Colorado in 1882 - Denver, North Park, South Park, Leadville

George F. Cram published this railroad and township map of Colorado in 1882 for his New Indexed Commercial Atlas of the Western and Southern States, a guide built specifically for businessmen and shippers that listed every town, post office, and rail and express route across the region it covered. Cram, a Union Army veteran who had reportedly served as a cartographer under General Ulysses S. Grant before founding his own Chicago mapmaking firm, indexed this sheet with population, railroad, and county listings alongside the map itself. The copy offered here carries hand-drawn annotations tracing travel routes both along the railroads and across open country where no official transit existed, a mark of practical, working use.

Denver anchors the map as Colorado's capital and rail hub, six years into statehood and still growing rapidly. North Park and South Park, the high mountain basins that give the map its title emphasis, appear as key grazing and mining regions within the central Rockies. Leadville, then in the full flush of its silver boom, stands out as one of the state's largest and most consequential mining towns. Political boundaries appear in color throughout, with county lines and drainage patterns mapped alongside both finished and still-unfinished rail lines. The hand-drawn travel routes added to this copy suggest it saw genuine use by someone navigating the territory's still-developing road network.

The hand annotations on this particular copy set it apart from the standard 1879 and 1889 Rand McNally Colorado maps also offered in this collection, giving it the added interest of a document actually used for travel planning in its own time. This piece is a compelling find for a serious map collector, a Colorado historian, or anyone drawn to the mining-era Rockies. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes, ready for a study or office wall.