"Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing" Topic

… of America.

"During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the geographic image of western North America began to change dramatically. Based on the observations of Lewis and Clark, information gathered from native people, and Clark's own cartographic imagination, this image evolved from an almost empty interior with a hypothetical single mountain range serving as a western continental divide, to an intricate one showing a tangle of mountains and rivers. A continent that had once seemed empty and simple was now becoming full and complex.

It would take another fifty years after Lewis and Clark to complete the cartographic image of the West we know today. Other explorers and map makers followed, each revealing new geographic and scientific details about specific parts of the western landscape. But this revealing process was not a simple one. New knowledge did not automatically replace old ideas; some old notions—especially about river passages across the West—persisted well into the century. In the decades after Lewis and Clark the company of western explorers expanded to include fur traders, missionaries, and government topographers, culminating in the 1850s with the Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers surveying the southwestern and northwestern boundaries of the United States as well the potential routes for a transcontinental railroad. By the time of the Civil War, an ocean-to-ocean American empire with borders clearly defined was a fact of continental life…."
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