Territory of Arizona in 1876 - Prescott, Tucson, Yuma, Phoenix

The U.S. General Land Office published this map of the Arizona Territory in 1876, compiled by principal draughtsman C. Roeser under Commissioner S. S. Burdett and printed by the New York lithographer Julius Bien for a national atlas tracking every state and territory under federal public land survey. Unlike the commercial state atlases of the period, this was an official government document, built to show land offices, township grids, land district boundaries, railroad limits, military reservations, and Indian reservations with bureaucratic precision. Arizona in 1876 remained thinly settled, thirty-six years before statehood, its economy still oriented around mining camps and military posts rather than agriculture. As an official federal survey rather than a commercial atlas, the map carries a bureaucratic precision in its legend and references that sets it apart from the more decorative state maps of its era.

Prescott, serving as territorial capital, sits in the central highlands near the mining districts that had drawn the territory's first Anglo-American settlers. Tucson, the territory's largest and oldest town, anchors the south near the Mexican border, while Yuma commands the vital Colorado River crossing linking Arizona to California. Phoenix, founded only a few years earlier in 1868, appears here still a modest settlement rather than the future capital it would become. Indian reservation boundaries, marked in green per the map's official legend, cover a substantial share of the territory's land.

This 1876 government survey offers a striking counterpoint to the 1893 Rand McNally map of Arizona also in this collection, which shows the same territory seventeen years later once railroads had multiplied and Phoenix had overtaken Prescott as the region's rising center; displayed together, the two sheets chart Arizona's rapid change in under two decades. This piece appeals to collectors of official government cartography and to anyone with roots in Arizona's earliest territorial towns. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.