Idaho, Montana and Wyoming in 1864 - Lewiston, Bannack, Cheyenne

Alvin Jewett Johnson published this military map of the United States in 1864, at the height of the Civil War, as part of his firm's rapidly expanding line of atlases and wall maps. Johnson had built his business by converting older Colton steel engravings to lithographic stone, letting his firm turn out maps faster and more cheaply than its rivals, and by 1864 the firm was producing its own original maps under the Johnson & Ward imprint. This sheet uses the distinctive fretwork border style Johnson favored between 1863 and 1869, and it organizes the nation around its wartime military divisions, forts, and posts rather than purely civil boundaries. The map captures a strikingly short-lived version of the West: Idaho Territory here still stretches across all of present-day Idaho along with the entirety of what would soon become Montana and Wyoming, a configuration that existed for barely a year before Congress split off Montana Territory in 1864 and Wyoming a few years later.

Idaho Territory's outsized reach is the map's most unusual feature, encompassing the future mining camp at Bannack - the settlement that briefly served as Montana's first territorial capital - and the future site of Cheyenne, later Wyoming's capital, within a single administrative boundary anchored around Lewiston. Set against this sprawling western territory, the map's nine inset harbor plans zoom in on the opposite end of the country: Baltimore, Washington DC, Hampton Roads, Charleston, the Savannah River, Key West, Pensacola, Mobile Bay, and New Orleans, each rendered in enough detail to show the coastal defenses and shipping channels that mattered most to a wartime Union planning naval and blockade strategy. Together, the transient western territory and the closely watched southern harbors capture two very different cartographic priorities of the same wartime year.

It's a distinctive find for anyone with roots in the old Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming territorial lands, or for a collector of Civil War-era military cartography drawn to maps that double as snapshots of borders that no longer exist. Few Johnson maps combine a transient western territory with a detailed set of Atlantic and Gulf Coast harbor insets in a single sheet, which makes this a genuinely unusual pairing within the firm's catalog rather than a standard wall map reissue. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.