Most booklets from western railroads are aimed at easterners touring the West. A few are aimed at westerners touring the East. This one is aimed at enticing easterners who have found themselves in California, perhaps for one of the 1915 Panama expositions, to take their return trip via the “Storied Northwest.” The booklet mentions that “Our Panama-Pacific Exposition folder deals at length with this World’s Exposition and will be sent free upon request by writing to the nearest Northern Pacific representative.”
Click image to download a 17.0-MB PDF of this 40-page booklet.
Pages 2 through 13 of the booklet are all about getting from California to the Northwest, either via the Southern Pacific’s Shasta Route or then-new “Palaces of the Pacific” of the Great Northern Pacific Steamship Company (which was technically a subsidiary of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway). Those 524-feet-long ships, named Great Northern and Northern Pacific, were, the booklet assured readers, “the most magnificent and luxuriously furnished of any steamship ever built in an American shipyard.”
The ships had a short career operating between San Francisco and Astoria before being impressed into government service in World War I. Known for being fast but expensive to operate, the railroads decided not to replace the steamships after World War I. Instead, they were sold to the Pacific Steamship Company. Before being reconditioned for private service, the Northern Pacific was accidentally destroyed by fire in 1922. The Great Northern was renamed H.F. Alexander and became the flagship of Pacific’s fleet until 1942, when it was again impressed into service as an army transport. It was scrapped in 1948.
The steamship Northern Pacific shortly after being launched in 1914.
Pages 14, 15, and most of 16 describe Spokane, Portland & Seattle routes up and down the Columbia River. The booklet doesn’t actually describe any Northern Pacific lines until the end of page 16, when it mentions the route from Portland to Seattle, mainly as an introduction to Rainier National Park. The next several pages describe the Puget Sound region, and it is only on page 22 that the journey eastward begins. The trip east ends in Duluth on page 31, while pages 32 through 35 focus on Yellowstone.
After two pages describing Northern Pacific train services, page 38 has a list of publications whose costs ranged from free to 25 cents. The Land of Geysers, a 52-page book which we’ve seen here before in a 1916 edition, was 2 cents, while a set of 12 postcards was 25 cents. Page 38 also has a photo of the steamship Northern Pacific. This booklet is courtesy of NPRHA — Lorenz Schrenk collection.