Utah Territory Map 1857 Territorial Print - Salt Lake City, Great Salt Lake, Ogden

Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston issued this Territory of Utah sheet in 1857, published in London by Edward Stanford and engraved by W. & A.K. Johnston of Edinburgh, part of their Atlas of the United States. This printing draws on notes from John C. Fremont's exploration reports, discussing the Great Basin's elevation and topography, with proposed Pacific Railway routes marked in purple. The sheet maps the Utah Territory as it stood in 1857, a vast expanse still shaped by its Mormon settlers' own recent arrival barely a decade earlier.

The Great Salt Lake anchors the territory's central geography, the landmark around which Utah's Mormon settlers had built their earliest towns beginning in 1847. Fremont's survey notes on the Great Basin's elevation and topography give the sheet an added layer of firsthand exploration detail unusual for a general atlas map. The proposed Pacific Railway routes marked in purple capture a transcontinental rail line that existed only on paper in 1857, more than a decade before the actual line would be completed nearby. Together the Great Salt Lake, Fremont's survey notes, and the proposed railway sketch a territory still in its first true decade of organized settlement.

For a Utah family with pioneer-era roots, or a collector drawn to this British-published perspective on the territorial frontier, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Utah combined with Nevada in Mitchell's later 1884 sheet elsewhere in this collection, and separately from Cram's 1893, 1883, and Asher & Adams' 1874 editions; this 1857 Rogers and Johnston sheet is the only one in the store to draw on Fremont's own exploration notes for the territory's geography. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.