The territories, drawn as maps
This is a companion site to the GWA Worldbook at gwawrestling.com. The Worldbook tells the story of the Great Western Wrestling Alliance in prose: its wrestlers, its championships, its four decades of storylines. This site tells the same story in one dimension the prose can't. Geography. Who ran which towns, in which year, and how the map changed under them.
Fiction on a real frame
The Great Western Wrestling Alliance never existed. Its territories, wrestlers, and title lineages are invented, and so is every boundary on the GWA map.
What is not invented is the system it sits inside. From 1948 the National Wrestling Alliance coordinated dozens of independent regional promoters who agreed to respect each other's boundaries: one promotion per region, exclusive rights to its talent and its buildings, and a single travelling world champion who moved between them. That system was real, it worked that way for roughly forty years, and national cable television collapsed it in the 1980s. The GWA is built to the rules of that world. It is a Western alliance that could have existed, and didn't.
Both maps are here so you can see the difference. The Territorial Era map is the documented history: real promotions, real turf, real years. The GWA map is the fiction, drawn to the same grammar.
The maps
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GWA Territories
1957–1993 · every year
The fictional map. Watch the alliance grow out of a single Cheyenne territory, reach fourteen at its peak, and consolidate in 1989. Press play or scrub year by year.
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Territorial Era Wrestling
1958, 1965, 1975, 1985
The real map. NWA members plus the AWA and the WWWF, at four snapshot years. Texas splits four ways, California north and south, and St. Louis is run by two promotions at once.
How to read them
Territories shared cities and fought over regions, so a single flat color per county would lie about how the business actually worked. The maps use three layers to show it. Counties are filled by the one promotion that held the turf that year. Towns are drawn as dots, and a town run by more than one promotion in the same year splits into wedges, one per owner. Regions that were genuinely co-promoted are hatched over the top.
Every map can be embedded in another site, framed on a specific year or a single territory. The instructions are on each map's page.
Under the hood these are all one renderer driven by data. Two development pages exercise it directly: a two-territory fixture covering all three overlap layers, and the unstyled county base.