Montana & Wyoming Map 1874 County Print - Helena, Cheyenne, Bozeman

This anonymously published county map of Montana and Wyoming, issued around 1874, is a genuinely scarce sheet, the first example of its particular plate seen in recent memory even among specialist dealers of Western Americana. It records both territories colored by county at a moment just two years after Yellowstone's 1872 establishment as the first national park anywhere in the world, and the map includes the new park explicitly among its administrative divisions, a rare early instance of a commercial atlas map treating Yellowstone as a distinct labeled entity rather than simply unorganized territory. The plate's anonymous publication and its careful, workmanlike engraving suggest a smaller regional atlas firm rather than one of the major national houses, giving it a documentary character distinct from the more widely circulated Lloyd and Colton territorial maps of the same decade.

Helena anchors Montana Territory's eleven counties as its capital, a number that reflects the rapid county-organization Montana had undergone in the decade since its 1864 creation. Cheyenne performs a similar role for Wyoming, one of only five counties recorded there alongside the newly designated Yellowstone National Park itself. Bozeman marks one of Montana's key agricultural and trading towns near the Yellowstone River, close to the routes explorers and settlers had used to reach the park's geysers and canyons in the years just before its federal protection. The Big Horn Mountains rise along the Montana-Wyoming border, still only lightly settled territory shared uneasily between American forces and the region's Native nations.

This scarce county map makes a compelling gift for a Montana or Wyoming family with roots in the territorial period, or for a collector interested in the earliest cartographic treatments of Yellowstone as a named national park. Alongside the store's Lloyd territorial maps of the same region from just a year or two earlier, this anonymous 1874 sheet marks a clear before-and-after moment, the point at which Yellowstone stopped being merely explored territory and became a formally bounded park on the map itself. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.