California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona & Washington Map 1865 Regional Print - San Francisco, Portland, Boise, Salt Lake City, Carson City, Tucson, Olympia

This map of California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington was produced by S. Augustus Mitchell Jr. and published in 1865 by E.H. Butler & Co., one of fifty-five sheets in Mitchell's New Reference Atlas for Colleges, Libraries, Families and Counting Houses. Compressing seven states and territories onto one small sheet took some doing: each is hand-colored and tinted separately, engraved with relief shown by hachures, at a scale wide enough to hold the whole Far West together. It covers this ground in 1865, a year when most of it was still raw territory rather than settled statehood, its boundaries redrawn repeatedly as mining rushes and railway surveys pushed settlement further west.

California, the only state among the seven, is anchored by San Francisco, already the West's dominant port after the gold rush. Oregon, a state since 1859, is shown with Portland positioned along the Willamette. Washington Territory is recorded around Olympia, its capital, still sparsely settled north of the Columbia River. Idaho Territory, only created the year before in 1863, is shown centered loosely on Boise. Utah Territory is anchored by Salt Lake City, the Mormon settlement that had organized much of the region's early infrastructure. Nevada, admitted as a state in 1864, appears with Carson City marked among its mining districts. Arizona Territory, the newest and least developed, closes the sheet around Tucson.

Notice how much of this sheet is still territory rather than state; that's the real subject here, a snapshot of the Far West in 1865 while its final borders were still being worked out on paper. It's a natural pick for anyone with roots anywhere across the region, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City to Tucson, or for a collector drawn to that unsettled moment, and it suits anyone interested in the mining-rush history behind Nevada and Idaho's rapid, and rare, jump to territorial status within a single decade. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece for an office or study.