1931 Mother Lode Map Incorporating Mother Lodes of California and Nevada, Scenes of the "Romantic Days of Gold"
DESCRIPTION
Few subjects are more closely associated with California than the Gold Rush, and Robert Cormack packs nearly a century of mining history, folklore, landmarks, wildlife, and frontier humor into this wonderfully busy 1931 pictorial map of the Mother Lode.
Cormack's map follows California's great gold country through the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada and eastward into Nevada, incorporating both the California Mother Lode and the Comstock Lode. Rather than presenting the region as a conventional road or mining map, Cormack fills the landscape with hundreds of miniature scenes. Prospectors pan streams, miners descend into shafts, pack animals carry supplies, stagecoaches and covered wagons travel the roads, Native people appear in several locations, and bears, deer and other wildlife wander through the mountains. The Mother Lode Highway, highlighted prominently in red, provides a visual spine through the California mining country and anticipates the route that became California State Route 49.
The Days of the California Gold Rush
The map is steeped in the mythology of the California Gold Rush. Towns and mining camps including Auburn, Placerville, Coloma, Jackson, Angels Camp, Sonora, Columbia and Mariposa appear amid humorous depictions of prospecting, gambling, drinking, transportation and everyday life in the diggings. Cormack also identifies famous mines and historic locations while extending the map eastward through the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe and Virginia City, linking California's Gold Rush with the later silver boom of Nevada's Comstock Lode. A decorative cartouche at upper right invokes "The Days of Old, the Days of Gold, the Days of '49," establishing the nostalgic tone that runs throughout the map.
A particularly useful panel at right lists "Famous Landmarks, Points of Interest and Locale of Literary High Lights of the Mother Lode Country." Among the places and stories referenced are Sutter's Mill, Hangtown, Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and other writers and episodes associated with California's mining frontier. Cormack was therefore mapping more than mining geography. He was charting the stories through which the Gold Rush had entered American folklore by the early twentieth century.
A California Pictorial Map from a Future Disney Artist
Robert Cormack was a California artist who later worked for Walt Disney Studios and served as an art director on films including Fantasia, Bambi, and Make Mine Music. His animation background is easy to anticipate here: individual figures function almost like tiny cartoon scenes, with exaggerated gestures and visual jokes scattered throughout the landscape. Published during the great flowering of American pictorial cartography in the 1920s and 1930s, the map shares some of the visual exuberance associated with Jo Mora's California cartes while retaining Cormack's own crowded, cartoon-like style.
This example is the desirable California Art & Engraving Company issue, copyrighted 1931 and explicitly identifying Cormack as cartographer in the lower-right imprint. The map provides an unusually entertaining visual history of California's mining country, bringing together the Gold Rush, Comstock silver boom, mining camps, literary history, transportation, natural landmarks and the mythology of the Old West on a single colorful sheet.
CONDITION
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