Arkansas in 1838 - Little Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville

Arkansas's map in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam, was printed just two years after Arkansas joined the Union as the 25th state. The state's western border in this period sat directly alongside the Indian Territory, where thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole people were being forcibly resettled throughout the 1830s under federal removal policy — a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding on Arkansas's own doorstep even as the young state itself was still filling in with new American settlers. George W. Boynton engraved the sheet at a scale of roughly 1:1,480,000.

The Mississippi River defines the state's eastern border on the map, with towns and cities marked by dots across county lines hand-colored in the atlas's signature style — a frontier state whose settled river-bottom counties in the east looked very different from its still-unmapped western reaches.

This one resonates with an Arkansas family, a Natural State transplant, or a collector adding to a run of Bradford's 1838 maps. The print is unframed and available in a range of sizes.