Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado in 1862 - Denver City, Topeka, Omaha

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. published this map of the central plains and Rockies in Philadelphia in 1862, part of the New General Atlas his firm had issued since 1860 to replace the aging Tanner maps it inherited. Mitchell's house style favored crisp steel engraving set inside an ornamental floral border, a decorative treatment distinct from the plainer county atlases that would come to dominate the plains-map trade later in the century. The sheet covers Kansas, Nebraska Territory, and the brand-new Colorado Territory, with a large Dakota Territory occupying the top of the map and portions of New Mexico, Texas, and Indian Territory along its southern edge. It was published only months after Colorado Territory's creation in February 1861, catching the region at a moment when Idaho and Wyoming did not yet exist and Dakota Territory still extended across most of the modern states of Wyoming and South Dakota.

Kansas counties on this sheet reach only across the state's eastern third, the rest left blank as unorganized plains. Nebraska's counties cover an even smaller fraction, thinning out well before the territory's boundary reaches its western edge. Colorado, by contrast, has no counties drawn in at all; instead the map marks Denver City and a cluster of surrounding mining towns, the settlements that had sprung up around the Pike's Peak gold strike just three years earlier. Indian tribes, forts, and a scatter of proposed railroad routes are laid across the still largely unorganized ground between them, a plains region the map itself notes was still very much in transition in the years just after the Civil War began.

This 1862 Mitchell edition suits a Kansas or Nebraska family with roots in the territorial period, a Colorado transplant drawn to a map made in Denver City's first years, or a collector pairing it with the store's later Mitchell edition of the same three territories, issued the following year in 1863 to record the newly formed Idaho Territory to the west — a revision made necessary within months of this sheet going to press. Between the two, this earlier state is the one to show Dakota Territory still at its original, un-shrunk extent. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes.