Mexico & Southwest US Map 1795 Regional Print - Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico

This engraving of Mexico and New Spain came from the hand of Thomas Kitchin, an engraver who learned his trade under Emanuel Bowen before building an independent reputation prolific enough to illustrate Dr. William Robertson's History of America, a work so popular it ran through many editions and translations across more than three decades. The geography on this 1795-dated sheet actually dates to 1777, the year Kitchin first cut the engraving, capturing the state of commercial cartographic knowledge about the region just before Jesuit missionary expansion into Upper California began supplying Europe with better survey information. Robertson's History treated the Americas with unusual scholarly seriousness for its time, and Kitchin's accompanying map matched that ambition, standing up well against the best commercial geography being produced anywhere in Europe during the period.

The map gives real attention to southern Arizona and New Mexico, better documented than territory further west thanks to decades of Spanish mission and presidio activity across the two provinces. Its rendering of Baja California captures the geographic understanding of the peninsula current just before more detailed Jesuit-era survey work corrected it. Texas remains comparatively bare in its interior, a fair reflection of how little confirmed detail Spanish authorities had actually gathered on the province by the 1770s. Santa Fe again stands as the sheet's most developed northern settlement, the administrative seat around which the rest of New Mexico's scattered missions and presidios were organized.

A fitting gift for a Southwest transplant or a collector who already owns Wyld's 1830 Santa Fe Trail-era map and wants to go a generation further back in the region's cartographic record. TheMapVault offers this same Kitchin map as two individual examples; this is the second, offered as a separate print from its companion copy for buyers who want their own individual example rather than sharing one between two rooms or two family members. Like its companion, it's supplied unframed and available across the same full range of nine sizes, from a compact accent piece to a large-format statement print.