We’ve already seen one Alaska-service menu with a colorful cover like this one. Starting today, I’ll present four more. That previous menu showed St. Andrews Church, built on the shores of Lake Bennett, British Columbia in about 1899. Today’s and the other three I’ll present are all somewhere in the Inside Passage between Vancouver and Skagway and all show the steamship Prince George, the newest and largest ship in Canadian National’s Alaska service.
Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.
This particular menu shows Prince George moored in Skagway, the northern-most point of call in the Inside Passage. Also visible is a White Pass & Yukon steam train ready to take ship passengers on to White Horse, Yukon. The White Pass Route still runs steam (but mostly Diesel) trains today, but the rest of Skagway’s landscape has completely changed.
The foreground along the river is now an airstrip. Two new terminals for giant cruise ships have been added to the waterfront. Although winters can be horrendous, summer tourist traffic has led the locals to build homes and businesses on almost all of the non-airport flatland in the area.
While that makes the town sound unappealing compared with the bucolic scene on the menu cover, you can still see salmon spawning in Dewey Creek and near-wilderness conditions can be found in just a short walk (or better yet, a train ride) out of town.
Inside, the menu is dated July 28, 1952, and includes a “programme of music” that listed recordings from the Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Pops Orchestra, and London Philharmonic, among others. The unpriced dinner menu offers Ketchikan salmon, haddock, calf’s sweetbreads, sirloin steak, leg of lamb, or omelette Mexicaine with all the usual accompaniments.