Arizona Map 1874 Territorial Print - Colorado River, Prescott, Tucson

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this Arizona sheet in 1874 as part of their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, one of the first American atlases built almost entirely around the country's expanding rail network rather than its terrain. This printing, produced late in 1874 and described by the firm as its most complete edition, is hand-colored and engraved by the Franklin Type Foundry, with relief shown through hachures that give the Colorado River country and its surrounding mountain ranges more visual weight than the atlas grants most of its western sheets. The sheet maps Arizona as a territory rather than a state, eighteen years before its 1912 admission to the Union, a vast, thinly-settled expanse the atlas's rail-first styling could only partly capture.

The Colorado River and several mountain ranges are named directly on the sheet, outlining a territory whose settlement still clung largely to water and mining routes rather than rail lines, which barely reached Arizona at all by 1874, years ahead of the Southern Pacific's arrival later in the decade. Townships and settlements cluster where the map does show them near the Colorado, underscoring how central that river was to travel and trade across a territory otherwise defined by desert and mountain terrain. The neighboring territories of Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico, partially visible at the sheet's edges, situate Arizona within a broader unsettled Southwest still years from the rail connections that would later transform it.

For an Arizona family with territorial-era roots, or a collector building out the earliest American railroad atlases state by state, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Arizona from Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet is the earliest of the three and the only one mapping a territory the rail network had barely reached, unlike the more rail-connected Arizona Cram's later atlases depict. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.