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Charting the past
Frontier Pathways hosting exhibit
of old and new Pueblo maps

By MARY JEAN PORTER
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

Maps long have guided travelers through unfamiliar territory, but they've also put ideas into their heads.

Take, for instance, two of the maps on display at the Frontier Pathways Scenic and Historic Byway information center at El Pueblo History Museum. One map boasts 10 reasons why Pueblo will make a "great city," while the other ticks off 25 reasons, among them: Pueblo is the "greatest manufacturing and money distributing city of the West"; has the largest smelting works in the world, and the largest copper works; has water power "almost unlimited"; has gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc and iron ores, plus coal and oil in abundance; has a "perfect" sanitarium for consumptives; and its rail connections to Denver are unparalleled.

Pueblo boosters aren't quite this blatant today, but in the 1880s when the maps were published - the latter for the Downen-Gibson (real estate) Investment Co. of Pueblo - hype was the promoter's best friend, and maps could be a colorful, scientific-looking means to his end.

These two maps and others can be seen in "Mapping Pueblo from Past to Present," on display through May 14 at the Frontier Pathways byway information center. The exhibit contains 13 historic maps from the collections of Denverite Wesley Brown and the Denver Public Library, and 10 current or futuristic maps from the Pueblo County GIS Center. Also exhibited are surveying equipment on loan from the county public works department, aerial photos from Pueblo City-County Library District and an interactive mapping station where visitors can create maps of their own neighborhoods.

"One thing we want is to let people know the byway information center is here," says executive director Dawn DiPrince. "We promote tourism but also historic preservation, scenic conservation and economic development. I think this (exhibit) marries all this. I think it fosters pride in the community."

Chris Markuson, GIS (geographic information systems) manager for Pueblo County, notes that next year is the 200th anniversary of Zebulon Pike's arrival at what is now Pueblo, and the map exhibit - which contains a map drawn by Pike - is a nice complement.

Pike drew his map, "A Chart of the Internal Part of Louisiana" from "Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi, 1810," several years after he explored this area, working from his journals. It shows the area where Pueblo is now located and prominently features the Arkansas River. Pikes Peak is labeled "Highest Peak."

"Pike came with a bias," Markuson says. "He was looking to see how the West could be harvested and what Mexican troops were doing."

Predating Pike's map by more than 200 years is "Nueva Hispana - Tabula Nova," which shows the Southwest and was drawn in 1548 by Venetian Giacomo Gastaldi. It was included in a pocket atlas, was the first of a series of maps and was revolutionary because it was engraved on copper rather than wood.

Gastaldi was the map-maker of the 16th century, Markuson says, "a world-renowned guy." But he never visited this region, instead drawing his map from earlier maps of the continent and its coastlines.

"Some of these (early) maps just filled in the details," Di Prince says. "Like this one (Gastaldi's). They just threw in the mountains (in inaccurate places) to balance it out. They were very uncomfortable with wide-open spaces and that's what the West is.

"The thing that's so interesting is the American West didn't really exist (in people's minds) until it was put on a map. It was such an unknown."

"And because it didn't exist," Markuson adds, "it left it open to imagination and it became this recruitment thing. Maps became a way to draw immigrants to the West. Government officials making maps probably had as big an impact (on opening the West) as anything else."

Maps were built on earlier maps - as is evident in the ones displayed here - and though they might appear static, they actually represent the evolution of thought, Markuson says.

"Mapping Pueblo" also includes maps drawn by Alexandre de Humboldt (1811), who borrowed from the journals of Father Silvestre Escalante; Capt. John W. Gunnison, who was surveying for the Central Pacific Railroad; Josiah Gregg (1844), who borrowed from Pike and mapped "The Indian Territory, Northern Texas and New Mexico and The Great Western Prairies"; and Lt. J.W. Abert (1845), who was mapping for Capt. John C. Fremont.

The centerpiece of the exhibit, according to DiPrince, is the 1874 bird's-eye view of Pueblo which is juxtaposed against a 3-D computer-generated model of the city today.

The county GIS center's contribution to the exhibit is a set of large, brightly colored maps that convey information in up-to-date ways.

Pointing to one of them, Markuson says, "I can tell the computer to find me every parcel of land of a certain grade, a certain valuation, within a certain distance of a highway."

The computer quickly does that, and then identifies those parcels on a map of the county, which then can be used for a variety of purposes, including economic development.

GIS technology allows layers of information to be presented at once, in graphic form.

"The Gastaldi map was something only the most elite people could possess," Markuson says. "Now anybody can create a much better map using the county's Web site."

The Pueblo County GIS Web site is pueblomaps.com.

"Mapping Pueblo from Past to Present" is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday at the byway information center at the museum. Admission is free.

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