Indian Territory in 1890 - Cherokee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, Kiowa Reservation

This map of Indian Territory was published in 1890 by John Y. Huber & Co. as part of Samuel Augustus Mitchell's New General Atlas, printed from the copyrighted 1887 edition by Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. The sheet is finished in hand color with relief shown by hachures, a combination that gave Mitchell's atlas its reputation for both clarity and visual appeal among the many family atlases competing for buyers in the late nineteenth century. It covers Indian Territory seventeen years after the Gray edition of 1873, by which date additional tribes from the southern plains had been assigned reservations within its borders alongside the nations relocated decades earlier, and railroads had begun cutting across land that had previously been governed almost entirely by tribal treaty.

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw nations are all recorded on the sheet, their territories still organized much as they had been in earlier decades. Further west, the map marks land assigned to the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache, tribes moved onto reservations in the territory's southwestern plains following the end of the Red River War in the 1870s. An inscription noting a treaty dated June 22, 1855 appears within the Choctaw Nation, a reminder of the specific agreements that had fixed tribal boundaries decades before this map was printed. The sheet's borders touch Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, situating the territory as an island of tribal governance surrounded on every side by organized states.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone tracing Cherokee, Choctaw, Kiowa, or Comanche family history, or for a collector interested in how Indian Territory's tribal boundaries shifted between the 1870s and the 1890s. Indian Territory buyers should note we also carry the region as mapped by Gray in 1873 and by Rand McNally in 1892: this 1890 Mitchell edition sits between the two, recording the added southern-plains reservations that the earlier Gray map does not show. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.