Northern Pacific began serving Yellowstone in 1883 and this quirky brochure was one of its first advertisements for that service. This particular brochure was published in 1885, but an earlier edition came out in 1883.

Click image to download a 7.1-MB PDF of this brochure.

The brochure imagines that an adult Alice of Lewis Carroll fame crossed the Atlantic to visit Yellowstone and somehow managed to write a letter of well over 5,000 words to her cousin Edith. Alice Liddell, the namesake of the 1865 Alice in Wonderland book, had a sister named Edith; I’m not sure if she also had a cousin by that name, but it doesn’t matter because it isn’t canon anyway.

This brochure can be found at archive.org, which scanned and posted each panel separately. Fortunately, the National Park Service has a short article about the brochure that has a tiny picture of all of the panels assembled together. I brightened the archive.org images, removed library marks, and reassembled them following this picture with a map of Yellowstone on the back.

This is Northern Pacific’s first entry into its Wonderland series of books and brochures, which it would continue to publish through at least 1906, with a reprise in 1910. According to the Park Service, the term “wonderland” was first applied to Yellowstone by journalist Calvin C. Clawson in 1871. However, his writings were not widely distributed at the time, so NP can take credit for popularizing the term with its series of annual books. The Park Service lists other writers who called Yellowstone “wonderland,” but most of them were writing for Northern Pacific.

At the same time, unlike this brochure, most of NP’s Wonderland books appear to apply “wonderland” to the entire Northwest, from Minnesota to the Puget Sound, and not just to Yellowstone. I’ll present some of these books over the next few days.

From 1886 through 1892, the Wonderland books were signed by John Hyde. The books describe Hyde as the “author of ‘The Wonderland Route to the Pacific Coast,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in the New Wonderland,’ etc. etc.,” thus revealing to an unsuspecting public that today’s brochure wasn’t really written by Alice. The first title was the unsigned 1885 Wonderland book.

Not the missionary of the same name, Hyde (1848-1929) was an Omaha travel writer, an agricultural statistician, an editor of National Geographic, and (although his name doesn’t appear in the book) reputed to be the author of Homeward Through America, a Burlington Route book about traveling across the country by Pullman car. The artwork in this brochure is similarly unsigned but matches that in an 1887 NP brochure.