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Description

Irrigating Southeastern Wyoming in the 19th Century

Detailed irrigation map of District No 1 in Wyoming, consisting of of a large portion of the lands in Laramie County and Albany Count, north of the Platte River.

The map identifies describes 79 irrigation ditches, with dozens and amendments and changes in red and orange.

In 1886, the Wyoming legislature broke Wyoming Territory into eight “irrigation districts” and required the appointment of a single water commissioner to each district. Districts where homestead settlement was occurring rapidly were made smaller than those in the slower-growing, farther reaches of the territory, but were still far greater in size than one commissioner could be expected to cover with any frequency, given the modes of travel available in 1886. For example, District No. 1 consisted of “all lands irrigated from ditches from the North Platte River and its tributaries, except the Laramie River” from the Wyoming-Nebraska state line upstream to a spot near present-day Orin Junction, plus “Crow Creek, Lone Tree Creek, Pole Creek, Horse Creek, Chugwater Creek, Cheyenne River, Niobrara River and their tributaries.” Certainly one lone water commissioner on horseback had little chance of
covering that area of approximately 9,000 square miles effectively. But it was not expected that he should do so.

Blueprint & Blue Line maps (Cyanotype Printing)

Blueprint and blue line maps were among the most popular means for the swift printing of maps for which there would be a limited demand. A blueprint or blue line map could be made and/or revised much more quickly than a lithograph, cerograph, or other printing method, and at a much lower cost.

This method of printing was invented in 1842 by John Herschel, a chemist, astronomer, and photographer. A cyanotype process, one starts by drawing on semi-transparent paper, weighted down by a top sheet of paper. The paper would be coated with a photosensitive chemical mixture of potassium ferricyanogen and ferric ammonium citrate. The paper would then be exposed to light, wherein the exposed portions turned blue and the drawn lines, protected from exposure, would remain white.

The cyanotype printing process was an improvement on the expensive and time-consuming method of hand-tracing original documents. The technique was particularly popular with architects; by the 1890s, a blueprint was one-tenth the cost of a hand-traced reproduction. It could also be copied more quickly.   

Blueprint and blue line maps began to appear as early as the 1850s and 1860s, but they really began to become the standard for mining and similar limited-purpose maps by the 1880s. The ability to create these maps quickly and at a low cost made them the standard for short-run prints, ideal for mapping mining regions in the West and for similar purposes.

The method still exists today, but in a very limited fashion. In the 1940s, diazo prints (whiteprints or bluelines) became more popular, as they were easier to read and faster to make. The blue lines on a white background of these prints are now what most people call blueprints.

Reference
Craig O. Cooper, A HISTORY OF WATER LAW, WATER RIGHTS & WATER DEVELOPMENT IN WYOMING 1868-2002, June 2004 (p. 108).