1932 Pictorial map of Montana and Idaho
DESCRIPTION
Montana and Idaho are depicted together in this excerpted pictorial map from Berta and Elmer Hader's 1932 Picture Book of the States, defining the northern Rocky Mountain interior.
The sheet runs from Montana's Helena and Butte copper country east to the plains cattle range, and across Idaho's Snake River plain from the Canadian border south to Boise. Vignettes anchor each state's economic identity, among them Butte's copper mines feeding the smelter stacks at Anaconda and a prominent 'Mountain Grown Potato' label marking Idaho's defining crop, with racial caricatures of Indigenous peoples appearing throughout Montana's reservation-marked interior. The reverse carries a corresponding fact sheet for the book's Colorado and Wyoming entry, a consequence of the book's binding structure, in which each state's descriptive text appears on the verso of the preceding map leaf.
Berta Hoerner Hader (1890–1976) and Elmer Stanley Hader (1889–1973) were a husband-and-wife illustration team among the most celebrated collaborators in American children's publishing, having won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor in American children's book illustration, along with two additional Caldecott Honors. Picture Book of the States, their 1932 collaboration with Harper & Brothers, covers forty-eight states and the District of Columbia across twenty-eight illustrated leaves, each paired on its facing page with keyed descriptive text so that map and text could be cross-referenced at a glance. The result renders the American landscape, its industries, natural resources, and notable personalities, in the Haders' characteristic whimsical style, informative and warm at once.
CONDITION
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