Heading:
Author: Preuss, Charles
Title: Topographical Map of the Road from Missouri to Oregon, Commencing at the Mouth of the Kansas in the Missouri River and Ending at the Mouth of the Wallah Wallah in the Columbia, In VII Sections.... From the field notes and journal Capt. J.C. Frémont, and from sketches and notes made on the ground by his assistant Charles Preuss
Place Published: Washington
Publisher:
Date Published: 1846-[1849]
Description:

Lithographed map on 7 sheets. Each sheet approx. 39.5x63.5 cm (15¾x25"), folding into later cloth-backed boards 21.5x13 cm (8½x5¼").

Preuss's landmark map, based on the great Frémont/Preuss map of 1845 but in much more detail over the area depicted, in response to a request by the Senate of the United States, under whose auspices it was published. This is the second issue, or edition, published three years after the separately issued first edition, in John A. Rockwell's "Report... survey of certain routes for a canal or railroad between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; also... the establishment of a national road from the western frontier of Arkansas to California..." This version of the map is identical to that of the original 1846 Senate issue, except that the it does not have the Baltimore lithographer's name (E. Weber), and Sheet VI was misnumbered. Wheat remarks that the finished map "was a road guide for Oregon emigrants such as had never previously existed... The purview of each section is quite narrowly limited to the emigrant road, but the topography is developed in rather more detail than on the parent map. Owing to its rarity and to its having long stood in the shadow of the much more widely known and distributed Frémont map of 1845, Preuss's sectional map of 1846 has been insufficiently appreciated by students of Western history...." There are tables of meteorological observations and descriptive commentary on the map. Wheat illustrates all seven sections of the map. Graff 3360; Streeter Sale 3100; Wagner-Camp 115 (note); Wheat Transmississippi 523 (all referring to 1846 issue of the map).

Sheet VII is a bit trimmed at top edge slight affecting some letters at the end of one of the paragraphs of descriptive commentary; old stitching holes in margins; fine or nearly so.