In 1909, Seattle — eager to respond to Portland’s Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905, held a world’s fair to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the discovery of gold in the Yukon. That’s something like a fraternity having a party because the day of the week ended in a Y, but the Emerald City needed an excuse to outshine its older but slower growing neighbor to the south.
Click image to download a 14.1-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.
Excitement about the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition forced Rock Island to modify its usual pitch of “vacation in Colorado this summer.” Instead, the booklet admits, there were “unusual outing opportunities presented by the wonderful West this season.” Rock Island rails didn’t come any closer to Seattle than Denver, but that didn’t stop the company from showing tracks of the “Rock Island System” leading to union depot on a map of Seattle.
The pitch was that people should take Rock Island from Chicago to Denver or Colorado Springs, the Rio Grande to Ogden, and Union Pacific from there (with a possible side trip to Yellowstone) rather than the more direct Northern Pacific or Great Northern or even just Union Pacific from Omaha. Either the NP or UP routes would also allow a side trip to Yellowstone, but people following Rock Island’s suggestion could stay over in Denver or Colorado Springs plus see the Royal Gorge-Glenwood Canyon route through Colorado rather than the much more boring Union Pacific route across Wyoming or the NP route which was less boring than the UP line but still not comparable to the Rio Grande route.
On the other hand, Rock Island’s suggested route probably added at least a day to the journey. This didn’t trouble Rock Island, which urged people consider returning from Seattle via the Golden State route, which would prabably add at least two days to their journey.
This booklet was scanned from an original in the Brigham Young University Library that is posted on archive.org. Whoever scanned it did separate scans of the right and left side of the cover shown above (which is the back cover). For my PDF, I merged them back together and lightened and de-yellowed every page in the booklet.