A Symposium of Lectures and Articles
on Military Mapping
Marching with Maps &
Civil War Mapping and the Shenandoah Valley
A Symposium of Lectures and Articles on Military Mapping Section One
Marching with Maps & Civil War Mapping and the Shenandoah Valley
Copyright 2012 Earl B. McElfresh.
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Civil War Mapping and the Shenandoah Valley
Marching
With Maps
Making the Military Maps that
Remake the World
There is a very small percentage of the earth’s surface on which the great majority of human activity takes place. The places inhabitable for humans are hemmed in by vast oceans, mountain ranges, lakes, deserts, jungles, swamps, rivers and ice.
Man, seen as just another “hunter-gatherer” plying his trade on this meager allotment of land, is comparatively ill-prepared physically for the task. He is slow, small, weak, and innately defenseless. He has fingernails instead of claws, no horns, no fangs, no fur, no hooves, bad eyesight and poor hearing. But a particular attribute of man’s brain manifest itself in prehistoric times and contributed to man’s survival and ultimately predominance over otherwise vastly superior hunter-gatherers.
This was man’s ability to be aware of himself as being in the midst of his surroundings; to realize where he was—here—as opposed to where he was not—there. T.S. Eliot phrased this as “Where you are, is where you are not.” Crucially, man was able to recognize the “here” where he was, and the elsewhere, “there” where he was not and could recall the difference with the dawn of each new day. Being able to recognize his specific location and later to recollect it, man progressed ultimately to making a record of his recollection. In short, a man could make a map.
Pre-historic man began recording his description of a particular place by scratching an image of some sort in the dirt, on a piece of bark, on a stone, or using an arrangement of sticks. Bewildering Aborigine “maps” were deciphered when it was discovered that the Aborigines scratched their maps in the dirt with the destination or objective point closest and the departure point most distant. This was because they visualized their map in the enthralling primeval sky, imagining a line from directly overhead moving toward the horizon. Then they visually scrolled the map to the ground from the distant end, bringing the destination to their feet, where their journey would begin.
Cave drawings are almost certainly very practical and functional pictorial maps. They depict for future reference the usual haunts of the game they subsist on: the grazing sites and the trails animals routinely followed to salt licks and watering holes.
Another primitive source of “mapped” information that early man relied on was chanting—preserving the memory of grazing sites, water holes and salt licks not graphically but orally. The “song-lines” of Australia’s aborigines are straightforward examples of this sort of mapping. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer are probably descendants of the song lines, made more elaborate and dramatized over time.