The National Rifle Association Pictorial Wildlife and Game Map of the United States.

This crowded, colorful pictorial map covers the continental United States with hundreds of animals. It combines a decorative wall map with a field guide for hunters and conservationists. The map was designed by Ira Moss and originally published in 1956, with the present map being a 1972 reissue for the National Rifle Association to mark the NRA’s 100th anniversary.

Big game dominates the landscape: elk, moose, mule deer, white-tailed deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, bison, and black and grizzly bears are drawn large and placed in their regions. They are surrounded by hundreds of smaller figures, including wild turkeys, pheasants, quail, and grouse, along with rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, foxes, wolves, bobcats, skunks, and cougars. Waterfowl line the coasts and the Great Lakes, and in the Southwest a jaguar and an ocelot crouch near the Mexican border. Green pine trees mark the national forests, which are keyed by number to a legend at lower left. Cities and state capitals are marked in red, and the major rivers and lakes are drawn in blue. Around the border, dozens of small vignettes show a species and a map of its range in the United States. The sheet is said to contain illustrations of 68 species of birds and 55 of mammals. A note at bottom center explains the shading, with light red tones marking wintering areas and deeper tones marking nesting areas, and a lettered and numbered grid around the border helps readers locate each key entry.

The NRA, founded in 1871, had long promoted hunting and wildlife conservation alongside marksmanship. The 1972 reissue came in the era of the early environmental movement and the Endangered Species Act’s predecessors, when hunters were increasingly framed as conservationists, which is probably why the NRA chose to revive it for its anniversary. This new spirit is not entirely reflected in the map’s content – Jaguars had been wiped out in the United States by hunting by the 1960s, and Arizona banned jaguar hunting in 1969, so the big cat that crouches in the Southwest here is a creature of the map’s 1956 origins.

This map was originally designed by Ira Moss, a New York painter and graphic designer. At least two different editions of the map with nearly identical content but different titles were issued in 1956: “Pictorial Wildlife and Game Map of the United States” and the “Sportsman’s Map of U.S. Wildlife.” Moss also designed a similar fisherman’s map of the U.S. that was published in 1957. The copyright for the present map was later acquired by Shorewood Reproductions, which published this version in 1972 for the NRA’s centennial.