H.D. Hoover becomes
so excited and enthusiastic when he talks about an
exhibition of old maps in the University of Iowa
Museum of Art that it’s hard to believe the
retired professor did not spend his career teaching
and studying geography or world history. Hoover,
professor emeritus of education and former director
of Iowa Testing Programs at The University of Iowa,
is best known for his expertise on standardized tests
that measure academic achievement. But if you’re
lucky enough to find yourself in private audience
with Hoover, ask him about maps and you’ll
receive a fascinating lecture, filled with a scholar’s
love for detail, about images that delight the eye
as they tell us about the world.
Hoover is guest curator of The History of Iowa in
the Art of Maps, an exhibition of 35 maps on view
in the art museum’s Hoover-Paul Gallery through
Jan. 30. The maps are on loan from Hoover’s
private collection, the National Archives, the State
Historical Society of Iowa, UI Libraries, and major
private collections. The earliest maps in the exhibition
date from the time of Columbus and Vespucci, while
maps from the 17th through 19th centuries record
what explorers such as Lewis and Clark were learning
about North America’s vast interior. Some maps
depict the history of Iowa’s Indian nations.
fyi spent a few minutes in the Hoover-Paul Gallery
talking with Hoover about the exhibition and the
world of maps.
So what’s so great about a bunch of
old maps?
You look at these old things on the wall of a museum,
and you realize there’s no question—my
God, these are works of art! The paper in these early
maps [circa 1600s through 1700s] will blow your mind.
You can hardly tear it, it’s like steel. There’s
so much rag in it. All except one of these early
maps is an original, hand-colored engraving. Because
of the paper quality, the color is still so vivid.
The engraving and inscription in the early maps is
extremely elaborate and intricate.
They’re also fantastic historical documents.
I really enjoy the maps that begin to show details
of modern-day Iowa, including the locations and travels
of Iowa’s native peoples, such as the Fox (Meskwaki),
Sauk, and Ioway.
What are some of the most important maps in the
exhibition?
Joseph N. Nicollet’s meticulous depiction
of the Mississippi and Missouri River basins is a
landmark. For this map [Hydrographical Basin
of the Upper Mississippi River, 1843, on loan from the H.D.
and Myrene Hoover Collection], he used nearly 100,000
instrument readings and 326 astronomical point observations
as the basis for his engraving.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, to my mind, is
the extraordinary 1837 map of rivers and Ioway villages
presented to the U.S. government by Chief No Heart
of Fear of the Ioway [Untitled (Map of lands
claimed by the Ioway Indians), on loan from the National
Archives]. It’s a very rare manuscript map—not
many people have seen it. It shows where the Ioway
Indians lived and how they migrated over a period
of more than 200 years, and No Heart used it as part
of his plea for compensation from the government
for the Ioway’s ancestral lands.
The next maps to follow that [on the walls of the
gallery] trace the development of Iowa from the time
it became a territory through statehood, showing
changes in borders, growing numbers of counties,
and eventually, with transportation maps, the role
of railroads and the automobile in Iowa’s development.
How did the exhibition come about? Why did you want
to display your maps?
I don’t have a real extensive collection.
And I don’t collect them as an investment.
Not that they’re not wonderful investments—they
are. But if you collect them as investments, you
have to take extra special care of them and keep
them in drawers. I hardly have any maps that I don’t
want to show other people. I’d rather get them
out there where people can enjoy them. My wife, Myrene,
and I have been friends of the museum for some time,
and the curators knew about our collection and invited
us to put our maps on view, and the idea for the
exhibition grew from there.
You can tell at a glance which maps here are mine.
They’re the ones with fancy frames, because
my wife insists on this—she’s the arty
one!
What do you want museum-goers to get from the exhibition?
I hope people learn something about Iowa history,
especially about Iowa’s Indians. Nicollet very
carefully found Indian names for everything, not
just the tribes but everything—their lands,
their rivers. I talked to my kids who grew up here
in Iowa, and they’re clueless about this history,
as are many people. I think there are two reasons:
most of the early history is in French—this
was French territory—and a lot of this history
of the Indians is not pleasant, it’s a dark
period.
How did you become interested in maps?
When I was a kid growing up in the Ozarks, my oldest
sisters got married when they were very young and
moved to Texas. So we would go visit them in the
summer. This was before interstates, so going from
the Ozarks to Texas was quite the deal, and the sister
who was left at home and I would fight in the backseat,
and we would about kill each other. I was 8 years
old when my dad, who was a genius in many ways, figured
out what to do. He got a bunch of road maps for everywhere
we’d be going, and he put me in the backseat
with them and said, “Here’s Elkland,
Missouri, and we’re going here in Texas—you
get us there.” He’d go wherever I told
him. So I became fascinated because I’d sit
in the back and just study the hell out of these
maps!
Then about 20 years ago, I was in San Francisco—at
some boring convention, I’m sure—and
I was out walking around and wandered into this shop
that had a map on the wall. And I thought, “God,
I’d like to have one of those.” I bought
it, and I’ve been buying them ever since.
I knew I was hooked, though, when I bought the Abraham
Ortelius world map [Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1570].
It was my first significant expenditure in map collecting,
and it’s arguably the most widely recognized
and copied antiquarian map. If you’re going
to collect maps, that’s one that anybody who
wants an antiquarian map would want to have.
Are there any elusive treasures in the map-collecting
world you’d still like to track down?
There are so many. Some of the maps I bought 20
years ago I wouldn’t buy now because I couldn’t
afford them. The collectible value of these things
has shot up.
I’d like to have one of those Collot maps
[Victor Collot’s 1796 copperplate engraving,
Map of the Missouri of the Higher Parts of the
Mississippi and of the Elevated Plain, on loan from the MacLean
Collection].
It’s a simple map but only about
100 were printed in English. I’d love to have
a copy of the Lewis and Clark expedition map.
Most of all, I’d love to have that Mitchell
map [John Mitchell’s 1755 hand-colored copperplate
engraving, A Map of the British and French Dominions
in North America with the Roads, Distances, Limits,
and Extent of Settlements, on loan from the MacLean
Collection], but I’d have to sell my house.
I don’t think maybe Myrene would be up for
that.
by Gary Kuhlmann
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