US Mineral Commissioner Rossiter W. Raymond's Geologic Map of the United States, 1873, published originally in the 1874 volume of Mineral Resources West of the Rocky Mountains. 36 x 25", folds t fix text, reinforced archival paper tape along folds in the back. Raymond was a graduate of the Freiberg School of Mines, and was appointed Mineral Commissioner in 1869 after J. Ross Browne quit the job for lack of payment from Congress. Little did Raymond know at the time, but Congress did that to him too in 1876. Data by C.H. Hitchcock and Wm Phipps Blake, both prominent geologists, with Blake an exceptional ore deposits geologist. For thee western or deposit folks, the western region is of extreme interest. The map is published at a time a full decade before the creation of the USGS, and there had been no organized geologic mapping effort, except the Clarence King Survey, and J. D. Whitney had started mapping parts of California for the California Geologic Survey. Thus the geologic data is skimpy at best. In example, the Comstock region is mostly blank, as is the eastern Great Basin toward the Great Salt Lake. The California foothill belt is remarkably simplified, in spite of two plus decades of mining hundreds of millions in dollars of gold. The same holds true for Arizona, where the major ore deposits were yet to be found, as is the area around what would become Lead, South Dakota. The Keweenaw shows no trace of the important copper mines that occupied the peninsula from the 1830's right through the publication of this map.Many major geologic concepts were not yet "discovered" or understood, such as the great Sierra Nevada batholith. It certainly could be argued that this is the most important geologic map of the pre-USGS period, showing how our knowledge of the geology on the North American continent. Place this map adjacent to a similar map made just 25 years later, and look at the major advances in, and understanding of geologic science. Edge chips, right side.