Utah in 1886 - Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo

O. W. Gray of Philadelphia issued this map of Utah Territory in 1886 for Gray's National Atlas, one of the most commercially successful American atlases of the 1870s and 1880s and among the last major atlas series to rely on hand coloring rather than chromolithography. This sheet holds real cartographic significance: it is the first commercial atlas map to depict Utah Territory in the modern configuration it would carry when statehood finally arrived a decade later in 1896, preceded only by an 1857 Rogers and Johnson territorial map that had still shown Utah stretching to include the whole of Nevada. By 1886 the territory's Mormon-majority population had spent decades petitioning unsuccessfully for statehood, repeatedly denied by Congress over the polygamy controversy that would not be resolved until the Church officially renounced the practice in 1890.

Salt Lake City, founded by Mormon settlers in 1847 and territorial capital since Utah's organization in 1850, anchors the map at the base of the Wasatch Range. Ogden, sited at the junction of the Weber and Ogden Rivers, had grown into the territory's principal rail hub after the transcontinental line's completion at nearby Promontory Summit in 1869. Provo, further south along the shore of Utah Lake, appears as the seat of Utah County and home to the territory's Mormon academy. Early railroads, mining districts, and Indian reservations crisscross the map's mountainous interior, while county lines drawn in their final pre-statehood configuration divide the territory much as they would remain after 1896.

This map suits a Utah family, a Salt Lake City or Ogden transplant, or a collector interested in the territory's final pre-statehood configuration. It stands apart from the rare 1857 Rogers and Johnson Utah Territory map, which still showed the territory swallowing the whole of Nevada; this later Gray edition instead captures the compact, modern Utah boundary that would carry the territory into statehood a decade on. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.