Arbuckles Coffee Cards

Arbuckles Coffee was the most famous coffee company in the United States in the second part of the nineteenth century. Begun just after the Civil War by brothers John and Charles Arbuckle, the company came up with a means by which they could sell pre-roasted "Ariosa" coffee in one pound bags.

Prior to this, coffee beans were sold green, and they had to be roasted before use on a wood stove or over a skillet. John Arbuckle came up with the process where they coasted the roasted beans with an egg white and sugar glaze, which allowed them to retain their freshness. They then packaged them in one pound bags and sent them around the coutry.

Arbuckle’s coffee became a favorite around the country, especially out west where the cowhands were able to get a consistent cup of good tasting coffee. Such was their fame and wide-spread use that “Arbuckles” became a generic name for coffee. Arbuckles became known as “the coffee that won the West.”

The Arbuckle firm was innovative in their marketing, as well as processing, and they came up with a number of schemes to promote their coffee, including packaging a peppermint stick with each bag. In the 1880s they began to issue a number of series of small, colorful “trading cards” of different subjects, done with colorful chromolithography by the printmaking firm of Donaldson Brothers. Each bag contained one of the trading cards, with the idea that customers would try to collect all the cards in a series.

The series included different subjects, including animals, sports, food, historic scenes, and—one of their most popular—maps of states and the nations of the world. The state series were published in 1889 and included a map of the state surrounded by vignette scenes from the state, as well as various statistics. The verso of each card included an advertisement of Arbuckles Ariosa Coffee.

The state map series proved so popular that in 1915 the company came out with an updated series of these cards. The maps sometimes had new vignettes, the statistics were updated, and roads added.

The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire

I always enjoy it when I see an old map or print used in a television program or movie and so it was fun to see a case of this in one of my favorite shows, PBS’s Mr. Selfridge. This program is about American businessman Harry Gordon Selfridge and the department store he founded in London in 1909. The second season of the show has recently started and one of the themes of this season is the beginning of World War I in 1914.

As a promotion, and to show support for Great Britain, Selfridge decided to hold “Empire Week”, where displays throughout the store would evoke all corners of the British Empire. This included the window displays and in the last scene of episode two we see Selfridge looking at a window which has the legend “The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire.” In the window is a large map of the world which, even at the quick glance we have of it, apparently shows the British Empire.

The map shown is, in fact, probably the most famous map to show the British Empire, Walter Crane’s “Imperial Federation, map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire…” I think it is pretty cool, the show using an appropriate map as part of the Empire Week set. However, I do have to note that there are a couple of ‘not quite right’ aspects to this. First off, the map was issued, as the title above goes on to state, “in 1886,” not in 1914 when the show takes place. Secondly, the real map is about 2 x 2 1/2 feet in size, whereas the map in the show is considerably larger than that. Still, I love the use of such an interesting map in this great television series.

Crane’s map was issued as a supplement to a British newspaper, The Graphic, on July 24th, 1886. It is a wonderful example of the pictorial map genre, drawn by one of the most influential book illustrators of the late nineteenth century, Walter Crance, who is known especially for his children’s book illustrations. The map was based on “statistical information” provided by J.C.R. Colomb (to whom the map is sometimes attributed) and it shows the world with the different parts of the British Empire colored in red.

The map also shows Britannia literally sitting on top of the world, surrounded by her subjects. The map uses the Mercator projection, which was common for world maps of the period, and it is interesting that this projection does tend to exaggerate the size of places in the higher latitudes, such as the British Isles and Canada. It is also interesting to note that if this map had been issued in 1914, instead of 1886, more of the world, especially in Africa, would have been colored red.

Splitting Dakota Territory

New research at the Philadelphia Print Shop often results from our acquiring a new print or map which contains an interesting feature about which we do not know much. This happened recently when we were writing up a map of the United States from 1882 by John Bartholomew. Looking over the map, we noticed that the Dakota Territory was divided, even though this map was issued four years before North and South Dakota were created. A closer look showed that the northern section was titled "Lincoln" and not North Dakota.

Vince Szilagyi decided to figure out what this was about and he found that this "Lincoln Territory" was just one of several proposals for the division of the Dakota Territory before 1886. Here is what he found out:

Initially, a huge Dakota Territory was created out of parts of the Nebraska and Minnesota Territories in 1861, extending from Minnesota to the Continental Divide and between the 43rd parallel and the Canadian border. This vast territory was whittled down in the next few years so that by 1868 the territory essentially encompassed the lands lying today within North and South Dakota. Prior to the Civil War, most of the population consisted of Native Americans, primarily Sioux, settled on several Indian reservations.

After the end of the Civil War, the Dakota Territory had become a place of major activity and interest for Euro-Americans in a United States eager to expand and grow after years of destruction. The territory experienced an explosion of development in the 1870s due to its mineral wealth, fertile soil and the expansion of the railroads into the region. As the area boomed and the Indians were displaced by a series of conflicts with the US Federal Government, there began a series of calls to split the huge territory into smaller, more manageable units.

The desire to break the Dakota Territory into smaller units was prompted by a couple of factors. First, the territory had two main population centers, one in the northeast around Bismark and one in the southeast around Yankon. These were separated by hundreds of miles of difficult and untamed terrain. The isolation was so pronounced that Judge J.A. Barnes of the Dakota Territory Supreme Court proclaimed “The people of Northern Dakota want a division of the territory because they are so far remote from Southern Dakota that they do not feel any identity of interest.”

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, dividing the territory into two parts would double the number of Senators sent to Washington from the Dakotas when they eventually became states. As the territory at the time was solidly Republican and the Senate was tightly contested, the Republican Party supported the split wholeheartedly. Surprisingly enough, the Democrats also believed splitting the territory would be to their advantage, as they had hopes that one of the new territories would swing Republican and the other Democratic.

Despite, or perhaps because of these factors, the actual splitting of the territory was a difficult and slow process. Numerous proposals were put forth and bills submitted to split the Dakota Territory into smaller units during the 1870s and ‘80s. None of these succeeded until 1889, when the division was finally realized, with the admission of two new states, named sensibly, albeit somewhat dully, North and South Dakota.

The earlier proposals were unsuccessful for various reasons and their proposed political entitles, with names such as Pembina, Huron and Lincoln, were never realized in fact. However, they did, get a ghostly, cartographic existence, appearing on a few maps, now of considerable interest to collectors and students of history.

Pembina

An early proposal to split the Dakota Territory involved chopping off essentially the top half and naming it Pembina. Pembina Territory never became a reality, although in the Dec. 22nd, 1874 edition of the Sacramento Daily Union there is a brief one sentence note declaring that "The Pembina Territory Bill was revived on motion of Boreman" in the U.S. Senate, indicating that the idea was at least discussed beyond the wilds of the Dakota Territory. Only one cartographer, John Bartholomew of Philadelphia, seems to have put the proposed territory on his maps, making these particularly rare.

Huron

Another similar proposal to split the territory was made in July of 1876. A convention was held in Yankon (the territorial capital and now in South Dakota) to address the question, where the Dakotans came to the conclusion that they supported “the organization of a new territory out of the northern part of Dakota, and believe such an organization will largely tend to enhance the interests of the people in both sections." The U.S. Senate passed a bill in December of 1876 to create the Territory of Huron out of the Dakota Territory north of the 46th parallel. The bill was never signed into law, but some cartographers took a gamble and included the nonexistent territory their maps. This “jumping the gun” by publishers was not unusual, as fierce competition often spurred the companies to try and be the first to show new developments.

Lincoln

During the 1880’s, several further attempts were made to split off the northern portion of Dakota into a Lincoln Territory. Unlike Huron and Pembina which more or less shared their borders with present day North Dakota, the Lincoln Territory would have encompassed all of present day North Dakota as well as extending into modern day South Dakota. This larger territory was bitterly opposed by Democrats in the territory as well as Democrats in the Senate, who refused to consider a bill creating a territory named after their most bitter political foe. Thus this bill never made it past the Senate.

The Curious Case of Currier & Ives’ Buffalo

Currier & Ives has always been a printmaking firm of great interest to me, so when I moved to Denver about three years ago, I naturally began to focus on their western prints. One of my favorites is “The Rocky Mountains,” published in 1872-74, which shows an purported scene of a valley in the Rockies with a lake and a herd of buffalo. From the appearance of the mountains and the animals, it is clear the artist who made this print had never seen either!

It is a well-documented that Nathaniel Currier’s and Currier & Ives’ western prints were not based on first-hand drawings. The firm was issuing these prints for an audience most of the members of which had never seen the American West and it was easier and less expensive to make up views than to try to procure first-hand renderings. The number of such Currier/Currier & Ives western prints, issued over many years, is a strong indication that this lack of genuineness was not an issue with the print buying public.

Now that is not to say that there wasn’t an effort made to make the prints at least somewhat accurate. It is recorded that Nathaniel Currier took A.F. Tait and Louis Maurer, both of whom made western scenes for Currier, to the Astor Library in New York City to look at the prints of Karl Bodmer, prints which were based on first-hand renderings.

Still, it is particularly striking that none of the four main artists who produced Currier/Currier & Ives western prints—A.F. Tait, Louis Maurer, John Cameron, and Fanny Palmer—had travelled west of the Mississippi before making their western prints, and I think of these artists only Maurer ever got there at all.

The Currier/Currier & Ives prints were based either on other images, on western artifacts, or on the accounts of travelers. This did cause some disapproval at the time, with the artists criticized for their “curious mixture of truth and fantasy,” and for trying “to visualize the plains grasslands from the security of their New York studios.” Still, the large folio prints were, on the whole, relatively accurate in terms of landscape and the appearance of the actors in the scenes depicted.

Not so much with the small folio prints, however, as “The Rocky Mountains” nicely illustrates. I always found the buffalo in this print to be particularly wonderful, looking something like a cross between African lions and poodles. It was a lot of fun, then, when I recently realized that a print which we had in our shop was the original source for these buffalo.

The print in question is “The American Bison,” from Sir William Jardine’s The Natural History of the Ruminating Animals, which is volume XII in Jardine’s famous Naturalist’s Library (Edinburgh, 1836.) About his report on the American bison, Jardine wrote “Our information regarding this important animal is, thanks to the intrepid travelers in the artic regions, and particularly to Dr. Richardson, much more authentic than most of that we have been able to collect regarding one or two others.” (p. 252)
The textual information, perhaps, but the image is rather odd looking. The print was drawn by James Hope Stewart (1789-1856), a Scottish farmer who produced the images on at least 545 of Jardine’s Naturalist Library prints. Stewart was an amateur artist from Gillenbie, Scotland, and he obviously never saw a buffalo.

His picture of the buffalo was clearly the source of the images in Currier & Ives “The Rocky Moutains.” The buffalo at the front and center is simply a reversed image of the Jardine print and the other buffalo are variations of that central image. This is not, certainly, an earth-shattering discovery, but it made my day to discover finally the source of the curious Currier & Ives buffalo.

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1866-69.

As discussed in the last blog, Nevada, created out of western Utah in 1861, had its eastern border moved from the 116th degree longitude to the 115th just two years later, taking that land from the Utah Territory. This was done to put newly found gold sites within the Nevada, which was closely controlled by the federal government, and at the same time take them away from the Mormons, against whom the government was strongly biased.

Just three years later, in 1866, the same thing happened again. Beginning in 1865, a rumor appeared of new mineral riches, including perhaps the legendary silver mountain, located in what became the Pahranagat Mining District. It was not known at the time if this area was located in Nevada or Utah, so to be sure, Congress once again shifted the border one degree further east to the 114th degree line.

Nevada was on a roll in terms of increasing its domain, with the next expansion being towards the south. Brigham Young had seen the Colorado River as affording a possible route by which to bring in supplies and new recruits to Utah, so in 1864 he sent Anson Call to set up a settlement on the Colorado, which was done the following year, the town of Call’s Landing or Callville being located at the head of navigation on the river.

By 1866, the importance of this outlet for shipping was apparent to those in Nevada, so they petitioned Congress to give them the land which lay between their original border on the 37th parallel and the Colorado river. This, of course, was the western part of the Arizona territory, which complained the federal government about this land grab. However, because of its past support of the Confederacy, Congress didn’t like Arizona any better than Utah, and in January 1867 this 18,000 square mile section officially became attached to Nevada, which once again had benefited at the expense of a territory on Congress’s black list.

As I discussed in the last blog, when Montana was created in 1864 from the northeastern part of Idaho Territory, the southeastern part of that once very large territory was attached to the Dakota Territory, giving it an odd, butterfly-like shape. This shape and the huge size of Dakota was not practical, so in 1868, the southwestern rectangle of Dakota was reformed as a new Wyoming Territory.

Wyoming was created so that it was essentially a rectangle of equal size to its southern neighbor, Colorado. Its northern border was the southern border of Montana, and its eastern border drawn south as a continuation of Montana’s eastern border at the 104th meridian, until it met Colorado’s border, which then became its southern line. This border was extended along the 41st parallel for seven degrees to the 111th meridian. This had the effect of taking, once again, territory from Utah, as well as Idaho, as their borders with the Dakota Territory had been the 110th meridian.

This perfect rectangular shape ended up having a rather strange, and unintended effect-—the creation of a “thumb” of the Dakota Territory separated from the rest of that territory by Wyoming. When Montana was created, its southern border ran along the 45th parallel as far as the 111th meridian, then straight south to 44°30’, then west to the Continental Divide. Idaho’s northern border stopped at the continental divide, so there was a small triangle of land north of Idaho’s border, south of the 44°30’ line, and west of the 111th meridian. In 1864 this gore of land had been part of Dakota and when Wyoming was created to the east of the 111th line, this area remained part of Dakota. This small thumb of Dakota was thus over 360 miles from the rest of the territory, as it remained until 1873, when it was finally given to Montana.

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1862-65.

As discussed in the previous blog, once the Southerners had left Congress in 1861, the Federal government was able within one year to create three new territories. Nevada had been created to give the miners on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, hitherto living within in the jurisdiction of the government of Utah Territory, a local government independent of the Mormons. Not only would this bring the wealth of the Comstock Lode more directly within the control of Washington, but also the Federal government had no love for the Mormons and so was always willing to limit the scope of their power.

Thus it was that when silver was discovered further east in 1862, in what became the Reese River Mining District, there was little hesitation in Congress to move the border of Nevada one degree further to the east, from the 116th meridian to the 115th meridian, which was done in March 1863. The Congressional bias towards Nevada was further demonstrated in October 1864 when the territory, created only three years before, was admitted as a state. In contrast, Utah, which became a territory in 1850, didn’t become a state until 1896!

As further evidence of the desire of the now almost-exclusively northern U.S. government to take advantage of the absence of the pro-slavery Congressmen, the problem of the Arizona Territory was dealt with in 1863. It was clear that the vast New Mexico Territory should be divided, but Congress was loath to create a territory from the southern half, as had been originally proposed, for it would not only be inhabited mostly be pro-slave citizens, but it also would lie below the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30’, and thus could become a slave state. Instead, Arizona was created from the western half of New Mexico, so the border between the two territories would run North-South, rather than East-West.

That same year of 1863, Congress created another territory as a result of a gold rush, for similar reasons to those which prompted the creation of Nevada and Colorado. In 1860, gold had been discovered in the eastern part of Washington Territory. Prospectors swarmed into the region and began to push east across the continental divide, into the Dakota Territory, where gold was discovered in 1862 near what became Bannack and then the following year near what became Virginia City. Others miners probed into the more south-eastern part of Washington Territory, where gold was discovered in the Boise Basin in 1862.

The miners in these areas felt isolated from the Washington Territorial government in Olympia, well to the west. When this was combined with the desire of the citizens in the Puget Sound area not to end up being outvoted by all the voting-age miners flooding in to the eastern parts of the territory, it was a popular decision all around to create a new territory of Idaho.

Thus in 1863, Washington Territory was trimmed in size to a width that essentially matched that of Oregon to the south, and the eastern part of Washington became Idaho Territory. This new territory, though, was created much larger than just that, for Idaho took in also the western half of the Dakota Territory and five degrees off the western part of Nebraska, Idaho’s eastern border being set at the 104th meridian. This not only incorporated into Idaho the gold mining region around Bannack and Virginia City, but it also cut Dakota down to about seven degrees in width, which was becoming something of a standard size for territories as they moved towards statehood. For good measure, the northeast corner of Utah was cut off and given to Idaho, the federal government once again demonstrating its bias against the Mormon government of that territory.

This new territory of Idaho was really too large to be sustained, especially as the eastern mining towns, such as Bannack and Virginia City, were separated by the rugged Rocky Mountains from the western mining towns and the capital city of Lewiston. Almost as soon as the Idaho territory was created, the settlers to the east of the Bitterroot range began to ask for a new territory and for a seat of government more accessible to them.

A champion for their cause appeared in Sidney Edgerton, who had been appointed by Abraham Lincoln as first Chief Justice for Idaho. Edgerton and his family set off for Idaho from Washington in 1863, but they ended up stranded in Bannack, unable to make it across the mountains to Lewiston. Edgerton soon realized the wealth of the eastern mining camps and he was converted by the miners there of the cause of splitting off a new territory from Idaho.

Edgerton was chosen by the miners to lobby for their cause in Congress, so he set off for Washington with $2,500 in gold nuggets to be used to aid his arguments. The nuggets and his lobbying had the desired effect and in 1864 a new territory of Montana was created out of the north-eastern part of Idaho.

The eastern border of Montana extended to the Dakota Territory and the southern border was set at the 45th degree parallel so that there was room ultimately for two states between Colorado and Canada. Idaho was thus reduced in size close to what had been the eastern part of the original Oregon Territory, but not quite.

The original Oregon Territory had extended to the continental divide in the east, however about half-way up Idaho’s new eastern side, the border stopped following the continental divide and instead turned west to follow the Bitterroot Mountains. An old story said that this was because the survey party had gotten so drunk that they didn’t realize they had taken this wrong turn, but the true story is even more interesting.

When Judge Edgerton had first arrived to take up his judgeship, the territorial governor, William Wallace, had appointed him to a remote district east of the Bitterroots in order to show his contempt for judges imported from the east. Wallace aggrieved the wrong man, for with Edgerton's political connections, he was able to change the border between Idaho and Montana to the advantage of the new territory—-of which Edgerton was appointed first territorial governor—-by adding the fertile Bitterroot Valley to Montana instead of Idaho.

When Idaho was cut down to manageable size in 1864, the large southeastern part of the old territory—-south of Montana—-was attached to the Dakota Territory, giving that territory an odd, butterfly shape. This, though, was simply a temporary configuration which would soon be changed by Congress.

The Civil War years saw many significant changes to the political borders of the American West, something which continued for the rest of the decade, as we'll see in the next blog in this series.

St. Louis Mercantile Library

Earlier this month I attended for the first time the St. Louis Fine Print, Rare Book & Paper Arts Fair. We have exhibited there for all 8 years of its existence, but it was always my partner, Don Cresswell, who attended. This year it made more sense for me to go, which I was pleased about as I had never really spent any time in St. Louis.

It was even more of a pleasant visit than I anticipated, though, for I was totally blown away by the venerable St. Louis Mercantile Library. This is one of the many private libraries (such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Cincinnati Mercantile Library) founded in order to provide a library to the community in the era before public libraries were established.

The St. Louis Mercantile Library was founded in 1846 and it is the oldest library west of the Mississippi. It was originally established to be a subscription library "where young men could pass their evenings agreeably and profitably, and thus be protected from the temptations to folly that ever beset unguarded youth in large towns."

The Mercantile Library has moved several times-—it is now housed at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—-and its purpose has changed over the years as well. Today it’s purpose is to serve as a community cultural asset, as a research library, and a repository of its impressive collection which its makes available to local and national users.

The collections concentrate on Western Expansion and the history, development, and growth of the St. Louis region and of the American rail and river transportation experiences, and they encompass a wide variety of objects including rare books, manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, newspapers, drawings, and of course, maps and prints.

To have such a great research resource is terrific, but a visit to the library itself is a real experience. The library is on the lower floors of the university library and the rooms are simply packed with not only shelves and shelves of books, but sculpture, models, paintings, maps, and prints hung in, it seems, every nook and cranny.

My visit for the fair was my first opportunity to visit and I didn’t have nearly enough time, but I wandered about looking at familiar and unfamiliar items with a huge grin on my face. Anyone interested in the Western Expansion would be well served to use this resource, but anyone visiting St. Louis should make it a point to stop by and experience what is, in effect, a twenty-first century version of the enlightenment's cabinets of curiosity.