The front of this brochure features eighteen photos of sights along the Great Northern from St. Paul to Seattle. Instead of a full-spread map, the map on the back covers only about a third of the page with the rest devoted to another eighteen photos.

Click image to download a 6.8-MB PDF of this brochure, which is from the David Rumsey Map Collection.

The brochure is undated and the Rumsey collection estimated it is from 1925. However, a photo on the map side shows one of the Great Northern Pacific steamships that operated between Astoria and San Francisco. Since these entered service in 1915 but were conscripted into military service in 1917, the brochure must be from that period. Pictures of the Columbia River Highway and Many Glacier Hotel, both of which opened in 1915, confirm these dates.

Another photo shows Hotel Field on Washington’s Lake Chelan. The hotel opened in 1892 and was operated by M.E. Field. In 1915, Field sold it to the Great Northern, which operated it until 1927, when Lake Chelan Dam raised the lake’s water level by 27 feet and flooded the site of the hotel. This doesn’t help to date the brochure but does provide some trivia about the railroad I didn’t know.