|
|
Article: Revisiting the Topia Road: walking in the footsteps of West and Parsons.
- Article from:
- The Geographical Review
- Article date:
- October 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 American Geographical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Sixty years ago, Robert C. West (1913-2001) and James J. Parsons (1915-1997), two young, exuberant Carl Sauer graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to rediscover historic mining sites in Mexico's western Sierra Madre. They undertook the trip, chronicled in their 1941 Geographical Review article "The Topia Road: A Trans-Sierran Trail of Colonial Mexico," in December 1940-January 1941 to provide a firsthand look at mining areas that had been, in their heyday, some of the most productive sites in North America. West had traveled extensively in northern Mexico in the mid-1930s, conducting fieldwork for his master's degree; for Parsons, the trip ...