The 1907 edition of Under the Turquoise Sky has a much nicer cover than the 1905 version. This image probably represents a scene in what would become Rocky Mountain National Park, where the Trail Ridge Road reaches dizzying heights. While that road wasn’t opened to automobiles until the 1930s, it followed trails that were previously used by horseback riders as shown on the cover.
Click image to download a 19.6-MB PDF of this 84-page booklet.
Inside, except for some introductory paragraphs, much of the text and many of the photos are the same. One notable difference is that this booklet is attributed to both the Rock Island and Frisco Lines. Booklets on archive.org dated 1908 and 1909 are attributed to Rock Island, Frisco, and Chicago & Eastern Illinois. Rock Island probably put other railroad names on the booklets to encourage agents with those railroads to route their western passengers over the Rock Island.
The artwork is signed “FTB,” which isn’t much to go on. If anyone knows who the artist is or of other art with a similar signature, please let me know.
The multiple-railroad branding was actually due to the fact that for a time, the Rock Island, Frisco, and C&EI were under common control. This was the effort of an early twentieth-century tycoon named Benjamin Franklin Yoakum, who had dreams of becoming the “empire builder” of the Southwest. He obviously didn’t have the financial strength to see this through.