Emory, William H.:

$500 · Offered by William Reese Company

NOTES OF A MILITARY RECONNOISSANCE, FROM FORT LEAVENWORTH, IN MISSOURI, TO SAN DIEGO, IN CALIFORNIA, INCLUDING PARTS OF THE ARKANSAS, DEL NORTE, AND GILA ... The scarce first regular trade edition (after the two government editions of the same year) of one of the most important government reports on overland travel, with accounts of the march of the Army of the West, the Mexican-American War in New Mexico and California, and some of the first American views of the far Southwest. "A library of Western Americana is incomplete without it" - ZAMORANO 80. Emory also made an important scientific contribution with this work, especially in the botanical section contributed by John Torrey. The map, "Military reconnaissance of the Arkansas, Rio del Norte and Rio Gila...," is called "epochmaking" by Wheat, and put much of the country on the map for the first time. This copy contains thirty-nine of forty plates, and possibly never had the missing "Head of the Mountain Goat Female." It would seem that this edition was made by combining a new printing of the text, done in New York, with lithographs done by the same Washington and Baltimore lithographers who did those for the original edition. The New York publishers thus melded government overruns with their commercial package - a considerable savings. If a print stock ran out, on the other hand, they had no way to replace it, and this is probably what happened with the "Mountain Goat" plate.

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