Rock Island began to publish its series of Turquoise sky booklets on Colorado at least as early as 1902 and continued at least through 1930. At 84 pages, this one from 1909 is one of the longest in the series; of the ones I’ve seen, only 1905-1909 are this long.

Click image to download a 43.2-MB PDF of this 84-page booklet.

This one is downloadable from archive.org, but their scans are dark and yellowed. I’ve lightened them up and tried to restore the colors to the way they would have appeared when new.

The front cover, shown above, and the back cover, showing a fly fisherman, are both signed “Harper.” There was a Chicago landscape artist in the early 1900s named William A. Harper, but I can’t find any evidence that he did any commercial illustration and the signatures don’t match. Frankly, I doubt that a fine arts painter would be eager to have their name associated with the cartoonish figures on these covers.

Inside, the booklet is illustrated with dozens of rather muddy black-and-white photos. The poor quality of these photos may be due to inept scanning by whoever made a copy of the Library of Congress’ edition of this booklet, but I suspect a large part of it can be blamed on the original printer.

While most Turquoise Sky booklets were issued solely by Rock Island, this one (along with the 1908 edition) is also credited to Frisco and Chicago & Eastern Illinois. Frisco may have been included because it had better connections to Memphis and the Deep South than Rock Island while C&EI was probably included solely because at the time it was financially controlled by the Frisco.