Having published a brochure based on the fictitious Alice in Wonderland writing home at the end of a trip to Yellowstone, NP decided to write a brochure based on the fictitious diary of a lovelorn Massachusetts school teacher. It is likely that both were written by John Hyde.
Click image to download a 5.7-MB PDF of this brochure.
The unnamed writer of the diary notes that she once had a boyfriend named Jack who decided to go west to seek his fortune with the promise that he would contact her once he had done so. Some ten years later, she still hadn’t heard from him and didn’t know “whether he has been killed by Indians, or lost in a blizzard, or run away with a ranch girl.”
Not wanting to end up a spinster, she realized that there was a surplus of women in Massachusetts but a shortage in the Northwest. So she headed west on the Northern Pacific, enjoying the wheat fields and badlands of North Dakota before arriving at Yellowstone.
In Yellowstone Canyon, she and her traveling companions happened to meet some “huntsmen, apparently, from their trappings.” Amazingly, one of them turned out to be her long lost boyfriend, Jack. He immediately apologizes to her, saying he didn’t contact her because “he had not been ‘in luck.'” But he had recently “made his fortune in Tacoma” and now was on his way back to Boston to find out if she was still available.
Like a sap, she believed this story despite the obvious holes: If he was so eager to find his old girlfriend, why was he touring Yellowstone? If he had really made his fortune in Tacoma, why was he dressed like a “huntsman”? Why didn’t he at least send her a letter? In fact, like any good huntsman, he probably had a trapline of girlfriends in every city along the Northern Pacific line in Montana.
Whatever the veracity of Jack’s claims, this is a beautiful brochure with 11 full-color paintings of authentic scenes in Yellowstone Park. I date it to 1889 because the diary notes that someone was “setting up a delightful steamer on” Lake Yellowstone that should be ready “before I begin my diary for 1890.” That would be the Zillah, which had operated on Lake Minnetonka but was sold in 1889 to the Yellowstone Park Association, which cut it in three pieces to move it to Lake Yellowstone and reassembled it for operation in 1890.