Nevada in 1909 - Carson City, Reno, Virginia City

This map of Nevada was published in 1909 by George F. Cram and Ellis Arthur Davis as part of Davis' New Commercial Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, a regional atlas produced in Berkeley for readers following the economic development of the western states. The sheet is printed in full color, with each county picked out in its own hue and the mountainous terrain rendered in hachures, a treatment aimed at practical clarity for a business and settler audience rather than at purely decorative display. By 1909 Nevada had been a state for forty-five years, yet its population remained thin and its fortunes tied overwhelmingly to mining, with railroads, county lines, and Indian reservations recorded here at a moment when a new wave of silver and gold strikes was again reshaping the state's map.

The Sierra Nevada is marked along the state's western edge, the range that gives Nevada its name and separates it from California's gold country. To the north the sheet records the Ralston Desert, one of the arid basins that define the Great Basin landscape covering most of the state. Carson City, the state capital since 1864, sat at the foot of the Sierra as the seat of territorial and later state government, while Reno, further north on the Truckee River, had grown into the state's principal rail and commercial center. Virginia City, the town built on the Comstock Lode that had made Nevada's statehood possible in the first place, remained a byword for the silver wealth that shaped the state's early economy even as new boomtowns such as Tonopah and Goldfield were then drawing fresh mining investment.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family ties to Nevada's mining country, whether the old Comstock towns around Virginia City or the early twentieth-century boomtowns of Tonopah and Goldfield that were reshaping the state's economy the very year this sheet was printed. Collectors of western mining-era cartography will appreciate its full county coloring and its place within a regional commercial atlas rather than a national one, a format less commonly seen than the standard state-atlas issues of the period. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.