Whither the Waters

Whither the Waters, John L. Kessell's second book about don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, a widely known and colorful figure in the history of late colonial New Mexico, grew out of a question posed to the author at a signing event for his biographical study Miera y Pacheco: A Renaissance Spaniard in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico (2013). His interlocutor, Kessell explains in the preface to Whither the Waters, asked whether Miera y Pacheco's famous 1778 cartographic portrayal of the westward-bound Domínguez-Escalante expedition had shaped later efforts to map the northwestern frontiers of New Spain and, after 1821, of Mexico. Although Kessell attends to Miera y Pacheco's mapmaking activities in Miera y Pacheco, this particular question lay beyond the scope of this earlier project. Whither the Waters, then, is the outcome of Kessell's efforts to trace the subsequent influence of Miera y Pacheco's maps on the cartographic construction of territories that would eventually become Utah and northern Arizona. In particular, the author endeavors to show how Miera y Pacheco's tantalizing but erroneous hydrography, which shows two large rivers flowing west, influenced subsequent cartographic practices and fueled hopes of a riverine route to the Pacific.Kessell sets the scene with a brief biographical sketch of Miera y Pacheco, a Catalan who had settled in New Spain as a young man, and with an account of the fortunes of the Domínguez-Escalante expedition. Led by two Franciscans, this exploratory venture, in which Miera y Pacheco himself participated as cartographer, set out from New Mexico in 1776 with the objective of reaching the Pacific. The expeditioners got no further than the Utah Valley before they were forced to turn back. Nevertheless, the undertaking allowed Miera y Pacheco to create a detailed map of this frontier region, relying in part on geographical knowledge that he and his companions gleaned from indigenous informants. The central chapters describe the circumstances in which the Catalan made his initial 1777 map as well as the more elaborate and revised 1778 version and closely examine the geographical details and modifications the two maps reveal. In the second half of his study, Kessell traces how Miera y Pacheco's cartography influenced the frontier maps of late colonial military engineers, Alexander von Humboldt's map of New Spain, and, in the early nineteenth century, US-Spanish boundary negotiations as well as cartographic portrayals of the emerging American West. A final chapter examines the relegation of Miera y Pacheco's cartographic productions to the status of artifacts in the mid-nineteenth century, when his tantalizing, westward-flowing rivers finally disappeared from new maps.Kessell persuasively demonstrates the significance and influence of Miera y Pacheco's maps throughout and also beyond the final decades of the colonial era, into the turbulent contexts of a new century that brought Mexican independence from Spain and the westward expansion of the United States. Written in a clear and highly accessible style, the study will appeal to scholarly and general readers who are interested in the history of New Mexico and in the life of Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco. Whither the Waters also warrants close attention from readers who have broader interests in the history of cartography and of colonial mapmaking in particular. By means of his detailed yet lively examination of Miera y Pacheco's evolving cartographic images, Kessell offers readers a meticulous case study of cartographic intertextuality and the role of maps in shaping, often powerfully, geographical imaginations and practices. Further, readers are reminded of the historical continuities between Spanish and Anglo-American expeditions in nineteenth-century western North America and the considerable reliance of the latter on Spanish sources. The inclusion of high-quality map images in this book—all of them in full color—greatly enhances the clarity and immediacy of Kessell's narrative by allowing readers to study the details of the maps under discussion.For this reviewer, Kessell notably misses the opportunity to engage gently with the now extensive critical literature on historical cartography. If he had done so, he may have succeeded in conveying rather more forcefully the undoubted significance of his study for wider scholarly understandings of the varied roles and effects of maps and their creation in the contexts of imperialism and the shaping of colonial as well as national frontiers

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