Nevada & California Map 1871 Regional Print - Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Reno

H.H. Lloyd issued this striking map of California and Nevada in 1871, a work that survives today largely because it appeared as a supplement bound into county and state atlases published by Warner & Beers, since Lloyd's own Atlas of the United States was never issued as a stand-alone volume. Counties across both states are shown in distinct color, and the sheet locates the U.S. Mail Route, the wagon route running from Los Angeles to Salt Lake, the old Telegraph and Express Route, Transcontinental Railroad lines, missions, forts and Indian settlements alongside towns, rivers, mountains and lakes. Lloyd's work is genuinely scarce, a fact made more notable given the ambitious detail packed into this single sheet covering two states just two years after the Transcontinental Railroad's completion transformed travel across the American West. The map predates the creation of Riverside, Imperial, Orange, Ventura and several other California counties still to come.

Las Vegas appears here not as a city but as an Old Mormon Fort, a marker of just how undeveloped the site remained a half-century before its twentieth-century transformation into a resort destination. Nevada's vast Grand Interior Basin is named directly on the sheet, a nod to the arid geography that shaped settlement patterns across the state's center, while the Comstock Lode country around Virginia City, the source of Nevada's mid-century silver boom, anchors the state's mining detail. The wagon route linking Los Angeles to Salt Lake threads across the map's southern reach, tracing one of the era's principal desert travel corridors before rail service fully displaced overland wagon traffic. Together these details capture a transitional Nevada and Southern California, still defined by mining camps, forts and wagon roads even as the railroad was beginning to reorder the region's geography.

A fitting gift for a Nevada or Southern California family with roots in the Comstock-era mining boom, or for a collector drawn to the scarce supplement maps issued alongside Warner & Beers county atlases rather than as stand-alone publications. Its portrayal of Las Vegas as an old Mormon outpost, rather than the city it later became, gives it a particular appeal for anyone interested in that specific transformation. The print is supplied unframed and offered in the full range of sizes we carry, from a modest desk piece to a large-format print for a bigger wall.