QIZ :
This is a General Land Office wall map, “Map of the United States and Territories, with Adjacent Parts of Canada and Mexico, also Part of the West India Islands” — dated 1885 right there in the cartouche. It was issued under Commissioner William A.J. Sparks, who ran the GLO under President Cleveland starting in 1885, so that pins it precisely — this isn’t a generic “old map,” it’s from Sparks’ specific one-year tenure before he was replaced in 1887.
Drafted by Charles Roeser, the GLO’s chief draughtsman, who worked on this same map series for over a decade (versions of it exist under multiple commissioners going back to the 1870s — Drummond, Burdett, Williamson, Stockslager, Groff — each just swapping the commissioner’s name and updating the survey data). The GLO put these maps out to track the extent of federal public land surveys, Indian and military reservations, railroads, canals, and land grants as the country expanded westward. It’s literally a government infrastructure/land-management document, not a decorative atlas piece.
To the “Canada” question — the title itself says “Canada,” so by 1885 that’s standard. Canada became a unified confederated Dominion in 1867, so any US-published map after that point calling it “British Possessions” or “British North America” would actually be the outdated/incorrect version. If someone dates a map by that label, pre-1867 is the tell, not post-1867.
Scale is 1:2,550,000-ish range for this GLO series, originally issued as a multi-sheet wall map meant to be joined into one massive reference map spanning the whole continental US. Surviving originals are rare — most listed by dealers today (Rumsey, Geographicus, Raremaps) have only a handful of institutional holdings (Yale, Princeton, Cornell, etc.), so if that’s an original in your hands and not a reproduction, it’s a genuinely uncommon piece.
2026-07-09 15:23:01