Oregon, Washington and Idaho in 1863 - Portland, Olympia, Lewiston

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. of Philadelphia issued this rare variant map of Oregon, Washington, and the newly formed Idaho Territory in 1863, part of the same New General Atlas he had launched in 1860 after taking over his father's business from DeSilver. The firm's steel-plate engraving and even hand coloring gave its territorial maps a crisp, reliable look that helped the atlas sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year through the 1860s. This particular printing is an unusual transitional state: Oregon appears within its final statehood borders, Washington Territory still runs east to the Rocky Mountains, and Idaho Territory, only months old, is drawn in an early, compact configuration reaching north just to the Salmon River gold country rather than to the 49th parallel it would later claim, a boundary arrangement that likely existed for only a few months at the end of 1863.

Portland remains Oregon's dominant river port on the Willamette, while Olympia, seated on Puget Sound, continues as Washington Territory's capital. Lewiston, perched at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, served as Idaho Territory's first capital and the supply hub for miners rushing to the Salmon River diggings the map singles out by name. Further east, the sheet marks a second cluster of gold regions in the Bitterroot Mountains, ground that would soon be organized as western Montana. Early wagon roads, forts, and Indian land boundaries trace the routes prospectors and settlers used to reach these scattered mining districts, while the map's compact Idaho boundary is itself a record of how quickly Congress kept redrawing the territorial map through the gold rush years.

This edition suits a family with Pacific Northwest or Rocky Mountain mining-era roots, or a collector building a set of the region's rapidly shifting Civil War-era territorial boundaries. The store also carries Mitchell Jr.'s 1860 map of the same region, issued before Idaho Territory existed at all; that earlier sheet shows Washington wrapping fully around Oregon, while this 1863 variant reflects the brief, compact Idaho configuration that followed only a few months later. It is available unframed in a range of sizes, from a small print to a large wall map.