Texas in 1855 - Austin, Houston, Washington-on-the-Brazos

George Philip & Son of Liverpool issued this map of Mexico, Texas, and the Southwest as part of an early edition of their Imperial Atlas in 1855, just before the Gadsden Purchase would redraw the region's southern boundary the following year. Philip's firm produced the map for a British audience with a commercial interest in tracking American territorial expansion, rendering an oddly configured Texas hemmed in by a vast, still-undefined Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory, alongside a Southern California not yet separated from the rest of Mexico's former northern provinces on the map's western edge. The engraving captures a genuinely unsettled geography - Sevier Lake and several since-disproven "phantom" lakes appear across Utah, while an "Inconstant River" is shown running from the Colorado River toward an unnamed Mono Lake - the kind of speculative detail typical of maps made before the region had been fully surveyed. Dealers today note this as only the second example of the map seen on the market in more than twenty years.

Texas carries the map's densest detail, naming Fort Parker, Fort Houston, Frankfort, Cincinnati, Austin, Richmond, Houston, Texana, Gonzales, Franklin, Liberty, Crockett, Washington, and Bolivar - a set of frontier-era town names, several of which, like Washington-on-the-Brazos, where Texan independence was declared, would fade from prominence as Houston and Austin grew into the state's dominant cities. To the east, the map shows unusually strong detail across western Arkansas and Indian Territory, naming a number of settlements strung between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. Farther west, the Rocky Mountains are traced north to the sources of the Rio Grande del Norte, giving the whole sheet a rare combination of frontier Texas town names alongside genuinely exploratory detail across land barely surveyed at all.

It's a fitting gift for a Texas family with roots reaching back to the Republic era, or for a collector of pre-Gadsden Purchase maps of the American Southwest drawn to the genuine cartographic uncertainty this sheet preserves. Published from Liverpool rather than an American house, it offers a distinctly British commercial perspective on Texas and Mexico that stands apart from the New York and Philadelphia atlases more commonly found in the store's Texas holdings. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.