PACIFIC RAILROAD SURVEYS. Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, Made Under the Direction of the Secretary of War, in 1853-4. Washington, D.C.: Beverley Tucker, 1855-1861.

Description

The Foundational Scientific Survey of the American West.

Few publications have done more to open a continent to understanding than this one. The Pacific Railroad Survey Reports — twelve quarto volumes, 652 plates and maps, not including the woodcuts in text — represent the most ambitious scientific survey of North America ever undertaken to that date: a comprehensive reckoning with the topography, geology, botany, zoology, and indigenous peoples of the American West, commissioned by Congress and executed by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers between 1853 and 1861. Wagner-Camp called it “a monumental collection of scientific information, geographical, zoological, botanical, geological, of the still mysterious American West.” Howes called it “the best cartographical work on the West up to its time.”

This complete Senate issue in original leather bindings, comprising all twelve volumes (thirteen books) as issued, was published volume by volume as the reports arrived — the first in 1855, the last in 1861, just as the country it documented was tearing itself apart. The transcontinental railroad that the surveys were designed to enable began construction from Omaha toward California within two years of the final volume’s appearance.

The Publication in Detail

The surveys grew from a single political question — where should a transcontinental railroad run? — into something far larger than anyone anticipated. The original plan was three or four volumes. The final tally was twelve, and even then the reports arrived in disorder, zoological sections split across multiple volumes, plates assigned and reassigned as the printers worked through an avalanche of material. The result is, as one early commentator affectionately noted, “charmingly eccentric” rather than forbiddingly disorganized. The breadth of what was gathered is extraordinary.

Volume I is the introductory volume, containing the correspondence and summary reports, including a memoranda on railways by Brevet Captain George B. McClellan of the Corps of Engineers. Volume II covers the Kansas-Colorado-Utah route along the 38th and 39th parallels, with the posthumous report of Captain J.W. Gunnison — killed by Paiute warriors in Utah while writing it — accompanied by twelve colored lithographic plates of western scenery, twenty botanical plates, and a color map. Volume III, the ethnographic volume, follows Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple’s 35th parallel expedition from Little Rock through Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona to Los Angeles, with extensive documentation of the Indian tribes of the region and twenty-one colored lithographic plates.

Volume IV covers the botany of the same route, devoted almost entirely to studies by Dr. J.M. Bigelow, George Engelmann (twenty-four plates of cacti), and Asa Gray (twenty-five botanical plates). Volume V is the first Southern California volume, with views of Los Angeles and San Diego — among the earliest printed views of those settlements — together with surveys of the deserts, valleys, mountains, and flora as far north as San Francisco. Volumes VI and VII cover the California-Oregon routes, from the Sacramento Valley to the Columbia River and from San Francisco Bay south to the Gila, with sections on geology, botany, and zoology, including colored plates of the Ponderosa Pine and the fauna of the Pacific coast.

Volumes VIII, IX, and X constitute the sprawling Zoology Report, compiled under the direction of Spencer F. Baird of the Smithsonian Institution, who was simultaneously one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. Volume VIII covers mammals (757 pages); Volume IX covers birds (1,005 pages); Volume X covers reptiles and fishes, with colored plates of birds alongside. Volume XI is the map volume — the most fragile and the rarest in the digital record — containing four engraved map plates, thirteen lithographed view plates, and twenty-one folding maps with profiles, totaling thirty-two maps and profiles in all. Volume XII, published in two books in 1860, covers the northern route along the 47th–49th parallels from St. Paul to Puget Sound, reported by Isaac I. Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, and illustrated with seventy colored landscape plates.

Historical Context

The question of where to route a transcontinental railroad was, in the 1850s, as much a political crisis as an engineering problem. Northern and Southern interests contended bitterly over which states the line would cross and which cities it would make great. The man who temporarily broke the deadlock was Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War under President Pierce, who in 1853 obtained a congressional appropriation to send Army surveying parties along four candidate routes simultaneously: the northern route (47th–49th parallels, from St. Paul to Puget Sound); the central route (38th–39th parallels, through the Rockies via Salt Lake); the 35th parallel route, through New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles; and the southern route (32nd parallel), along the Gila River to San Diego, which Davis personally favored. Pacific coast surveys were added to connect the route termini with San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.

The result was the largest coordinated scientific expedition in American history, staffed by Army officers, civilian geologists, botanists, zoologists, and artists, many of whom went on to distinguished careers. By the time the final volume appeared in 1861, the country was at war, Davis was President of the Confederacy, and the railroad question had answered itself: the Union Pacific would begin at Omaha, running west to meet the Central Pacific coming east from California. The surveys had documented the alternatives; history chose the route.

Publication History and Census

Volumes I–VII: Washington, Government Printing Office, 1855–1857. Volumes VIII–X: Washington, Beverley Tucker, Printer, 1857–1859. Volume XI: Washington, George W. Bowman, 1861. Volume XII: Washington, Thomas H. Ford, Printer, 1860. Issued in both octavo and quarto formats and in both House (cloth) and Senate (leather) issues; the quarto Senate issue in original bindings, as here, is the preferred and more complete form. This copy comprises all twelve volumes (thirteen books) in publisher’s cloth, many volumes rebacked with the original spine laid down. All volumes except Volume VIII carry a library bookplate on the front endpaper and a small library stamp on the title page. Boards show some edge wear and variable fading to gilt spine lettering; occasional browning and foxing due to variations in paper stock; some minor tears to the large folding maps in Volume XI without loss. Internally, pages, plates, and maps are in very good to fine condition throughout. Total: 652 plates and maps, not including the woodcuts in text. Howes P-3; Wagner-Camp, The Plains & the Rockies, p.462.