For 1896, Olin Wheeler at once simplified the titles but almost completely broke from the travelogue format. In that year and the following ten years, the titles would simply be “Wonderland” followed by the number of the year — two digits in the 1890s and four digits in the 1900s.
Click image to download a 38.6-MB PDF of this 118-page booklet.
In exchange for this simplified title, readers gained a book with individual chapters providing in-depth information about various new topics. The first part of the 1896 edition seemed to focus on the Northern Pacific in ways that made it more of an ad than an informative book. This included chapters on Northern Pacific’s premiere (but as yet unnamed) train; Northern Pacific country; and Northern Pacific cities. But it also included detailed chapters on the Red River Valley; Yellowstone; hunting mountain goats; the Puget Sound; the north Pacific coast; and Alaska. Some of these chapters provided far more information about certain topics than would be found in a travelogue at the expense of leaving out a more superficial look at some parts of the Northwest.
The other compensation for simplified titles was increasingly fantastic cover illustrations. The cover used in 1896 is so modernistic that it almost looks fake, like one of the covers used for reprinted editions of books that are out of copyright. A close examination of the cover included with archive.org scans of the booklet found in the Brigham Young University library show that it is aged in many ways, some of which I’ve repaired for the above PDF.
In many ways, the 1896 edition of Wonderland represented a turning point in Northern Pacific’s advertising. With exciting new articles replacing repetitious travelogues, I can imagine that people who didn’t even intend to travel through the Northwest looked forward to every new edition, which in turn may have inspired some tourism that might not have otherwise taken place.
On a minor note, this was the last edition of Wonderland published by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Forced into bankruptcy by the Panic of 1893, the company emerged as the Northern Pacific Railway, under which banner future editions would be published.