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Description

With Annotations Showing Route 66!

Rare Blackburn map of Eastern San Bernardino County, Clark County, Nevada and Southwestern Arizona.

A very interesting map of the region, with meticulous details, townships, towns, roads, wells, mountains, lakes, etc.

The railroads have been highlighted in orange, major roads in red and the Colorado River system in blue.

Several annotations in blue pencil note a new Railway from Las Vegas to Boulder Dam and the price of land in Cottonwood Valley, east of Searchlight, Nevada on the Colorado River "This landheld at $125 pr acre."

Further down, in blue ink near Bullhead Rock, the future site of Bullhead City, a Dam is noted, along with a distance note to Oatman, Arizona and a note concerning a proposed road from a train stop west of Needles on the National Old Trails Road through Fort Mojave to Oatman.

To the east of Kingman and again furtner west, #66-Highway is shown, a reference to Route 66, just months after its creation in November, 1926. US Route 66 became the first highway to be completely paved in 1938. Several places were dangerous. More than one part of the highway was nicknamed "Bloody 66" and gradually work was done to realign these segments to remove dangerous curves. The section through the Black Mountains outside Oatman, Arizona, was unquestionably the worst, fraught with hairpin turns and was the steepest along the entire route, so much so that some early travelers, too frightened at the prospect of driving such a potentially dangerous road, hired locals to navigate the winding grade.

The map shows the old route through Oatman. In 1953, the Oatman Highway through the Black Mountains was completely bypassed by a new route between Kingman, Arizona and Needles, California. By the 1960s, Oatman, Arizona, was virtually abandoned as a ghost town.

Blackman's map is very rare on the market. This is the first example we have ever seen.