The cover of this booklet seems designed to attract people interested in Canadian history. Two of the six figures at the top are recognizable as Alexander Mackenzie (third from the left) and David Thompson (fourth from the left), both early explorers. The others look fairly generic; I don’t even think that Native Americans who inhabited the Athabaska region dressed like the ones on the cover.

Click image to download a 15.9-MB PDF of this 36-page (plus map) booklet.

The emphasis on history seems misplaced when advertising the scenic wonders of western Canada. The rest of the booklet is filled with 28 black-and-white photographs and five color paintings illustrating those scenic wonders. Four of the paintings — the Athabaska Valley, Mount Edith Cavell, the Skeena River, and the Inside Passage — are unsigned. The fifth, providing an aerial view of Jasper National Park, is signed Richard Rummell.

Rummell was born in Canada in 1848, but his family moved to Buffalo when he was a boy. When he was about 30, he moved to Brooklyn (which was still a separate city) and opened an art studio in Manhattan (New York City). He soon developed a name for himself doing bird’s-eye views of cities, towns, and college campuses, as well as visions of what he thought cities would look like in the future. He was wrong about the future, but his aerial drawings were so accurate that some people believed he must have used a hot-air balloon to see the view. In fact he just carefully drew each building and feature as it would appear from an oblique aerial view.

Rummell died in 1924, so this painting was done a few years before this booklet was issued. In fact, it is also found in this 1924 booklet about Jasper National Park.

This booklet isn’t dated, but it lists A.T. Weldon as traffic manager. Weldon has the same title in the 1924 Jasper booklet, but by the time a 1926 Triangle Tour booklet was issued, he was promoted to vice-president. Based on this, I date this booklet to 1925.