The Macomb Expedition – Bones, Stones and Mapping Zones

He squinted toward the setting sun, at a maze of blood-red cliffs, resembling jagged dinosaur teeth erupting from an ancient jawbone.
The view seemed alive when viewed through the intense heat waves of that August afternoon in 1859.
John Newberry, with three other men, left their camp before daylight in lower Indian Creek, hoping to find a point high enough for them to see the Green River emptying into the Colorado.
In the heat, they realized too late that they’d brought only half the water needed to complete the trip comfortably.
They paid for the judgment lapse with intense headaches, impaired judgment, and limited observation powers, and never saw the confluence. 
The four men – Captain John Macomb, Dr. John Newberry, Charles Dimmock, and Lt. Milton Cogswell – all members of the Macomb Expedition, were deep in the maze of southern Utah canyons on orders from the War Department.
Three of the group completed the hike that day, but heat exhaustion forced Macomb to return to camp early. 
I found myself in the same area 150 years later, on the other side of the river and just nine miles from where those three men with swollen tongues, parched lips, and foggy minds searched for an understanding of the strange land they were in. (See photo on page A5).
Macomb and his men were 29 days into their journey from Santa Fe to find a practicable route to the settlements of southern Utah and to answer lingering questions about the region’s geography, geology, and general scientific attributes. 
There I stood, only five days into my trip, accompanied by my long-time, high school buddies. Our trek was purely recreational.
Unlike Macomb’s men, we were there for the sheer pleasure of feeling native sand in our teeth, armpits, and other unmentionable places. We had plenty of water, thanks to the detailed maps that evolved from the first steps taken by Macomb’s men 150 years ago.
We had plenty of food, comfortable beds, and, when our trip ended, a jet-boat would return us to our vehicles in a paved parking lot in downtown Moab. 
While the primary purpose of the Macomb expedition was military, it had other goals, including filling in a massive blank spot on the only maps available in 1859.
Before Macomb, maps of southern Utah included the tag — “Region Unexplored Scientifically”.
I can’t help laughing each time I read Macomb’s pithy, handwritten report on the trip:
“I cannot conceive of a more worthless and impracticable region than the one we now found [sic.] ourselves in.” Captain John N. Macomb, November 1, 1860
The military objective was an abject failure, but the scientific achievements exceeded all expectations, thanks to a single man — Dr. John Strong Newberry.
Newberry, a medical doctor and geologist, led the scientific discovery efforts, and Charles Dimmock, a civil engineer and sketcher, led the mapping and route-finding.
Both men made significant discoveries, for which they rarely receive the accolades they deserve.
Added to the leadership was Lt. Cogswell, commander of a small group of soldiers to protect them from potentially hostile local tribes.
Ironically, a member of the Elk (La Sal) Mountain Ute band, filled the role of Public Relations Officer. He was simply called Chief, who Lt. Cogswell described “...his intelligence, activity & ugliness, blended with the love of his native soil,”.
Newberry’s description of what he found in San Juan County contrasted sharply with Macomb’s.
Newberry saw in the expanse before him a: “...long line of spires of white stone, standing on red bases, thousands in number, but so slender as to recall the most delicate carving in ivory or the fairy architecture of some Gothic cathedral; yet many, perhaps most, were over 500 feet in height... Their appearance was so strange and beautiful as to call out exclamations of delight from all our party.”
The first night, after descending into East Canyon from the Great Sage Plain, Newberry, while staring at the smooth sandstone cliff above him, thought he saw bones sticking out above it.
The next day, he scaled the cliff and found the petrified remains of a giant, plant-eating dinosaur, a smaller cousin of the brontosaurus, both sauropods.
Newberry freed a few bones he carried to Santa Fe and on to the Smithsonian, where today, they likely rest in a crate in some obscure warehouse in downtown Washington next to the Arc of the Covenant.
The quarry faded into obscurity for the next 130 years until Fran Barnes of Moab rediscovered it while researching his 1988 book “Canyonlands National Park: Early History and First Descriptions.”
Each year between Newberry’s discovery and Barnes rediscovery corresponds to more than a million years since the day that dinosaur exhaled its final breath between 150 and 175 million years ago. That was the first sauropod found anywhere in North America. 
Before leaving the quarry, Newberry lamented he was forced to leave the job of finishing the dig to some future geologist…
His prediction was fulfilled this century (2014)  by paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU), thanks to Fran Barnes.
Newberry’s findings didn’t end with the bones; he went on to make a significant geological observation that led to a profound change in belief about the forces that shaped the earth.
Early travelers marveled at the region’s beauty but were also terrified of the physical dangers of crossing its deep canyons and jagged terrain. Most scientists, then, ascribed such topography to apocalyptic earthquakes.
Until Newberry, no credentialed scientist had ever laid eyes on southeast Utah’s rock pile. Once Newberry saw the evidence layered in stone, he knew this landscape could only have been shaped by the combined actions of wind and water over millions of years, a process geologists call fluvialism. 
Perhaps the most useful achievement of the Macomb expedition was its contribution to the region’s maps. Topographer Charles Dimmock laid the groundwork with meticulous field measurements while crossing the rocky landscape.
He recorded detailed survey lines along the route and tied them to the coordinates of prominent peaks in the La Sal and Abajo mountains to ensure accuracy, then compiled them into a large, highly detailed sketch map. 
The outbreak of the Civil War delayed the publication of the detailed expedition report for years, but for the mapping portion of the report, it turned into a great advantage.
It gave cartographer Wilhelm von Egloffstein the time needed to process Dimmock and Macomb’s survey data. From the data and sketches, Egloffstein created uber-detailed plaster casts showing the land’s 3D topography. He then photographed the model and overlaid the field measurements to produce some of the first shaded relief maps.
Dr. John Strong Newberry’s discoveries have, through 150 years of scientific scrutiny, crowned him champion of that two-month journey in 1859, and the trek should bear his name, not the name of the man who described our dirt as “worthless and impracticable.”
The unfortunate timing of the Civil War, coinciding with the normal wrap-up conversation that usually follows such achievements, obscured it from the nation’s conversation and from the knowledge of those living where it took place – San Juan County, Utah.