Chief George Kian (sometimes spelled Kyan) was born in the 1880s and died in 1955. At some point, he commissioned this pole which consists of a crane on top, a thunderbird in the middle, and a brown bear — his personal crest — on the bottom. The pole is mentioned in a 1915 book on totem lore and still stood in Ketchikan in 1936 when an artist drew the picture on this menu cover. The aging pole was replaced with a replica in 1964 and again in 1992, so its third incarnation can still be seen in Ketchikan.
Click image to download a 2.2-MB PDF of this menu.
The signature on the cover picture is M.S. Osborne, who also drew the totem pole portrayed on the lunch or tiffin menus used aboard Canadian Pacific steamships. After some searching, I’ve determined that M.S. is Milton S. Osborne, an American architect.
That may seem improbable, but my first clue was a web site that listed M.S. Osborne as a Canadian artist with a reference to the Dictionary of Canadian Artists. I found that book on line at archive.org, but the book only says that Osborne was a “University of Toronto professor who sketched architectural drawings of buildings in the Greater Toronto area which were published” in an unnamed 1958 magazine. A web page about the history of the University of Toronto architecture school reveals that “Milton Osborne of Pennsylvania State University was appointed Acting Director [of the architecture school] for one year in 1957-58.”
From Pennsylvania State University I learned that Osborne was born in Ohio in 1897 and, after getting a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia in 1928, became an associate professor of architecture at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, which is now known as Auburn University. Then in 1929 he became the director of the University of Manitoba’s school of architecture, where he remained until 1946. While there, he was instrumental in introducing the principles of Bauhaus architecture to North Americans. He joined the faculty at Penn State in 1946, retired in 1962, and died in 1972.
Apparently, wherever he went he made drawings of interesting buildings and other structures, which is why he was listed in the Dictionary of Canadian Artists. Many of his drawings are in the Library of Congress while others are at the Pennsylvania State University library. I haven’t confirmed that he was in Ketchikan in 1936, but he could have made the trip during his University of Manitoba tenure, and his totem pole drawings are stylistically similar to his other architectural drawings.
The inside front cover of this menu shows and briefly describes seven different princess ships while the menu itself is on the opposite page. It seems to be a six-course dinner designed to keep passengers entertained on the long steamship journey up the Inside Passage, which is mapped on the back cover.
The menu is undated, but is obviously after 1936. We’ve seen other menus in this style, on one of which someone wrote “Aug 13-52.” The menus seem older than that and that’s not necessarily an accurate date. But if it is, then this one was probably used in the early 1950s as well.