Between the Lines: Culture and Cartography on the Road to Statehood
An exhibit on display at the Governor's Gallery in the State Capitol Building - 4th Floor in Santa Fe until May 2012

Emory, who eventually achieved the rank of major in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, mapped the Greater Southwest from 1844 well into the civil War, including the Mexican-American boundary and the Gadsden Purchase in 1848-1855. On this annotated copy of his map of New Mexico, he added hand-written boundaries. This information proved useful in the Mexican-American War and helped to establish New Mexico's future territorial boundaries.

A Disturnell map was used during boundary negotiations by U.S. American and Mexican diplomats leading to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) at the end of the Mexican-American War. It was accepted as "authoritative" not because it was absolutely accurate, but because it was in general use in the United States and Mexico. Consequently, the imperfect settlement based on it - because it placed El Paso thirty-four miles north and one hundred miles east of its true location - precipitated the corrective Gadsden Purchase in 1854.

This seminal map, based on Frémont's explorations and other current reliable information and beautifully rendered by Preuss, is an illustration of American expansionism that fueled the policy of Manifest Destiny. Both men were in the Corps of Topographical Engineers. The map filled in many previously empty spaces and offered an accurate picture of the now-American West, including New Mexico on the far right, at the end of the Mexican-American War.

This chromolithograph map drawn by Gilman, a draftsman for the publisher Duval, depicts the American West after the acquisition of the Mexican Cession. The New Mexican lands east of the Rio Grande still are erroneously shown as part of Texas as it defined itself as a republic after its independence from Mexico in 1836. Texas would maintain claims to areas of New Mexico until statehood in 1912.

This colorful broadside map received wide distribution at the outset of the Mexican-American War. It evoked American patriotism and expansionism and explained American territorial aspirations in the entire Greater Southwest, along with issues surrounding the future border beween Mexico and the United States. [Better image will be uploaded as soon as available]

While the southern boundary of New Mexico was determined by the surveys connected with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the subsequent Gadsden Purchase, the other borders of the territory and future state were surveyed later. this elegant folding map depicts the outcome of the Daling 1868 U.S. government survey of the part of the 37th Parallel that became the boundary between the New Mexico and Colorado territories.