Here’s a lunch menu that was used on the 1923 Chairman’s Special Western Trip. This menu features a painting of wildflowers by Walter Loos. Another of his paintings was used on a 1924 menu previously featured here. A third Loos painting was used in the 1928 Call of the Mountains booklet.

Click image to download a 403-KB PDF of this menu from the Minnesota History Center.

Loos was born in Switzerland in 1887 and moved to Saskatchewan in 1907. His work as an artist led Great Northern to hire him to paint Glacier Park wildflowers in 1922. In 1924, he moved to California where he lived until 1966.

Whoever planned the menus for the chairman’s trips didn’t associate each cover with any particular meal. Menus from this 1923 trip in the Minnesota History Center include examples of two different menu covers for the same meal as well as two of the same menu covers for different meals.

Menu folders such as the one with Loos’ wildflowers on the cover often included a lengthly list of beverages, but there was no room for this on cards such as the ones used for the Chairman’s Special. Of course, prohibition was in effect in 1923, but I doubt that Louis Hill went without alcohol during his travels.

“Louis Hill wasn’t an alcoholic,” one of his biographers once told me, “but he did drink every day.” In 1923, he was probably already planning the Prince of Wales Hotel in Canada’s Waterton National Park where visitors to Glacier Park could legally imbibe in alcoholic beverages.