In 1900, James J. Hill negotiated the purchase of nearly all of the stock of the Burlington Route, half of which was held by the Great Northern and half by the Northern Pacific. This created the co-marketing opportunities for the Burlington, as exemplified by this brochure, which looks similar in many ways to Northern Pacific brochures about Yellowstone.

Click image to download an 12.3-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

For people living in or east of Chicago or St. Louis, noted the brochure, the best ways to get to Yellowstone were over Burlington lines to Minneapolis or Billings, connecting at those cities with Northern Pacific trains. The Billings route was made possible by the completion of a Burlington line to Billings in 1894. A small Burlington system map in this brochure also shows a planned line to Cody, which was completed at the end of 1901, a few months after this brochure was published.

Naturally, the back of the brochure is a large map of Yellowstone marked “Burlington Route — Northern Pacific Railway.” The map is dated 1898, but since (as the brochure notes) the park was expanding its road system, it had probably been updated since then.

The front has information on tours, fishing, hotels, and statements by Rudyard Kipling and Frederick Remington. As a cyclist, I was intrigued to read the “suggestions” from someone who “has made the trip a wheel.” The main suggestion is to use an ordinary bicycle (which was another term for a pennyfarthing, a bike with a huge front wheel and small rear wheel) because it didn’t require a chain, which was likely to get dusty during the ride. The brochure also noted that “a brake is almost a necessity.”

Almost! Riding some of the mountain roads in Yellowstone without a brake would be extremely dangerous. For that matter, bike manufacturers had stopped making ordinaries in 1892 because they were both more difficult and more dangerous to ride than the “safety bike” with equal sized wheels and a chain connecting pedals to the rear wheel. I hope no one took the advice of this brochure to ride an ordinary from, say, Mammoth to Old Faithful.