Arizona in 1886 - Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott

George F. Cram published this railroad and township map of Arizona Territory in 1886, likely for an early edition of his Standard American Railway Atlas, a reference aimed squarely at the businessmen, investors, and travelers who needed accurate, current data on the West's fast-expanding rail network. Cram's Chicago firm relied on the cerographic wax-engraving process, which let the company revise its plates frequently to keep pace with newly laid track, freshly incorporated towns, and shifting county lines, a critical advantage in a territory changing as quickly as Arizona was in the mid-1880s. The map's county boundaries date it precisely: Gila County, formed in 1881, is shown with the strictly horizontal northern boundary that existed only between 1885 and 1889, before it was expanded into Yavapai County.

Phoenix, still a young town built around irrigation canals in the Salt River Valley, and Tucson, the territory's older commercial hub on the Southern Pacific line, anchor the settled south, while Prescott administers the mining country of the central highlands. The Southern Pacific crosses the south of the territory and the Atlantic and Pacific crosses the north, anchoring a network of remote mining camps, agricultural settlements, and military posts including Fort Bowie, Fort Grant, and Fort McDowell, while the expansive Navajo and Moqui, now known as Hopi, reservation lands are explicitly defined in the northeast. This map was published the very year Geronimo's surrender ended the Apache Wars, a moment that triggered an immediate surge of population and capital investment across the territory it depicts.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with Arizona roots, for a transplant now settled in Phoenix or Tucson, or for a collector of territorial-era railroad maps of the Southwest. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.