Texas in 1838 - San Antonio, Galveston, Austin's Colony

Published just two years after Texas declared independence from Mexico, this map from Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas shows the young Republic of Texas rather than a U.S. state. Sam Houston, hero of the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836, was serving as the republic's first elected president, and the new nation was actively petitioning for annexation by the United States even as its borders with Mexico remained bitterly disputed and its economy — built on cotton and enslaved labor imported largely from the American South — was still finding its footing. Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam published the atlas, engraved by George W. Boynton at a scale of about 1:2,820,000.

Empresario land grants including Austin's Colony and De Witt's Colony are mapped out across the young republic, with San Antonio and Galveston named along the Gulf of Mexico coastline and the Brazos and Colorado Rivers threading through the interior — the same empresario system that had originally brought American settlers into Mexican Texas in the 1820s and helped set the stage for the revolution itself.

This one is a genuine conversation piece for a Texas family, a collector of Republic-era Texana specifically, or anyone drawn to the brief nine-year window when Texas was its own country. The print ships unframed and in multiple sizes.