Seth Kaller, Inc.

This traveler’s guide included detailed listings of railroad, stage, and steamboat routes to locations throughout the United States with intermediate mileage and cumulative mileage on each route. It also includes a list of canals in the United States. It was issued annually from 1846 to 1850.

It is accompanied by a large folding map (20½ x 26 in.), with hand-colored outlines of each state and territory. It is believed to be the first published map to include the frontier settlement of Dallas, Texas, along the Trinity River.

[Texas]. J. Calvin Smith. A New Guide for Travelers through the United States of America: containing all the Railroad, Stage, and Steamboat Routes, with the distances from place to place. (New York: Sherman & Smith, 1846). 79 pp., 3⅝ x 5½ in.

Inventory #26523       Price: $3,500

Historical Background
In 1839, three years after Texas independence, John Neely Bryan (1810-1877) surveyed the area around present-day Dallas and planted a stake near three forks of the Trinity River. He returned in 1841 to establish a permanent settlement named Dallas. The origin of the name is disputed; it may have been named for Vice President George M. Dallas (1792-1864) of Philadelphia; Commodore Alexander James Dallas (1791-1844), whose father and namesake had been U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1814 to 1816; the village of Dallas in Scotland; or another person named Dallas.

Bryan served as the town’s first postmaster, store owner, and ferry operator, and his cabin served as the courthouse. He helped to organize Dallas County in 1846, and when voters selected Dallas as the county seat in 1850, Bryan donated land for the courthouse.

J. Calvin Smith(1809-1890) was a surveyor and geographer, active in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. He published a series of guides, handbooks, and gazetteers for travelers in the 1840s and 1850s, both with partners George Sherman and Samuel Stiles and with his son as J. Calvin Smith & Son. In 1853, map publisher J. H. Colton acquired many of Smith’s map plates.

Condition: publisher’s gilt cloth, very skillfully rebacked, minimal wear; lacking front free endpaper, possibly lacking an ad leaf, minimal wear to contents.

Howes S614; Sabin 82929; Wheat, Transmississippi West 522. None traced in OCLC, though one is held by the American Antiquarian Society.