For 1893, Northern Pacific handed the job of writing its annual Wonderland booklet to Olin Dunbar Wheeler. Over the next fourteen years, Wheeler would transform the series from a mere travelogue to what amounted to an annual magazine with individual articles focusing on different topics each year. While one of the articles was always about Yellowstone, the other topics varied widely.
Click image to download a 34.2-MB PDF of this 112-page booklet.
Born in Ohio in 1852, Wheeler went to school to become a civil engineer and spent six years helping John Wesley Powell survey the Southwest. He then spent 10 years learning the advertising business in St. Paul, which led to his being placed in charge of Northern Pacific’s advertising in 1892.
Wheeler didn’t immediately revolutionize the Wonderland format, instead making incremental changes each year that he wrote and designed the booklets. This 1893 edition opens with an introduction titled “Seward’s Prophecy,” claiming that William Seward — who was Lincoln’s Secretary of State and responsible for the U.S. buying Alaska from Russia — predicted in 1860 that the Northwest (meaning Minnesota) would soon become the “future seat of power” of the United States. (If Seward actually said anything like that, it was in the midst of a presidential campaign in which the candidate was no doubt trying to butter up his St. Paul audience.)
After that introduction, the booklet continues with the travelogue format. However, Wheeler introduced color tints to many of the woodcut illustrations in the book — admittedly crude tints, but colors attract the eye in a way that mere woodcuts did not.
This booklet is available on archive.org. However, many of the tinted illustrations in that booklet are faded, at least compared to those scanned by the British Museum and posted on the Wikimedia Commons. Where it would improve the booklet, I substituted the British scans and cleaned up any library markings. The result is a PDF that is three times larger than archive.org’s, so if you have a slow connection or limited disc space, you may prefer to download that one.
I would just like to take a moment to thank you for the tireless work and enormous effort you put into gathering everything and carefully restoring it for presentation here.
Thank you very much. I, and presumably everyone else who comes here, greatly enjoy what we find. Coming here every day to find something new, and often delightfully fascinating, is one of the nice little amenities of my life. I am well aware of the fact that this is a luxury and you have no gain from this site, so your dedication is really touching.