Lot 122: WARRE, Henry James (1819-1898). Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory . [London:] Dickinson & Co., [1848.]

WARRE, Henry James (1819-1898). Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. [London:] Dickinson & Co., [1848.]

Broadsheet 2° (544 x 370mm). Lithographed map and 20 variously tinted lithographed views after Warre on 16 sheets. Publisher's slip advertising binding options tipped onto first text leaf. (Without the dedication leaf found in some copies, wear with small losses in margins of text leaves and some guards, some of these with small, old repairs, plates with light wear and light spotting near blank edges, one plate with short marginal tears.) Original cloth-backed printed wrappers (gutta percha perished leaving all leaves loose, front wrapper chipped and with repaired tear near spine, finger-sized loss to rear wrapper, some soiling). Provenance:?'S.R.G.' (indistinct initials in an early hand on the front wrapper).

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.

PALMER, Charles John (1805-1882).
Est. £5,000 - £8,000
($8,050 - $12,880)