What kind of map maker was William Clark??
As, as a cartographer, Clark was without peer, not in the sense that he produced elegant maps, in, in the same sense that, that the Army topographers of, of the 1850’s produced elegant maps. What made Clark so, so marvelous as a cartographer, even though his, his maps look to us today to be a bit crude, was that he had an incredible instinct and, and feel for the landscape. He seemed to know what was the most logical direction for a river to take, once it got out of his line of sight. If you look at, at Clark’s maps as, as field exercises in and by themselves, as opposed to looking at them as finished products of, of cartography, you, you see a, a, a beauty in the ability of, of this guy to, to recognize the landscape, to convert what he’s seeing in a horizontal perspective into that vertical map perspective. It, it’s the hardest thing that people do in, in dealing with space. As a geographer, one of the things that I, I have to teach my students at the very beginning of their training
