We’ve previously seen several booklets about The Storied Northwest from 1922, 1923, 1927, and 1929. No doubt there were ones from the intervening years as well, but this one — based on the list of Northern Pacific agents in the back — is from 1921.

Click image to download an 5.8-MB PDF of this 28-page booklet.

It isn’t really clear what these booklets were for. Not really advertisements, they seem more oriented toward informing people who are already aboard Northern Pacific trains. Although the subtitle of this one is “along the Northern Pacific Railway,” they weren’t really along-the-way booklets either, as they focus on only a few major sights along the way.

True to the name, the 1927 and 1929 booklets tell the stories of Lewis & Clark and other early explorers and pioneers. But this booklet and the ones from 1922 (whose text is nearly identical to this one) and 1923 (with slightly different text) don’t even have that as a focus and instead just describe 10 regions: the lakes of Minnesota, North Dakota badlands, Yellowstone River, Yellowstone Park, Three Forks, Flathead Lake, Lake Pend Oreille, the Columbia River, Cascade Mountains, and Puget Sound. My guess is that the publicity generated by Great Northern’s historical expeditions of 1925 and 1926 persuaded Northern Pacific to revise this series of booklets to focus more on history than on present-day landscapes.

Northern Pacific also had an earlier series of booklets titled Eastward Through the Storied Northwest, including the 1906 edition shown here a few days ago plus editions from 1909, 1913, 1915, and 1929. These were clearly advertisements focused on encouraging Californians to make trips to the east over the “Shasta-Northern Pacific route,” meaning Southern Pacific to Portland and NP to the Twin Cities and Chicago.