Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Idaho in 1863 - Denver, Topeka, Omaha, Lewiston

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this update of his Kansas-Nebraska-Colorado sheet from Philadelphia in 1863, revising the map his firm had published only the year before to record the creation of Idaho Territory that March — one of the earliest appearances of the new territory on any printed map. The engraving keeps Mitchell's signature ornamental floral border and crisp steel line work, the house style that distinguished his New General Atlas from the plainer county-format maps beginning to appear elsewhere in the trade. The sheet covers Kansas, Nebraska Territory, Colorado Territory, and the eastern portion of the new Idaho Territory, with New Mexico, Texas, and Indian Territory sketched along its southern margin. Idaho at this date still absorbed the whole of what would become Wyoming, a boundary arrangement that survived barely a year before further territorial splits began.

Kansas counties again cover only the state's eastern third, while Nebraska's have expanded slightly to claim just under half the territory. Colorado shows roughly fifteen organized counties, a marked jump from the year before, clustered around the gold regions near Denver that continued to draw settlement along the Front Range. Indian tribes, early towns, and forts are marked across the plains between the settled counties, and proposed railroad routes crisscross ground the war had slowed but not stopped. Idaho Territory occupies the map's northwestern corner as an almost entirely blank expanse, its vast size on paper matched by almost no organized settlement shown within it.

This 1863 revision is a natural pick for a Colorado or Idaho family tracing early territorial roots, or for a collector pairing it with the store's 1862 Mitchell edition of the same Kansas-Nebraska-Colorado grouping — the earlier sheet predates Idaho Territory entirely and still shows Dakota Territory at its original full extent, while this one captures the region just as Mitchell's map was redrawn to keep pace with Congress. Colorado's jump from no counties to roughly fifteen between the two editions is itself a record of how fast the gold-rush settlements organized. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes.