The first two cards today are dated 1925. The first shows an illustration of Glacier Park Lodge on one side, with room for correspondence. The other side has an illustration of the train’s maid entertaining two little girls in the women’s lounge, plus several paragraphs of text written in the first person as if it is from one of the passengers and not the railroad’s advertising department.
Click image to download a 221-KB PDF of this postcard.
The text refers to “that old poem, the last verse of which ended, as I recall it, with the words, ‘Bless me this is pleasant riding on the rail.” The postcard doesn’t say so, but this poem was called Railroad Rhyme and was written by John Godfrey Saxe in the late 1840s.
Click image to download a 228-KB PDF of this postcard.
With a picture of Great Northern tracks along the Puget Sound in place of Glacier Park Lodge, the back of this card shows the interior of the Oriental Limited‘s lounge car at 4:00 o’clock tea time. Although the text is a little different, it too refers to the Railroad Rhyme.
Click image to download a 78-KB PDF of this postcard.
This card is undated but I found it in the same files as the above 1925 cards in the Minnesota History Center. The back is blank and the person illustrated on the front, as far as I can tell, was fictitious, or at least the name was. There is no mention of anyone named Spokane in the Blackfeet geneology records. Why would a Blackfeet Indian be named after another Indian tribe hundreds of miles away?