Indian Territory in 1873 - Cherokee Nation, Choctaw Nation, Chickasaw Nation

This map of Indian Territory was produced by the civil and topographical engineer O.W. Gray and published in 1873 by Stedman, Brown & Lyon as part of Gray's Atlas of the United States, a first edition drawn in part from earlier maps by Colton and Frank Gray and updated for Gray's own series. The atlas was issued in full color, and this sheet follows that practice with a bold outline marking the territory's boundary and distinct coloring used to separate the lands assigned to its different nations. It covers Indian Territory, the land set aside in what is now Oklahoma for tribes removed from the southeastern United States, at a date when its nations governed themselves under treaty arrangements even as pressure from railroad interests and white settlers on its borders was steadily increasing.

The Cherokee Outlet is marked across the northern part of the territory, a strip of land held by the Cherokee Nation primarily for hunting and later leased for cattle grazing. Creek Country occupies the central territory, land governed by the Creek, or Muscogee, Nation under its own constitution. The Choctaw Nation is recorded across the southeastern portion, and the Chickasaw Nation immediately to its west, the two having agreed to share a common territory following their removal from Mississippi and Alabama decades earlier. Together these divisions map a territory organized not by American counties but by the sovereign boundaries of the nations who had been relocated there.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone tracing Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, or Chickasaw family history, or for a collector of nineteenth-century maps documenting Native American nations in the era before Oklahoma statehood. Indian Territory buyers should note we also carry the region as mapped in 1890 and again by Rand McNally in 1892: this 1873 Gray edition is the earliest of the three, printed while the territory's nations still held sole governing authority over their lands. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.