Hysterical Map of the Grand Canyon

You can learn to read a Grand Canyon tourist map as a pictorial object, not as a survey, and you already know the question it answers. It shows you where to look and what to feel when you look.

What makes a map pictorial rather than technical

Pictorial maps are also called illustrated maps, panoramic maps, perspective maps, bird's-eye view maps and geopictorial maps. They depict a territory in a more artistic than technical style, and they stand apart from a road map, an atlas sheet or a topographic sheet. You see the difference at once in the drawing. A regular map records distances with care, while a pictorial sheet enlarges landmarks, populates its space with buildings, people and animals, and mixes different scales in one image so you recognize a place the way a visitor remembers it. The range runs from a simple map graphic with added drawings to a sophisticated three-dimensional perspective landscape, and the subjects run just as wide, from historical events and legendary figures to local farm products, from a whole continent to a college campus. The makers are specialized artists and illustrators, and the form runs from cartoon maps on restaurant placemats to treasured art prints kept in museums.

Why these maps bend scale and viewpoint

You usually see the ground as if from above at an oblique angle, not straight down. Pictorial maps are not generally drawn to scale, because the point is to keep street patterns, single buildings and major landforms readable in perspective at the same time. That choice explains the emphasis on objects and style, from childlike caricature to a spectacular landscape graphic. When the drawing holds together, the result is attractive, informative and highly accurate in its own way, even though some sheets require thousands of hours of work. A useful way to look is to ask what the artist kept large on purpose. For help with that slow looking, you can use the plate-by-plate studies of landmark sheets to train your eye on maker, date and motive before you trust the picture.

Where the humor sits on a tourist sheet

Humor in this kind of map rarely lives in a caption. It lives in selection, size and placement. An illustrator picks a mule train, a lookout crowd, a condor overhead or a winding trail and draws it a little too large, a little too close or a little too busy, so you smile and still find your bearings. The word hysterical in such a title points to that comic register, not to a survey method. The Wikipedia page does not publish a catalogue entry for a single Grand Canyon tourist sheet. What you can still study is the shared grammar, oblique view, enlarged landmarks and small human incidents scattered across the terrain, which let a canyon wall and a lunch stop share one picture without apology.

Did railroads teach towns to pose?

The link between travel and posing for the artist is old. In medieval cartography, pictorial icons and religious and historical ideas often overshadowed accurate proportions, as in the T and O map that showed the three known continents as a cross with Jerusalem at its center. During the European Renaissance, the detailed bird's-eye urban view flourished, and rising trade centers such as Venice paid artists for pictorial overviews that helped organize fairs and direct merchants. Printing turned those views into early advertising as cities competed for commerce. During the Age of Exploration, sea charts grew more accurate for navigation yet kept sketches of sailing ships for trade winds, small trees and mounds for forests and mountains, and sea creatures and unfamiliar peoples, much of it imaginary. Those drawings later moved to the borders and then left the scientific map. The pictorial manner then went its own way and came back with force in the railroad age. Between 1825 and 1875, the making and collecting of city panoramas rose to a mania, and in the United States alone thousands were produced by men such as Herman Brosius, Camille N. Drie, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, Paul Giraud, Augustus Koch, D. D. Morse, Henry Wellge and A. L. Westyard. You can trace that commercial line in the panoramic map tradition and see how town pride and ticket sales shaped the view. Exaggeration could cross into deceit, when travelers drawn by images of humming factories and busy streets found only mud-soaked shacks, and a vast collection of these prints is now kept by the Library of Congress while many sheets are still reprinted and sold.

How tourism brought back the illustrated sheet

With the growth of tourism, pictorial mapmaking returned as popular culture art from the 1920s through the 1950s, often in a whimsical Art Deco manner that marks its period. Banks, oil companies and other commercial firms ordered maps, and the artists were often draftsmen in architecture offices whose names were not recorded. Early examples were reproduced in the German arts magazine Das Plakat, after political cartoon maps of Europe by Paul Hadol in 1870 and by Walter Trier. Many sheets from the middle of the century are still published, with originals now changing hands for hundreds or thousands of dollars. You know the idiom from the 1926 Manhattan map by C. V. Farrow, from Jo Mora's western maps including the 1931 Yosemite, and from Gangland Chicago by Bruce Roberts from 1931. Another revival came in the 1970s and 1980s, when firms such as Archar and Descartes produced hundreds of colorful promotional maps mainly of American and Canadian cities, with local shops drawn in a flattering way and logos set proudly on their buildings.

What does the Grand Canyon give an illustrator to work with?

The canyon gives an artist a ready-made stage. It is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and more than a mile deep at 6,093 feet. The canyon and its rims lie within Grand Canyon National Park, the Kaibab National Forest, Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument, the Hualapai Indian Reservation, the Havasupai Indian Reservation and the Navajo Nation. The Colorado River set its course through the area about five to six million years ago and cuts through layer after layer while the plateau rose, exposing nearly two billion years of earth history. It is not the deepest canyon on land, since Kali Gandaki Gorge in Nepal runs deeper, but it is known for overwhelming size and intricate color. For thousands of years, Native Americans have lived in and around it, building settlements in the canyon and its caves, and Pueblo people held it as a holy place reached by pilgrimage. The first European known to have seen it was Garcia Lopez de Cardenas of Spain in 1540. Later visitors included missionaries, trappers, survey parties and John Wesley Powell, who first used the name Grand Canyon in 1871 after his 1869 river expedition. President Theodore Roosevelt visited often to hunt and enjoy the scenery and pressed for preservation, and the area became a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919. An illustrator can lean on all of that layered depth, rim-to-river contrast, trails, lookouts and river rapids, without inventing geology.

Can you read a funny map like a collector?

You can, if you check the business behind the picture. Many makers went from town to town seeking backing from merchants, industrialists and civic groups, whose support secured a prominent place for their property on the sheet. Edwin Whitefield, a prolific nineteenth-century American maker, sought about 200 subscribers before he drew, then sketched every building in town, combined the sketches from an imaginary aerial point of view into one detailed drawing, and then went back through town to collect payment. That method explains why a funny tourist map still works as a guide. As contemporary illustrator Jean Louis Rheault put it, pictorial maps, with their stress on what is eye-catching, make it easier to figure out what is where. Anthropomorphic play belongs to the same habit of turning land into a figure, from Sebastian Munster using a queen to depict Europe in 1570 to The Man of Commerce by Augustus F. McKay in 1889, the earliest known anthropomorphic map in the United States. Weather and access shape what the artist can even show you in season. The forested rims take winter snow; the Inner Gorge runs hot like low desert near Tucson; rain comes with winter Pacific storms and late summer monsoon bursts, and the North Rim road, State Route 67, closes in winter while the South Rim stays open.

The Wikipedia page on pictorial maps defines the type in contrast to road maps, atlases and topographic maps and follows its history from medieval icons and Renaissance bird's-eye towns through railroad panoramas to twentieth century tourist and promotional sheets. You find there the alternate names, the notes on oblique view and mixed scales, the artist lists, the publishing anecdotes and the links to collections. Pull the Grand Canyon dimensions from a park sheet, set them beside one illustrated souvenir, and note which butte, trail or building the artist enlarged for you. For the next comparison, open the directory of major map libraries and call up a railroad panorama and a 1930s tourist map side by side.