The Art of Eltea Armstrong, Part 1: Animals on the Map — Brewster, Bailey, and Aransas Counties
Map Spotlight — Women’s History Month Edition
As March is Women’s History Month, this is an opportunity to highlight one of the great draftspersons of the General Land Office, Eltea Armstrong. Not only was she an excellent drafter of county and state maps, Armstrong was a superb artist. The maps she drafted during her tenure at the GLO are both accurate and beautiful.
Armstrong’s maps are easily identifiable by her very specific style of artistic rendering. She favored a method of drawing known as stippling, a technique where ink is applied in dots to achieve both tone and texture. Depth of color and texture variance is achieved by applying more or less ink in small dots.[1]
Armstrong’s map art runs the gamut — from Presidential seals to armed conflicts on the Texas frontier — but there is a small collection of county maps that showcase animals.
The three-map series of Brewster County, the largest county in Texas, displays the original land grants of the county as well as towns, railroads, and other geographic features at a scale of 3000 varas to one inch.[2] Armstrong embellished each map by showcasing some of the diversity of wildlife, natural landscapes, and sporting activities in the county.
Drafted in January 1952, the hand-lettered map of the East Part of Brewster Co. shows the course of the Rio Grande from the San Francisco Creek to its entrance into Big Bend National Park. On the bottom right-hand side of the map, Armstrong has included a scene of a mountain lion stalking a grazing buck and doe in a canyon. The lion is poised to pounce on the deer from atop a rocky outcrop dotted with local flora.
The South Part of Brewster Co., drafted in June 1955, continues the route of the Rio Grande through Big Bend National Park into Presidio County. The artwork on the far left of the sheet is a scene of a horse-mounted man returning from a successful deer hunt. The hunter, with rifle hanging from his saddle, leads a second horse carrying the reward of his day in the canyons. The horses ascend a rocky, cactus-strewn hillside on a partly cloudy afternoon.
The third map in the series is the May 1956 North Part of Brewster Co., compiled by G. C. Morriss and H. H. Ulbricht, and drawn by Armstrong. In the upper left-hand corner is a drawing of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. The vignette, a recognizable motif of the West — and especially Texas — shows a young man breaking what looks to be a wild horse. The rider is clad in chambray and khaki and has the Lone Star of Texas on his spurred boots. The horse has no bit or bridle and the cowboy is only holding on to his mount with a rope. The drawing gives the impression that the young man is about to be thrown from his mount at any moment.
Also in 1956, Armstrong completed a survey of Bailey County, located in the far northwest Texas high plains. This map, drawn at a scale of 2000 varas to one inch, shows the abundant areas of both State Capitol Land and School Lands for a number of counties. The Panhandle & Santa Fe Railroad crosses the right corner of the county passing through the county seat of Muleshoe. In the lower third of the county Armstrong indicates the Muleshoe National Wildlife Preserve with a large flock of birds in flight. This wildlife preserve also provided inspiration for the decoration of the map title with a mated pair of mallards taking off and in flight at the top of the survey sheet.
Eltea Armstrong took inspiration from the counties she drafted showing the beauty and diversity of Texas in the process.
Before her work on the Brewster and Bailey County maps, Armstrong drafted a 1947 map of Aransas County. Placed in official use on February 18, 1948, this colorful map remains the official county map of Aransas County in the records of the GLO.
Armstrong used an orange-yellow ink to highlight the boundaries of the Aransas Migratory Waterfowl Refuge. Now called the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, this 54,829-acre area includes “scattered blackjack oak woodlands, fresh and saltwater marshes, ponds, and coastal grasslands on the mainland as well as 56,668 acres on Matagorda Island.” The Refuge is part of the Central Flyway, an area reaching from Arctic Canada southward, that provides winter roosts for over 300 species of birds and nearly 40 different mammals.[3] As a nod to the plentiful coastal natural resources of Aransas County, Armstrong included a spotted seatrout, also known as a speckled trout, which is abundant in the Gulf Coast and a favorite of fishers of the coastal bend.
[1]Stippling is related to the artistic movement of pointillism, favored by Neo-Impressionist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the late nineteenth century. For more on stippling see: http://www.artyfactory.com/pen_and_ink_drawing/pen_and_ink_drawing_7.htm and Ian Simpson, The Encyclopedia of Drawing Technique, London: Headline, 1987. pp. 62–64.
[2] 1 vara = 33.25 inches
[3] For more on the wildlife refuge see Handbook of Texas Online, Diana J. Kleiner, “Aransas National Wildlife Refuge,” accessed December 02, 2016, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/gka03
