LAUSR

revision of 1778. (Both are held in the British Library, and Kessell explains how they got there.) Miera’s “Plano Geographico” covers a vast area, roughly speaking from Santa Fe in the southeast corner of the map, well into central Colorado, northwest to the Great Salt Lake and southwest to the Grand Canyon. Bringing unique knowledge of this vast area was, in Kessell’s words “an unprecedented achievement” (p. 41) and in Wheat’s words, “a truly epochal map” (cited by Kessell, p. 35; also see Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West [San Francisco, CA: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957], vol. 1, p. 96). Scholars will thank Kessell who provides, in Appendix 1, a complete Spanish transcription of the map’s hundreds of place names and geographical features. Every campsite of the trip is noted on the map (usefully chronicled by Kessell in Appendix 2). Several descriptive legends abound, including one describing the “Sea of the West” as a hoax. One error, however, is of particular interest. On the map appear two connected lakes. One, labeled Laguna Timpanogos after local tribes, is today’s freshwater Utah Lake. It connects to a larger unlabeled lake to the north: today’s Great Salt Lake. The exhausted expedition chose not to investigate the northern Great Salt Lake. Connecting to this lake, on its left, is a major river flowing due west to the border of the map, which would become, on maps created by later map-makers, the River Buenaventura or River of the West believed to flow directly into the Pacific Ocean. Kessell puts the map in context by discussing important antecedents: Francisco Álvarez Barreiro’s map of 1726 and José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez’s map of 1768, both of which illustrate the paucity of information in the southwest available before Miera’s map. In addition, he explains the key Spanish map by Miguel Costansó and Manuel Augustín Mascaró in 1779 that copied Miera. This later map is important because it was the one studied by Humboldt to know the expedition’s discoveries; it is believed that Humboldt never looked at Miera’s maps directly. I especially enjoyed Kessell’s explanation of the errors on the Miera map and how they led astray generations of map-makers. Students interested in the mythical rivers of the west will enjoy Kessell’s discussion of key printed maps (Captain Zebulon Pike’s in 1810, John Melish’s in 1816, and Henry Tanner’s in 1822), all of which used Miera’s lakes to fantasize about the possibility that various rivers crossed the west to the Pacific. The dominance of Miera’s geographic image of the southwest is finally superseded, in Kessell’s words, “[f]or it was [Captain John Charles] Frémont’s epochal [map] [...] drafted by [Charles] Preuss and published in 1845, that finally demotes Miera’s ‘Plano Goegraphico’ from cartographic signpost to artifact;” the map “at last shows definitively whither the waters run, and more significantly, whither they don’t.” (pp. 71–72) The book is thoughtfully and compactly written, is well printed with 53 high-quality color illustrations, and is very reasonably priced. It should be read by map lovers and students of the American West alike.