Arizona, Nevada and California in 1912 - Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles

Rand McNally & Company issued this map of the western United States in 1912, the same year Arizona became the forty-eighth state and the last of the contiguous states to join the Union. By 1912, Rand McNally had grown from a Chicago railway-ticket printer into one of the country's dominant map publishers, using a wax-engraving process the firm had pioneered decades earlier to produce maps faster and more cheaply than traditional steel-engraved competitors. This sheet spans the country's western edge, stretching from the Pacific Coast east to Denver and south to the Sierra Diablo range in West Texas, capturing Arizona in its very first year as a fully recognized state rather than a territory. The timing gives the map genuine historical weight: it documents the exact moment the American map stopped needing a separate color or pattern to mark Arizona and Nevada as territories rather than states.

Phoenix anchors the map's Arizona detail as the new state's capital, sitting at the center of a territory whose population and irrigated agriculture had grown rapidly in the decades leading up to statehood. Nevada is represented around Las Vegas, still a small railroad town in 1912, decades before the growth that would later define it, while the map's California coverage reaches west to Los Angeles and the wider Pacific Coast that gave the sheet its outer boundary. Roads, railroads, and the mountain ranges connecting these three states are traced with Rand McNally's characteristic clarity, built for travelers and businesses that needed to navigate the region.

It's a fitting gift for an Arizona family marking the state's founding, a Nevada or Southern California transplant, or a collector of statehood-era maps documenting the moment the American West's territorial map became complete. Rand McNally's wax-engraved commercial style stands in clear contrast to the hand-colored government surveys and 19th-century atlases elsewhere in the store's collection, a genuinely different, more modern cartographic approach to the same Southwestern landscape. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.