Description
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Broadsheet 2° (544 x 370mm). Lithographed map showing the route of the expedition and 20 variously tinted lithographed views after Warre on 16 sheets. Publisher’s slip advertising binding options tipped onto first text leaf. Original cloth-backed printed wrappers. Superb copy with minimal staining and no significant damage.
FIRST EDITION, IN THE ORIGINAL WRAPPERS, OF THIS MAGNIFICENT SERIES OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST VIEWS. ‘Captain Warre and Lieutenant Vavasour of the Royal Engineers were agents of the British government who were sent out to Oregon at the height of the controversy between the United States and Great Britain over the sovereignty of that territory. The two officers crossed Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company route as far as the Rockies, where they turned south to cross the mountains, probably through Crow’s Nest Pass, to Kootenai Lake. They reached Fort Vancouver on August 25, 1845, and visited the Willamette Valley, the mouth of the Columbia River, Puget Sound, and Vancouver Island before returning to England, where they found that the dispute between the two nations had been settled in their absence’ (Wagner-Camp-Becker). Abbey, Travel 656; Graff 4543; Howes W-114 (‘the only western color-plates comparable in beauty to those by Bodmer’); Sabin 101455; Smith 10727; Wagner-Camp-Becker 157.
