Alaska Map 1884 Territorial Print - Sitka, Bering Strait, Yukon River

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Northwestern America sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886, reduced from a map published by the United States Coast Survey. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures and spot heights, mapping the territory Russia had ceded to the United States less than two decades earlier. The sheet maps Alaska and its surrounding waters, showing settlements and rivers across a vast, still sparsely surveyed territory.

Alaska is the sheet's central focus, its outline and coastal detail drawn from the Coast Survey's own recent work rather than an older or secondhand source. Boundaries with neighboring British Columbia and the Yukon are marked, a political geography still being worked out in the years following the 1867 purchase. Rivers and settlements are plotted across the territory, sparse markers reflecting how little of interior Alaska had actually been surveyed by the 1880s. Together the coastline, the boundaries, and the scattered settlements sketch a territory the United States had owned for less than a generation and was only beginning to map in detail.

For an Alaska family with roots in the territory, or a collector drawn to the earliest American maps of the purchase, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Alaska from Cram's 1883 edition; this 1884 Mitchell sheet, drawn from the Coast Survey's own data, is the more technically grounded of the two, built for surveyed accuracy rather than the traveler's-guide styling of later editions, and one of the earliest widely distributed American maps of the purchase. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.