"Marias River" by John Mix Stanley

"Marias River" by John Mix Stanley

C.1855

Hand-Painted Lithograph

A lone surveyor standing beside his pack horse on a steep, rocky hillside dominates the right foreground of this 1860 tinted lithograph titled "Marias River." Based on an original field drawing by the prominent Western artist John Mix Stanley, this print was meticulously produced by the famous New York lithography firm Sarony, Major & Knapp. The dramatic composition looks down into a deep canyon where a wide river snakes through a valley floor lined with dense groves of trees and expansive grasslands. In the background, staggering, sheer-walled bluffs and plateau formations tower over the landscape under a dynamic sky filled with rolling clouds. The delicate tonal stone work and subtle watercolor tinting beautifully preserve Stanley's sharp topographic precision and mastery of frontier scale, finalized with lower margin printing text reading "Marias River".

This composition belongs to a broader historical archive generated by the United States government during the mid-nineteenth century, where teams of scientists, engineers, and artists were commissioned to systematically map the uncharted territories of the American West. Published as Plate XXVI in the landmark multi-volume government document Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, prints like this hold monumental historical importance because they document the foundational geological and cultural surveys of the expansionist era. By illustrating the treacherous pathways of the Northern Pacific Survey route managed under Governor Isaac Stevens, the print highlights the critical intersection of American infrastructure development, early frontier illustration, and the strategic cartography that reshaped the geography of North America.

Dimensions: H 9”x 11 ½”W

Condition: Some tears from binding and a pin hole on the upper edge of the paper