Wyoming Map 1889 Territorial Print - Cheyenne, Laramie, Sheridan

This map of Wyoming was produced by Rand McNally and Company of Chicago and published in 1889 as part of the firm's Enlarged Business Atlas and Shippers' Guide, an eighteenth edition aimed squarely at merchants and freight agents rather than general readers. Where the firm's later indexed atlases favored broad reference use, this business-atlas edition is built for commerce: county lines are outlined in color and the railroad network is picked out in bold emphasis over the state's hachured, mountainous relief, making the sheet read almost like a shipping map first and a geographic one second. It covers the whole of Wyoming Territory county by county, at a moment just one year before statehood, when rail lines rather than settled townships still defined how the territory was understood and used.

The territory's rugged core is rendered through the Wind River Range and the Big Horn Mountains, both distinct enough on the map's hachured relief to stand out from the open plains stretching east toward Nebraska. Cheyenne, seat of the territorial government since 1869, anchors the southeastern corner, while the rail lines highlighted across the sheet trace the routes that would soon carry settlers, cattle, and ore out of the territory. Coal and cattle, rather than farming, were the era's chief exports, and the highlighted railroads underscore how closely Wyoming's economy depended on moving both to market. Together, mountains, rail lines, and county boundaries capture a territory on the very edge of admission to the Union.

This earlier Wyoming map makes a fitting gift for a family with territorial-era roots in the state, a railroad history buff, or a collector building out a shelf of Rand McNally editions. We also carry the same publisher's later 1897 Wyoming map, drawn from the more polished Indexed Atlas of the World once statehood had settled in; that later sheet reads as a calmer, more established reference map, while this 1889 business-atlas edition captures Wyoming Territory still oriented almost entirely around its railroads, published the year before admission to the Union. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.