1860 MAP OF CALIFORNIA

The old book trade has long since discovered that if you cut the illustrations and prints out of books they often sell collectively for much more than the old book would have sold for alone. Those illustrations turn over much faster too. I suppose that’s okay - it hardly ever seems to happen to rare books.

While on a vacation in Maine, I came across an 1860 map of California that had apparently come out of a book. It was for sale - for $100. I didn’t buy it, but I did examine it closely. The map was published in New York, so one wonders how accurate the information on the map was. Any map maker refrains from over crowding a map and sometimes puts in information just because an area of the map would look empty without something. For example, most globes include a place named “Nimule” on the border between Uganda and the Republic of Sudan. Well, I’ve been there and in 1964 it consisted of five native huts and a guard shack with a limb of a tree to block the border.

The map of California included Santa Barbara and San Buenaventura but did not include Los Angeles. However, what piqued my interest was that the hills from South Mountain (east of Saticoy) across to Santa Susana Pass were labeled “Sierra Susanna”. That would imply that in 1860 the hills north of Simi Valley may have been referred to by the Spanish form of the “Susanna Mountains”. Other earlier and later maps have no name for the mountains north of the valley but call the hills on the southern side of the valley the “Santa Susana Mountains”.

Mike Kuhn

10-15-01