Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Frémont

Whither the Waters, John L. Kessell's second book about don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, a widely known and colorful figure in the history of late colonial New Mexico, grew out of a question posed to the author at a signing event for his biographical study Miera y Pacheco: A Renaissance Spaniard in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico (2013). His interlocutor, Kessell explains in the preface to Whither the Waters, asked whether Miera y Pacheco's famous 1778 cartographic portrayal of the westward-bound Domínguez-Escalante expedition had shaped later efforts to map the northwestern frontiers of New Spain and, after 1821, of Mexico. Although Kessell attends to Miera y Pacheco's mapmaking activities in Miera y Pacheco, this particular question lay beyond the scope of this earlier project. Whither the Waters, then, is the outcome of Kessell's efforts to trace the subsequent influence of Miera y Pacheco's maps on the cartographic...