Dakota Territory Map 1874 Territorial Print - Bismarck, Yankton, Black Hills

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this Dakota sheet in 1874 as part of their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, one of the first American atlases built almost entirely around the country's expanding rail network rather than its terrain. This printing, produced late in 1874 and described by the firm as its most complete edition, is hand-colored and engraved by the Franklin Type Foundry, its township coloring laid over the same spare, transportation-first styling used across the atlas's western sheets. The sheet maps Dakota as a single, undivided territory bordered by British Possessions to the north and Nebraska to the south, captured the same year Custer's Black Hills Expedition confirmed gold in the territory's southwest corner, a discovery that would soon draw thousands into land the map still shows as largely unsettled.

Beyond township lines and the territory's own boundary with British Possessions, little is named on the sheet itself. The Missouri River cut through the territory as its dominant waterway, and Bismarck, founded in 1872 as a Northern Pacific Railroad terminus on its banks, marked how far the rails had reached by the time this map was drawn, still short of the Black Hills gold country further west. That gold discovery, only months old when the atlas went to press, would within two years bring the rush of settlers and prospectors that later maps of Dakota take for granted. None of it yet appears here, which is itself the point.

For a Dakota homesteading family or a collector tracking territorial maps from just before the gold rush reshaped the region, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Dakota split into North Dakota and South Dakota as mapped in Cram's 1893 edition, and combined again in his 1883 edition; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet predates the 1889 statehood split by fifteen years, showing Dakota as one unbroken territory the same year Black Hills gold was confirmed. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.