Metsker’s atlas of Harney County Oregon.

Portland, OR & Tacoma, WA: Metsker the Map Man, 514 SW Oak St., 1935. Thick oblong atlas folio. 18 x 14.5 in. 298 cyanotype blueprint leaves. Including 297 detailed blueprint plat maps, consistently dated 1935, key map title page. Publisher’s flexible simulated calf post-binder, gilt lettering title stamped on front cover, burgundy-coloured silk more pastedowns (minor creasing at center of front & back covers, slight tidemark at foot of gutter margin, minor toning, edgewear to a few maps), still a VG copy, from the estate of Edward Gray (1941-1996), best known for his excellent and detailed Oregon histories, such as Life and Death of Oregon “Cattle King” Peter French (1849-1897), An Illustrated History of Early Northern Klamath County Oregon, and William “Bill” W. Brown, 1855-1941: Legend of Oregon’s high desert. First edition, thus, of this very rare Harney County Metsker plat map atlas, and one of the most substantial of the Oregon county atlases compiled at the scale of 2 in. = 1 mile. This atlas provides invaluable historical and genealogical data for Eastern Oregon at the height of the Great Depression as private investment nearly evaporated across Harney County, the Malheur National Wildflie Refuge had just finished their purchase of Pete French’s “P” Ranch on the Blitzen River, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 closed the public domain to homesteading. The index provides specific names and locations for Donation Land Claims, logging and sawmill tracts; cattle and sheep ranches -- including Gap Ranch, Hotchkiss Ranch, M.S. Davies Ranch, Rineman Ranch, and Roaring Springs Ranch; as well as cities and towns -- including Burns, Hines, Crane, and others. In addition, this was issued at the time when three of the largest Civilian Conservation Corps Camps and Projects were launched around the Malheur Refuge, with this atlas showing the Buena Vista station which the CCC would build in Oct., 1935, and others would be built north of Frenchglenn, and Ewing Springs. Metsker (1881-1966) civil engineer and mapmaker began working as a teenager with his father in a Winlock, WA sawmill by 1900, and later by 1910 ahd become a draftsman in an engineering office in Tacoma, WA, followed during the next 15 years by stints at engineering firms in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, before striking out on his own as a mapmaker, surveyor, and mapmaker during the Roaring 20s. Metsker’s maps were sold by subscription, and updated on an ongoing basis, so the subscribers were supposed to throw out the earlier versions of the maps, and replace them in the succeeding decades. They all received heavy use, and the earliest versions created in the 1920s and 1930s are by far the scarcest of the atlases produced by the firm. Worldcat locates 2 copies of the 1935 (Multnomah County Library, State Library of Oregon, OSU).