1950 Sheets Pictorial Historical Map of Northern California

A richly illustrated c. 1950 pictorial map of Northern California, drawn by Millard Sheets and commissioned by the American Trust Company. It provides an overview of the early history of the region, from its indigenous inhabitants through the gold rush and beyond.

A Closer Look

Replete with historical allusions, the map covers the area from Sonoma County at north to the Monterey Peninsula at south and inland to the Sierra Nevada. At top is Fort Ross, a Russian trading post in today's Sonoma County, and the Sonoma Barracks, site of the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt. Less than a month after the revolt, U.S. marines captured Monterey, depicted near bottom, as part of the Mexican-American War. Further inland are scenes depicting dancing Native Americans, Spanish friars and conquistadores, vaqueros wrangling cattle, the gold rush, the arrival of railroads, battles between settlers and Native Americans, a stagecoach robbery, the dispensation of frontier justice, and bucolic depictions of trees and animals.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by Millard Sheets around the year 1950 and printed by lithogravure. It was paired with a map done in a similar style titled 'The Panorama of Today in Northern California.' Due to uncertainty over the publication date of this work, it is cataloged twice in the OCLC. By either reckoning, the map is held by Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and the Huntington Library.