United States and Mexican Boundary Survey

The United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (1848-1855) set the boundary between the United States and Mexico according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War. The results of the survey were published in a three-volume work, Report on the United States and Mexican boundary survey, made under the direction of the secretary of the Interior by William H. Emory, (1857-1859). Besides documenting the new political boundary, the survey report was notable for its natural history content, including paleontology, botany, icthhylogy, ornithology, and mammalogy. Twenty-five hand-colored lithographic plates of birds were included in the volume Birds of the Boundary edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird. These illustrations were prepared by the lithographic firm of J.T. Bowen and Company, of Philadelphia, the same firm that produced the octavo edition of Audubon's Birds of America. Numerous illustrations of plants and of reptiles and amphibians were included as well, colored in some editions. The hand-colored lithographs of scenery and ethnography are notable as historical records of that period.

Related pages

• Spencer Fullerton Baird
• Pacific Railroad Surveys

References

• Ann Shelby Blum (1993). Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 403 pages. ISBN 0-691-08578-1.
• Sacheverell Sitwell, Handasyde Buchanan, James Fisher (1990). Fine Bird Books, 1700-1900. Grove/Atlantic. ISBN 0-87113-285-0
• Robert Taft (1953). Artists and Illustrators of the Old West 1850-1900. New York: Scribner's. ISBN 0-517-10079-7.
• United States Department of the Interior (1857-59). Report on the United States and Mexican boundary survey, made under the direction of the secretary of the Interior by William H. Emory. Washington, D.C.: C. Wendell, printer. Three volumes, bound in two.
• Herman J. Viola (1987). Exploring the West. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books. 256 pages. ISBN 0-8109-0889-1.
• Edward S. Wallace (1955). The Great Reconnaissance--Soldiers, Artists and Scientists on the Frontier 1848-1861. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. 288 pages.