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Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819 and '20, By Order of The Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Sec'y of War: Under the Command of Major Stephen H. Long. From the Notes of Major Long, Mr. T. Say, and other Gentlemen of the Exploring Party. Compiled by Edwin James, Botanist and Geologist for the Expedition.
Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823, first edition, two volumes, octavo, and separate atlas, iv, [1] - 503; vii, 442, xcviii, pp., this set has an additional set of the suite of eight plates bound in to the text, albeit quite trimmed, bound in recent period style full calf, red leather spine label; accompanied by the quarto atlas, (dated 1822), 4, eight plates, one colored, two engraved maps, one profile plan, bound in the original boards, paper spine label, recent plain brown ¼ calf spine, re-cased, some paper repairs to corners of boards. Text volumes foxed, title-page of volume one bears the contemporary manuscript markings of "Union Library no. 312," no other markings, some offsetting from plates in text volumes, else very good.
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The Long expedition ranks in importance with those of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike. Edwin James was the botanist, geologist, and surgeon for this important government expedition, which added significantly to the earlier discoveries of Lewis and Clark.
Major Long was appointed by the government to explore the Yellowstone but the party's attempts to ascend the Missouri River in a steamboat were unsuccessful. The expedition then crossed the plains of present day Kansas and Colorado to the base of the Front Range. This contains what is perhaps the first published account of a journey up the Platte and then across the watershed to the Arkansas, and the first account of a journey down the Arkansas from above Fort Smith.
The plates in this work were done by Samuel Seymour, "the first artist to penetrate America's western interior and make sketches on the Upper Missouri and the plains and rockies, as well as on the Red River of the North" (Trenton and Hassrick, The Rocky Mountains. A Vision for Artists in the 19th Century, p. 22). Goetzmann & Goetzmann (The West of the Imagination, p. 10) refer to Seymour's plate in this work entitled: View of the Rocky Mountains on the Platte 50 Miles from their Base, as "the first eyewitness pictorial representation of the West to be placed before the American public." The appendix, with a separate title-page, dated 1822, contains astronomical and meteorological tables and Indian vocabularies.
The expedition consisted of Major Long, the commander; Captain J. R. Bell, official recorder; Thomas Say, zoologist; Edwin James, botanist, geologist, and surgeon; Titian R. Peale, assistant naturalist; Samuel Seymour, landscape painter; a corporal with six army privates, and assorted interpreters, hunters and baggage men. Edwin James subsequently based his compilation upon his own records, the brief geological notes of Major Long, and the early journals of Thomas Say.
Graff 2188; Howes J-41; Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives 4; Streeter Sale 1783; Siebert Sale 813; Pilling 1958; Rader 2046; Sabin 35682; Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West, 353; Wagner-Camp, Becker, 25:1
