Oregon and Washington in 1860 - Portland, Olympia, Walla Walla

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. of Philadelphia published this map of Oregon, Washington, and the surrounding Rocky Mountain frontier in 1860, the same year he took over his father's atlas business from DeSilver and relaunched it into a print house that remained active for more than two decades. The sheet appeared in Mitchell's New General Atlas, successor to an earlier Tanner-derived work the firm inherited, and its steel engraving carries the crisp, even hand coloring that became the Mitchell house's trademark across thousands of copies sold annually. The map captures a genuinely transitional territorial moment: Washington Territory still wraps entirely around the newly admitted State of Oregon, a configuration born the year before and one that would last barely two more years before further territorial splits reorganized the region.

Portland anchors the map as Oregon's principal river port on the Willamette, while Salem, seated as the young state's capital, sits further south along the same waterway. Olympia serves as Washington Territory's capital, a small but growing settlement on Puget Sound. The sheet notes only a handful of organized counties east of the Cascades, among them Walla Walla, which by 1860 had emerged as the territory's principal inland trading post for miners and wagon travelers heading toward the interior. Early wagon roads, forts, and mission stations trace the routes of exploration that opened this country, while dense hachuring marks the Cascade and Blue Mountain ranges separating the settled coastal valleys from the sparsely counted interior.

This map suits a family with roots in the Willamette Valley or Puget Sound, a Pacific Northwest transplant, or a collector tracing the short-lived territorial configurations of the pre-Civil War West. The store also carries Mitchell Jr.'s rarer 1863 variant of this same region, issued after Idaho Territory had been carved from the interior; that later sheet shows a very different eastern boundary, while this 1860 printing captures the fleeting arrangement that existed for barely two years. It is available unframed in a range of print sizes to suit any wall.