California in 1856 - Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles

This map of California, with its inset of Utah and part of New Mexico, was compiled by Charles W. Morse and Charles A. Colby and published by D. Appleton & Co. of New York in 1856, in what would be Morse's only folio atlas. Morse, the son of telegraph inventor Samuel F. B. Morse and nephew of the map publisher Sidney E. Morse, based many of the atlas's maps on his family's cerographic wax-engraving process, though this sheet was finished by hand in full color rather than left in the flatter cerographic style, giving it a richer, more painterly finish than its production method might suggest. Hachured shading renders the Sierra Nevada's elevation across the sheet, and dual prime meridians at Washington and Greenwich reflect the period's still-unsettled cartographic conventions. The map covers California just six years after its 1850 admission as a free state, with the Gold Rush that had swelled its population only recently subsided.

The Sierra Nevada rises prominently across the map's eastern reaches, its peaks and passes rendered in hachured relief as the barrier that had funneled so many Gold Rush emigrants into California's interior valleys just a few years earlier. Rivers threading down from the range toward the coast are labeled alongside a scattering of the small mining and farming towns that had sprung up since 1848, giving the sheet a genuinely lived-in texture rather than a blank territorial outline. The inset of Utah and part of New Mexico extends the view eastward, situating California within the wider expanse of land the United States had only recently acquired from Mexico. Together, mountain range, rivers, and inset situate California as both a settled state and the western edge of a still-forming American West.

This map appeals to a California family with Gold Rush-era roots, a collector interested in the Morse family's unusual telegraph and cartography connections, or anyone assembling a shelf of mid-1850s California maps. We also carry a Colton map from the very same year, 1856, which pairs California with a dedicated inset of the City of San Francisco rather than Utah and New Mexico; where that edition looks toward California's own booming port city, this Morse & Colby sheet looks inland and east, toward the territories still being organized beyond the Sierra Nevada. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.