Oregon, Washington, California, Utah & New Mexico Map 1858 Regional Print - San Francisco, Portland, Olympia, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe

This map of Oregon, Washington, California, Utah, and New Mexico was drawn by G.W. Colton with text by Richard Swainson Fisher and published in 1858 in Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography, a cabinet-sized volume that nonetheless let Colton fold enormous stretches of territory onto a single readable page rather than splitting them across several specialist sheets. The sheet depicts relief with hachures across the region's mountain ranges, colors each territory individually within a decorative border, and carries a separate inset detailing the vicinity of San Francisco, all engraved by Davies and Roberts and George Russell and Co. Published at a coarse scale of roughly one to seven million, the map covers the entire far western United States as it stood only a decade after the Gold Rush, most of it still organized as territory rather than settled statehood.

California is the most developed of the five, its inset of San Francisco marking the state's fast-growing Gold Rush port and financial center. Oregon appears to the north as an organized territory on the edge of statehood, its towns still thin along the Willamette Valley. Washington Territory, split off from Oregon only a few years earlier, is shown even more sparsely settled along Puget Sound. Utah Territory is drawn as a broad, largely blank expanse centered on the Great Salt Lake and its Mormon settlements. New Mexico Territory, the largest block on the map, stretches across the desert Southwest with only scattered towns marked along its river valleys.

For anyone curious how loosely organized California's neighbors still were before most of them became states, or with family history anywhere across the Gold Rush-era West, this sheet is a useful find, and it completes the Pacific and Mountain West for a Colton 1858 collector. Because it groups five separate territories on one sheet, this edition offers a wider view of the far West than any single-state map from the same atlas. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.