Alberta & Saskatchewan (NWT) Map 1897 Regional Print - Calgary, Regina, Edmonton

Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago mapped the southern portions of what would become Alberta and Saskatchewan, together with the district of Assiniboia and a slice of Manitoba, for their 1897 Indexed Atlas of the World, a two-volume reference the firm regarded as the high-water mark of its nineteenth-century atlas production. Printed and published from offices in Chicago and New York, the atlas paired large-scale maps with historical, descriptive and statistical text and an original reference index, bound in green cloth stamped in gilt. This sheet's full printed colour and hachured relief cover territory that was, in 1897, still organized as the North-West Territories rather than as separate provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan not created until 1905. It records the region at a genuinely transitional moment, its districts already carrying names still in use today even though the political map above them would be redrawn within less than a decade.

Regina, seat of the North-West Territories government, anchors the district of Assiniboia, which covers the southern portions of what would become both Alberta and Saskatchewan. Edmonton, further north and west, is marked as a fur-trade post turned regional centre on the North Saskatchewan River. Calgary, on the Bow River in the sheet's western reach, appears as a ranching town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, still years away from the oil-driven growth that would later define it. Together these three places trace a territory still governed as one administrative unit despite already containing the distinct ranching, farming and river-trade economies that would eventually justify splitting it into two separate provinces.

This sheet suits a Prairie family researching roots before Alberta and Saskatchewan existed as separate provinces, or a collector interested specifically in the North-West Territories period. The store also carries both regions mapped again as separate playful provincial sheets in the 1929 Animated Atlas series, and Saskatchewan alone in an 1903 land-sale map of the Last Mountain Valley; this 1897 Rand McNally sheet is the only one in the collection to show the territory before the 1905 provincial split, Regina still governing land that would soon answer to two separate legislatures. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.