During much of the 1800s, artists created fashionable bird’s-eye-view maps depicting towns throughout the country. With the use of lithography, these images could be mass-produced and circulated as needed. Although artists and lithographers used almost anything as subject matter, the settlement of the American

West and inevitable founding of new towns created several new subjects for artists to draw. City boosters often commissioned artists to render flattering depictions of a given

Boise artist Ward Hooper recalled the turn-of-the-century vision of Boise as an urban oasis, from the Ninth Annual Flower and Garden Show promotional postcard.

city, which a lithographer transformed into a lithograph. Boosters then used the lithographs to promote their cities in order to attract settlers, investors, and businesspersons. City lithographs hit their peak popularity between the 1880s and 1920s. It is not surprising that bird’s-eye-view maps of Boise exist as artists created thousands, utilizing towns of all sizes, during the nineteenth century. While few lithographers actually saw their subject in person, the illustrations of Boise are remarkably detailed and accurate thanks in part to the work of talented artists. Only in one case did a lithographer make a blatant change to an image of Boise. Generally, modifications by lithographers were rare and most consider the representations they created to be reliable.