One Sunday in Ghirardelli Square
or
How I got Hooked on this Story…
Several years ago, when I was working as a financial executive for a high-tech company, I found myself in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon with time to kill. I’d flown from Boston that morning, traveling 2,700 miles from one edge of the continent to the other in six-and-one-half hours. Thanks to the miracle of time zones, I still had a full afternoon to relax. Following a jet-lagged meander through the tourist distractions of Ghirardelli Square, I stepped into Lyons Antique Prints on nearby Hyde Street to browse their collection and clear my head before several days of investor meetings.
In a bin of shrink-wrapped prints, several pale-colored lithographs of western landscapes caught my attention. The proprietor, retired Stanford University professor Charles Lyons, pointed to the legend US PRR EX & SURVEY printed along the margin of each print, explaining that it referred to the Pacific Railroad Surveys, a moniker unfamiliar to me at the time. He described how the lithographs, printed between 1855 and 1860, had been cut from government reports describing a series of Army expeditions that were sent out west before the Civil War to search for a transcontinental railroad route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast.
The landscapes, while skillfully rendered, were not masterful artworks, but instead were pre-photography illustrations of the trans-Mississippi West, depicting remote mountain passes, arid deserts, river valleys, forts, settlements, Indian encampments, and the wilderness in between. Realizing that these expeditions pre-dated construction of the first transcontinental railroad, I looked at the prints as a sort of time machine window, allowing me to view the mid-nineteenth century western United States through the eyes of contemporary witnesses. While not portraying some mythical American Eden, the landscapes arguably depicted scenes that, with the eventual coming of railroads and large-scale white settlement, simply no longer exist, an idea both intriguing and amusing to me. I also wondered how the men on these expeditions, in the decade before the Civil War, imagined the future in front of them as they explored a path to the Pacific. Was it full of bright possibilities… or dark apprehension?
That chance encounter in the San Francisco print shop grabbed my imagination and ignited my curiosity. It also marked the beginnings of my long personal journey across the trans-Mississippi West of mid-nineteenth century America–and beyond. Over the next several years, as I traveled around the U.S. for business and pleasure, I also continued browsing in antique print and book shops in various cities. When I would run across prints bearing the now-familiar “US PRR EX & SURVEY” label, I observed more detail and greater variety of subjects, which only increased my curiosity about the Pacific Railroad Surveys. I eventually moved beyond mere browsing for old prints to begin seriously researching the history of the expeditions themselves, a journey of exploration and discovery spanning a dozen years.
The more I learned about how the Pacific Railroad Surveys intertwined with the complicated antebellum world of the mid-nineteenth century United States, the more my reporter’s instincts for an untold story, honed earlier in my career, were aroused. This journey has taken me into archives across the country, from the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, to the Army Corps of Engineers and the International Water Boundary Commission, as well as regional historical societies, university archives and state libraries across the western U.S., New York, and New England. Through this research as well as conversations with other historians and archivists, I learned about the PRRS unique and important place in both western exploration and cartography. These experienced historians of cartography and exploration of the West shared my interest in topic. Together, we pondered why these consequential expeditions remain shrouded in puzzling obscurity within America’s popular historical narrative and they encouraged me to write a history of the PRRS project, giving the topic the attention it deserves.
My journey also has taken me “into the territory” along trails explored by the topogs across the West. These efforts to retrace portions of the expeditions have forced me to imagine, as best as any 21st Century explorer can, to see what the topogs saw and experience the topography of the land as they experienced it.
Two episodes from these travels are worth mentioning here, as they illustrate my immersion in the PRRS project and how it has captivated me. One of the more moving experiences took place along the bend of the Sevier River in Utah when I stood at the site where Captain Gunnison and his men were killed, and where all but Gunnison remain buried in unmarked graves. One of my more rewarding discoveries occurred, after much searching, in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Standing on a dirt road near the entrance to a Forest Service cabin, I realized I had finally found the spot where Richard Kern, the surveyor/artist accompanying Gunnison, had stood as he sketched the view that became Entrance to Cochetopa looking up Sawatch Creek, Septbr 1st, printed in Volume II of the PRRS expedition reports. At that moment of recognition, it dawned on me that I was looking through the time machine window that had first sparked my imagination years earlier in the antique print shop in San Francisco.