Nebraska, Dakota, Idaho & Montana Map 1865 Regional Print - Omaha, Sioux Falls, Boise, Billings

Alvin Jewett Johnson published this map of Nebraska, Dakota, Idaho and Montana in New York in 1865, notable above all for containing one of the very earliest appearances of Wyoming on any printed map, so early in fact that the name had not yet made it into the map's own title. Johnson had built his firm out of the remnants of J.H. Colton's business, converting Colton's original steel-plate engravings to lithographic stone to produce atlases at a lower price point than his competitors, and by 1865 the Johnson firm, now operating without his former partner Ward, was issuing its own fully original plates each year. This sheet predates the creation of Yellowstone by seven years and shows the wider unorganized country between the Yellowstone River and the North Platte as still largely blank, a genuine snapshot of how little the northern Rockies were understood even by well-informed Eastern publishers at the war's end.

Omaha anchors Nebraska as its principal town and the map's easternmost point of real organization, while Virginia City and Bannack, Montana's earliest gold rush boomtowns, appear amid the sparse nine counties then recorded there. Idaho, freshly carved out with only five counties of its own, and Dakota, with none at all, both still read as barely organized frontier. The map's version of Yellowstone Lake, mislabeled Sublett's Lake and pushed well west of its true location, testifies to how garbled even the best available information about the region still was in 1865. Gold mines in western Montana and a scatter of proposed railroad routes and trading posts round out a sheet that captures the northern Plains and Rockies at their most genuinely unmapped.

This map makes a striking gift for a family tracing roots to Montana's original 1860s gold camps, or for a collector fascinated by the cartographic record of Wyoming's earliest, unnamed appearance on any published map. Set against the store's later, better-surveyed Montana and Wyoming sheets from Lloyd and the General Land Office, this 1865 Johnson edition shows just how quickly the region's mapping caught up over the following two decades. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.