Colton’s Map of the United States of America, The British Provinces, Mexico and The West Indies Showing the Country from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. New York, 1855.

Description

Colton’s large-format wall map of the United States is one of the great American cartographic productions of the nineteenth century — monumental in scale, vivid in color, encyclopedic in geographical content, and alive with decorative vignettes of frontier life, western wildlife, and maritime activity. This 1855 example, preserved on its original wooden rollers, represents the rarest known state of the map — a single copy of the 1855 issue has been positively identified, at the Huntington Library — and carries a distinction that sets it apart from every earlier state: it is the first Colton wall map to show the Gadsden Purchase border, the strip of land south of the Gila River acquired from Mexico in 1853 and ratified in 1854, which establishes the permanent southern boundary of Arizona and New Mexico as we know it today. The 1853 and 1854 states of this map both show the older pre-Gadsden border as it stood after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The 1855 state is where the contiguous United States achieves its final continental form.

The Map in Detail

The geography of the West is where this map rewards closest attention. Along the southwestern border, the Gadsden Purchase line appears for the first time in this series — the strip of approximately 30,000 square miles purchased from Mexico for ten million dollars, running south of the Gila River through what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico, and secured primarily to provide an unobstructed southern corridor for the transcontinental railroad. It is the last adjustment to the southern border of the contiguous United States, and its first appearance on a Colton wall map is a landmark moment in American cartographic history.

Elsewhere in the West, the reorganization brought by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 1854 is fully absorbed. Kansas appears as a formal territory. Nebraska Territory has been extended north to the Canadian border, absorbing the vast expanse Colton had labeled ‘Northwestern Territory’ in earlier states, now encompassing the future North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Indian Territory has been reorganized roughly along the lines of modern Oklahoma. Utah Territory remains one enormous entity with no trace of Nevada; Washington and Oregon Territories extend to the Rockies. Throughout the composition, small decorative vignettes enliven the geographical spaces: deer in Kansas, a bear in the Northwest Territory, beavers north of the Great Lakes, wolves and arctic foxes in Canada, Native Americans in ritual dance, wagon trains in Oregon, ships and sea creatures across the Pacific and Gulf. Two insets occupy the lower border — Central America at lower left, the West Indies at lower right — with statistical tables and a table of distances along the right margin.

Historical Context

The Gadsden Purchase resolved the final unfinished business of the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) had established a border that almost immediately generated disputes, and the strip of land south of the Gila River was identified early as the most practical route for a southern transcontinental railroad. President Pierce appointed James Gadsden as ambassador to Mexico in 1853 with specific instructions to purchase as much northern Mexican territory as possible. The deal ultimately signed in December 1853 and ratified in 1854 secured 30,000 square miles for ten million dollars — less than originally hoped for, but sufficient to establish the railroad corridor and settle the border permanently. Combined with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 1854, which reorganized the central territories at enormous political cost — repealing the Missouri Compromise and setting the country on the path toward Bleeding Kansas and eventually the Civil War — 1854 was the year that determined the shape of the American West. Colton’s 1855 wall map is the first to show both transformations in place simultaneously: the reorganized central territories after Kansas-Nebraska, and the completed southern border after the Gadsden Purchase.

Publication History and Census

Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800–1893), New York, 1855. First issued in 1853 (copyright date), the map went through at least four major states: the 1853 state (pre-Kansas-Nebraska, ‘Northwestern Territory’ labeled, pre-Gadsden border); the 1854 state (Kansas added as territory, Indian Territory reorganized, Nebraska extended to the Canadian border, pre-Gadsden border); the present 1855 state (post-Kansas-Nebraska, post-Gadsden — the first state to show the completed southern border); and a 1856 state. The 1855 state is the rarest: a single copy has been positively identified, at the Huntington Library. Mounted on original wooden rollers. Wheat Transmississippi 776; Wheat Gold Region 255; Martin & Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, no. 43.