Arizona and New Mexico in 1867 - Tucson, Prescott, Santa Fe

Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Jr. published this map of Arizona and New Mexico in 1867, just three years after taking over the family publishing business from his father and only four years after Arizona had been formally split off from New Mexico Territory. The Mitchell firm had spent more than thirty years specializing in school atlases and wall maps of the United States, pioneering the use of steel-plate engraving to achieve a level of durability and detail its competitors struggled to match. This sheet, colored by county and set within an attractively decorative border, arrives at a moment when the boundaries of both territories were still being actively redrawn, a period Mitchell's own catalog notes as one of especially frequent and interesting yearly updates.

Towns, roads, railroads, and rivers are traced across both territories, with Prescott serving as Arizona's newly designated territorial capital, chosen in 1864 largely for its distance from the still-unsettled southern reaches around Tucson, the territory's older commercial center. To the east, Santa Fe remains the administrative heart of New Mexico Territory, its Rio Grande valley settlements predating American annexation by more than two centuries, while the Gila River corridor threads south through Apache-held country still largely outside effective territorial control. The map's county coloring illustrates how sparse and provisional the administrative geography of the Southwest remained just after the Civil War, with vast stretches of both territories still organized more by military presence than by settled population.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with deep Southwestern roots, for a transplant now settled in Tucson or Santa Fe, or for a collector of early territorial-era maps. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.