North Dakota and South Dakota in 1883 - Bismarck, Pierre, Fargo

This map came from George Franklin Cram's 1883 Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, published in Chicago by A.C. Shewey & Co., part of the first mass-produced world atlas Cram ever issued. It maps the Dakota Territory six years before that territory split into the states of North Dakota and South Dakota in 1889.

Spanning two pages at a scale of roughly 1:2,300,000, the map shows the Dakota Territory's counties in outline color, with relief indicated through hachures. Rivers, lakes, and towns are marked throughout, along with the territory's boundary with Nebraska to the south. By 1883 the territory was in the middle of the Great Dakota Boom, a wave of homesteading so fast that the eastern counties shown here were filling in almost as quickly as the map's engravers could keep up, while the Black Hills in the west, opened to prospectors after gold was found there in 1874, had already drawn thousands of miners to boomtowns like Deadwood. Greenwich and Washington are both given as prime meridians.

A print like this suits anyone with roots in either Dakota, a transplant who wants a piece of the northern plains on the wall, or a collector chasing Cram's earliest atlas maps. It arrives unframed and comes in multiple print sizes, a fitting housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift.