The year 1927 was the 60th anniversary of Canadian confederation, and Canadian Pacific celebrated with a series of more than a dozen menus featuring some point in Canadian history — often having to do with the railroad or the more primitive forms of transportation it replaced. The artwork on many of these menus from the Chung Collection is signed “GFG,” which, as previously noted, refers to Gordon Fraser Gillespie, one of the few full-time artists on CP’s payroll.
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The cover illustration on today’s first menu is based on an 1884 painting of most of the representatives of various British colonies who met in Charlottetown, PEI, to discuss the creation of a Canadian government. Canadian Pacific uses the back cover of the menu to emphasize that many of the leaders believed construction of a sea-to-sea railway was a vital part of confederation.
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This menu shows a map of early forts and trading posts intended to represent the explorers and fur trappers who were the first white people to visit much of western Canada. Of course, the back cover points out, “the wilderness vanished before the advancing rails of the Canadian Pacific in the early eighties.”
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This menu is meant to show that travel in western Canada was once very primitive. “Traveling in style” meant wearing fancy clothes (as, apparently, Hudson’s Bay Company governor George Simpson did on a tour of the west in 1828), but enduring many discomforts. Note that menus in this series were both in portrait and landscape formats, the main other difference being that the landscape menus just had one illustration while the portrait menus generally had two or three.
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Continuing with the theme of primitive transport before the coming of the railroad, this menu celebrates the Cariboo Road, a wagon road built to access gold fields in British Columbia’s interior. To make sure the message gets across, the picture of the stagecoach is accompanied by a then-modern picture of the Trans-Canada Limited.
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Just in case the message of the previous couple of menus wasn’t clear, this one focuses on “the perils of the stagecoach.” Yet the text on the back admits that Indian attacks or robberies of stagecoaches were “far more common south of the international border” than they were in Canada thanks to the intrepid mounties. Still, the smaller front cover illustration makes explicit the claim that rail travel was far safer than stagecoach travel.