Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico and Indian Territory in 1856 - Omaha, Topeka, Santa Fe, Tahlequah

Charles Desilver of Philadelphia issued this map of the American West shortly after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, incorporating it into S. Augustus Mitchell's renowned New Universal Atlas after Desilver assumed control of that publication's plates from Thomas Cowperthwait & Co. in late 1855. Recognizing the intense public appetite for maps of the newly opened western territories, Desilver introduced this freshly compiled regional sheet and continued revising it over its first years in print as new survey data arrived from military reconnaissance and frontier reports. This example represents an early state of the plate, bearing Desilver's distinctive scrollwork border and page number 38, published at the exact moment the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of the Missouri Compromise was igniting violent conflict over slavery on the plains.

Emigrant and military routes crisscross the sheet, with the Oregon and Fremont routes tracing the Platte and Arkansas rivers and the Santa Fe Route arcing south toward New Mexico's commercial hubs, while roads radiating from Fort Smith connect to Doña Ana and Santa Fe under General Arbuckle's orders. A dense cluster of reservations for the Delaware, Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Pottawatomie lines the Missouri River in eastern Kansas, and the Indian Territory to the south records the lands of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw following their forced removal. In eastern Kansas, the newly founded towns of Lawrence, Lecompton, and Topeka sit in close proximity, mapped just as they became the battleground of Bleeding Kansas, while the recently surveyed Gadsden Treaty Line establishes New Mexico's modern southern border with Mexico.

This map is a compelling gift for a family with roots on the Kansas or Nebraska plains, for a transplant now settled in the Southwest, or for a collector of maps documenting the volatile prelude to the Civil War. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.