California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Washington in 1867 - Sacramento, Salem, Boise, Carson City, Phoenix, Olympia

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this compact map of California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington in 1867, a charming small-format plate drawn from one of the school atlases his Philadelphia firm produced for classroom use across the country. Mitchell Jr. had inherited the family publishing house in 1860 after more than three decades in the school-atlas and wall-map business, and by 1867 the company was among the pioneers of steel-plate engraving for educational maps, a technique that allowed for remarkably fine detail even at the small scale school atlases demanded. Despite its modest size, the map packs in a striking amount of information across the entire American Far West, tracking counties, towns, roads, rivers, and mountain ranges across seven separate states and territories at a moment when several of them, including Idaho and the Arizona and Utah territories, were still in the earliest stages of American settlement and formal organization.

Counties and towns are marked in detail across California and the Pacific Northwest territories of Oregon and Washington, while further east the map records the young territories of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, all of which had been carved out of larger unorganized land only in the preceding years. Roads and rivers thread across the entire region, the essential travel and trade routes linking these still-sparsely-settled territories to California's more established population centers. Indian tribal lands are marked directly on the map, a common feature on American atlases of the period reflecting the ongoing process of American settlement across land long inhabited by native peoples. Forts are also noted throughout the territories, military posts that marked the government's expanding presence across a region still being actively organized into the states it would eventually become.

This map makes a fitting gift for a family with roots anywhere across the American Far West, someone drawn to the story of how California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington were first mapped as a connected region, or a collector interested in nineteenth-century American school atlas cartography specifically. It stands alone among the Vault's Western regional offerings as the only sheet to cover all seven of these states and territories together on a single compact plate. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.