Those who have been following the Lewis & Clark journals day-by-day across the prairie are aware of how crucial maps can be. When the Mandan drawings are accurate, the company is elated -- when rivers appear where they are not noted, the company has to spend days trying to figure out river sources and relationships.
For the past several years, Piegan Institute has been sponsoring an August history conference called Aakawattop’a. In 2001 the theme was Apatohs--ohsokoi, “The Old North Trail.” One of the presenters was Ted Binnema, a professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. His doctoral thesis had been developed into a book called “Common and Contested Ground: a human and environmental study of the northwestern plains.” (University of Oklahoma Press, copyright 2001. ISBN 0-8061-3361-9)) I’ve been recommending it ever since I read it.
If you think I’m just easily impressed, here’s Dan Flores’ blurb from the dusk jacket: “Ted Binnema’s ethnohistory of the Northern Plains before Lewis & Clark is one of the most stunning new studies I have read. This model new approach for writing Indian environmental history makes possible a contextual analysis of band, and even individual, motivations in an altogether fresh way. Events that had been murky in cause emerge with a new clarity. A very impressive book.”
We seem to have made a generational transition as well as a brave bridging of disciplines that have been separate in the past. Some of the data is new: weather information, for instance, is highly relevant since snow depth, temperature and winds directly affected the survival of horses through the winter. Did you know that the strongest El Nino events ever known were in the early 1790’s? This meant warm, snowless winters which meant drought which meant fires. Historical events.
What Ted actually presented at the conference was a pair of maps dating to 1801-02. One is called “Old Swan’s Map” and the other is by an unidentified Gros Ventre cartographer. They are from Hudson’s Bay archives in Winnipeg and are reproduced in the book.
It’s famously said that “the map is not the territory” -- otherwise the map of the United States would be 3,000 miles wide, same as the continent! Of course things have to be left out of every map. What one chooses to leave out is determined by one’s objectives in making the map, one’s assumptions based on experience, and the conventions of cartography, like the little compass rose in the corner that always indicates north.
This map of Old Swan’s looks like a candleabra: there is a broad band across the top where the candle flames would line up, a main straight line perpendicular in the middle, and a lot of arms. It’s a little inscrutable at first. The first major insight is that north is to the right side of the page -- that band across the top is the Rocky Mountains. The other map is similarly oriented, so this must have been a “convention” in map drawing. Each of the “candleabra arms” is drawn to a landmark of some kind -- a peak, a valley, a strange rock formation. A list of the landmarks is written at the top and other notations on the arms of the candleabra.
This is where Ted was particularly brilliant. He took his map to the territory. The rest of his presentation was slides he had taken of the actual landmarks indicated on Old Swan’s map. It wasn’t easy, mostly because towns, fences, ranches and roads had been created since then, sometimes nearly preventing access, but the landmarks were major enough to persist and certainly recognizable after one figured out about how much ground an Indian band on horseback might cover in a day’s travel. Just as the previous landmark disappeared in the rearview mirror, the new one appeared through the windshield.
It’s interesting that though Old Swan was a Blackfeet, the map is written in Gros Ventre words. Binnema thinks this may be because the Blackfeet are pressing increasingly farther south and using the Gros Ventre names.
A journalist who shall remain nameless (He’s a nice guy!) remarked to me that the Indians never named the peaks in the Rocky Mountains. HIS map had the names given the mountains by Grinnell, Schultz, et al. Mostly famous people who would enhance the national significance of the Park and maybe help fund it. But clearly (as he realized) the Indians DID name the peaks -- they used descriptive phrases that would help a person find the way along the mountains. Thus, “Chief” mountain -- the one that sticks up out there alone. “Heart” butte -- the one shaped like an animal heart.
When things are not expected by us, they don’t appear on our maps. We give them other people’s names or have to invent new names for our own reasons. Bob Scriver and I called one hill along Highway 89 “the Japanese hill,” because it looked like a Japanese sketch of a high twisted conifer. No one else could find it using that name, but we always looked for it and were rewarded by the sight.
Binnema’s chapter epigraphs are relevant. For the introductory chapter he quotes Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., in “The White Man’s Indian.” “For most Whites throughout the past five centuries, the Indian [and we might say Indian terrain] of imagination and ideology has been as real, perhaps more real, than the Native American of actual existence and contact... Although modern artists and writers assume their own imagery to be more in line with ‘reality’ than that of their predecessors, they employ the imagery for much the same reasons and often with the same results as those persons of the past they so often scorn as uninformed, fanciful, or hypocritical.”
Francois-Antoine Laroque took these notes in 1805. “A few of [the Crows] assembled and draughted on a dressed skin, I believe a very good map of their Country, and the[y] showed me the place where at different seasons they were to be found.
“They told me that in winter they were always to be found at a Park [bison pound or jump] by the foot of the Mountain a few miles from this or thereabouts. In the spring and Fall they are upon this [Yellowstone] River and in the summer upon the Tongue and Horses River.”
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