Illinois, Iowa & Missouri Map 1858 Regional Print - Chicago, St. Louis, Des Moines

This map of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri was drawn by G.W. Colton with text by Richard Swainson Fisher and published in 1858 in Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography, an atlas that leaned on Fisher's statistical tables and narrative description to do work a bare map alone could not, aimed squarely at general readers rather than land agents or surveyors. The sheet colors each state's counties individually within a decorative border and carries two separate insets detailing the vicinities of Chicago and St. Louis, with the Mississippi River drawn prominently as the boundary running through the map, all engraved by Davies and Roberts and George Russell and Co. Published in a decade of rapid westward settlement, the map records three states central to the country's expansion into the trans-Mississippi interior.

Illinois is shown with Chicago given its own inset here, already emerging as the region's dominant rail and lake-shipping hub at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Missouri centers on St. Louis, likewise detailed in a separate inset as the principal gateway for river and overland traffic heading further west along the Missouri River. Iowa appears the least developed of the three, its capital at Des Moines only recently established after the seat of government moved there from Iowa City the previous decade, and its county grid still filling in from east to west. Running between them, the Mississippi River ties the map together as the great commercial highway linking Chicago, St. Louis, and the farm country of the surrounding states.

An Iowa family tracing its roots back to the state's earliest years will find plenty here, and so will anyone with ties to the river towns of Illinois or Missouri, or a collector filling gaps in a Colton 1858 frontier-state run. Chicago and St. Louis were still years away from their late-century size when this was engraved, and the sheet's two insets catch both cities at that earlier, smaller stage. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.