Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona in 1872 - Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, Tucson

H.H. Lloyd published this county map of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona in 1872 as part of the firm's scarce Atlas of the United States, which appeared only briefly as a supplement bound into Beers County Atlases during the early 1870s. Lloyd worked in partnership with Warner & Beers, and the resulting map reflects the close, county-level detail that Beers' county-atlas business was known for, applied here across four still-developing western territories rather than a single settled state. At this date only Colorado among the four had achieved statehood, having entered the Union just four years later, while Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona all remained federal territories governed from Washington.

The map hand-colors each territory by county and records an unusually dense layer of practical detail: towns, mountain ranges, rivers, forts, and Indian villages appear alongside both operating and proposed railroad routes stretching out across the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin. Denver anchors Colorado's booming Front Range mining economy, Salt Lake City sits at the center of Utah's Mormon-settled Wasatch corridor, and Santa Fe and Tucson mark the older Spanish-era towns around which New Mexico and Arizona Territory had organized their more recently drawn counties. The inclusion of proposed as well as existing railroads captures the speculative energy of the early 1870s, when competing lines were racing to connect these territories to the national rail network.

This map suits a gift for a family with roots anywhere across the Four Corners region, for a transplant now settled in Denver or Salt Lake City, or for a collector of early territorial railroad maps. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.