Lot 45: [HOUSTON, Sam (1793-1863),Senator, President of Texas.] FRÉMONT, John C. (1813-1890).Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843-’44. Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1845.

[HOUSTON, Sam (1793-1863), Senator, President of Texas.] FRÉMONT, John C. (1813-1890). Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843-’44. Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1845. 8°. 22 lithographed plates and 5 maps (two folding, the large Preuss map in pocket at end). (“Fort Laramie” plate detached but present.) (Occasional spotting throughout.) Original brown blind-tooled cloth, gilt-lettered on spine (wear at ends of spine and extremities). [Including:] PREUSS, Charles. Map of an Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Year 1843-44. Baltimore: E. Weber & Co. [1845]. Large folding map (825 x 1346 mm). FIRST EDITION, the Senate issue. AN OUTSTANDING ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY SAM HOUSTON on the front free endpaper: “Presented to Miss E. D. Burnside, by her friend and obt. Servt Sam Houston, Texas. Washington, 19 June [1846].” A powerful association of “Pathfinder” Frémont’s with a central figure in Texas history. Frémont’s Report describes the 10,000-mile “wilderness which lies between the frontiers of the Missouri to the shores of the Pacific” (Wheat). Houston was back in Washington as Senator for the new State of Texas, 14-years after being forced to flee the U.S. after his caning of Congressman William Stanbery. The two reports, written with the help of Frémont's wife Jessie Benton, "caught the public imagination: images of Frémont's guide, the then little-known Christopher 'Kit' Carson, riding bareback across the prairie, and Frémont himself, raising a flag on a Rocky Mountain peak, entered the national mythology" (Pamela Herr, American National Biography). The reports mapped out all California rivers south of the American River and the three Colorado rivers. They became essential guides for gold rush travelers and settlers heading for California and the Oregon Territory. Frémont stresses the importance of Preuss's large map of the routes traversed in both expeditions: "it fills up the vast geographical chasm" between Missouri and the Columbia River. Historians ever since have warmly agreed, calling it "monumental in its breadth--a classic of exploring literature" (Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, p.248). Wheat, in Mapping the Transmississippi West, deems it "as important a step forward from the earlier western maps...as...Pike, Long, and Lewis and Clark in their day" (p.495). Cohen Mapping the West, pp.130-133; Field 565; Graff 1436; Howes F-370; Sabin 25845; Streeter sale VI:3131; Wagner-Camp-Becker 115:2; Zamorano Eighty 39.