Yesterday’s booklet, Eastward Through the Storied Northwest, mentioned that Northern Pacific also had a folder describing the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915. This is that booklet, which is also from the Schrenk collection and made available to us courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association.
Click image to download a 14.3-MB PDF of this 32-page booklet.
As I’ve noted before, there were actually two expositions celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal, the Panama Pacific in San Francisco and the Panama California in San Diego. Both are featured on the above cover (which is actually the back cover). But, like yesterday’s booklet, this one seems to assume that its audience has already decided to attend one or both expos and is written to encourage people to visit other parts of the Pacific Coast, preferably ones served by Northern Pacific trains or Great Northern Pacific steamships. I’m not sure where GNP steamships docked in San Francisco, but it couldn’t have been far from the expo grounds.
As previously noted, the Union Pacific exhibit at the San Francisco fair included a life-size recreation of Old Faithful Inn, the interior of which was used as a dining hall for 2,000 people. The building required two million board feet of timber and cost half a million dollars.
This incredible exhibit isn’t mentioned at all or even shown on the maps in the Northern Pacific booklet. While it is possible that NP did not want to call attention to its rival, it is more likely that NP wasn’t aware of what that exhibit would look like when this booklet was prepared, as a map of the exposition on pages 5–6 is dated 1913.
Although the Union Pacific route to West Yellowstone offered the most direct access to Old Faithful, UP elected to have fairgoers enter its Old Faithful exhibit by walking over a re-creation of the Golden Gate, a precipitous road between Mammoth and the Old Faithful geyser basin, which is the route that would be taken by NP passengers to Gardiner.
Click image to download a 185-KB PDF of this postcard.
Northern Pacific didn’t have an exhibit at either expo, but Great Northern had one at the San Francisco fair. The front of the above postcard shows Blackfeet Indians greeting visitors while the back says that the exhibit building advertised Glacier Park as a tourist destination and the Northwest as a “zone of plenty.”