Oklahoma and Indian Territory in 1898 - Guthrie, Oklahoma City, Tahlequah

George F. Cram, who took sole control of the Evanston, Illinois atlas firm he had founded with his uncle Rufus Blanchard in 1867, issued this large-format map of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in Chicago in 1898. Cram's company was among the first American publishers to issue a world atlas and became best known for its Unrivaled Atlas of the World, a title the firm kept in print from the 1880s into the 1950s. This sheet is one of the relatively few large-format maps to document the brief window when Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory existed side by side as separately governed jurisdictions, a configuration that ended with their 1907 merger into the new state of Oklahoma. Published nine years after Oklahoma Territory's 1889 land run and just two years before Congress began seriously debating statehood, the map documents a region firmly past its earliest chaos and well into building the rail and county infrastructure statehood would require.

Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory's capital since the 1889 run, anchors the map's western half as the seat of a territorial government eight years into its existence and well past the makeshift arrangements of its first year. Tahlequah, the Cherokee Nation's capital, continues to anchor Indian Territory's eastern half, a government structure that by 1898 was under increasing federal pressure to dissolve ahead of statehood. The map includes a list of operating railroads, evidence of how thoroughly rail lines had filled in the territory since the sparse routes shown on earlier maps of the region. Oklahoma City, still a young rail town at this date, appears as one of the territory's fastest-growing settlements alongside Guthrie, with the fully drawn county lines marking a territory only a few years from the political reorganization statehood would bring.

It's a fitting gift for an Oklahoma family, a collector tracking the state's path from territory to statehood, or anyone drawn to large-format Cram atlas sheets. It follows the store's other Oklahoma and Indian Territory map, a Julius Bien Census Bureau edition from 1890, by eight years, and where that earlier map catches the region in its first chaotic year, this Cram edition documents a far more settled territory with an established railroad network already tabulated in its margins. It's available unframed in a range of sizes.