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HISTORIAN JOHN KESSELL ADDS TO HIS earlier 2013 book on Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, an important artist, cartographer, and figure of colonial New Mexico. He distinguishes this slim and beautifully illustrated volume as an addendum, but it is more than a tack-on treatise to his earlier work.
Whither the Waters continues to illuminate Miera y Pacheco’s cartographic contributions. The 55 color plates included in the volume are stunning and make the work valuable for historians, cartographers, and colonial-period cultural scholars. Alone, they make the book worth purchasing. Yet Kessell does not stop at the simple excavation of these valuable primary visuals. He clearly and concisely makes the case that Miera y Pacheco’s cartographic work influenced, often erroneously, later cartographers and explorers of the Great Basin region. Kessell continues to provide scholars and readers with some of the best interpretive work on primary sources focused on the Greater Southwest and, in this case, the Great Basin as we label it today.
The heart of this volume is focused on Miera’s mapping work for the Domínguez-Escalante expedition of 1776...