Colorado and Indian Territory in 1880 - Silverton, Ouray, Tahlequah

Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Jr. published this double-sided sheet in Philadelphia in 1880, pairing a detailed map of Colorado with a map of Indian Territory printed on the reverse, a practical publishing choice that let the Mitchell firm cover two fast-changing but unrelated regions on a single plate. By 1880 Mitchell had run the family atlas business for two decades, continuing his father's tradition of finely engraved school atlases and wall maps, and this sheet captures Colorado in the middle of its southwestern mining boom while documenting Indian Territory during a critical period of treaty negotiation with the Five Civilized Tribes.

On the Colorado side, a series of gold and silver strikes in the San Juan Mountains during the 1870s had sparked a rush of prospectors into the state's rugged southwest, and by 1880 towns including Silverton, Ouray, and Lake City anchored a thriving mining district, with the map further detailing the Animas River Valley and the newer camps of Telluride, Ophir, San Miguel, and Placerville. On the reverse, the map of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, records the settlements and reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes following an 1871 treaty that preserved their semi-autonomous status, with Tahlequah standing as the Cherokee Nation's capital amid a territory the map shows growing increasingly diverse as Native American, African American, and European American populations mixed across its borders.

This dual-sided map is a distinctive gift for a family with roots in the San Juan Mountains or Indian Territory, for a transplant now settled in Colorado or Oklahoma, or for a collector of maps documenting the era's shifting Native American treaty boundaries. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.