British Columbia Map 1897 Regional Print - Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster

Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago mapped British Columbia for their 1897 Indexed Atlas of the World, a two-volume reference issued at what the firm itself regarded as the high-water mark of its nineteenth-century atlas production, printed and published from offices in both Chicago and New York. The atlas paired large-scale maps of every country and civil division with historical, descriptive and statistical text, plus an original reference index that made it genuinely useful for quick lookups rather than sequential reading. Bound in green cloth stamped in gilt, with volume one covering foreign countries and volume two the United States, the set treated British Columbia as part of its foreign-countries coverage, mapped in full printed colour with relief shown by hachures. It records the province twenty-six years after it joined Confederation, its coastal cities beginning to overtake the interior gold-rush settlements that had first drawn attention to the region decades earlier.

Victoria, on Vancouver Island, appears as the provincial capital, its position across the strait from the mainland giving it a more insular, colonial character than its mainland neighbours. Vancouver, at the mouth of the Fraser River, is marked as the province's fastest-growing city, its status as the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway only twelve years old by 1897. New Westminster, upriver from Vancouver, is shown as the older of the two mainland cities, briefly the colonial capital of mainland British Columbia before Vancouver's rise eclipsed it. Together these three towns trace how quickly the balance of power on the coast had shifted within a single generation.

This regional sheet suits a British Columbia family with roots in any of these three coastal cities, or a collector who values Rand McNally's late-1890s house style specifically. The store also carries British Columbia mapped by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1865 and again in 1872, both plainer British-published regional sheets from decades before Vancouver's rise, and once more as a playful 1929 pictorial print; this 1897 Rand McNally edition is the only one in the collection to record the province at the exact moment Vancouver was overtaking Victoria and New Westminster as the coast's leading city. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.