Dakota Map 1884 Township Print - Bismarck, Yankton, Deadwood

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Dakota sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures and marks Indian reservations directly on the map alongside counties, settlements, railroads, and rivers, a level of tribal-boundary detail most territorial maps of the period left out. The sheet maps Dakota as a single, still-undivided territory, five years before the 1889 split into North and South Dakota, tracking a region in the middle of a major settlement boom driven by rail expansion across its prairie interior.

The Missouri River cuts through the territory as its dominant waterway, the same river that had guided the earliest rail and steamboat traffic into the region decades earlier. Indian reservation boundaries are marked directly on the sheet, a specific political geography reflecting the treaty lands still governing large sections of the territory even as settlement pressure was rapidly increasing around them. County lines are laid out across the settled portions of the territory, a much denser administrative pattern than the largely unorganized land shown on this collection's earlier 1874 Dakota sheet. Together the river, the reservations, and the counties sketch a territory in the final years before its formal division into two states.

For a Dakota homesteading family with roots on either side of the eventual state line, or a collector tracking the territory's maps through its final undivided years, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries North Dakota and South Dakota separately from Cram's 1893 edition, combined in Cram's 1883 edition, and as one earlier undivided territory in Asher & Adams' 1874 railroad atlas; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one of the group to mark specific Indian reservation boundaries on the still-unified territory. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.