Collection of America maps from when California was an island are now online

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The image posted looks more like Baja California than California based upon where the Tropic of Cancer crosses it.

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I like how the cartographers just made up realistic-looking coastline detail. I remember doing that in elementary school.

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Collection of accurate in the future maps of California?

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There they are, abbreviated on the bottom, P de La Paz and C de San Lucas.
Then look closer at the top, there’s C de Mendocino.

So California means the whole thing, FYI even today it can correctly be said to be Upper California (Alta California) and Lower California (Baja California), so these guys yanked the whole thing from Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and Sonora.
They also squeezed the long stretch from Fort Bragg to Crescent City like an accordion.

Cartography of the future
photobombs the past
for your enjoyment today!

United States State Name Origins:

Native American Names and Reference: 29
European Royalty: 7
Spanish and French Descriptions: 7
English Places: 3
US Founders: 3
Fantasy Novels: 1

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Lex Luthor: Everything west of this line is the richest, most expensive real estate in the world: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Everything on THIS side of the line is just hundreds and hundreds of miles of worthless – wait, what’s this? Otis, what is this?

Otis: Sorry Mr. Luthor.

Lex Luthor: Sorry?

Otis: I already launched the rocket.

Lex Luthor: And?

Otis: I got the coordinates wrong?

Sounds like some kind of early version of a trap street, that got a little out of hand. You can tell that a lot of the cartographers had obviously never been to places, and were just copying off maps made by others. It’s odd, a lot of the maps show South America quite accurate, but then completely mess up North America.

It would seem that Stanford has much better scanners than U Texas (and pretty much any other U map site I’ve seen)
BTW, the terms of use give a 404, and this stuff is copyrightable?

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