Lot 114: Warre, Sir Henry James

Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London: Lithographed, Printed and Published by Dickinson & Co., [1848] Broadsheets (21 1/4 x 14 3/8 in.; 538 x 365 mm). 16 handcolored tinted lithographed plates after Warre (containing 20 views), engraved map partially handcolored in outline, plates and text leaves on guards; lacking dedication leaf (not issued with all copies according to Howes), marginal soiling and repair to text and to about half the plates, long diagonal crease to final plate. Half red morocco, original brown printed wrappers bound in (soiled and repaired); extremities rubbed.

Abbey, Travel 656; Graff 4543; Howes W114; Sabin 101455; Smith 10727; Wagner-Camp 157

First edition, colored issue, of the the most notable color-plate book on the Pacific Northwest. In May 1845, Captain James Warre was sent from Montreal, in the company of Lieutenant Vavasour of the Royal Engineers, on a military reconnaissance to the Oregon Territory. The already uneasy joint occupation of Oregon by the United States and Great Britain had threatened to develop into war as American expansionists demanded that a northernmost boundary be established between the rival claimants. (In 1844, Democrat congressional candidates began rallying under the slogan "Fifty-four Forty [degrees and minutes of latitude] or Fight!") By the time Warre returned to England with his accumulated intelligence, a compromise has settled the dispute, with the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixing the boundary between the United States and British America on the forty-ninth parallel. With the military object of his mission no longer relevant, Warre turned a portion of his notes and drawings into a magnificent view book, which contains "the only western color plates comparable in beauty to those by Bodmer" (Howes). His plates provide dramatic depictions of Puget Sound, the Columbia River, the Rocky Mountains, and Mount Hood, while the accompanying travel narrative describes Warre and Vavasour's stays at Fort Vancouver, Fort George, and the Willamette settlement and their encounters with Blackfeet, Assiniboine, and Cree peoples. The map is colored to show the routes of the party to the Pacific and back to the east coast.