Washington in 1878 - Puget Sound, Mount Rainier, Columbia River

This pocket map of Washington Territory was issued in 1878 by Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago, likely the firm's first year producing a folding pocket map of the territory, a format built for travelers, land agents, and railroad clerks rather than atlas shelves. It was printed in outline color by county and folded into a light blue cardboard cover stamped with the firm's name, relief across the territory rendered in fine hachure work rather than the flat tinting common on larger atlas sheets. The map records the railroads and express companies then operating across Washington Territory, each route and carrier noted individually, at a moment when the territory's rail network was still being pieced together well in advance of the statehood that would not arrive for another eleven years.

Mount Rainier appears on the sheet under its older name, Mt. Tacoma, the territory's great volcanic peak and a landmark used by surveyors and travelers alike to orient themselves across the western lowlands. The Columbia River is traced through the territory's southern and central reaches, the waterway that had carried fur traders and early settlers into the interior long before the railroads arrived. Puget Sound anchors the western portion of the map, its many inlets and harbors already the commercial heart of the territory's shipping trade. Both prime meridians, Greenwich and Washington, are marked on the sheet, a small but telling detail of a cartographic period still transitioning toward a single international standard.

This map makes an appealing gift for anyone drawn to Mount Rainier country or the Puget Sound shoreline, or for a collector who favors the compact, practical pocket maps produced for 19th-century travelers over showier atlas sheets. Washington buyers should note we also carry the territory as mapped in the same firm's 1879 Business Atlas and in George F. Cram's 1875 railroad atlas: this 1878 pocket edition is distinguished by its portable folding format and its early use of the Mt. Tacoma place name. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.