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Mapping Colorado

The Hayden Atlas turns 130 years old

By Andrew Gulliford

The Maps of The Four Corners Regions (The Author's Favorites)

• AAA Indian Country Guide Map (Automobile Club of Southern California) • The Colorado Plateau (Time Traveler Maps) • Road Map of Navajo & Hopi Nations including Monument Valley, Chaco Culture and Canyon de Chelly (North Star Mapping) • Colorado Southwest Recreation Topo Map (Latitude 40 degrees) • San Juan National Forest Map (U.S. Forest Service) • Map of the Mountains of Silverton, Telluride and Ouray (Drake Mountain Maps) • Hiking Trails of Ouray County & the Uncompahgre Wilderness (Ouray Trail Group) • Trails Illustrated: Weminuche Wilderness, Grand Gulch Plateau and Canyonlands (National Geographic) • Hubbard Scientific Raised Relief Maps

If I could, I would live in a glass house with views of mountains and storm clouds moving across the tops of high peaks. On interior walls I might have a piece of art or two, perhaps a watercolor, a framed photograph, or a limited-edition print, but what I'd really want would be maps - new maps, old maps, maps of the West and maps of the world. I am fascinated by maps because just like words in a foreign language, they give new meaning to landscapes we think we know. Maps create worlds. They define people and places and routes we have not yet taken. They show us where we've been and where we want to be.

Of all the maps we can buy and browse that depict where we live in the Four Corners region, there is one map that appeals to me most of all. It's actually a series of maps, an atlas, and to open this atlas on a large table or desk is to see a landscape that is both ever present and yet has ceased to exist. It is the great-great-grandfather of all Colorado maps and stunning in beauty and prescience.

To open the 1877 Geological And Geographical Atlas Of Colorado And Portions Of Adjacent Territory by F.V. Hayden, referred to commonly as the Hayden Atlas, is to see a masterwork of science, lithographic art and 19th-century ideology. Imagine the bold and adventurous task of mapping Colorado, by hand, on foot and on horseback. What an audacious idea, and yet the 19th-century West, after the Civil War, was full of men seeking to understand the landscape and themselves. They created the world in which we live.

An original Hayden Atlas has surprisingly supple paper, yellowed at the edges. Leather bindings can be scuffed and frayed. There are two copies at the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College and a single copy in the Western History Collections of the Denver Public Library, viewable by appointment. Gil Mull, a private collector and retired geologist in Santa Fe, owns one copy. It was withdrawn from the Muhlenberg College Library in Ohio and was once priced at $25. I consider it priceless.

As the United States emerged shaken from the Civil War, the 1863 Homestead Act provided free land for farmers and settlers, and the 1869 Railroad Act built the first transcontinental railroad. As immigrants and Americans began the long journey westward in the 1870s, Congress funded four separate government surveys of the West, by F.V. Hayden, John Wesley Powell, George M. Wheeler and Clarence King. In 1880, these surveys were combined to become the U.S. Geological Survey.

Gil Mull explains, "Of the four surveys, the Hayden Survey was the largest and of longest duration. In addition to written reports, the Hayden Survey published separate topographic, drainage, and geologic maps for many areas in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but only Colorado was mapped in its entirety." Geologic, triangulation and drainage maps for all of Colorado were printed at a scale of 1 inch to 12 miles.

From our perspective in the 21st century, the 1877 Hayden Atlas is extraordinary. Holding it in your hands and slowly turning the pages is to travel backwards in time to see what was here, and not here, 130 years ago. Durango does not yet exist. There is no road east of Pagosa Springs, and the only wagon roads coming toward southwestern Colorado come from Tierra Amarilla, Abiquiu and Santa Fe, New Mexico, along the Old California Trail. F.V. Hayden's Atlas shows the 1874 Brunot Cession, which deeded the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains to the public domain, but left the Ute Indians owning all the rest of western Colorado. A trail is shown from Parrott City, at the mouth of La Plata Canyon near Mayday, down toward Junction Creek and Animas City. Durango would not be founded until four years after the Atlas was published. The significant silver and gold strikes at Aspen, Leadville and Cripple Creek had yet to occur.

The Atlas reveals Indian ruins, Indian burials and the names of historic ranches. Battle Rock in McElmo Canyon can be found as well as Hovenweep Castle and areas labeled "Ute farms" and "Indian farms." There are no green, white or brown little squares portrayed on today's maps showing 640-acre sections of U.S. Forest Service, private or Bureau of Land Management property ownership. Mesa Verde is not yet a national park, and in 1877 the Wetherill family has not yet moved here; no Anglo has discovered Cliff Palace or Spruce Tree House, but Hayden and Jackson journeyed up the Mancos River so sites are listed in what is now Ute Mountain Tribal Park including Jackson's Butte, Mosses Tower, Double Walled Tower, and Two Story House.

The country is wide open, unfenced and unclaimed. The maps display notations and color coding for agricultural land, pine forests, pi�on and cedar trees, and quaking aspen groves. The Atlas reveals sage and badlands, coal lands, and gold and silver districts. With impunity, the surveyors named rivers, creeks, canyons, peaks and hot springs. In some cases they used locally generic names but in many instances they simply invented names.

Near what is now Rifle, Colo., Hayden christened creeks "Muddy, Alkali and Desert Creeks . . . as an indication of the kind of country through which they flow." According to legend, the surveyors also named Rifle Creek, from which the town is named, because near the creek they found a rifle leaning against a tree.

They labeled the Great Sage Plains near Dove Creek, Colo., and they identified the Great Sand Dunes in the San Luis Valley. Because they were geologists they also labeled the depositions of the earth and the Atlas shows deposits from the Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Paleozoic eras. Across the entire western slope of Colorado there is no Colorado River. Instead it's called the Grand River - the name change would not occur until 1921.

All of us who live in western Colorado and eastern Utah owe a debt of gratitude to a small man who grew up as an orphan in Ohio and possessed a penchant for frayed frock coats, battered hats and unexpected fits of belligerence. Ferdinand Vandeever Hayden was a quiet, dreamy, nervous student considered by his classmates at Oberlin College to be the least likely to succeed. Yet succeed he did, not only in helping to establish the United States Geological Survey, but also in producing the first reliable set of Colorado maps.

Historian William Goetzman described Hayden as the quintessential "businessman's geologist" whose agenda was not just mapping the West but also uncovering its mineral wealth. Hayden saw the region as the "resource West," and in keeping with the political tenor of the times, devoted himself, in Goetzman's words, to "the pursuit of practical prospecting in the public interest."

After surveying Yellowstone Park and promoting it before Congress in 1872, F.V. Hayden set himself the nearly impossible task of surveying and naming the Colorado Rockies during summer expeditions in 1873, 1874, 1875 and 1876. Colorado was not yet a state. The entire western third of the territory remained the Ute Indian Reservation. To obtain precise measurements, survey teams working under Dr. Hayden lugged 50-lbs. theodolites, which were combined transits and levels, to the summits of Colorado's principal mountain peaks. They surveyed Pikes Peak at 14,147 feet - the official height is now 14,110 feet - a wholly acceptable margin of error in the 19th century.

Hayden's topographers included Gardner, leading map maker and head topographer; Wilson, head of the Southwest Colorado survey team; Bechler, head of the Yampa Division; George B. Chittendon, official topographer of the White River Division, and W. H. Holmes, the topographer of the Dolores Canyon and San Miguel and Bear River Mountains. All his men found mapping Colorado a magnificent professional challenge and within three years they had covered 70,000 square miles of rugged mountain country.

By 1876, mineral wealth had catapulted Colorado to statehood, and Hayden augmented that wealth by discovering coal deposits and iron ore in sufficient quantity to make Colorado the "Pittsburgh of the West." He made a fortune for knowledgeable entrepreneurs who had missed the silver and gold strikes but found resource potential in thick seams of undeveloped coal.

Hayden's party committed to paper what Congress could only presume. The maps contained in his Atlas of Colorado located the state's principal forests, pastures, croplands, areas of coal, gold, silver and all the potential routes for railroads and toll roads. It was a book 26� inches from top to bottom and 36 inches wide. The future of Colorado could be seen in its magnificent color pages.

Published in 1877, or 130 years ago, the Atlas of Colorado forever altered the demographics of the state. For any newcomers coming into the West, the book was a gold mine of drawings and maps that still mesmerize a century later. Ute Indian names became indelibly a part of Colorado geography. The Hayden Survey named the Uncompahgre Plateau from the Ute word for hot springs. Surveyors also named the state's physical features after each other.

The party named Marvine Creek on the Flat Top Mountains north of Glenwood Springs after Archibald Marvine, one of the surveyors, and the town of Hayden, near Steamboat Springs, after the great geologist himself. They christened "Cannibal Plateau" near Lake City on the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River after Alferd Packer - a less distinguished but equally famous Colorado resident who ate members of his prospecting party. As for Mt. Wilson near Telluride, it was named in honor of A.D. Wilson who led surveyors in the southwest corner of the state.

Called "Little Man Alone" by the Utes because F. V. Hayden seemed always by himself sketching, studying and taking samples, he encouraged his surveyors to strive for accuracy. To gauge the proper elevation of a 14,000-foot peak, the survey team had to spend the night above timberline and break camp before dawn to reach the peak in time to meet the sun's earliest rays.

Three times surveyor James Gardner's assistant poked him in the back with a transit tripod on August 20, 1873 to keep him from falling backwards off Snowmass Peak. One party, attempting to scale a 13,000-foot peak, chose the perilous route of following fresh grizzly bear tracks to reach the summit.

As huge cumulo-nimbus thunderclouds moved across mountain tops during summer afternoons, lightning storms proved serious threats to the surveyors with their metal tripods perched always at the highest points. A.D. Wilson wrote that, after finally having reached the summit of a peak, he and his partner began to feel "a peculiar tickling sensation" along the roots of their hair. It was accompanied by "a peculiar sound almost exactly like that produced by frying bacon." As the thunderheads swept closer, the surveyors' transit began to click like a telegraph and their hair stood on end.

"By this time," his companion remarked in an obvious pun, ". . . we were electrified, and out notes were taken and recorded with lightning speed . . . . When we raised our hats our hair stood on end, the sharp points of the hundred stones about us emitted continuous sounds, while the instrument out sang everything else." They dashed off the peak and were 30 feet below the summit when lightning struck.

Indian troubles were infrequent because of the patience of the Utes, but John Gardner and his small party in 1875 did run into several lodges of Native Americans in the La Sal Mountains of Utah. Chief Ouray had warned against renegade bands of Utes and Paiutes, but Gardner proceeded anyway down the Dolores River. With tired mules and parched throats, the team sought protection from Indian bullets and finally reached Colorado territory with a loss of eight pack animals.

Despite the rigors of the trail, Hayden and his men managed to produce a remarkable atlas which provided insurmountable evidence of the wealth of Colorado. The cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, who traveled with the Spanish Friars Francisco Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, made crude maps in 1776 that showed the Florida and La Plata Rivers and the lands of the "Uta" Indians. Capt. William Macomb of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyed New Mexico (which at the time included Arizona) and speculated on southern Colorado in 1859 for the War Department. Francis M. Case surveyed Colorado Territory for Governor Gilpin in 1861-62, but no earlier work compares with the complexity and beauty of Julius Bien's lithographic plates from the Hayden Atlas.

If Hayden's surveys were accurate, one could question the writings of William Henry Jackson, the famous pioneer photographer who first photographed southwest Colorado cliff dwellings in Mancos Canyon but missed Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House because they had not yet been discovered. Jackson accompanied Hayden in Yellowstone and he was there in 1874 in Mancos Canyon with Hayden and the guide John Moss. They discovered Two-Story House and other Ancestral Puebloan sites now in Ute Mountain Tribal Park. All of that seminal work is clearly displayed in the Hayden Atlas of 1877, but like other Westerners, one has to take their hunting stories with a grain of salt.

Big game was plentiful on the Western Slope and elk and mule deer abounded, but the surveyors and William Henry Jackson wanted to "git a b'ar." And not just any bear. Only a towering silver-tipped grizzly would do. Hayden and Jackson had been pursuing a huge grizzly for a mile or more through new-fallen snow. Suddenly the bear crouched behind a large fallen log. W.H. Jackson wrote, "I knelt and fired at close range. The bear never moved a muscle. Puzzled, I cautiously approached and poked him with my gun. He toppled over - dead as the proverbial door nail."

That much of the hunter's tale could possibly be believed, but the next line is suspect. Jackson stated, "My one shot had penetrated his left nostril, leaving no mark, entered his skull and killed him."

Members of the Hayden Survey kept accurate survey measurements. Their mapping of Colorado is extraordinary, but as hunters they may have been prone to exaggeration, perhaps caused by too many lightning storms and other hair-raising experiences.

Hayden's surveyors mapped the West, and Colorado in particular, and William Henry Holmes drew in precise detail vast landscapes. In a 19th-century Victorian conceit, magnificent panoramic views show small figures of the surveyors themselves drawn to scale against the backdrop of southwestern Colorado mountains. They stand at the edges of great precipices and contemplate the scenery, sketch the mountain massifs, or lean on their canes as they wear formal greatcoats and fashionable bowler hats. Mountain sheep gaze at them from the drawings' edges. Literally and figuratively, Hayden's men are contemplating the West of the future, the resource-rich West they have shown us on their maps. As they look down from high peaks, it is almost as if they can see the farms, ranches and towns that will emerge a century later.

Panoramic views up to 38 inches long were hand-drawn, shaded pen-and-ink drawings completed on location by William Henry Holmes. He produced exceptional drawings of the La Plata Mountains from atop Mt. Hesperus, the San Juan Mountains, the Elk Mountains near Aspen, and the southwestern part of Mesa Verde, Ute Mountain and Mancos River canyon.

Geologist Gil Mull notes, "In these views, Holmes not only portrayed the rugged topography, but also skillfully accentuated the rock stratification in order to show the geological structure."

Mull explains that the Hayden Survey "established and published the geologic framework that all succeeding geologists in the Rockies have expanded upon and refined. Although the work was hard and dangerous, I can fantasize what it must have been like to have had the privilege to participate in these expeditions of discovery, and the feeling of excitement when understanding a geological framework fell into place."

Now, a century later, copies of the Hayden Atlas reside only in the special collections of libraries and in the hands of collectors like Gil Mull who truly appreciate the work of pioneer surveyors who boldly set out to try to understand geology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, ethnography and archaeology in the West. In many ways, modern American field science directly descends from these great surveys.

As for me, I don't live in a glass house with a view of high peaks. Instead, I see my neighbors' homes across the street. But I love maps because of where they can take me, and with all the public land in the Four Corners there are plenty of places to visit. The early U.S. Geological Surveyors mapped Colorado and in a sense gave us the mountain West. We live in the mapped and bounded world they helped to create, but adventure isn't found on any map. For each of us the West is terra incognita until we explore it on our own.

Maps on the opening spread are copied from the Hayden Atlas (Gil Mull Collection) and the small illustrations located throughout Gulliford's story are taken from the Hayden Atlas's various landscape illustrations by William Henry Holmes.

Andrew Gulliford is a historian, photographer and professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.