What is it about gazing into a map that’s better than a picture of a place? Not that I don’t like pictures, with their color and texture and all, but they only provide a glance. A hundred pictures give you a hundred fragments, but a map says it all.
Maps give me power. I am a god. I see it
all. And if I can see it all, if I can grasp THE WHOLE THING,
understanding will surely follow. The relationships among all the parts will
be clear.
I broke down and cleaned my bathroom this weekend and in the overgrown stack of reading material was the September National Geographic map of the U.S. western migration, full of all the trails that traders and explorers and pioneers grooved into the landscape. I’d been studying it (before it got buried under the half-finished New Yorkers) to see if it would help me figure out how my family got from Ireland to the Midwest.
My great-great grandfather arrived in St. Louis sometime before his marriage in 1849 – likely a refugee from the Irish potato famine of 1845-1851. The map shows St. Louis to be the “gateway to the West” – the jumping off point of many trade routes to the west (Lewis and Clark had set out from there not long before, in 1804).
Patrick had made his way from Ireland, and across the eastern states to the frontier, to the gateway into a vast, barely explored and largely hostile territory, a refugee from starvation with nothing to lose. What was there for him?
Today I went looking for more information – and more maps.
