Issued 18 years after yesterday’s brochure, this one covers the same ground but does so in a much more visual fashion. We’ve seen the front cover before on a 1963 menu commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Northern Pacific’s last spike ceremony (with ex-President Grant holding the hammer in the painting).

Click image to download a 2.4-MB PDF of this brochure.

The cover illustration is based on a painting by Amédée Joullin (1862-1917) that hangs in the Montana state capitol combined with a photograph of the celebratory train that was taken in St. Paul just before it left for Montana, where the last rails would be laid. Joullin was a French artist who spent many years in the United States painting native Americans and western landscapes. Joullin wasn’t at the last spike ceremony; instead, the 1903 painting was commissioned by NP as a donation to the state of Montana. To place the locomotive in the cover picture, the illustrator reoriented the tracks from Joullin’s straight-on view to a three-quarter view.

Inside the 80th anniversary folder (but not bound into it) is an 1964 folder commemorating the 100th anniversary of the legislation creating the Northern Pacific. “The untold hardships involved in building the first northern transcontinental line can best be told, perhaps, in the accompanying series of Northern Pacific pictures, taken during the Railroad’s construction era of 1870-83,” says the folder, which has 14 black-and-white photographs and a rather crude drawing of President Lincoln.