It consisted only of officers who were handpicked from West Point[1] and was used for mapping and the design and construction of federal civil works such as lighthouses and other coastal fortifications and navigational routes.

Members included such officers as George Meade, John C. Frémont, Thomas J. Cram, Stephen Long, and Washington Hood.

William Goetzmann has written: From the year 1838 down to the Civil War, there existed a small but highly significant branch of the Army called the Corps of Topographical Engineers.

The Corps of Topographical Engineers was a central institution of Manifest Destiny, and in the years before the Civil War its officers made explorations which resulted in the first scientific mapping of the West.

The Topographical Engineers were sophisticated men of their time who worked closely with the foremost scholars in American and European centers of learning.

By virtue of his West Point training and status he was an engineer, something above the ordinary field officer, whose duties were confined usually to strictly military tasks.

In 1805–1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike was ordered by General James Wilkinson, Governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, to find the source of the Mississippi River.

In 1819, President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun ordered General Henry Atkinson to lead what became known as the Yellowstone Expedition.