Arizona in 1885 - Phoenix, Maricopa County, Salt River Valley

C.J. Dyer sketched this bird's-eye view of Phoenix, Arizona Territory, in 1885, only four years after the town's incorporation, and the Schmidt Label & Litho Company of San Francisco printed it as a chromolithograph using a multi-stone process capable of the intense, sunlit color tones the view is known for. Dyer had learned the view-maker's trade in Napa, California, before moving to Arizona around 1884, and this Phoenix print, along with a companion view of the territorial capital at Prescott, represents some of his earliest and most acclaimed Southwestern work. Historians of American city views have singled it out as one of the most attractive and technically accomplished bird's-eye lithographs made for a town of its modest size, its oval border of trimmed saplings and compartmented corner vignettes considerably more ambitious than the format most similarly sized towns received. At the time, Phoenix's own promotional text on the sheet estimated a population of about 3,500, likely optimistic, but a genuine sign of a town's confidence in its own rapid growth.

The Salt River Valley Canal, Grand Canal, Maricopa Canal, and Arizona Canal all appear labeled across the sheet, the network of irrigation works that had transformed the surrounding Sonoran Desert into farmland and made a permanent town possible in the first place. The view's numbered legend of twenty-nine points of interest includes the county courthouse, the public school, several churches, J.Y.T. Smith's flour mill, and the Phoenix Hotel, offering a near-complete civic inventory of a town barely out of its founding years. Additional inset vignettes show the Falls and Head of the Arizona Canal, along with individual residences and business blocks, each rendered with the same careful, saturated detail as the central view.

It's a compelling choice for a Phoenix or Maricopa County family, an Arizona transplant drawn to the valley's earliest years, or a collector of Western bird's-eye views who values genuine rarity - only a single confirmed institutional example of this print is known to survive. Dyer's later, larger 1890 view of Phoenix shows the same city after five more years of growth, with every house individually rendered across a much bigger sheet; this 1885 view instead captures Phoenix while it was still small enough for a single artist to draw with this much individual attention. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.