Idaho Territory Map 1878 Railroad Print - Boise, Lewiston, Idaho City

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Idaho Territory in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio, hand-colored atlas built as a business traveler's guide to the country's rail lines, though at this date no railroad yet reached deep into Idaho itself. This sheet comes from the atlas's rare original printing, colored by county across a territory whose boundaries and government were still centered on old mining camps rather than any agricultural base. Idaho is mapped here during a relative lull between the placer gold rushes of the early 1860s that first drew settlers to the territory and the larger silver and lode-mining booms still a few years off in the 1880s.

Boise anchors the map as the territorial capital, a town that grew directly out of the gold rush era and retained the seat of government even as mining activity elsewhere ebbed. Lewiston appears to the north as the territory's older river port, a Snake River town that had briefly served as the first territorial capital before the seat moved south to Boise. Idaho City, once one of the largest mining boomtowns in the entire Pacific Northwest, is recorded here as a fading reminder of the placer strikes that founded the territory. The Snake River curves across the southern territory and the Salmon River country lies to the north, and between the two the landscape remained overwhelmingly defined by mining camps and mountain wilderness rather than settled farmland.

Idaho's old mining districts still anchor plenty of family history, and this sheet catches a genuinely quieter interval between the territory's two great mining eras, a detail collectors tracking that arc will appreciate as much as descendants of the mining camps themselves. The store's other Idaho editions include the 1893 and 1883 Cram issues and an 1874 sheet pairing Idaho with Montana; this 1878 map is the one printed in the gap between Idaho's first gold rush and its later silver boom. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.