The maps in this part of the exhibit show the United States national borders in the 1850s and consider their expansion alongside the competing claims of Native American tribes and the neighboring countries of Mexico and Canada. Note how the boundaries of state and country shift in each map and consider how those same spaces resist permanence today. Throughout the world, many borderland residents cross between countries everyday routinely travelling for work, to visit family or even to shop at their closest grocery store. In this way, neighboring countries can be considered local and national boundaries can be seen as porous and arbitrary political interventions.
A New Map of Texas Oregon and California, printed in 1846 by S. Augustus Mitchell, was one of the first commercially available maps of the United States western territories. Its publication excited those interested in exploring and exploiting resources like gold and land for farming and ranching. It shows the developing contours of the western United States before the southern or northern borders were fixed. Copies of this map were used by Brigham Young to help plan the Mormon’s eventual route to an area then outside of United States control but which we now know as Salt Lake City.
The 1846 map shows the western states before they were fully explored, bounded, named or settled. The map's northern border, marked in red, was being negotiated with Britain who still held this land within their empire. Canada was not formed as an independent nation until roughly twenty years later in July of 1867. Though many state names on the map are familiar, their geographic areas are far different than their present day scope. California encompasses what is now Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Oregon includes Washington, and Idaho and Iowa contain what is now Minnesota. You will also note that Santa Fe is part of Texas and that New Mexico is a mere sliver of its current size. Further, much of this territory belonged to Mexico, not the United States, until the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Similarly, the United States did not claim control of the interior middle section of the country. The present-day states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma and North and South Dakota are designated as "Indian Territory."
The Southwest Tribal Nations Map was designed and printed in 2022 by Aaron Carapella. Carapella is a self-taught mapmaker of Cherokee descent who uses maps to counter white, colonialist narratives of the Americas. He has spent two decades researching and creating new representations of the Western hemisphere that show indigenous nations’ ties to the land. This limited edition map shows tribes in pre-contact locations in the present-day Southwestern United States. Below this text you will find another Carapella map for the territories commonly known now as the United States. These maps represent the period from 1590 through 1850. Carapella wrote that he created them as a "visual reminder of who called this land home for tens of thousands of years before any European set foot" adding that "to Native Americans, this land will always be our ancestral homeland."
The Map of the Territory of New Mexico was commissioned in 1846 by Stephen Watts Kearny, a general in the Mexican-American War to document exploration of new territory then coming under United States control. Kearny led the U.S. forces against Mexico as they fought for and claimed lands north of the Rio Grande River. After this successful campaign, William Emory was tasked by Kearny to explore the region. He led an expedition to create the 1846-47 map and an 1848 report titled Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Mississippi, to San Diego, in California. Map historian Ralph Ehrenberg writes that this report was critical to helping westward travel because it provided “the third basic route map of the Transmississippi West” and “formed the basis for all subsequent maps of the Southwest for the next decade.”
The 1846-47 map focuses on geographic features like rivers and mountains including a detailed view of the Rio Grande and Gila Rivers from north of Taos to south of San Antonio. It includes villages, towns, cities and pueblos located in the territory, and it designates lands in the northwest to the Utah Indians and in the south to the Apache Indians. Crossed sabers at Canada, Embuda and the Pueblo of Taos mark them as sites where conflicts were recently fought with Native Americans and New Mexicans. This map was used in early negotiations for the Gadsden Purchase as it was the only scientific survey of the area at that time, though it was already 25 years old and not wholly accurate.
