Passengers on Great Northern trains were allowed to stopover at Glacier National Park at no extra rail fare, at least when this booklet was issued. The booklet briefly describes one- to seven-day tours people could take in the park, but unfortunately does not list the prices of each tour.

Click image to download a 2.0-MB PDF of this 8-page booklet.

The booklet doesn’t have a date but offers a few clues about when it was issued. First, it lists GN agents including A.J. Dickerson as passenger traffic manager and E.H. Wilde as general passenger agent. These two held those positions from about 1928 to 1937, after which Wilde was replaced by someone else. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough GN timetables from the 1930s to compare the other agents’ names.

Another clue is a statement that “There are 19 National Parks located within the confines of the United States.” The nation’s 19th national park, Carlsbad, was created in 1930 and the 20th, Everglades, was created in 1934. That would narrow the date down to 1930 to 1933.

However, two national parks, Hawaii Volcanoes and Mt. McKinley, were not strictly within the confines of the United States in the 1930s. If these are excluded, then the 19th national park was Shenandoah, created in December 1935, while the 20th, Olympic, was created in 1938. That would narrow the date down to 1936 or 1937.

Finally, the picture of the pre-red jammer tour bus on the cover suggests an earlier, rather than later, date. The red jammers were introduced in 1936, and I doubt GN would have pictured an obsolete vehicle in its advertising after that. I’ll have to find some more GN timetables to pin the date down further, but in the meantime I’m tentatively dating this to 1935 plus-or-minus a few years.

I found this booklet at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. The center does not allow the use of scanners so I photographed the pages. Some of the pages did not lie flat so the booklet isn’t as good a representation of the original as I would like, but it is still readable.