Sacramento — Bird’s-Eye View Published by the Daily Record-Union and Weekly Union

Cartographer: Drawn and lithographed by W. W. Elliott & Co., San Francisco; issued for the Daily Record-Union and Weekly Union newspaper, circa 1890

Year: 1890

Seen from a vantage above the Sacramento River just south of the rail yards, this sweeping panorama spreads the capital’s rigid street grid across the plain to the foothills. A busy waterfront of steam-packets, wharf cranes, and the Central Pacific’s trestle bridges frames the foreground, while the broad American River traces a leafy arc on the northern horizon. The image is bordered by twenty-eight inset vignettes—State Capitol, hotels, schools, mansions, factories, railroad shops—advertising the city’s civic pride and commercial vitality. An indexed key below the view identifies churches, mills, depots, and public buildings, accompanied by booster text touting Sacramento’s climate, orchards, and rail connections. Executed in Elliott’s characteristic stippled style, the lithograph captures both the post-railroad rebuilding boom and the orderly suburban expansion of the 1890s, offering historians a richly detailed snapshot of California’s river metropolis at the close of the nineteenth century.