United States Map 1858 Regional Print - New York, New Orleans, San Francisco

This map of the United States 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 small-format volume Colton pitched at households and classrooms rather than surveyors, its hundreds of pages of statistical tables and short descriptive text meant to accompany each engraved sheet. Engraved by Davies and Roberts and printed by George Russell and Co., this sheet colors every state and organized territory individually and renders the country's mountain ranges in hachure shading, the whole composition set within an ornamental floral border with twin elevation profiles added across the bottom tracing the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Published on the eve of the Civil War, the map captures a nation still expanding westward, its settled states sharply defined against the broad, undivided territories beyond the Mississippi.

The Indian Territory appears as a broad, undesignated block west of Arkansas, a reminder that large sections of the continent still lay outside state or settled territorial government. To its north and west, the map traces the vast, largely blank expanse that would later become Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, drawn here as thinly defined territory rather than fixed political units. The twin cross-continental profiles at the base of the sheet give a rare sense of the country's physical rise and fall, from the Appalachian ridges in the east to the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada in the west. Together these features turn a simple political map into a working record of a country still being surveyed, settled, and argued over as it grew.

This sheet suits anyone drawn to the sweep of the country as a whole rather than a single state, a history teacher's office, a well-traveled family's study, or a collector filling out a run of Colton's regional maps with the national view that ties them together. Because this 1858 edition predates the Civil War by only a few years, it makes a natural point of comparison against later Reconstruction-era wall maps of the United States. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.