Hi everybody. Good morning. It is so great to be here with you today
talking about cartoon maps of canyon land. I learned so much yesterday
listening to all of the wonderful different talks and one thing that I was
reminded of. It's not that I learned it, but I was reminded of it. I am
definitely not a scientist or a cartographer right. Um I'm I'm a graphic
designer and graphic design historian and I stand in awe of all of the
real cartographers and scientists out there and I hope that you will enjoy
a little change of pace with me this morning as we get started because
essentially I'm going to be telling you a story and there are lots and
lots of pictures that we will be looking at as we tell this story as well.
Um so once upon a time we're not going to talk about how many years ago
because I got depressed when I counted them. Um I was a PhD student here
at Arizona State and I was writing my dissertation about how professional
graphic design and illustration practices had shaped popular cartography
basically during the first half of the 20th century. And as I was doing
this research, as you can see, I was kind of staying away from the Grand
Canyon as much as possible because so many amazing scholars had already
written so much about the Grand Canyon um that I was going to focus on
other subjects instead. So I was looking at gold mines and spanish
missions and the painted desert and um you get the idea if you want to
read more about it. I wrote about it in the book. So anyhow really early
in this process though, I discovered this image, this map. Um it's a 1935
cartoon map of the state of Arizona. And it's by a commercial cartographic
illustrator named Ruth Taylor. And the map has been published in a book
called Our U. S. A. A. Gay geography. It was published by Little and Brown
out of boston in 1935 and it was illustrated by Ruth and it was written by
her brother frank and I just fell in love with it. Um I fell in love with
the colors and with the stories and the way that every person in place was
obviously so meticulously researched and yet at the same time so
absolutely stereotypical.
Um and in many ways we would now say um represented in a way that's
culturally quite insensitive
Yet at the same time I was just in awe of Ruth Taylor. Um and I found out
a little bit more about her um discovered that she was a divorced woman
who had a really successful um professional illustration practice in the
1930s. You'll meet her again in a few minutes. Um So as it turned out,
there were tons of cartoon maps of the Grand Canyon. And even though I
wasn't starting out to write about them in my dissertation, I couldn't
avoid them. Um So I ended up writing a little bit about them, but really
putting together this talk has been a welcome opportunity to revisit some
famous images and have an excuse to pull them all together and to focus on
the Grand Canyon. Um even though nothing has changed, lots of other really
famous people have said really intelligent things about the Grand Canyon,
but I've enjoyed revisiting these maps um and thinking about the cultural
context for these really, really specific images of the Grand Canyon. So
why do they look the way they do um who made them and for what clients,
for what audiences and then perhaps most importantly, what stories do
these maps tell us about the Grand Canyon and what stories do they tell us
about? The stories we like to tell ourselves about the Grand Canyon, um
even today. So this is what we are going to be talking about this morning
, cartoon maps of the Grand Canyon, their cultural context, the narratives
that they communicate. Um I'm a teacher, I can't quite help myself. I
decided I had to give you an outline of apologies, but this is where we're
going today.
So the first context, the first way of understanding these maps is to look
at the visual formats that influenced them and their aesthetic, the way
that they look. Um there's three really important aesthetic or visual
contexts that are key to understanding cartoon maps as a visual genre and
the first of these um as you probably have already guessed, um are the
illustrated atlas images and we saw some of these yesterday. Um The
illustrated atlas is a visual form with a really long cartographic history
, but we're looking at three more recent examples that are really a lot
closer to home for those of you who live here in Arizona or the southwest.
And we have Clarence Dutton's 18 82 tertiary history of the Grand Canyon
district, commissioned as you all know by the U. S. Geological Survey and
illustrated by thomas Moran and William Henry Holmes. We're also seeing
the Arizona plates from our buckles illustrated atlas of the United States
of America and our buckles was a coffee company. Um and they commissioned
these chroma lithographic or color printed images um as trade cards for
inclusion in their coffee packaging. So they were sort of like the
forerunner of our contemporary cereal box surprise fully in a way. Um they
were designed to be collectible, you were supposed to want to keep them
and possibly even hang them up as art in your home. Um and in 18 89 our
buckles conveniently issued a commercially available atlas that included
all of the maps and the set. And of course you can see how their
surrounding Arizona with these really romanticized in a historical images
of Indigenous residents of Arizona. And then finally we're seeing Antonio
Garcia Cubas is 1887 geographical and statistical atlas of Mexico. Um kind
of on the far right of your screen and you can see how the cartographic
map is framed and surrounded. Bye more pictorial images. So formal or
visual characteristics that I want you to notice before we move on from
the illustrated atlas is um, they're combining cartographic maps and
illustrations into a single image. Um, so it might be compartmentalized.
They're also composed really holistically as images. They're designed
very carefully. Um, the maps are often framed or surrounded by pictorial
images. Um, and then both typography and lettering can play a really
important role. So words and images are working together to craft this
message and tell us a story.
The second really important um formal influence for cartoon maps is of
course the bird's eye view map. Um so the map maker most associated with
Arizona is CJ dire and we're seeing his map of phoenix here. He was
working throughout Arizona um in the 18 eighties and the early 18 nineties
and this is his 18 85 ish map of phoenix. So bird's eye views were drawn
primarily by itinerant map makers. They would travel around during the
second half of the 19th century. Um, and they would make drawings for
these maps from live observation. So CJ dire visited phoenix. He went to
all of these places, he sketched them from live observation and then they
would take all of these images back to a big city lithographer or printer
have the map printed and finally, folks who had subscribed to the map
while the map maker was in town would receive their finished map. Um,
accuracy was a really important consideration in making and selling these
maps. So they're actually pretty decent historical records and a lot of
cases. Um, this 1862 news item from the Delphi times um sums it up really
, really nicely. Um, so that article describes a map that will show the
roads, streams, durable springs, mills, schoolhouses, etcetera. It will
contain such statistical matter as well, make it useful to the citizens of
the county and great care will be taken to ensure the accuracy of the math.
So homes and businesses, um, gets depicted in really high detail. You can
find yourself on the map. You can find important buildings that are
numbered and labeled and the map is appealing because of civic pride and
frankly because of personal vanity. So you can see things that you're
familiar with that you really love possibly that belong to you. And so it
was a profitable venture and a lot of cases. One last description from a
period newspaper um, describes the process really nicely. A Ruger. An
artist for the Chicago lithographic company has sketched a very pretty
bird's eye view of Centralia showing all the streets and buildings. It is
to be lithograph and printed in colors and will make a useful as well as a
beautiful picture. Every citizen of Centralia should possess one for its
beauty and use as a map of the city and also to encourage your work that
will add to the already well earned character and fame of our growing city.
So of course Centralia is so famous. I'm sure you've all been there and
had lovely tourist experiences of the place um before we move on from the
bird's eye view map, just pointing out a few formal characteristics that
we're going to see again when we get to our cartoon maps. Um an Ortho
graphic or three quarter aerial view, which is really popular with a lot
of cartoon maps and almost all birds eye view maps because you can get
both the landscape and the human characters in that landscape and a pretty
high level of detail. Um, there's lots of labeling going on here.
Buildings are named streets are named and there's this real emphasis on
color and aesthetics. These are beautiful and useful. They're supposed to
seduce you into buying them.
And then of course we can't talk about cartoon maps without talking about
cartoons. Um so Richard out called wildly successful yellow kid who you're
seeing in the top left hand corner of your screen and he's called the
Yellow kid because he's wearing a yellow nightshirt. It took me a while to
figure that out. So I'll just share it with you. He's wearing a yellow
nightshirt. Um, and this comic introduced a lot of the things that we
think of as so typical of comics today for the first time. Um so all the
staples, speech bubbles, sequential panels are recurring cast of
characters. And we're also looking at some other really early examples of
cartoon strips And again, the way that they look is going to be very
familiar to you when we advance to the cartoon maps of Arizona. Um because
the Kenton Jammer kids starting up in 1897, bringing up father, which got
underway in 1913. Grace Drayton Dimples, which ran between 1914 and 1918.
Grace Drayton is a lot more famous for the Campbell's Soup kids if you
happen to know those. Um and then finally on the far right, we're looking
at James Winterton kiddies of the Canyon country which ran in good
housekeeping from 1922 to 1941. So it had a really long run and as you're
going to see these um round and chubby and happy little cartoon characters
are going to turn up again as well, speech bubbles. Um and a recurring
cast of characters. So the characters themselves really tend to be types
or tropes, they're familiar. They're stereotypical, they're cartoons. Um
and though they're detailed, they aren't particularly specifically
individualized. And again, um this is going to be familiar when we get to
our cartoon maps of Arizona. So these three influences came together in
America in the 1920s to form a popular new genre, the cartoon map. And
there's this argument that the cartoon map was a British import, an
American artists were first exposed to it through this image, which is by
the British artist MacDonald Gill um from 1914 and that image was re
printed on the front cover of a trade magazine in America in 1926. And
there's again this theory that the cartoon map was imported into America
at that time. However, this is an early American example of the form. Um
it was drawn by Joe Squirrel in 1925 and published by the ST paul, great
Northern Railway Company um a year earlier than Mcdonald's Gil's image was
imported into America. So scarily may indeed have seen the gill image. I
can't tell you that he didn't, but he definitely didn't see it for the
first time when it was printed in America because his map here is earlier
than that. So regardless of their origin story where they came from, what
was influencing them. These cartoon maps were really, really warmly
received by public audiences of all different kinds. Um, since they were
both cartoons and maps, they were generally described as education and
amusement rolled into one or much to see and much to learn or as the new
york times put it when they described ruth tailors are us a quote. These
maps convey a great deal of accurate information, Question mark um with
the gusto of the funny papers.
So those are the formal or visual sources for these cartoon maps of
Arizona. Um but it's really important also to think about who made these
images and cartoons maps of the Grand Canyon were drawn by a small group
of cartographic illustrators. Some of them were local to Arizona or the
southwest. Some of them were working on a national scale um and they
brought their own style and their own set of priorities to the images that
they were making. So it's important to get to know them just a little bit
and I'm going to introduce you to a cast of characters and their maps, um
some of which you might already be familiar with, but some of what you
might be seeing for the first time. So Jo Mora of course you probably know
his name perhaps um 1876-1947,
attended art school and then established a commercial illustration
practice in Boston as a young man. And then as an adult he relocated with
his family to the southwest and he just fell in love with the landscape of
the southwest. So as a painter and a sculptor and a cartographic
illustrator, he had quite a successful career. He called his cartoon maps
, Cartas, which is French for maps and most of his cartographic work was
really centered here in the southwest. This is his 1931 Carter of the
Grand Canyon with color added for a 1959 reprinting and his son joe Jr
actually traveled around the southwest, drumming up subscriptions for
these maps, just like the itinerant um cartographers of the previous
century. So you can see how he was really inspired by for instance,
something like the atlas of Mexico. Um he's framing this image, you can
see a bit of that in the upper left hand corner, where he frames the more
cartographic map of the Grand Canyon. The pictorial images, Ernest Doubly
Chase was born in Lowell massachusetts. And so his, his Grand Canyon isn't
quite as detailed or um Lovely in terms of all the stories that it's
telling, but it's a beautiful map. You can see how he's really in love
with this idea of labeling everything. A little bit like the Eric Gill
image um that we saw earlier. This is his 1940 America, the Wonderland
Pictorial Map of the United States, all of the maps that he made, no
matter what the location have these really bountiful labels that we're
looking at. And again, because this is a map of the United States were not
tightly focused on the Grand Canyon. We're just getting kind of an aerial
view of it as an iconic tourist destination.
Another cartographer slash illustrator who really loved the Grand Canyon
was Jolly
Lindgren 1895-1952. And he was born Elmer um to his parents in Wisconsin
and then his family moved to Spokane Washington later on where he and his
brother Oscar established the lindgren Brothers decal printing company in
1928 and they made these what they called hysterical maps. And so the
point of was to tell jokes about the landscapes that they were depicting.
Um these were quite famous in their day, Maybe some of you have some at
home. Um They're really lovely. The land grants were also known for their
souvenir decals of tourism destinations. So the stickers that you can buy
and stick onto your stuff when you visit someplace like the Grand Canyon.
Um they got in on that action very early in 1948 and they were very
successful. So this is his 1940 hysterical map of Grand Canyon National
Park. And as you can see he's really fond of speech bubbles. So he's
taking that from the cartoons that he may have encountered um and
newspaper strips drawing on that visual tradition. We're going to come
back to all of these maps and talk about the stories that they tell. We're
just speeding through them as we get to know their illustrators. So this
is Catherine Cahill
1884-1962. Um I've never been able to locate an image of Catherine Cahill
, but this is an artist who she depicts on her map standing in for her.
She studied in Los Angeles at the school of illustration and painting with
William Cahill, whom she later married. Um and she mostly painted figures
and landscapes. This is her only map. It's a 1933 map um called Arizona
translated Little Springs and we're zoomed in on the canyon in the upper
left hand corner of your screen. Her husband eventually moved to New York
and she decided that Arizona was a better place to be. I'm not sure I can
blame her. So she relocated to Phoenix. Um she lived with her family and
globe before that. So she had some roots here in Arizona. Um had a solo
show at the Phoenix Art Center in January 1941. and again, this is her
only map. It was published in 19 33 and it predates anything done by
George A. V for Arizona highways. Um we're going to meet him in two more
slides except I'm sure you already know him and are familiar with his
beautiful images. So possibly he had seen this and was kind of thinking
about it as he got his pictorial cartography of Arizona underway.
We can't skip our friend ruth taylor. Um She lived most of her life in san
Francisco where she was a successful practicing commercial artist. She had
attended stanford for a while as an english major, but then decided really
she was an artist. Um she went to new york to study at the Institute of
Art and Design. Um and she married Leonard White in 1919 and they moved to
Phoenix. So she had some local roots here in Arizona as well. Um
eventually she divorced Leonard and moved back to northern California
where she continued to have an active career as a commercial illustrator.
She called her maps cartographic, I really like that word, I think it
works well. Um and she had significant success with them. Um but when I
was finally able to visit the archives at stanford and look at her papers
, evidently her brother frank reported that she got tired of doing maps
all the time, which I found a little bit heartbreaking, but I was able to
move on from that disappointment. Um here we're seeing a detail from her.
Arizona map from our usa, which as you already know, was published in
1935 and she's done her research right. Um She pictures a male weaver in
Hopi land for instance, which is historically accurate, but at the same
time, all of her characters are undeniably caricatures. Um so they're
playing familiar roles in expected ways and there's a real tension between
those caricatures and the obvious level of research that she poured into
what she was doing. Um You know, George A B I would imagine. Um But this
is his um map of Arizona 80 was the art director for Arizona Highways. His
mother was an art teacher and he studied art in high school. Um He studied
architecture at university for a while, but then had to return home as the
great depression started to have a really deep economic impact By 1933, he
was in the drafting office at the Arizona Highways Department and he moved
from there to take on art direction for Arizona Highways, the magazine
from 1938 to 1972.
And so we're seeing here his 1942 map. Arizona welcomes you and 80s are
probably the most famous cartoon maps of Arizona. I'm pretty sure most of
you have seen this image or one very much like it before. Um there are
definite parallels with Catherine Cahill's site specific narratives and
with Ruth Taylor's visual style. All of these illustrators are
participating in a broader visual culture that they're sharing with each
other. And like artists always do, they're quoting each other. Um and I'm
echoing one another.
Done blood good, 18 96 to 1989 lived in Sedona from the 19 sixties inward
and like Gilmore, he fell in love with the landscape of the southwest. He
was a really active commercial cartographic illustrator with big name
clients like Shell oil. Um we're looking here at his pick tour guide map
of Arizona and like Ernest doubly Chase. He's really, really fond of these
textual labels, um drawing on the tradition of bird's eye view maps and
every so often he'll use a speech bubble as well often to tell a joke and
then last but not least reg manning another Arizona native 1905 to 1986.
It was a Pulitzer prize winning editorial cartoonist for the Arizona
Republic where he hired on in 1926 and remained until the end of his
career. His family moved to phoenix when he was a teenager and he took
part in high school and this was his only formal artistic training. Um but
in 1938 he wrote the cartoon guide to Arizona and it included this
beautiful map that we're seeing in detail of here. He's indebted to
cartoons for all of his speech bubbles and he makes really good use of
these to tell lots of stories and jokes that are local to Arizona.
So in addition to being influenced by visual forms and by the people who
made them, these maps were also influenced by their corporate sponsors. Um
We're going to start off with the National Park Service, which of course
is not corporate, but we can't skip over the national park service because
they commissioned so many amazing maps of the Grand Canyon um like other
truly corporate interests, they did this to stimulate interest in tourism.
Um so they played a large sponsorship role and a lot of national parks
maps like the 1957 1 on the left are useful, right? They get us around and
hopefully we don't have to have rangers come and fetch us because we got
lost in the Grand Canyon, but some of them were commissioned to be
decorative or collectible or just playing fun. Our good friend ruth taylor
had some family connections with the National parks service. Her sister
was married to an NPS official, Her brother frank did a lot of freelancing
writing work with them. And she illustrated this book ranger, a book about
the national parks, which of course features the Grand Canyon is one of
the iconic sites that you need to visit when you come to America. Um,
of course you can't escape fred harvey at the Grand Canyon. You knew I was
going to talk about fred harvey, I'm sure his tourist services for the
santa fe railway are famous. We're looking at a 1928 map of the indian
detours on the right in the 1946 illustrated map of the Great Southwest on
the left. We're going to come back to all of these maps when we talk about
the stories that they're telling, so I'm not going to paul's and describe
them in detail even though it's so tempting. Um, the Atchison Topeka and
santa fe railway released illustrated maps as well that weren't
necessarily connected to harvey at the very top level of their visual
communication strategy. Um, the map on the left is from 1956 and when you
read the small print, it encourages tourists to visit the Grand Canyon,
quote the largest natural Cannon Canyon in the world. I'm not sure that's
what I would say about the Grand Canyon if that's the only phrase I were
using to describe it. It's, it's the biggest in the world. Um, but that's
the first they used and then the 1950 map on the right emphasizes the
quote enormous transportation system and tremendous network represented by
santa fes lines. And this is a recurring theme for a lot of the corporate
sponsors. You can get where you need to go. You can arrive at the Grand
Canyon because of our amazing transit networks that we can build for you
and our offering to you at a wonderful low price. Um so while the santa fe
emphasized, the Grand Canyon is part of the southwest, the Union pacific
included the canyon as part of a menu of Great Northwestern sites because
of course, um they want you to stay at their tourist large lodgings which
are on the north rim. Um, so the canyon is both the largest and the most
southerly site available for Union pacific and they feature it on many of
the maps that encourage you to travel throughout the west on the Union
pacific
Airlines in addition to just flying over Arizona in general, often
sponsored cartoon maps to encourage tourism. So this is a 1945 map for
American airlines and its emphasizing Americans routes of course, and
shows how the route of the flagships connects you with other perhaps
lesser carriers and their routes and it's really functional. It, it tells
you where to go, it tells you time zone scale is marked, which is unusual
for a cartoon math and we have a ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. Um
, it's not really more important than any other sites on the map, but you
can definitely get their traveling on americans flagships.
This is Ruth Taylor White's 1939 map for United Airlines and it is a
little bit more focused on um, the Grand Canyon as part of this larger um
network of sites that you should absolutely see as you travel the United
States as a tourist. This is a detail from a 1936 map drawn at Rand
McNally for T. W. A. And it's clearly calling on with Taylor's language of
gay geography here. I haven't been able to track down exactly who at Rand
McNally illustrated this map. Um, but it's definitely cheerful with these
chubby little cartoon characters and lots of labels and speech bubbles.
It's calling on a lot of the formal features that we've already seen.
You can get to the Grand Canyon by bus. Um, so this is greyhounds, good
natured map of the colorful southwest from 1939 and its small print tells
us Arizona holds much in store for you. You will not want to miss the side
trip from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon side trip to the Grand Canyon. It
is impossible to convey in words the vastness, the beauty, the
magnificence of this world famous wonder.
Um, This is the National Trailways bus system map from 1949. It's a little
bit unusual because it's not showing us any roads. Um, but occasionally we
see a bus. So I guess we can travel by bus on roads to the Grand Canyon
and emphasis here is really on human interaction with the site. So we're
looking at all of these maps because they show us how these systems that
were commissioning. The maps are part of larger networks stretching across
the country encouraging americans to see America first. And if we think
about our historical timeline, these maps are published in an era
characterized by patriotism after World War One and then my thrift during
the depression years. So you're not going to hop a jet to europe. Um,
you're going to see America first and tour your own country as an
expression of national pride and as a money saving strategy for a cheaper
vacation because americans are practical. Right? So as the interstate and
highway systems developed, an automobile ownership rose. Turning around in
your own car. Was also encouraged those kind of towards the end of the
period that we're looking at here. And oil companies of course
commissioned maps, possibly you have some of these at home. My, my mom was
telling me she had some when she was a kid and then she threw them all out
when she was cleaning her room at some point. Mom, she has many other
great qualities. Um, so the oil companies commissioned maps to boost
travel to establish themselves as a household name. I found this one in a
thrift shop. Um, my mom's great, she didn't ruin my life by throwing out
her maps. Um, and it's, it's a pretty typical oil company map, right? It
shows what we can see when we travel around at the Grand Canyon. Of course
we see the canyon, we see surrounding narratives. Um, and that's what
we're going to talk about with the rest of our time that I'm trying to
keep track of closely here. Um, so these stories um frame the Grand Canyon
for us and as it turns out the, the stories that they tell us about the
Grand Canyon are pretty similar. So visually we've seen a wide variety of
images. The narratives that they craft Horace. The stories that they tell
are pretty consistent across all of these visually um diverse maps. And
the first of these stories is easy access. So historically, of course, um
you get to the rim by horse. Um These are santa fe, advertising images
from earlier in the century, but by the time cartoon maps emerged in the
twenties and the thirties, um transportation at the canyon is no longer
horse drawn. The santa fe railway had opened its branch railroad line in
1901. El Tovar opened in 1905. So by the time the cartoon maps come along
, you jaunt over to the Grand Canyon by train or by bus on a network that
spreads throughout Arizona and across the United States, travel to and
through the canyon is now as we can see on the maps themselves,
accomplished by train or bus or car, no matter where you are in America,
you can hop a ride that takes you to the Grand Canyon. And once you're
there, transportation networks are really clearly marked again. As you now
know often because of corporate sponsorship. Right. The commissioner of
the map has a lot to do with how transportation of the canyon is pictorial.
Ized.
Um, you're going to see some famous sights while you're there. You can
take your own personal car, you can take an airplane ride over the Grand
Canyon. Um, as with helicopter rides today, taking a biplane flight over
the canyon on some of these maps is offered as a really great way to
access views that are unreachable by wheeled vehicle or on foot. The Grand
Canyon Airport opened to commercial flights in 1925. Um, as we can see on
the blood goods map towards the right hand side of your screen. Um, and
not all of these maps include flight as a transit option, but quite a lot
of them do and they're definitely about access to the scenery once you're
there at the Canyon. Um, for those of you who prefer to stay on the ground
and not ride around on top of a biplane. No worries. Um, there's this
really great. According to the maps network of roads within the park. The
often show tourists enjoying the view from their car and the upper left
hand corner. We're seeing hater and haters 1932 map that emphasizes the
business of the Canyon and the crowds who flock there by depicting a
traffic jam headed into the park. So this map was an illustration for a
cartoon atlas of the United States, a little bit like ruth taylor's. Um,
as you can probably imagine maps that were explicitly distributed often by
transit companies to encourage tourism did not picture traffic jams. They
just left that out of the narrative entirely. Once you're there, once
you've escaped the traffic jam and you're tooling around with the Canyon,
how should you organize your travels and what are you supposed to do while
task number one is to enjoy the sublime views. John Wesley Powell had
wrote, had written about this in his 1895 edition of Exploration of the
Colorado River and its canyons. It's a famous quote, I'm sure you've heard
it. The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in
symbols of speech nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic arts
are taxed beyond their powers and attempting to portray its features.
Language and illustration combined must fail. And yet it's the USgs that
gives us what's probably the foundational image of white tourists enjoying
the views at the Grand Canyon. Um, this is Clarence Dutton's panorama from
point sublime published in 18 82 and I'm really hard pressed to think of a
cartoon map that doesn't essentially quote this image to us just in a very
different visual language.
Tiny humans perch on the edge at the canyon right, and they look at the
awesome views and they need to record their experience visually. Um so
very, very early on in the Canyons life as a tourist destination. Railway
adds situated the activity of looking in a commercial context. The canyon
is a living piece of art on Union Pacific's Ad and the left um drinking it
in as the primary activity that tourists are responsible for. And cartoon
maps definitely adopt this visual language and they play on this familiar
trope in most of the images that we're seeing. So a lot of the maps will
picture as we're seeing here, tools for looking. We don't just look, we
have special tools that help us to look at the Grand Canyon. Um We have
cameras, we have easels, we have palette. These artists are using art as a
lens to frame a really specific way of encountering the Grand Canyon. Um,
so Don Bloodgood gives us photographers, jo mora shows us painters.
Katharine. Cahill includes an observer with a telescope pointed at the
canyon. We are not looking here. Um in the bottom left hand corner at her
Lowell Observatory image. We're looking at her Grand Canyon image and the
person here is using a telescope to zoom in. Um a lot of the maps show
characters who are acting sort of like tour guides with their fellow
tourists. Um This seems to be the case in the humble oil map on the top
right, we're pointing out the beautiful views in the distance.
Um other characters just stand around and kind of golf and wonder. Um So
two of these maps, one by George, avian, one by bob Betley used the phrase
golly what a goalie. Um That's not what I said the first time I saw the
Grand Canyon, but the thought is probably similar. Right, wow! Um Even
Ruth Taylor writes the Mule Deer. So if you look at the illustration in
the bottom left hand corner, even the mule deer is gazing and wonder at
the Canyon. Um and then the 1948 map on the top left signed Smith uses a
speech bubble to emphasize again the smallness of humans and the grandness
of the Grand Canyon. It's not as elegant as Dutton's panorama, but it
really is expressing quite the same view. The message is the same, of
course, how to look isn't the only story that we're being told by these
maps. Yes, there's easy access to sublime views, but there's also this
narrative of the untamed wilderness. So on the south rim mule trails
dominate this untamed wilderness story. There are remote locations that
are unreachable by car or other real vehicle and you have to access them
by mule, so john hantz operated a hotel about 15 miles east of today's
Grand Canyon village and he started advertising lodgings and mule rides in
18 87. You know of course the Cold brothers in their souvenir photo studio
at Bright Angel Trail. Um Taking snapshots of tourists on mule back,
starting around 19 04. And then we have plucky tourists on all of these
cartoon maps that are keeping this tradition alive for us. Um so we're
seeing joe Maura, Don Bloodgood, reg manning, jolly lindgren and the 1930
60 W A. Map here and all of them show tourists taking mule rides.
Sometimes the trails are barely there and then like the jolly lindgren map
in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Sometimes they're really
more like roads. I feel like even I can stay on a mule if we were riding
on roads.
Um at the north rim of course hunting camps represents this idea of wild
spaces. So north rim tourists encounter wild animals and bed down in
rustic lodgings, evidently they also get chased around by giant kaibab
squirrels and angry buffalo. Um I, I got to just skip this experience when
I went to the Grand Canyon as well. Not so sorry about that. And as in
real life there are fewer visitors on the north room. It's a lot emptier,
a lot more open. Um at least according to Don Bloodgood and Katharine
cahill who we're looking at again here. Catherine cahill's angry buffalo
really scares me every time I look at it very closely. Um and this leads
us to the last Wilderness Trobe, which is that of empty space. So the
enormity and the untouched beauty of the canyon is persistent Throughout
all of these maps is a visual motif. And here we're seeing Catherine
cahill, jolly lindgren fred harvey in the National Park Service, showing
us that there are these vast swaths of untouched land, wild, completely
void of human presence. But don't worry if a rustic hunting cabin isn't
really your cup of tea, all of these maps also highlight the desirable
amenities available at the Grand Canyon. So somehow empty wilderness and
luxury hotels are not at all incompatible if you're not. When construction
of Bright Angel Lodge was announced, for instance, a 1903 newspaper in
Globe had a lot to say about that magnificent edifice that will be three
stories high and will afford every modern convenience.
So both the santa fe and the Union pacific railroads made sure that the
cartoon map they commissioned. We're going to show us their luxury
accommodations for the Union pacific emphasis, of course, was on the Grand
Canyon Lodge on the North room, which had opened in 1928 burned down in
1932 was rebuilt on the same site in 1937. And for the santa fe, of course
, the iconic destination was Harvey's el Tovar on the south rim and we're
seeing lots of details from joe moore's map of the Grand Canyon um which
since moore was kind of an independent observer, shows both of these
famous destinations without discriminating between the two of them. The
famous hotels and deluxe cabins. The only kind of cabin I would like to
stay in were featured on railway maps, like the to harvey maps um that are
in this image, the blue one up top and then the Grand Canyon El Tovar
detail below it. Um, but these same destinations made their way onto maps
that weren't sponsored by the railways as well. So we're looking at
details from other maps tailored Bloodgood that you've already seen and
notice how all of these points out these famous hotels as tourist sites in
and of themselves, tourists should see them because they are part of the
experience of visiting the Grand Canyon, part of the experience of that
place. So for harvey, you might even say that el Tovar really kind of
equals the Grand Canyon typographic lee. That's certainly what's starting
to happen here on this map.
One of the most persistent stories that the maps tell is of course, that
of the timeless, what they call natives.
Um, so the indian detours map tells viewers that they will visit a land
that is at once the last frontier and the home of an ageless antiquity.
There's this idea that native americans will give presumably white
tourist access to days gone by merely by their presence in the landscape.
Um, and we have a historical indigenous neighbors on every side of the
canyon landscape. Ruth taylor's 1929 card, A graph of the Grand Canyon
populates the region with native american characters in traditional dress
, um traditional architecture, craft and costume are always on display
adjacent to the Grand Canyon. And then um the haters and Quinn in 1931 for
their illustrated atlas is in the top right corner, make sure that we
experience the landscape of the Canyon as an activity that's framed by and
surrounded with indicators of authentic native American culture. This is a
1927 Winslow Daily Mail newspaper item that's talking about a new curio
store opened by Hopi chief joe Sakic or yellow feet. Um soon after the
arrival of two truckloads of curios from the Hopi reservation, he would
open his shop and he plans, says the newspaper to bring indian workers to
his establishment there to do their native leaving and other works of art
for the benefit of the visitors Later on, Hampton's also to produce indian
dances and other tribal ceremonies. So this emphasis on authentic native
residents is an established visual narrative. By the time the cartoon maps
are introduced. Harvey of course had been marketing the idea of indians at
the Grand Canyon for a really long time and indigenous culture is on
display constantly throughout these maps, primarily as a way of providing
um, and the images at least white tourists with access to native peoples
and practices. So we have access to traditional craft visiting the Grand
Canyon turns into a shopping trip as well as a way of learning about
native american cultures, crafts are equivalent to souvenirs. Um and
that's very apparent and a lot of the textual labels on a lot of these
maps
and then of course performance turns up on many, many of the maps as well
more than simply being made. Traditional crafts are performed as we have
seen by the people who make them. And then we can also see um indigenous
americans performing identity through dance through song through
culturally specific activities like weaving or pottery, even simply
performing the idea of native America as an object of passive observation
as in the smith image in the center here um just by standing there
presumably for the white visitors to be able to gaze at their leisure.
There's also this idea in the maps that native americans are living in the
depths that their remote and unspoiled. Of course they are living there.
Um the Havasupai are portrayed as simple farmers and keepers of
traditional life ways on the maps. Um jolly lindgren reg manning, john
Bloodgood Katharine cahill ruth taylor white all make um this trope
apparent in their maps and Maura um shows us cliff dwellers. They feel a
little bit more stone age than anything else in his cliff dwellers lament
on the far right and it's complicated right? Because of course the
Havasupai reservation is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the Hopi in
the Navajo do have rich traditions of living in textile production and the
Yavapai do have a strong and diverse heritage of dance and all of these
things show up on the maps. Um so one of the complicated things about them
is that they really are quite carefully researched in a lot of their
details and they can be accurate in many ways, but at the same time, they
can also really flatten these experiences and treat them in a very a
historical way, removing them from specificity or from contemporary
culture or even from a very specific historical moment in space and time.
Um and simply having the past as kind of this endless, undifferentiated
hazy um and yet beautifully illustrated moment. So one last example of
course, is how um native americans keep watch in the cartoon maps often at
desert view watchtower a. K. A. Indian watchtower. Um And a lot of the
maps pick up on this motif probably you already know. The watch tower was
designed by mary Colter, Finished in 1932, modeled on ancient pueblo
peoples watchtowers, particularly the one at National Monument.
I'm not sure that we really have time for our bonus story of not falling
in. Um but we're not talking about suicide right? We're going to talk
about that later. I want to talk about it, But this persistent motif of
holding people back from the edge. Um I was kind of really surprised by
this and I found it really, really funny as I went along. Um there's lots
of holding back from the edge, not leaning too far, don't fall in. Um It
takes me back to childhood tourism activities with my dad who was always
afraid that one of us was going to fall over some ledge somewhere and a
couple of inches was enough to spark anxiety. We never visited the Grand
Canyon as a family. Um but when I did visit there, I had this moment of,
oh gosh, I can't get too close to the edge. I will fall in. It really
turns up on a lot of these maps, but of course the Canyon Kitties never
fall in. It's really exhausting that all of the grown up white adults are
about to just drop over the edge accidentally at any moment. But the
Canyon kitties are up to all sorts of hijinks right on the edge and
they're never scared and they never fall in. Um So as we wrap up, my
question, looking at these maps is always why should we even care why
bother. Um and my argument is that these maps have left us with a visual
legacy. Right? Um so when we look at more contemporary maps, like The one
on the left by boy dement from 1983. His touristed mileage map In 1991 map
by Blaine Kaye Stevens on the top right, and then a vintage postcard
reprint that you can still buy in gift shops. Um, we can see that we have
inherited these visual vocabularies from the past and we keep on playing
out these narratives and it might be time to pause and reflect and see if
there are ways to broaden those narratives in any way, um, to be more
inclusive or to ask ourselves difficult questions about contemporary
issues of land use and resource management or tourism at the Grand Canyon.
Um, not all of the persistent motifs are this serious. We can see on the
left there, there's not a fence around the Grand Canyon to keep us from
falling in, so it's safe to go there. You won't fall in. These visual
tropes continue to persist. Um, you can find by be given maps that are
still drawing on this visual language as you tour around Arizona, as I'm
sure, you know, because you're in Arizona. Um, so you can pick up maps
like these in many locations. Um, and this visual heritage continues to
influence folks who are producing maps today. So explorer maps, we're
looking at a detail of their beautiful map here, specifically draws
attention to their images as hand drawn and historicism. They're not stock
, they feel a little bit old timing and that's part of their appeal there.
Clearly drawing on the formal visual language of the past that we've been
looking at together and these maps are repeating the stories that we've
been telling ourselves about the Grand Canyon since we first started
touring it. Nostalgia can be a really powerful tool that prompts us to
think fondly of the good old days, but I think we have to ask ourselves at
some point exactly what we're nostalgic for. Are there parts of that story
that we might need to reconsider or that we need to stop repeating as we
move forward into the future? These are really big questions and I am not
in any way suggesting that the cartoon maps we've seen today are going to
answer them for us. Um those are complex questions and even more complex
answers, but maybe these images can prompt us to start asking those
questions. Um so thanks for hanging out with me and hearing this story
about cartoon maps of the Grand Canyon. Um you can get in touch with me if
you wanted to know more about any specific image. Thanks folks, thank
you. Okay, so I did kind of a bad job of timing, but maybe we have time
for questions. If anyone has them. Your bad job, I would say that's great
job, that's ahead of schedule for the coordinator. That's great. So we
have some time. Um that was a wonderful presentation. So if you guys have
some questions, let's let's dive in
or if you want to see a specific image again because I advanced too
quickly for you to read it. Can you hear me
specifically joe Morris um story is as a young artist. And this is a
comment that I wonder if you, in your research knew that he painted and he
lived among the Hopi and painted very detailed images of casino dancers.
Not not cartoons but right. Yeah.
Yeah. And they were um at some point too much detail. And they went into
the archives at the Museum of Northern Arizona and elsewhere. And he made
this transition in the 1920s to cartooning. And you mentioned his accurate
portrayal, one of the things he and others portrayed with the snake dance
which began to trivialize it to the point where the Hopis said no more
visitors to the snake dance. And and I think um I saw you thought it was a
Hopi male weaver. I double check that. Yeah. But it was also next to
Navajo land. So I just love the detail and thank you so much. And it's
yeah. Research process was just really really deep. So a lot of that came
through in his maps.
Hi Dory. It was wonderful. Um since this is sponsored by in part by the
CSU library. I wanted to ask you, where did you find all of these
wonderful images And when you talk a little bit about, you know the role
of research libraries and archives and where you had to hunt to find these.
So the the wonderful librarians at a. S. U. Both while I was writing my
dissertation and while I was putting talk together very generously hooked
me up with some wonderful high resolution scans of various items in the
collection. And then the other thing that I would encourage for those of
you who maybe want to look in more detail um is the David Rumsey are um S
. E. Y. Map collection. Um Is that house at stanford now? Is that where it
physically ended up? Yes so another university library but that one is
open access online. They're all zoo mobile Youtube can go there and zoom
in to look at the tiniest tiniest detail. And without librarians every
time I go to a new city every time I move to a new university my first
point of contact is my librarian because without them the work cannot
um your distinction if there is any between cartoon maps and pictorials
which you did not mention that term.
That's a really tricky line to navigate. And I had a lot of philosophical
arguments with myself as I put this presentation together and sort of
decided to despair you all that that conversation I had with my cat about
the difference between pictorial maps and cartoon maps. Um I tried to zoom
in and concentrate on the ones that had you know speech bubbles labels,
the rounded nous of cartoon characters. I think a lot of maps tread that
really fine line. Um So I was trying to focus today on a very rough and
non scholarly definition. That's basically maps that tell jokes,
please don't quote me in print because that's not a very great scholarly
definition,
like.
Mhm.
Absolutely. Yeah,
they do.
So there are a lot of companies creating cartoon maps or pictorial maps in
a contemporary context and they do the these tourist maps can be very very
highly detailed, but unfortunately as you pointed out, so rightly a lot of
times they're quoting the same narratives as their source material. So
when I teach these maps, usually one of the first things we do is exactly
what we did today. We pause to talk about what stories they are telling um
what caricatures they are putting forward what tired old narratives
they're asking us to still buy into. Um and and we approach them both in
terms of appreciating them for their level of detail and research and then
also to critique them for the stories that they continue to tell and to
ask ourselves, you know, maybe in our classrooms there's the person who
will be the next jo mora or the next ruth taylor. Um I live in hope at any
rate.
Uh Yeah, great presentation. Thanks again Dory. Um I noticed that on some
of the maps there's a representation of what the surrounding landscape is
for. And there was one map by a v I think was this last name maybe um
which showed a lot of ranching, grazing, mining, hunting and if you can
find it, there was a representation of a park ranger there and the park
ranger had his arms folded and a stern look on his face. Don't come in
here. He's policing that landscape
contrast to the cartoon map you showed by manning. Which had that sort of
super welcoming, friendly hand up in the air. Come on in park ranger.
Yeah, none of the other ones had a park ranger like that. But yeah, all of
the other rangers are really really cheerful fellows, but this one's a
little bit scary. I I I noticed that and I didn't really know what to make
of it. It was a little bit baffling. Um but maybe he's worried they were
going to fall in. I don't know. Well I have, if you look at all the other
people uh you know, there's an awful lot of resource users and there's a
conflict, there's a long historical conflict between the resource
industries and the people dependent on those resource industries and the
park service which they think is locking up lands and keeping people out.
And so that's what I see reflect. That's a really interesting observation
and I will now go home and track down all sorts of other things that I
could look at to think about that further. Yeah.
One contemporary cartoon map producer is tom lamb okay, L. A. M. B. And
he's done maps in basically the 2000s and contemporary so you can look
them up. But um cataloged a map of the Los feliz area of Los Angeles and
my colleague said, oh look there's my apartment. It even has the umbrellas.
I will be headed back to my hotel room tonight. Silicon in as well.
I didn't see anything by bob walled meyer. Did he do nothing of the Grand
Canyon? He's the famous cartoon map maker that for Route 66. I have not
found anything by walled Meyer yet. Um, but the search continues. Okay,
thank you so much everybody. I had a great time. I hope you did too.