Eastern Montana Map 1874 Regional Print - Fort Peck, Yellowstone River, Missouri River

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this eastern Montana 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 and spot heights that mark out the territory's river valleys and highlands more clearly than the atlas's flatter eastern sheets. The sheet covers only Montana's eastern portion, splitting the territory in two the way the atlas splits Idaho's pairing with Montana's western half, a reflection of how the Northern Pacific Railroad, still under construction, had only begun to press into the territory's interior by 1874.

Beyond townships and rail distances, little beyond the border with British Possessions to the north is spelled out on the sheet itself. That northern boundary mattered in 1874 as much for the reach of the Northern Pacific, still years from a transcontinental connection, as for any settled population on either side of it. Montana's eastern plains held far fewer towns than its mountainous western half, a division the atlas mirrors by treating the two halves as entirely separate sheets rather than one combined map. The land the rail lines were reaching toward here was still, in large part, open range.

For a Montana family with eastern-plains ranching roots, or a collector building out the earliest American railroad atlases region by region, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Montana as one combined sheet in Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet is the earliest of the three and the only one to split the territory into eastern and western halves, a choice that reflects how unevenly settled Montana still was when this atlas went to press. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.