This cover painting depicts old Santa Fe, the railroad’s namesake city. While Santa Fe has done more than most cities to create a unified architectural style and atmosphere, street scenes today are dominated by cars and tourists, not horses and Indians.
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The artist, Leonard Howard Reedy, was born in Chicago in 1899 and, inspired by Frederick Remington’s paintings of the West, studied at the Chicago Art Institute. His travels around the West earned him the title, “Chicago’s cowboy painter,” but his horses don’t look very authentic.
This Fred Harvey menu was used on the Grand Canyon and thus doesn’t have the top-notch offerings that would be found on a Super Chief menu. Still, grilled salmon, roast duck, braised prime beef, and omelet with ham and minced jelly entrées seem pretty fine, though a salad with an otherwise complete meal was 25 cents extra. A charcoal broiled sirloin steak was on the a la carte side for $3.75 (around $30 today), more than the cost of any of the full dinners.
There’s no date on the menu other than a suspicious looking “6-1-3,” which I have previously inferred to mean 1963. But I could be wrong.