Montana, Idaho and Wyoming in 1884 - Helena, Boise, Cheyenne

Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Jr. published this county and township map of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming Territories in Philadelphia in 1884, continuing the family publishing tradition his father had built into one of the largest American atlas houses of the nineteenth century through the pioneering use of steel-plate engraving. By 1884 all three Rocky Mountain territories remained years from statehood, and this sheet captures them at very different stages of administrative development, with Wyoming organized into only seven counties, Montana into eleven, and Idaho into thirteen, a telling snapshot of how unevenly settlement and county formation had proceeded across the northern Rockies.

Native American reservations, mountain ranges, towns, roads, and rivers are recorded in detail across all three territories, among the most thorough treatments of the region available in a commercial atlas of the period. Helena anchors Montana as its territorial capital, chosen in 1875 for its position amid the state's gold-mining districts, Boise governs Idaho from its southwestern valley along the Boise River, and Cheyenne, built around the Union Pacific Railroad's transcontinental line, serves as Wyoming's territorial capital and largest town. The map's careful county-level detail across three territories whose borders and internal divisions were still actively being drawn makes it a genuinely useful document for tracking the northern Rocky Mountain region's slow but steady progress toward eventual statehood.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with roots anywhere across the northern Rockies, for a transplant now settled in Helena, Boise, or Cheyenne, or for a collector of territorial-era Mitchell atlas maps. Note this exact Mitchell edition is also offered elsewhere in our catalog under a different crop selection, so the underlying map and year are the same, only the image crops differ. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.