Kansas & Indian Territory Map 1857 Regional Print - Topeka, Lawrence, Tahlequah

Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston issued this Territory of Kansas and Indian Territory sheet in 1857, published in London by Edward Stanford and engraved by W. & A.K. Johnston of Edinburgh, part of their Atlas of the United States. This printing shows both territories in printed outline color with proposed railway routes marked in purple, drawn during the violent Bleeding Kansas period just before statehood. The sheet maps Kansas and the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, jointly, a pivotal moment in the sectional conflict over slavery's westward expansion.

Kansas's territorial boundary is marked in outline color, capturing the territory in the midst of the settler conflict over whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state, a struggle already underway by 1857. The Indian Territory appears south of Kansas, its own boundary reflecting the land set aside for tribal nations relocated there decades earlier. Proposed railway routes marked in purple trace transportation plans that existed only on paper at the time. Together the contested Kansas boundary, the Indian Territory, and the proposed railways sketch a region at the center of the country's sectional crisis in the years just before the Civil War.

For a Kansas family with territorial-era roots, or a collector drawn to this British-published perspective on the Bleeding Kansas period, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Kansas combined with Nebraska in Mitchell's later 1884 sheet and alone in Cram's 1878 railroad atlas, both elsewhere in this collection, and Kansas from Cram's 1893 edition; this 1857 Rogers and Johnston sheet is the only one in the store to map Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas territorial conflict itself. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.