This brochure advertises trips to Yellowstone National Park under what today would be considered primitive conditions. Roads were dirt, vehicles were bumpy stagecoaches, and while the brochure says that the park’s four hotels “compare favorably with those of metropolitan cities,” in fact most were poorly built. An 1893 visitor wrote of the National Hotel in Mammoth that, although it was “said to be the best of the park, it was nevertheless lacking in all comforts and all the amenities for the travellers.” Fortunately, the scenery made up for the discomforts and the weather during the tourist season made up for shoddy hotels.

Click image to download a 9.3-MB PDF of this brochure.

The back of the brochure is a large map of the park dated 1882, but the hotels and roads shown on the map did not then exist. The cover shows a grand hotel with a tall spire; this was the National Hotel mentioned above. However, I can find no photographic evidence that the spire shown in the illustration was ever built; instead, as shown in the photo below, the tower was topped with a viewing deck surrounded by a low guardrail.

Click image to download a 3.3-MB Park Service report on the history of the Mammoth Hotel.

Although this hotel first opened in 1884, it was expanded and modified over the years and didn’t appear as shown on the brochure cover (minus the spire) until 1893. Therefore, I’m dating this booklet to 1893 under the assumption that there was a plan for a spire that never materialized. The brochure could be a year or two older, but is from no earlier than 1891, when the Fountain and Lake hotels, both mentioned in the brochure, first opened.

This booklet was collected by Lorenz Schrenk, who co-authored several books about the Northern Pacific Railway. He donated his collection to the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association and NPRHA board member Dean O’Neill scanned many of the items. The group has generously allowed me to post some of them here. I’ll post more over the next several weeks.