, The Art of Surveying and Measuring Land Made Easier. This was a popular field guide for surveyors throughout the colonial times. In the preface he hints at the challenges a naïve surveyor in America may run into: "I have seen Young men, in America, often nonplus'd so, that their Books would not help them forward, particularly in Carolina, about Laying out Lands, when a certain quantity of Acres has been given to be laid out five or six times as broad as long."A map by John Love of the Carolinas thought to be printed in 1711. I recommend viewing the high resolution version at the source. Source: Library of Congress.Even in the seventeenth century, Love would have measured plats of land with a Gunter’s chain. Stretching 66 feet long, it’s made up of 100 wire links 7.92 inches long. Edmund Gunter’s clever math allows for easy multiplication and division by 10. One Gunter’s chain is equal to 22 yards which equates to 1/10th of an acre. Ten chains square is equal to one acre, and a single link is 1/100th of a Gunter’s chain.  John Love’s book even provided a handy conversion table – but it also included a few lessons on rhomboids, chords, and trapezoids. It turned out trigonometry was sometimes needed to exact the measurements precise surveys required.HUTCHINS LAST STANDSurveying under these conditions was not a simple task and Hutchins had but one or two men capable of doing the math necessary to measure, calculate, and draw accurately.  But precision is what the surveyor’s son, Thomas Jefferson, had in mind when he drafted the Land Ordinance’s of 1784 and 1785 – including the establishment and designation of the Geographer’s Line. This was an imaginary line from the point of origin, marked by that piece of wood lodged above the waterline in the bank of the Ohio River to another point forty-two miles due west along the meridian that encircles the globe. A map of the Seven Ranges as established by the Geographer’s Line in Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785. Each square was a township to be sold to prospective White men farmers or land speculators. Source: Author (Google base map).Hutchins did his best to place himself and his crew at the exact place on earth where his measurements were to begin. He likely used his sextant to measure his location relative to the sun thus determining his latitude. But he documented the starting point as 40° 38’ 02” which is 22” off of the meridian – an error of nearly 1.5 half miles. The crew, in a hurry to make progress, then headed due west documenting one mile after another to establish the Geographer’s Line. Mapping historian and surveyor, C. Albert White, describes it in his book, A History of the Rectangular Survey System:“Between September 30 and October 8, 1785, Hutchins, the other 8 surveyors, and a crew of about 30 chainmen and axemen ran 4 miles of line west from the beginning point. The line was run with a compass or circumferentor, with orientation at each point by using the compass needle, and measured with a two-pole Gunter's chain held horizontally. A post was set at the end of each mile. Bearing trees were taken and scribed using either a carpenter's race knife or cooper's (barrel maker's) knife. At the rate of $2 per mile, the crew only earned $8 for nine day's work. On October 8, 1785, Hutchins stopped work because he had word of Indian trouble at Tuscarawas, 50 miles to the west. Though Hutchins made an elaborate report of these four miles of line to the Congress, it was nevertheless a very poor showing for the year.”Fifty miles may seem a fair distance away to be of concern, but this Ohio region had become the new frontline of resistance to settler expansion westward. There was also lingering British competition for land. Just three years prior, in 1782, George Washington dispatched Philadelphia minutemen to the Ohio frontier to exact revenge on raids from angered Indigenous tribes in Pennsylvania. Not far from the soon to be west end of the Geographer’s Line, the militia happened across a group of nearly one-hundred Lenape people tending to their corn. The troops surrounded them and took aim with their muskets. The Lenape froze and pleaded their innocence with the men. The soldiers held a vote as to whether they should killed these peaceful, defenseless people or not. Seconds later 96 Lenape people lay dead. Massacred. These Lenape were known as Christian Lenape and had just returned to their homeland after having been driven north by competing British-allied tribes a year earlier. The Christian Lenape dated back to the early 1700s. A group of Christian Moravian missionaries, originating from the present day Czech Republic, found a small group of Lenape people following them after their tribe had nearly been exterminated by small pox. The missionaries took them in and converted them to Christianity. Colonial Moravians settled far from others to protect their followers from the tension that emerged from competing religions, native conflict, and colonial settlement. By the late 1700’s they had moved to the Ohio frontier to escape the very violence that ended up taking their lives. A Delaware Lenape mother about to have her arm cut off by a White European settler as her children lie dead in a pool of blood. Source: Legends of America.Despite Hutchins’ disappointing start to the mapping of the Seven Ranges, he returned on August 9th,  1786 with six of the original delegates and six more were added. Hutchins picked up where he left off and began running due west to create the Geographer’s Line. After measuring six miles from that stick in the mud on the northwest bank of the Ohio River, he sent Absalom Martin due south toward to a bend in the Ohio River. This was to be range number one of seven. At the next six mile juncture, he sent Adam Hoops of Philadelphia south, then came Isaac Sherman, then Ebenezer Sproat of Rhode Island, then Winthrop Sargent who had replace Edward Dowse, then James Simpson, and finally the two most capable surveyors and mathematicians took ranges six and seven: William Morris and Thomas Hutchins.Hutchins, again, was forced to retreat due to Indigenous resistance. By the middle of October, Winthrop Sargent had finished most of the fifth range, but was also forced to retreat. Hutchins was now short on time. He directed six of the men to complete east-west lines in order to complete at least some townships. By the middle of November 1786, four ranges of townships had been completed. They spent the next two months drawing and detailing their maps. Hutchins then left a frigid Ohio back east to New York for his presentation to the Board of Treasury of their progress. In April of 1787 Ludlow and Martin returned to Ohio and then Simpson soon after. Ludlow hastily finished the seventh range in two weeks. Harassed but not deterred by native resistance, Simpson and Martin were able to complete ranges five and six soon after Ludlow. While their work was wrapped up by June 1787, the Board of Treasury in New York did not receive final maps and plats until July of 1788. By then Congress had grown impatient and between September and October of 1787 had already sold land on those first four ranges Hutchins and his crew completed in the final months of 1786. Hutchins returned again to Ohio in the fall of 1788, then traveled home to detail his work, and on April 28th, 1789 he died. Get on the email list at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,This week we pick up where we left off with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had appointed Thomas Hutchins to be Geographer of the United States in 1781. In 1784 Jefferson was preparing for expansion west and was combing over Hutchins’ descriptions of what lie west of his beloved Virginia. Jefferson was dubious of Hutchins’ mapping facts and took it up with him in a personal correspondence. What follows is the unfolding of a cartography project of Roman scale. And the birth of an empire.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.Now let’s go…ON TURTLE ISLANDThomas Jefferson was born with a passion for measuring the world. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor, naturalist, cartographer, and colonial settler. He instilled in his son a love and interest in the culture and languages the Indigenous people. Later in life, Thomas Jefferson even partnered with another Indigenous admirer and fellow colonizer I mentioned back in February, Roger Williams. They collaborated on documenting the nuances of local native languages. Jefferson compiled twenty years of notes on Indigenous dialects and culture that travelled with him to New York City when he became president. Upon returning to Monticello the boatmen responsible for transporting his belongings ripped opened a box containing the precious papers in search of valuables to be stolen. When all they saw were piles of paper, they tossed them overboard. Decades of research and knowledge lost. As a young man, Jefferson spent time with Indigenous people – and so did his father. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson writes, “Concerning Indians . . . in the early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the Revolution, they were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontassete, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journey's to and from Williamsburg.”Even as Jefferson was scheming to carve up the land his forefathers had invaded into a cartesian grid, he held natives in high regard, writing in 1785,“I am safe in affirming that the proofs of genius given by the Indians place them on a level with the whites. . . . I have seen some thousands myself, and conversed much with them. . . . I believe the Indian to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”Thomas envisioned an interracial “Continental America”. Later, in 1802, he said to a group of native Americans, "Your blood will mix with ours, and will spread, with ours, over this great island." The word ‘island’ is most likely in reference to ‘Turtle Island’ which is rooted in the Native North American creation story, including the Haudenosaunee – a confederacy of six nations in the Northeast. This ancient tale tells how the ‘Great Sprit’ (a term Jefferson commonly used in place of the word ‘God’) created the land of America and its people – complex people capable of both good and evil. As Jefferson was toiling over Hutchins’ maps and words in 1784, looking west at the silhouetted Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he was about to embark on an endeavor that history can now regard as both good and evil.A reproduction of a pocket globe with a celestial case similar to the one Thomas Jefferson was said to have owned. Source: http://www.coulborn.comJEFFERSON MISCALCULATESJefferson loved contemplating the universe and fell in love with astronomy in college in 1760. The study of the stars gave him an appreciation for the universe Isaac Newton had revealed a century before. On his transatlantic trips to and from England and France, he’d be on deck exacting the stars dotting the dark sky and calculating meridians as the boat curved along the earth’s surface. He collected maps, globes, and sextants and obsessed over the global coordinate system. He wasn’t alone. This was a time when a consistent calculation of longitude remained elusive and there was a £20,000 prize for a solution. Newton believed the solution would come from astronomy, but woodworker and clockmaker, John Harrison, invented a  mechanical marine chronometer and won the prize in 1773. So it should come as no surprise that Jefferson was able to scrutinize the maps his newly appointed chief geographer, Thomas Hutchins, had published of the territories west of Virginia. Hutchins had been in this role just three years when Jefferson wrote to him with this inquiry in 1784:SirI have been recurring to your pamphlet (which I borrowed for that purpose) for the times at which the inundations begin and end in the Missouri, Missisipi, Illinois, Ohio, Wabache, but I do not find it mentioned there. Will you be so kind as to give me as accurate an account of these times as you can? Does the Tanissee overflow periodically? I suppose not. Will you give me leave to correct an error in your pamphlet page 13. where you say that the country extending from Fort Pitt to the Missisipi and on both sides watered by the Ohio and it’s branches contains at least a million of square miles. I think the Ohio in all it’s parts and branches cannot water more than the fourth of that. Count the degrees in your map into which it pushes it’s branches. You will find them not quite 80, but suppose them made 80 by the branch of the Tanissee which heads in S. Carola. A degree in the middle of this space would contain about 3000, or 3100 square miles and of course 80 would contain about 250,000. I think the whole United states reduced to a square would not be more than one of 900 miles each way and of course that the whole U.S. do not contain a million of square miles. Excuse my freedom. I think this an error in your pamphlet and would wish to know from you whether I see it wrong. I am with much esteem Sir Your most obedt. servtTh: JeffersonThe pamphlet Jefferson is referring to is Hutchins 1778 publication, Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. Hardly a pamphlet as we think of them today, it’s over 100 pages of mostly textual descriptions of the land he had explored as far west as the Mississippi River. The majority of which highlighted the agriculture, climate, and land features suitable for settling. As a plantation owner who believed farming was the future of America, it makes sense Jefferson took such interest in the ratio of water to land in Hutchins’ work. It was all part of his grand vision of a mass agrarian expansion west. This is why he wanted Hutchins to lead efforts to survey, measure, and carve it up into a precise and quantifiable grid. Just as the latitude and longitude lines carve up the globe as he bobbed his way across the Atlantic.A 1778 Hutchins map of villages along the Mississippi River just south of St. Louis forming the border of what is now Missouri and Illinois. Source: Archive.orgBut Jefferson’s estimation of Turtle Island’s expanse was way off. The whole United States reduced to a square, as Jefferson posited, would end up being nearly four times larger than he imagined. Jefferson didn’t believe that imaginary rectangle could be larger than a million square miles, but it turns out to be nearly four million miles square. Since he’d never really travelled west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s easy to see where it would be hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine four million square miles even when seen from a satellite image. What Jefferson was trying to rectify, was just how much land to quantify, upon which taxes his country could rely.HUMAN RIGHTS. STATE FIGHTS.Jefferson was acting out what had already been done in Europe in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Rulers pushed for more centralized power and control and cartography played a staring role. The Enlightenment led to what some describe as ‘Enlightened Absolutism’. Two elements emerge under this interpretation of the Enlightenment: An explosion of discovery and invention that led to cultural and societal advancement. A recognition of needed state resources, power, and control for the purpose of war. It fell on cartography to map the acquisition of land through the drawing of lines for the exercise of power. Modernization during the enlightenment included demonstrating governance through systematic documenting and registering of land. Jefferson, a worshipper of the Enlightenment, was acting out the ‘enlightened’ European practice of nation building, cadastral mapping, and growing an army. The revolutionary war had left the new formed United States of America strapped for cash. Like their European contemporaries, they went about collecting funds through subdividing the land to excise tax. When Jefferson wrote to Hutchins in January of 1784 with his questions, he likely was in the process of preparing the Land Ordinance of 1784. This document called for the creation of states west of the Appalachian mountains, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. The ordinance included these five articles:The new states shall remain forever a part of the United States of America.They shall bear the same relation to the confederation as the original states.They shall pay their apportionment of the federal debts.They shall in their governments uphold republican forms.After the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of them.This ordinance was put to committee in April of 1784, but with one glaring omission – Article 5. Abolishing slavery lost by a single vote. Virginia representative James Monroe was absent from voting, at home sick in bed. Monroe, like other slave owning Virginians including Jefferson and James Madison, were routinely conflicted over slavery. They struggled with two competing ideals, upholding the enlightened values of human rights they ensconced in the constitution, and holding together this loose collection of newly formed states for fear of civil war over the issue of slavery. Another example of tension riddled compromise came 16 years later when the absent voter, Monroe, was then President of the United States. He signed the Missouri Compromise in 1820 which admitted Missouri as a slave state while abolishing slavery in states to the north. To this day, our elected leaders continue to waffle on the rights of all humans as imagined by Jefferson. After the loss of Article 5, Jefferson wrote, "The voice of a single individual would have prevented this abominable crime; heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."There were also conflicts over just how these states should be carved up. Jefferson had a clear vision of uniform divisions for the purpose of expansion, taxation, and farming. But corporations and private land speculators had other ideas. They had already been grabbing up land and selling it to settlers for a profit. They also had an ally in the government – Alexander Hamilton. This pitted Jefferson against Hamilton in how to measure and divide the newly acquired land.Former surveyor and cadastral mapping historian, C. Albert White, writes, the Jefferson group included advocates:“of [the] sale [of land] to individual settlers in small parcels. The small farmers, frontiers men, and merchants argued that an essential part of a democracy was the right to own property. They could not afford to buy land in large tracts, and if it were sold in huge blocks to wealthy men, the small man would be squeezed out or forced to pay high prices and interest.” Meanwhile, the Hamilton group was: “generally made up of wealthy southern aristocrats and plantation owners, did not think the democracy advocates were capable of settling the land intelligently or capable of handling land ownership. The conservatives were in favor of large grants at low prices to companies or wealthy men who would then handle the business of settlement, such as surveying and patenting.”This was around the time Hamilton was establishing the Bank of New York and he thought Jefferson’s rational approach to subdividing the land would take too long. He favored the rough and tumble approach called ‘metes and bounds’ which is a method that had established the irregular boundaries of the existing colonies and states. It was also a system that had already clogged the courts in land disputes. But Hamilton argued, “It had not been the general governmental policy in the colonies to sell land as a source of revenue prior to the war. The people were familiar with the free settlement system and would occupy and hold the territory faster if allowed free location.”AN ORDINANCE ORDAINEDJefferson, ever the cartographer’s son, knew what he was doing and pushed ahead with his plan. The expansion west would be divided into a grid. And in echoes of the Roman land plots called ‘centuries’ mentioned in last week’s post, Jefferson would follow by naming them ‘hundreds’. As C. Albert White documents:“In 1784, a committee headed by Jefferson drafted an ordinance which called for prior survey of tracts ten geographical miles square, which were called hundreds; they would be subdivided into lots one mile square. The lines would run due north and south, east and west and settlement would be by hundreds or by lots.”After months of debate, the tract size was reduced from ten to seven mile-squares with 49 township lots. One square would be allocated for a school, another for a church, and four would be reserved for Congress to assign at a later date. One-third of any precious minerals found would also be granted to the government. The township squares were to be sold at auction for $1 per acre.This plan drew further objections and the size was reduced once again to six miles square. The intent was to minimize land barons from buying large tracts on speculation. There was also fear that townships spread too far apart would leave them overly vulnerable to attacks by angry Indigenous nations. On May 20, the Land Ordinance of 1785 was passed. The 6x6 grid as defined in the Land Ordinance of 1785. This is the plan Hutchins operated against as he set out to to survey his first plots of land. Source: C. Albert White."Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled, that the territory ceded by individual states to the United States, which had been purchased of the Indian inhabitants, shall be disposed of in the following manner: A surveyor from each state shall be appointed by Congress or a committee of the states, who shall take an oath for the faithful discharge of his duty, before the geographer of the United States, who is hereby empowered and directed to administer the same; and the like oath shall be administered to each chain carrier, by the surveyor under whom he acts.”The chief surveyor and geographer of the United States under whom they would act was Thomas Hutchins. He was granted a team consisting of one surveyor from each of the 13 States. But only eight showed up to work. Their first task was to map a section of land west of the Ohio River bordering West Virginia known as the Seven Ranges. This was the beginning of the United States Public Land Surveying System, known today as the Bureau of Land Management.A map of The Seven Ranges west of the Ohio River. These were the first plots to be surveyed and sold as part of the Land Ordinance of 1785. Source: Wikipedia.Hutchins and his crew began work September of 1785 on the north bank of the Ohio River. But it only lasted a week. On October 8th word came of Indigenous unrest due west of their site near land occupied by the Tuscarawas. Hutchins and his crew had only surveyed four miles. A disappointing start to a monumental task. And their troubles had only just begun. Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. Donald A. Grinde, Jr., Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History, University of California at Riverside., Bruce E. Johansen, Associate Professor of Communication. University of Nebraska at Omaha. 1990.A History of the Rectangular Survey System. C. Albert White. Jan 1983. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. Get on the email list at interplace.io