The intrepid-looking fellow standing on the cover of Northern Pacific’s 1886 Wonderland booklet is supposed to be Frederick Schwatka, who is credited with writing more than half the booklet. As a U.S. Army lieutenant, Schwatka achieved fame for leading the … Continue reading
Category Archives: Northern Pacific
“This is a world of wonders!” opens this 1885 booklet. “Beyond the Great Lakes,” it continues, “lies a region which may justly be designated the Wonderland of the World.” In saying so, this booklet is referring not to Yellowstone but … Continue reading
Northern Pacific began serving Yellowstone in 1883 and this quirky brochure was one of its first advertisements for that service. This particular brochure was published in 1885, but an earlier edition came out in 1883. Click image to download a … Continue reading
Issued 18 years after yesterday’s brochure, this one covers the same ground but does so in a much more visual fashion. We’ve seen the front cover before on a 1963 menu commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Northern Pacific’s last … Continue reading
“The history of the Northern Pacific teems with romance, courage and industry,” claims this hand-typed brochure that, for some reason, NP chose to print on some rather ugly green paper. It might be a little reminiscent of the greens used … Continue reading
The cover of this four-page brochure features a painting by Sydney Laurence (1865-1940), whose art Northern Pacific also used on posters. This painting of a place called Castle Cape is colored quite a bit differently from an image shown on … Continue reading
To promote construction of a northern railway, Congress in 1864 offered the most generous land grant in U.S. history: roughly 44 million acres consisting of every other square mile of land within 20 miles on either side of the rail … Continue reading
Northern Pacific’s land grant called for it to build from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. However, it was nearly financially exhausted when it reached Washington territory in 1883. There, it met with the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, which went … Continue reading
In 1871, Kentucky Congressman J. Proctor Knott gave a humorous speech on the floor of the House of Representatives ridiculing the idea of giving land grants to western railroads. He focused on Duluth, which at the time had about 3,000 … Continue reading
Congress gave Union Pacific and Central Pacific loans and land grants to build the first transcontinental railroad. In contrast, Northern Pacific received a much larger land grant but no cash grants or loans. This made construction more difficult, especially since … Continue reading