Alaska in 1911 - Nome, Skagway, Fairbanks

Rand McNally & Company of Chicago issued this map of Alaska in 1911, drawing on the firm's decades of experience producing railway guides and wax-engraved reference maps for a national audience. By this date Rand McNally had become the dominant name in American commercial cartography, and this sheet reflects that scale, combining broad geographic coverage of Alaska's coastline, mountains, and river systems with two detailed insets covering the Seward Peninsula Mining District and the Mt. McKinley District. The map arrives roughly a decade after Alaska's major gold rushes had reshaped the territory's economy, and it captures a period when railroads, rather than dog sleds and riverboats alone, were beginning to knit the territory's remote mining camps into a working economy.

The Seward Peninsula inset records the district around Nome, where gold discovered at Anvil Creek in 1898 triggered a rush that built the town almost overnight on the shores of the Bering Sea. The Mt. McKinley District inset covers the area around the continent's tallest peak, known today as Denali, then valued as much for copper and lode gold prospects as for its scenery. Five early Alaskan railroads are traced in red, including the White Pass & Yukon Route running from Skagway into the Klondike, and the Copper River & Northwestern Railway built to reach the copper deposits of the Kennecott Mines, alongside the shorter Council City & Solomon River and Tanana Valley lines.

This map makes a distinctive gift for a family with Alaska roots, for someone who has made the move north to Fairbanks or Juneau, or for a collector building out a set of early twentieth-century American territorial maps. It ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.