Month: January 2024

Northwest Publishing Co.’s 1901 Plat Book of Chase County, Kansas, includes an outline map of the entire county. As evidenced by this map’s key (pictured below), human creations are prioritized over natural features.

Structures such as roads, houses, and churches are all identified with labels on the map. Only one category of natural features, labeled as “Creeks & Springs,” are included. Given that water is essential to settlement and agriculture, this inclusion fits with the generally human-focused purpose of the map. However, a view of the entire map reveals a more specific proposition.

The above map is dominated not by buildings or roads, which would be easily visible to those actually standing on the ground in Chase County. Rather, the most prominent characteristic of this map is the grid lines. This grid denotes the surveying of Chase County, which divided the area into sections and property lots. Given their mostly equal size and straight borders, one can infer that mathematics (not, say, topography or soil fertility) primarily informed the division of the land. Though the grid system is purely the creation of the human mind, the map nonetheless proposes that these lot and farm distinctions exist where they do. Unlike buildings, mountains, roads, or rivers, property only really exists on paper. And yet, through mapping, gridded property lots become a reality which binds society and individuals.

In his book PrairyErth, William Least Heat Moon contemplates the grid system as a framework for his literary “deep map” of Chase County:

Heat Moon points out that the coordinate system is detached from land and history. While this detachment could allow broad room for Heat Moon to structure his exploration, it also alludes to an important reminder about mapping. Maps need not be strictly beholden to physical subjects—whether they be created by humans or nature. Instead, maps can impose ideas or legal conventions onto physical space. In the words of Heat Moon, maps like the one explored in this post have “allowed the wildness to be subdued.” Much is left out of the 1901 Outline Map of Chase County, and this is deliberate. The purpose of the map is to portray how the land has been organized and divided to facilitate ownership, not to recreate or represent the natural, or even certain aspects of the human, world.

The Outline Map of Chase Co. Kansas. 1901. seems to be a reference map which proposes an “outline” of the land organization and settlement patterns of Chase County, Kansas. With the map’s title beginning with “outline,” the mapmaker clearly did not intend to provide the viewer with a comprehensive guide to the landscape of Chase County and instead intended to provide limited information about the landscape and the settlements in the county.

The map primarily focuses on depicting human-made features such as towns, schoolhouses, and railroads. . .

. . . as well as features that humans have imposed on the landscape such as the clearly marked Township and Range lines of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) that pervade the map.

The mapmaker largely omitted depicting most natural terrain and vegetation on this map in favor of depicting these human-made and human-imposed features. This indicates that the mapmaker intended for this map to help people buying land in Chase County determine where they might like to purchase land and what amenities may be near that area.

Despite omitting most natural features, this map does depict streams and rivers that run through the county.

Having a nearby water source to provide water for human habitation, livestock, and crops would be an important consideration for a prospective landowner. As a result, this map depicts water sources throughout the county to better serve its purpose of providing people buying land in Chase County with an outline of the county’s layout to better inform their purchase.

In his book PrairyErth: (a deep map), William Least Heat-Moon provides readers with an outline of Chase County with a simple grid of twelve blank squares each representing one section of Chase County.

Throughout the book, Heat-Moon fills in these empty spaces by describing the minute details of the landscape of Chase County as he creates a “deep map” of the area.

Prospective landowners viewing the Outline Map of Chase Co. Kansas. 1901. similarly used their imagination to fill the “empty” and featureless natural landscape the map depicts with the plans they had for the land they sought to purchase.

The portrayal of plots of land as blank spaces allowed viewers to imagine the farms, ranches, businesses, or houses they planned to construct on a “blank slate” of land in Chase County, creating their own imaginary “deep map” of part of the county.

You should review the “how to write a blog post” page before you begin. Probably helpful before you read the assignments and look at the maps too…

Here is some insightful thing I want to say about mapping based on 1. readings and 2. mapping products. (Imagine I’m 400 words).

Oh yeah, and here is an image I’m using for support (think of this as visual quotation marks). It can be at the beginning, middle, or end of your post. The format and structure is up to you!

…which I want to compare to this one…

Don’t forget to cite your work!

FINALLY, don’t forget to categorize your post as a “weekly blog post” and add the tag “weekly blog post” before you “publish.”