# Is "An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi" by Zebulon Montgomery Pike a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi by Zebulon Montgomery Pike (C. and A. Conrad & Co., 1810) is identified by: Conrad, & Co., 1810, a thick octavo co-published with the Somervell & Conrad imprint of Petersburg, Virginia, also named on the title page alongside Norfolk and Baltimore booksellers.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad, & Co., 1810, a thick octavo co-published with the Somervell & Conrad imprint of Petersburg, Virginia, also named on the title page alongside Norfolk and Baltimore booksellers
- Collates with an engraved stipple portrait frontispiece of Pike, six engraved maps (five folding, including the separately engraved Map of the Internal Provinces of New Spain), and three folding letterpress tables bound in at the rear
- This is the first published account by any American of an official U.S. government expedition into the Southwest, written up by Pike after his return to the United States in mid-1807, covering his 1806-07 reconnaissance during which Spanish troops arrested his party at a stockade on the Conejos River in present-day Colorado, then marched them south through Santa Fe for interrogation and on to Chihuahua before releasing them
- Because the maps and tables were routinely removed, misbound, or replaced in facsimile by later owners, a complete first edition is verified by collating every leaf, map, and table against the full list rather than by any single point
- Publisher imprint reads C. and A. Conrad & Co.
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Zebulon Montgomery Pike |
| Publisher | C. and A. Conrad & Co. |
| Year | 1810 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad, & Co., 1810, a thick octavo co-published with the Somervell & Conrad imprint of Petersburg, Virginia, also… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad, & Co., 1810, a thick octavo co-published with the Somervell & Conrad imprint of Petersburg, Virginia, also named on the title page alongside Norfolk and Baltimore booksellers. Collates with an engraved stipple portrait frontispiece of Pike, six engraved maps (five folding, including the separately engraved Map of the Internal Provinces of New Spain), and three folding letterpress tables bound in at the rear. This is the first published account by any American of an official U.S. government expedition into the Southwest, written up by Pike after his return to the United States in mid-1807, covering his 1806-07 reconnaissance during which Spanish troops arrested his party at a stockade on the Conejos River in present-day Colorado, then marched them south through Santa Fe for interrogation and on to Chihuahua before releasing them. Because the maps and tables were routinely removed, misbound, or replaced in facsimile by later owners, a complete first edition is verified by collating every leaf, map, and table against the full list rather than by any single point.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Do not confuse the 1810 first edition with Elliott Coues's heavily annotated 3-volume 'The Expeditions of Zebulon M. Pike' (Francis P. Harper, New York, 1895), a modern scholarly resetting of the text with added notes and maps that is often the edition readers encounter first.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi* by Zebulon Montgomery Pike a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/an-account-of-expeditions-to-the-sources-of-the-mississippi
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.