“The history of the Northern Pacific teems with romance, courage and industry,” claims this hand-typed brochure that, for some reason, NP chose to print on some rather ugly green paper. It might be a little reminiscent of the greens used in the Pine Tree of NP’s original streamlined North Coast Limited, except this was published in 1946, almost two years before that train made its inaugural run.

Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this brochure.

The history extends from 1864, when President Lincoln signed the bill offering the land grant for the railroad, to 1908, when half-subsidiary Spokane, Portland & Seattle completed a line that would carry NP trains from Pasco to Portland. In between it focuses on the dates that the railroad completed construction to various points.

The brochure claims that General Grant was one of he original incorporators of the railroad, something I’ve never heard elsewhere. It seems like he was a little too busy on other projects in 1864 to engage in railroad incorporation. At the railroad’s invitation, he did go to the railroad’s last spike ceremony in 1883.

Another incorporator, the history notes, was Jay Cooke, “one of the financial geniuses in raising huge funds for the Civil War.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t enough of a genius to save the Northern Pacific from the panic of 1873, as his heavy investments in the railroad forced both Cooke and his bank into bankruptcy. The history briefly alludes to this but otherwise says nothing about the titanic financial struggles the railroad went through over the next 30 years.