Pacific Railroad Surveys
"The Most Important and Massive Compilation of Exploration Reports and Data About the Trans-Mississippi West..." - Reese
Complete With the Volume of Maps with Warren's Great Map of the West
During the 1850s, the U.S. Government sponsored an extensive series of expeditions designed to gather information on the vast new territories that had been acquired in western North America. The discovery of gold in California further stimulated westward traffic and heightened the need for a faster and more convenient transportation connection between the various parts of the country. To this end the government initiated the Pacific Railroad Surveys to identify feasible railway routes from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, facilitating westward expansion. The surveys were conducted under the auspices of the War Department, then under the direction of Jefferson Davis, leveraging the expertise of topographical engineers and scientists. The Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers meticulously mapped several potential routes across diverse terrains, ranging from the northernmost paths through the Rocky Mountains to more southern trails past the Sierra Nevada. The resulting reports, rich in geographical, geological, and natural history observations, provided critical data that was intended to help the decision-making process for the final route of the transcontinental railroad. These comprehensive documents, collectively known as the Pacific Railroad Survey Reports, thus go beyond railway history, to enompass scientific research and the strategic development of the West.
These reconnaissaince surveys constituted the government's first attempt at a comprehensive and systematic geographical examination of the vast western region. The resulting information made possible the first reasonably accurate topographical map of the West, while the reports and sketches comprise a remarkable mine of geographical information about the area at that time....The reports are accompanied by approximately 650 plates, maps, and tables, many of them colored, depicting landscape views, regional inhabitants, fossils and other achaeological findings, and natural history subjects of all kinds. Some of these are quite remarkable; there are, for example, 36 hand-colored plates of birds executed by John Cassin... - Hill.
Under the provisions of the Army Appropriation Act of March 1853, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was directed to survey possible routes to the Pacific. Five selected routes, roughly following specific parallels, were to be surveyed by parties under the supervision of the Topographical Corps. The most northerly survey, between the 47th and 49th parallels, was under the direction of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, governor of Washington Territory. This route closely approximated that proposed by Asa Whitney in 1849. The ill-fated party under Capt. John W. Gunnison was to explore the route along the 38th and 39th parallels, or the Cochetopa Pass route, advocated by Senator Benton. Because he failed to get John Charles Fremont appointed to head this expedition, Benton promoted two well-publicized, privately financed ventures in the same year, one headed by Edward F. Beale and the other by Fremont. After Gunnison's death at the hands of hostile Indians, Lt. Edward G. Beckwith continued the survey along the 41st parallel. Capt. Amiel W. Whipple, assistant astronomer of the Mexican Boundary Survey, and Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives surveyed the routes of the 35th parallel, westward to southern California. This was essentially the route traversed by Josiah Gregg in 1839 and later surveyed by Col. John J. Abert. When the results of the surveys were analyzed it was apparent that additional data on the roadbeds, grades, and passes were needed for the 32d parallel route to California. Lt. John G. Parke resurveyed along the Gila River between the Pima villages and the Rio Grande. Capt. John Pope mapped the eastern portion of the route from Dona Ana, N. Mex., to the Red River. Topographical surveys to locate passes through the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast Range in California and to determine the route that would connect California, Oregon, and Washington were made under the direction of Lt. Robert S. Williamson.
In all, there were 6 major expeditions; five of them covered the area between the Great Plains and west coast, and the sixth explored the coastal states of California and Oregon. All of these expeditions were accompanied by naturalists and artists to document the landscape, flora and fauna along the route.
The plates (both engraved and lithographs), show towns and settlements, birds, and other natural history subjects, animals and botanical specimens. "Included herein are the reports of Humphreys, Stevens, Beckwith, Whipple, Warren, Williamson, Lander, et al., supplemented with reports on scientific observations, and numerous significant achievements in cartography, including Warren's [map]" - Reese.
E. I. Edwards, the bibliographer of the Southern California desert, pointed to volumes 3, 5 and 7 as having important content relating to the California desert: "Vol. V has much to tell concerning Tejon Pass, the Great Basin, Mojave River, San Fernando Pass, the Cajon, San Gorgonio Pass, Warner's Pass, the Carrizo Corridor, Warner's Valley, Camp Yuma, the Colorado Desert generally. In Vol. V are 26 colored lithographs, including the very early one of Los Angeles."
Following on Edwards, the editors of the Zamorano Select singled out Volume 5 as particularly important for California, with it's fine lithograph views of the San Diego Mission, Los Angeles, the Colorado Desert, and the like:
Not since Napoleon had taken scientists to Egypt in the late 1700s had so much data been collected in a single undertaking... Volume 5 is of special interest to historians of Southern California because it contains the conclusions that the Tehachapi Pass and the Cañada de Uvas (the Grapevine) were the practical routes between the south and the central part of the state, and the Cajon Pass was the natural gateway from the east. There are also many maps and lithographs of locations in California, including the first lithographic rendition of Los Angeles, and a striking image of the San Fernando Mission standing almost as an island in the then hauntingly barren San Fernando Valley - William G. Donohoo in Zamorano Select.
For a full rundown on the contents of each volume see the respective entries in Wagner-Camp, whose compilers acknowledged the complexity posed to the bibliographer by this gargantuan publication project:
The Quarto Edition [of the Pacific Railroad Reports] began to appear in 1855, concluding in 1861 with Volume XII. Despite their flaws, these volumes contain a monumental collection of scientific information, geographical, zoological, botanical, geological, of the still mysterious American West. Upon first examination, the volumes seem forbiddingly disorganized; reports clearly were printed as they were received; there is no overall system or arrangement, nor are there general indices to the volumes, and, as Camp has pointed out, there is the usual duplication of printing and lithography by both houses of Congress - Wagner-Camp.
G. K. Warren's Monumental Map of the American West
Lt. Governeur Kemble Warren's monumental map of the Transmississippi West stands as perhaps the single most important map of the American West issued after Fremont's map of Oregon & Upper California. It is included in volume 11 of the present Pacific Railroad Survey Reports. Howes called it "the best cartographical work on the West up to its time."
"Warren's General Map" is a monumentally important map that is considered to be the first accurate overall picture of the region. Wheat considered it so important that he dedicated eight pages to its description (see his Mapping the Transmississippi West, vol. 4, pages 84-91) and called it the most important map produced by the Topographical Engineers. Drawn on the polyconic projection, the map culminated a half-century of government explorations beginning with Lewis & Clark. Only 24 years old when assigned the task, Warren used information from the U.S. Land Office, the Coast Survey, Topographical Engineers, the Adjutant General, the Quartermaster General, the Indian Bureau, and Smithsonian Institution to obtain the latest information in developing this map. The majority of the map was completed by 1854, but it was not fully complete when the first railroad survey report was published in 1855 and continued to be issued in revised editions until 1868.
William H. Goetzmann gives a wonderful overview of the importance of Warren's cornerstone map:
The most important of the maps drawn by the Topographical Engineers was Lieutenant Gouvenuer Kemble Warren's map of 1857... A monumental work which encompassed the whole West, Warren's map was, in a sense, the culminating achievement of the Great Reconnaissance period. For the first time, a reasonably accurate, intstrument-based outline of the entire complex geography of the West was available. Only twenty-six when he produced the map, Warren was something of a cartographic genius. In order to construct the master map of the West, he had to collate all the work of the previous decades, including the innumerable computations and celestial observations... Warren produced one of the climactic maps in the history of America cartography. After his work, as Carl I. Wheat has written, everything else was a matter of filling in detail. - Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West, p. 314-16.
Rarity
Nice complete sets with the maps and plates are becoming quite scarce in the market, particularly uniformly-bound sets.