On the Borders of the Imaginary, “Erring” on the Side of Hope

Christopher Columbus and James Cook both share similar features—one of them is to have failed to discover what made up the actual purpose of their quests; they did, however, “f[i]nd what they wanted to see,” as reflected in the writings and maps the two illustrious explorers handed over to posterity. This assumption by Thomas P. Slaughter appears to also fully apply to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sent by Thomas Jefferson beyond the frontier, in search of the legendary Northwest Passage, a hypothetical transcontinental water route the control of which would promote the implementation of the expansionist design. While the enterprise itself—among other objectives—aimed at furthering cartographic knowledge, the prospect of exploration also required to be fully acquainted with the region to be traveled, ahead of the journey. Jefferson had succeeded in gathering precious data but the mental image still remained very much incomplete: his judgment was flawed with regard to the actual distances and hardships of the project, which might never have taken shape, had the fictitious map not temporarily supplanted the true reality of frontier geography. Challenged throughout the “wilderness” experience, the heralds of Jeffersonianism quickly measured the gap between the mental construct and actual daily life within an unconquerable natural environment that put the Western cartographers under heavy strain, even undermining their methodology. The travelers also took particular care in collecting the invaluable information provided by the Natives—whose perfect mastery of the territory had been granted to them by the thousands of years during which they had been occupying the place—only to find out that the Native American approach to cartography usually mirrors Indigenous thinking more than it helps deepen the “civilized” man’s understanding of the spatio-temporal framework he progresses in. In this respect, beside merely representing space, maps might also be construed as the subjective projection of the mind they spring from

Expansionism · Frontier · Gloom · Humanity · Jeffersonian democracy · Mental mapping · American History and Culture · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Linguistic and Cultural Studies

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