California Map 1860 State Print - San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles

Britton & Rey, the San Francisco lithographic house founded in 1852 by Joseph Britton and Jacques Joseph Rey, issued this rare third and final edition of George Henry Goddard's foundational Map of the State of California in 1860, following a first edition in 1857 and a reduced second edition in 1858. Often called a western Currier & Ives, Britton & Rey built its reputation on ambitious lithographic work ranging from grand bird's-eye views to Gold Rush pictorial letter sheets and municipal ephemera, output that fixed the visual identity of early California in the public eye. Cartographic historian Carl Wheat called this map "by far the most accurate and complete map of California and of its gold regions which had as yet been published," praising it as a beautiful example of the cartographer's art despite its rarity. It captures California in its early statehood configuration, a full decade after admission to the Union but still years before the state's modern county map took shape.

The map shows California with large, still-undivided counties: Orange, Ventura, Riverside and Imperial had not yet been created, and the road network connecting the state's few small communities remains sparse. Its key is unusually evocative for a wall map of this period, distinguishing "Small Towns & Ranchos," "Bars & other Mining Places," "Stage & Wagon Roads," "Emigrant & Mountain Trails" and "Canals & Main Ditches," a level of category detail aimed squarely at miners and settlers rather than casual travelers. Nevada Territory had not yet been split off from Utah Territory when this map was printed, an event that would follow in 1861, so California here borders Utah Territory and New Mexico to the east rather than the Nevada state line familiar from later maps. Some of the earliest California railroads already appear threaded through the settled portions of the state, a sign of the infrastructure that would soon transform its interior.

For a California family with Gold Rush-era roots, or a collector assembling the full run of Goddard's map through its three editions, this scarce 1860 third edition is a natural centerpiece, its wagon roads and mining place-names capturing a working, frontier California quite different from the settled county maps of later decades. OCLC records list surviving 1860 copies at only UC Berkeley, Harvard and Yale, underscoring how rarely this particular edition surfaces. It's supplied unframed, in the full range of sizes from a modest desk print up to a large-format piece for a study or office wall.