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[Salt Lake City, Utah Territory]: B[ernard] A[rnold] M[artin] Froiseth; New York, Am. Photo-Lithographic Co., N.Y. (Osborne’s Process), 1870. 3 lithographic maps on one sheet, 16.65” x 13.75” within a border. Map sizes: 9.75” x 6.75”; 5.75” x 4.5”; 6” x 4”. Map at lower-left corner hand-colored in red, yellow, blue, and green. Upper-left map hand-colored in only two areas. Portrait of Brigham Young in lower-right corner, 1.75” x 1.5”. CONDITION: Very good, old folds, soiling along the upper margin, light chipping along lower-right margin.

A composite map of Utah Territory comprising a hand-colored plat of Salt Lake City, maps of the Territory of Utah and the Great Salt Lake Valley, and a portrait of Brigham Young, published soon after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. 

This is one of two editions of the map, the other published by Skandinavisk Post of New York. Both editions bear the American Photo-Lithographic Co.’s imprint. The largest of the three maps included on this sheet shows Utah divided into counties and bounded by Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. Among the details represented are towns and cities, bodies of water, mountains, roads, forts, mines, counties, Indian reserves, the Overland Mail Route, railroads (extant and proposed), Gunnison’s Route, and “the Great American Desert.” A key locates various lakes, county seats, and more. 

The plat of Salt Lake City is divided into colored wards and includes a key identifying a dozen aspects such as Temple Block (where the first Mormon temple was built), Brigham Young’s residence and offices, a railroad depot, and more. The map of the Great Salt Lake Valley and its surrounding area centers on Great Salt Lake, which is populated by islands, bays, rocks, and knobs. In the lower-right corner of the map is Salt Lake City, through which the Pacific Railroad passes. Some of this map’s details include roads, towns and cities, canyons, a penitentiary, promontories, mountains, deserts, camps, additional rail lines (proposed and completed), and bodies of water. A facsimile signature and the word “correct” beneath Young’s portrait attests to the accuracy of the maps. On all three maps, relief is shown by hachure and spot heights. Scale varies for each. 

Born in Norway, Bernard Arnold Martin Froiseth (1839–1922) immigrated to Minnesota as a child and earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Montreal. Prior to the Civil War, he worked in the Department of the Interior and during the war served as a Colonel in the Union Army. In 1869 he moved to Salt Lake City, where he settled with his wife. Froiseth first worked in Utah under the surveyor general and is credited with creating the first map of Utah Territory and then the first map of Utah after it became a state in 1896. Wheat describes him as “Utah’s first indigenous cartographer of stature,” noting that the present map was his “first independent production” (Wheat, p. 278). After he ceased working for the government, he worked in real estate and also ran his own map publishing firm. 

Based in New York, the American Photo-Lithographic Co. operated from 1866 to 1890 and produced maps, sheet-music covers, advertising posters, and architectural plans. During its early years, the firm used Osborne’s Process, a photo-mechanical technique for creating lithographic plates that was invented by Irish-Australian John Walter Osborne (1828–1902). Osborne is known to have worked for the company for a period after immigrating to America.

REFERENCES: Gittins, Jean. “John Walter Osborne (1828–1902),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 5 (1974); Last, Jay. The Color Explosion (2005), p. 161; Wheat, Carl I. Mapping the Transmississippi West, Vol. V, pp. 278–79; #1213; Rumsey 3945.

Item #9455

Price: $1,250.00