Montana Map 1865 Territorial Print - Billings, Missoula, Bozeman

Walter Ware De Lacy, a civil engineer and West Point graduate, produced this map of Montana Territory in 1865, commissioned by the territorial legislature at its very first meeting following Montana's formation on May 16, 1864. Carl Wheat, the leading historian of Western American cartography, called it one of the great maps in the record of Western cartography, and this example represents a later 1899 reprinting of the original plate, the earliest reasonably obtainable edition of a map whose first printings survive in only a handful of known copies. De Lacy's manuscript was engraved and issued within a year of Montana's creation, giving it a rare claim to documenting a brand-new American territory essentially as it was being organized on the ground, its mining camps, counties and reservations recorded almost as soon as they existed.

Virginia City appears as Montana's original territorial capital, its gold rush boomtown status reflected in the map's dense record of gulch and placer diggings nearby, while Bannack, the first capital before Virginia City, marks an earlier center of the 1862 strike that first drew miners into the region. Helena, recorded here under one of its early names before its later rise to territorial capital, sits among the mining camps and trails threading the Rocky Mountains near Bozeman. De Lacy's map is equally notable beyond Montana's borders for its early depiction of Yellowstone, tracing the Cooke and Folsom expedition's route through its canyons and thermal springs years before the area's 1872 designation as a national park, alongside the Bridger and Bozeman trails and a scatter of abandoned military forts guarding the routes north.

This map makes a striking gift for a Montana family descended from the territory's original gold rush settlers, or for a collector of Western American exploration cartography given its historic status as one of the earliest detailed maps of both Montana and Yellowstone together. The store's other Montana Territory maps from the Lloyd and General Land Office series show the region a decade or more later, once counties and railroads had filled in behind this pioneering De Lacy survey. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.