About this site…
This website focuses on my exploration through the hopeful yet precarious decades of mid-nineteenth century America and my book, Grand Reconnaissance (a work in process). More specifically, I delve into the largest peacetime expeditionary force the United States had mounted before the Civil War—the Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853 – 1856. These expeditions were sent by a deadlocked congress “to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad” from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast. It is a largely forgotten story, hiding in plain sight, of how the West was mapped before it was settled.
![Warren, G. K, Selmar Siebert, and United States War Department. Map of the territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean; ordered by Jeff'n Davis, Secretary of War to accompany the reports of the explorations for a railroad route. [Washington, D.C., War Dept., ?, 1858] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/76695826/.](https://i0.wp.com/bdallen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Warren-2-lores.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1)
Why has this story been relegated to a footnote in most histories of western exploration and virtually lost to American popular memory? An obvious answer is that the Pacific Railroad Survey expeditions failed in their primary mission, since science and a surveyor’s transit could not answer the essentially political questions surrounding a railroad to the Pacific. Like so much in antebellum America, the PRRS project became hopelessly entangled in sectional rivalries and the question of slavery’s future, particularly its future in the West. As a result, the PRRS project is often overlooked in the celebrated story of the first transcontinental railroad. That well-documented history usually begins with passage of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, after Southern voices removed themselves from congressional debate.
Although they failed in their primary mission, the PRRS expeditions accomplished much. They compiled the first accurate map of the trans-Mississippi West, giving the country a depiction, for the first time, of the continent’s major geographic features in proper relation to one another. And it not only depicted a complicated physical geography but a complex human landscape, populated by hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, twin topographies the country would have to navigate to reach the Pacific.
It was as if Americans could hold up a mirror in which they could finally see the country accurately portrayed from coast to coast. And this mirror offered so much more than just a map—it reflected and galvanized Americans’ belief in both the promise and the possibility of a nation that could dare to span a continent.
My book, Grand Reconnaissance: G. K. Warren, The Pacific Railroad Surveys and the Map that Changed America is the first popular history to tell the full story of both the mission and the men of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, and the important place they hold in American history.
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