Rare first edition of Bancroft's map of California & the Southwest.
The map is hand colored by counties and shows tremendous detail, being unquestionably the best map of the Western United States published West of the Mississippi during the Civil War. Early roads, towns, rivers, mountains, mines, Indian Villages, Springs, lakes, islands, railroads, railway stations, military camps and forts and a host of other details rarely seen on maps of the period. Wheat notes that this map and the larger map of the Pacific State established the rising HH Bancroft house as the greatest map publisher of the Pacific Coast, and remarks that the size of the maps is so large and so overflowing with detail that it is utterly impossible to describe their minutiae.
Wheat notes that the student must go to the maps themselves, as they are so rich with source information as to defy description.