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Descent of Bear River Mountains, Utah, 1849. WHi 31553
The drawings featured in this gallery are 50 of the original 200 or so created by artist James F. Wilkins on his 151-day journey from Weston, Missouri (near Independence), to the California gold fields in 1849. Wilkins captured the landscapes and events along the way and the sketches became the foundation for an enormous panorama depiction of the route known as "The Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail." While the panorama has been lost to history, Wilkins' sketches — a unique pictorial sequence of drawings — have survived, and are featured here, with selections from his diary.
These sketches (the only ones to survive, as far as we know) were purchased in St. Louis in the early 1850s, evidently from Wilkins, for $1,000 by druggist Rudolph Adams. In 1925 his son, C.R. Adams of Portland, Oregon, offered to sell them to the Missouri Historical Society, which was unable to acquire them. Mr. Adams next offered them to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Society Superintendent Joseph Schafer purchased the sketches, which were unsigned and unidentified, and then attempted to identity the artist, inconclusively considering likely candidates Lt. Andrew Jackson Lindsay, George Gibbs, and William Henry Tappan. Although all of them had journeyed on the Overland Trail, none of them had traveled the exact same route depicted in the drawings. James F. Wilkins, a relatively obscure artist in his own day and largely forgotten by 1925, was not identified as the creator until the 1960s, when his previously undiscovered journal came to the attention of experts, who found that the sketches matched exactly the notes in his diary. View the Gallery >
Wisconsin Birdseye Map Prints Available on eBay
A selection of Wisconsin Birdseye Map prints is available for purchase in the WHS Images eBay Store. Print reproductions are made from high resolution scans of the original source material and are printed on enhanced matte paper using archival pigmented inks. For more information, check out our store FAQ.
Looking for a birdseye map from your hometown? Check out our online map collection to see if we have it. We hope you enjoy browsing the over 26,000 images now on WHI. If you have suggestions for a future gallery, send us an email!
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WHI Feature Galleries
WHI provides a rich pictorial view of Wisconsin and United States history. Our collection consists of 19th and 20th century posters, paintings, photographs and ephemera.
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