1839 Colton Guide and Map of the Territory of Iowa (First Edition)

Utmost Rarity: First edition of First Iowa Guide and Map.

This is the first edition of J. H. Colton's 1839 Guide for the Territory of Iowa, a rare pocket guide and map published the year after Iowa separated from the Wisconsin Territory. Possibly the earliest printed guide devoted exclusively to the newly organized territory, it combines practical information on government and public lands with a detailed map of the Mississippi settlement corridor. Its numbered townships, treaty boundaries, mineral deposits, and emerging towns present Iowa at the intersection of Indigenous dispossession, federal land surveying, and settler migration. The retention of Slaughter County distinguishes this first edition from the 1840 revised edition.

A Closer Look

The Map of the Surveyed Part of Iowa follows the Mississippi from the mouth of the Des Moines River and Keokuk north to the Yellow River, opposite the vicinity of Prairie du Chien. Rather than portraying the enormous Iowa Territory in its entirety, Colton focuses on the eastern strip where federal surveys and American settlement were advancing. Hand-applied pink, green, and yellow washes distinguish counties, while numbered townships and ranges, organized around the Fifth Principal Meridian, give the map a practical framework for locating land.

The political circumstances explain this selective coverage. Congress approved the act establishing Iowa Territory on June 12, 1838, effective July 3. The new jurisdiction embraced Wisconsin Territory west of the Mississippi and the line extending north from its source to the Canadian boundary, far beyond the limits of the present state. The settler population had more than doubled between 1836 and 1838, reaching 22,859. Colton's compact combination of map, territorial information, and land-sale guidance addressed a readership deciding where to travel, settle, or acquire property.

Two dotted boundaries running through the western portion of the mapped area identify the Black Hawk Purchase of September 21, 1832, and the additional cession of October 21, 1837. These are fundamental to the map's geography: the county and township framework overlays lands recently ceded by the Sauk and Meskwaki, historically termed Sac and Fox in federal records. The first purchase opened to American settlement in June 1833; subsequent cessions extended the area available for occupation and survey. At the southern tip, the map retains the historical designation for the reservation established for people of mixed Sauk and Fox ancestry between the Mississippi and Des Moines Rivers. Read together, these boundaries record the legal distinctions underlying the expanding land market.

The map also supplies information that the township grid alone could not convey. Its explanation distinguishes roads and trails, reserves, hills, rock ledges, bluffs, rapids, and lead ore. Clusters of ore symbols around Dubuque suggest an extractive economy alongside the agricultural opportunities shown in the surveys. Hachured bluffs and the Rock Island and Des Moines Rapids describe the physical constraints of the Mississippi corridor, while roads connect river landings with inland settlements. Burlington receives prominent lettering; Davenport, Bellevue, Fort Madison, and Keokuk appear among numerous smaller places. Bloomington, the future Muscatine, preserves an earlier stage of the region's urban geography.

Slaughter County and the Revised Geography of 1840

The southern counties provide useful distinctions between this first edition and its successor. Here Slaughter County survives west of Louisa, and Jefferson County has not yet appeared. The 1840 edition introduces Washington and Jefferson Counties and revises Louisa. Slaughter was not simply abolished and absorbed: it lost territory to Louisa on January 12, 1839, then was renamed Washington on January 25 and enlarged with adjoining territory. The map thus preserves a county configuration already overtaken by legislation during its publication year.

Historian Frank Harmon Garver identified two boundary errors in the first edition: the Johnson-Slaughter line was placed one township too far north, and the Des Moines-Lee boundary followed a township line where part of it should have followed the Skunk River. These details help distinguish imperfect contemporary mapping from subsequent administrative changes. The second edition revised the Slaughter-Washington configuration and depicted the river boundary between Des Moines and Lee.

Provenance

This example bears a stationery-store label from St. Louis and the name of an early owner, Andrew Miller.

Publication History

Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800 - 1893) published the guide and map in New York in 1839. Both the title page and map bear that date, and the map also carries an 1839 copyright statement. The lower-right imprint credits Stiles, Sherman, and Smith with engraving and printing. Samuel Stiles (1796 - 1861) had previously partnered with Colton, making this an example of their continued professional connection after their businesses separated. The cloth cover is gilt-lettered Colton's Map of Iowa with a Guide.

A second edition followed in 1840. The David Rumsey Map Collection catalogs that later edition and describes its map as more detailed than the General Land Office survey maps of 1839 - 1840. The accompanying guide describes the territory, its government and judiciary, counties and population, and township information. The present 1839 publication should also be distinguished from the larger Jesse Williams map and land description issued by Colton in 1840, a separate undertaking with a similar map title.

Historical market appearances include the C. G. Littell copy in 1945, a Midland catalog offering in 1959, and the Thomas W. Streeter copy in 1967. The Midland and Streeter records may refer to the same example.

Cartographers

Joseph Hutchins Colton (July 5, 1800 - July 29, 1893), often publishing as J. H. Colton, was an important American map and atlas publisher active from 1833 to 1897. Colton's firm arose from humble beginnings when he moved to New York in 1831 and befriended the established engraver, Samuel Stiles. He worked under Stiles as the 'Co.' in Stiles and Co. from 1833 to 1836. Colton quickly recognized an emerging market in railroad maps and immigrant guides. Not a cartographer or engraver himself, Colton's initial business practice mostly involved purchasing the copyrights of other cartographers, most notably David H. Burr, and reissuing them with updated engraving and border work. His first maps, produced in 1833, were based on earlier Burr maps and depicted New York State and New York City. Between 1833 and 1855, Colton proceeded to publish a large corpus of guidebooks and railroad maps, which proved popular. In the early 1850s, Colton brought his two sons, George Woolworth Colton (1827 - 1901) and Charles B. Colton (1832 - 1916), into the map business. G. W. Colton, trained as a cartographer and engraver, was particularly inspired by the idea of creating a large and detailed world atlas to compete with established European firms for the U.S. market. In 1855, G.W. Colton issued volume one of the impressive two-volume Colton's Atlas of the World. Volume two followed a year later. Possibly because of the expense of purchasing a two-volume atlas set, the sales of the Atlas of the World did not meet Colton's expectations, and so, in 1856, the firm also issued the atlas as a single volume. The maps contained in this superb work were all original engravings, and most bear an 1855 copyright. All of the maps were surrounded by an attractive spiral motif border that would become a hallmark of Colton's atlas maps well into the 1880s. In 1857, the slightly smaller Colton's General Atlas replaced the Atlas of the World. Most early editions of the General Atlas published from 1857 to 1859 do not have the trademark Colton spiral border, which was removed to allow the maps to fit into a smaller format volume. Their customers must have missed the border because it was reinstated in 1860 and remained in all subsequent publications of the atlas. There were also darker times ahead; in 1858, Colton was commissioned at a sum of 25,000 USD by the government of Bolivia to produce and deliver 10,000 copies of a large format map of that country. Although Colton completed the contract in good faith, delivering the maps at his own expense, he was never paid by Bolivia, which was at the time in the midst of a series of national revolutions. Colton would spend the remainder of his days fighting with the Bolivian and Peruvian governments over this payment, and in the end, after a congressional intervention, he received as much as 100,000 USD in compensation. Nonetheless, at the time, it was a disastrous blow. J. H. Colton and Company is listed as one of New York's failed companies in the postal record of 1859. This led Colton into the arms of Alvin Jewett Johnson and Ross C. Browning. The 1859 edition of Colton's General Atlas lists Johnson and Browning as the 'Successor's to J. H. Colton' suggesting an outright buyout, but given that both companies continued to publish separately, the reality is likely more complex. Whatever the case may have been, this arrangement gave Johnson and Browning access to many of Colton's map plates and gave birth to Johnson's New Illustrated (Steel Plate) Family Atlas. The Johnson's Atlas was published parallel to Colton's atlases well into the 1880s. The Colton firm itself subsequently published several other atlases including an Atlas of America, the Illustrated Cabinet Atlas, the Octavo Atlas of the Union, and Colton's Quarto Atlas of the World. They also published a large corpus of wall maps, pocket maps, and guides. The last known publications of the Colton firm date to 1897 and include a map and a view, both issued in association with the Merchant's Association of New York. Alice M. Colton married August R. Ohman (May 3, 1859 - April 22, 1934) on January 5, 1897. In 1898, Ohman joined the Colton firm, which continued to publish as Colton, Ohman & Co. until 1901.   Further Details...

Samuel Stiles (July 15, 1796 - April 3, 1861) was a New York-based map and banknote engraver active in the mid-19th century. Stiles was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, and apprenticed there as a line-engraver under self-taught master Abner Reed. In 1821, after his apprenticeship, Stiles moved to Hartford, Connecticut, with his former master, Abner Reed, to form the firm Reed and Stiles. Reed and Stiles engraved portraits, historical scenes, landscapes, and maps on wood and copper. Another former Reed apprentice, Pelton, joined the firm in 1822, and the firm changed its name to Reed, Stiles, and Pelton. Around this time, he also joined the Connecticut State Militia, where he was commissioned as a corporal in the same Cavalry regiment as his brother, Asabel Chapin Stiles. In 1824, he moved to Utica, New York, where he worked with Vistus Balch, another former Reed apprentice. In 1828, Stiles and Balch moved to New York together to found Balch and Stiles, banknote engravers. In 1833, Samuel Stiles partnered with Joseph Hutchins Colton, then a young man, to found Stiles and Company – Colton being the 'company.' This partnership lasted until 1836, when he and Colton published their great plan of New York City, known as the 'Colton Map.' Colton went his own way and became a major American map publisher. Stiles moved a few blocks away and partnered with George E. Sherman and Colin Smith to found Stiles, Sherman and Smith. The partnership dissolved in 1840, and Stiles resumed work with J. H. Colton, who was already becoming prominent. In 1841, he joined Danforth, Ball, and Company, Bank Note Engravers. This firm eventually merged into the American Bank Note Company. In 1859, Stiles became a founding member of the National Banknote Company, which incorporated as the American Banknote Company. He was the treasurer of this successful firm until his death in 1861. On a side note, Stiles married Charlotte Sophia Reed, the daughter of Abner Reed, in 1825. Their son, Henry Reed Stiles, also gained fame as a historian and genealogist.   Further Details...

Source

Colton, Joseph Hutchins, Guide for the Territory of Iowa, with a Correct Map, Showing the Township Surveys, (New York: J. H. Colton, 1839).    

Condition

Good. Some wear and slight loss at a few fold lines. Foxing.

References

Streeter, Thomas Winthrop, The Celebrated Collection of Americana Formed by the Late Thomas Winthrop Streeter, no. 1874 (1839 edition). Edward Eberstadt and Sons, Americana, catalog no. 133 (1954), no. 562. Karrow, Robert W., ed., Checklist of Printed Maps of the Middle West to 1900 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), vol. 8, #8-0637. Mott, Frank Luther, Literature of Pioneer Life in Iowa (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1923), entry for Colton's Guide for the Territory of Iowa. Rumsey, List Number 4192.003 (1840 second edition). United States, Statutes at Large, vol. 5, chapter 96, pp. 235–241.