Lot 524: WARRE, Henry James, Sir (1819-1898). Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory . [London:] Lithographed, Printed & Published by Dickinson & Co., [1848].

WARRE, Henry James, Sir (1819-1898). Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory . [London:] Lithographed, Printed & Published by Dickinson & Co., [1848]. Broadsheets (518 x 352 mm). Title-page, dedication leaf, three leaves text, publisher's advertising slip with descriptions of bindings tipped to first text leaf. 20 hand-colored lithographed views on 16 sheets after Warre, one lithographed map colored in outline (plate 9 with small area of color rubbed beneath image, plate 15 with small adhesion lower left.) (Title and text leaves with a few small marginal repairs.) Early 20th-century red half morocco. Provenance : Thomas W. Streeter (bookplate; his extensive notes on endpapers, inserted typed description with pencil annotation: "don't include... left to F[rank] S S[treeter] in my will 9/10/62. For F.S.S." Frank S. Streeter has placed an inserted typed description which accompanied his exhibition at the Grolier Club: "This is one of the best copies I have seen and was a legacy to me from my father, thus keeping it out of his sale, where it would have done very well, a decision I greatly appreciated.") "THE ONLY WESTERN COLOR-PLATES COMPARABLE IN BEAUTY TO THOSE BY BODMER" (Howes) FIRST EDITION, COLORED ISSUE, OF THIS MAGNIFICENT SERIES OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST VIEWS. This copy includes the dedication leaf to the Hudson's Bay Company not found in all copies. "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). The sequence of the plates in this copy varies from that in the printed description. The plates are bound in the following order: 1. The Rocky Mountains from the Columbia River Looking N.W. 2. Fall of the Peloos River 3. Mount Hood 4. Mount Hood from Les Dalles 5. Les Dalles. Columbia River 6, 7. Fort George. Formerly Astoria -- McGillivray or Kootoonai River 8. Valley of the Willamette River 9. The American Village 10, 11. Mount Baker. -- Cape Disappointment 12, 13. Fort Vancouver -- Indian Tomb 14. Source of the Columbia River 15. The Rocky Mountains 16. Distant View of the Rocky Mountains 17, 18. Buffalo Hunting on the W. Prairies -- Forcing a Passage through the Burning Prairie 19. Falls of the Kamanis Taquoih River 20. Fort Carry Map: Untitled, showing Warre's route. Abbey Travel 656; Graff 4543; Howes W-114 ("c": "they remain the only western color-plates comparable in beauty to those by Bodmer accompanying Maximilian's Travels ."); Sabin 101455; Smith 10727; Wagner-Camp-Becker 157.