Alaska Map 1883 Territorial Print - Sitka, Aleutian Islands, Pribilof Islands

This map of Alaska was created by George Franklin Cram and published in 1883 by A.C. Shewey & Co. of Chicago as part of the first edition of Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, the earliest of Cram's mass-produced world atlases, a title that would continue in various forms for nearly seventy years afterward. The sheet uses both full and outline color depending on the feature, with territorial boundaries picked out in bold red and relief shown through hachures, a decade earlier and visually distinct treatment from Cram's own later 1893 Alaska map made for the Columbian World's Fair Atlas. It covers Alaska together with the neighboring British Columbia and North West Territory, and it was produced sixteen years after the 1867 purchase from Russia, during a decade when American interest in the territory's resources was only beginning to firm up.

The Bering Sea, Arctic Ocean, Pribilof Islands, and Aleutian Islands are all named across the map, giving a strong sense of Alaska's scattered maritime geography beyond the mainland itself. Red boundary lines separate Alaska cleanly from the adjoining North West Territory and British Columbia, reflecting the political arrangement of the period, while hachured relief marks the Rocky Mountains extending into the territory's interior. The Arctic Circle is drawn across the map's northern reach, anchoring the sheet's polar orientation. Taken together, these details capture a territory whose coastal geography was reasonably well understood even while its interior remained largely a blank.

This map suits a collector who wants the earliest available Cram depiction of Alaska, since it predates his better-known 1893 World's Fair edition by a full decade and shows a noticeably different color treatment from the same cartographer's hand. Alaska buyers should note we also carry that 1893 Columbian World's Fair Atlas edition of Alaska; displayed together, the two Cram maps make an easy way to compare how one publisher's view of the territory shifted across ten pivotal years. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.