1902 Cram Railroad and Shipping Guide Map of Idaho

This is rare first edition of George Cram's separate-issue 1902 pocket map of Idaho, that appeared in that year's Indexed Township County Map and Shipper's Guide for the state.

A Closer Look

Covering the state of Idaho with portions of neighboring states, especially Montana, the map provides information on settlements, railroads, mines, and topographic features. The map is overprinted in red and updated in manuscript to indicate railway lines, including electric lines. 'Banking towns' are also indicated with red overprint. Similarly, mining districts are indicated with yellow overprint, as are wagon roads (although Idaho's gold rush had subsided by this point, new mines extracting silver, zinc, lead, and other minerals were still being established). Survey lines overlie the terrain, particularly in more heavily populated parts of the state. Indian Reservations are noted, while other placenames (Blackfoot, Nez Perces, Custer County) harken to the recent frontier history.

Interestingly, the map includes degrees of longitude from both Greenwich and Washington, D.C., when most American maps had adopted Greenwich as the sole Prime Meridian by this point (the determination of Greenwich as the international standard prime meridian was determined at an 1884 conference which, ironically, took place in Washington, D.C.). This inclusion is likely due to the fact that the Washington Meridian was crucial to the demarcation of territory/state borders and surveying throughout the American West in the 19th century.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by George Cram for the 1902 edition of his Indexed Township County Map and Shipper's Guide of Idaho. Cram published several atlases per year around this time aimed at different audiences, and the present map visually resembles that in his Cram's Standard American Railway System Atlas of the World, though it remains noticeably different. While maps from the Indexed Township County Map and Shipper's Guide series do come to market from time to time, the present map of Idaho is extremely rare. We only note a single example of this edition of the map in the OCLC, held by Boise State University.