This travel guide is nearly a hundred years old, yet it is amazing how little has changed in the Southeast Alaska journey that the booklet describes. The populations of many of the communities, including Wrangell, Ketchikan, and Skagway, have doubled or tripled, while Juneau has grown to ten times its 1920 population. Yet they remain dwarfed by the gigantic landscapes that surround them, and many if not most of the buildings that existed in 1922 can still be found today.
Click image to download a 5.8-MB PDF of this 12-page booklet.
The biggest difference is that, in 1922, the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National each had one steamship a week capable of carrying 236 passengers from Vancouver to Skagway, while in the summer of 2019 anywhere from one to five cruise ships carrying 2,400 to 3,100 passengers each docked in Skagway every day. This has made the towns along the way even more tourist-oriented than they were in 1922, but if you can ignore the trinket shops the scenery is as awesome as ever.
It seems like this booklet should have a brightly covered cover, similar to many other CP and CN Alaska booklets. There’s no evidence that a cover was ever attached to this booklet, and I can’t find one like it in the Chung collection. A 1921 booklet doesn’t look anything like this one (and doesn’t have a color cover). The next one I can find is dated 1928, and while it has a colorful cover the interior doesn’t look like this one. It’s possible that 1922 is before the era of multi-colored covers.