The cover of this four-page brochure features a painting by Sydney Laurence (1865-1940), whose art Northern Pacific also used on posters. This painting of a place called Castle Cape is colored quite a bit differently from an image shown on Flickr, yet they are otherwise nearly identical. It seems likely that these are two different paintings that Laurence made of the same subject but with different coloring.
Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of this brochure.
According to Wikipedia, Laurence “more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as “The Last Frontier.” Born in Brooklyn, Laurence studied at the Art Students League of New York and married another artist, Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre, in 1889. Unable to make a name for himself as an artist, he left his wife and two sons in 1904 to search for gold in Alaska. No one is sure whether he intended to return or just abandoned his family, but they never saw him again.
He never found gold but did take up painting again and is considered the first professional painter to settle in Alaska. His paintings of Mt. McKinley, totem poles, sailing ships, and steamships in Southeast Alaska are considered definitive. Northern Pacific used a portion of another painting of his, “Off to the Potlatch,” on a poster. He actually did several “Off to the Potlatch” paintings as well as several not-quite identical Mount McKinley paintings, so it is possible he did more than one Castle Cape painting as well.
Click image for a larger view. Image is from the Library of Congress.
Rising 1,200 feet above the ocean, Castle Cape is an impressive sight. Due to its location in the Aleutian Islands, however, it would be seen by few tourists going to Alaska. While a steamship went through that area when this brochure was issued, none of the tours described in the brochure went this far southwest of Anchorage. Today, a ferry goes by there twice a month in each direction during the summer months only.
This brochure refers to a booklet about Alaska that was also published by Northern Pacific. My edition of the booklet is dated 1938, but other editions appeared as early as 1935. Because the tour prices in the brochure are slightly different from those in my booklet, I assume the brochure came out in a different year. I have tentatively dated the brochure to 1935 but it could be 1936 or 1937.
The last page of this brochure has a painting of the North Coast Limited with Mount Rainier in the background. The painting is unsigned but is a slightly simplified version of a painting on a poster we’ve seen before signed Gustav Krollman. An even more simplified version of the same painting is on a postcard in the Boston Public Library collection.
The locomotive in the painting is numbered 2507, which was in the first series of Northern Pacific 4-8-4s. The back page also describes the North Coast Limited as “air conditioned, roller-bearing,” which NP wouldn’t have been able to say before 1935 when the train was first completely air conditioned.
Finally, on the top of page 4, a caption to a photo of steamship passengers in Alaska’s inside passage has been glued onto the brochure. Apparently, whoever designed the brochure forgot to include that particular caption and so they added it after printing.