Idaho & Montana Map 1874 Regional Print - Boise, Helena, Missoula

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this Idaho and western 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, its relief shown through hachures that give the region's mountain country a rougher, more textured look than the atlas's flatter eastern sheets. The sheet covers both territories jointly rather than as separate maps, sixteen years before Montana's 1889 statehood and sixteen before Idaho's own admission the same year, a pairing that reflects how thinly settled and loosely surveyed both territories still were in 1874.

Boise, Idaho's territorial capital, is named on the sheet, one of the few towns detailed enough to appear in a region the atlas otherwise treats sparingly. The pairing of Idaho with only Montana's western portion reflects the practical reality that neither territory had enough rail-linked settlement in 1874 to fill a sheet on its own, unlike the denser eastern states this atlas maps individually. Mountain ranges dominate both territories' terrain, a fact the hachured relief captures even where individual peaks go unnamed, and the scarcity of townships shown outside Boise underscores how much of this country remained unmapped in any real administrative sense.

For an Idaho or western Montana family with territorial-era roots, or a collector building out the earliest American railroad atlases region by region, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Idaho and Montana separately in Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet is the earliest of the group and the only one to map the two territories jointly, a pairing later editions abandoned once each territory had grown enough to warrant its own sheet. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.