Page 21 - Early Naturalists of the Black Range

Henry S. Tanner Map of 1825
The Henry S. Tanner Map of 1825 (the third edition - 1846) is shown below. It was the original source of a substantial amount of angst in the late 1840’s. This was a good map for the time, but it did have its faults, and those faults led to some international disputes.
The 1828 map published by White, Gallaher & White was plagiarized from Tanner’s 1825 map of Mexico. It is shown on the following page, including a detail from the map which shows the area of the Black Range. As a point of reference, the San Diego crossing is in the lower right corner of the map detail, and the mountain range running north and south about a quarter of the way from the right is the Sierra de los Mimbres. To the left of the Sierra de los Mimbres are the Burro Mountains, the Gila, and the San Francisco. There is also an unknown river flowing into the Gila from the south - this might be an erroneously depicted Rio Mimbres. The road from Chihuahua to Santa Fe is clearly marked as well.
Disturnell’s map (see page 48), which caused such confusion for the United States-Mexico Boundary Survey in the late 1840’s, was based on the White, Gallaher & White map.
The practice of plagiarizing earlier works, or simply using them as definitive sources of information, is a continuing source of irritation and litigation in modern map-making. It is not all about the past. It is not uncommon for map makers to intentionally introduce errors on their maps to make it easier to prove copyright violations. The legal effectiveness of these techniques has been drawn into question by recent rulings of the United States Supreme Court, specifically Feist v. Rural Telephone Company and Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Amsterdam.
The map shown below is from the David Rumsey Map Collection. The link will take you to the map overlaid on a modern map, what they call their “georeferencer”, an extremely useful tool when trying to decipher exactly what early maps are showing.
Maps, in general, can provide a significant amount of insight into what was known of the world at a specific time. The series of maps depicted in this reference (Early Naturalists of the Black Range) clearly demonstrates a growing precision over the years. From that it is easy to infer, at the very least, a growing understanding of the geography, geology, and hydrology of our area.
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