A journal of travels into the Arkansa Territory, during the year 1819. With occasional observations on the manners of the aborigines. Illustrated by a map and other engravings
Philadelphia: Thos. H. Palmer, 1821. First edition.
Octavo in 4s (8 5/8” x 5 7/16”, 219mm x 138mm): 2 binder’s blanks, π4 1*2 2-374, 2 binder’s blanks [$1 signed]. 150 leaves, pp. i-v (title, copyright, dedication, blank, preface) vi-xii, 9 10-296. With a folding engraved map by Henry Schenck Tanner and 5 aquatint plates.
Bound in later XIXc half morocco over marbled boards. On the spine, five raised bands. Title and date gilt to the second panel. Author gilt to the fourth panel. All edges of the text-block marbled to match the boards. Presented in a brown buckram slip-case with chemise.
Rubbed, with wear at the fore-edges and -corners. Tanned, with scattered foxing. Adhesive residue (and binding holes from reversal) to the plates. Repaired splits to all the folds of the map, with offsetting.
Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859) was a journeyman printer from the West Riding of Yorkshire, who came to Philadelphia ca. 1808. There he met the pioneering American botanist Benjamin Smith Barton (a member of the American Philosophical Society, to which Nuttall would be elected in 1817) and developed his skill as a field botanist. He joined the 1810 Astor expedition up the Missouri River, during which he collected many plants that had been lost by Lewis and Clark, providing type-specimens. He returned to Britain in advance of the War of 1812, and returned to Philadelphia in 1815 to publish his Genera of North American Plants in 1818. Later that year he began the travels that provided the basis for the present work.
The Arkansas River originates in the Rockies southwest of Denver and flows largely east-southeast through modern Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas before joining the Mississippi. Although James Wilkinson had made a similar voyage in 1806, Nuttall’s experience as a natural scientist makes the present work an important account of the flora (and fauna; he would eventually publish a Manual of the ornithology of the United States and Canada) of the American West. Of particular note is his description of the indigenous people he encountered, who would be so fundamentally displaced and decimated in the decades following.
The present item was lot 254 in the Sotheby’s New York sale of Laird U. Park, Jr., 29 November 2000. Park (1922–2001) was a graduate of the Hill School and Princeton, graduating after serving in the Pacific theatre of WW2 in the Navy. Park re-established the great balance-making firm of Troemner but his passion was Americana, his books principally bought from Mabel Zahn at Sessler’s Bookshop, now the location of Arader’s Philadelphia branch.
Field 1145; Howes N 229; Sain 56348; Wagner-Camp 19a.
Item #JLR0785
Price: $7,500