After running John Hyde’s travelogue for five years straight with only modest changes, NP must have decided it needed something new for 1890. Hyde, who was living in Omaha, had a new neighbor named Robert Peattie, who had recently moved from Chicago to become the managing editor of the Omaha World Herald. Peattie’s wife, Elia (1862-1935), was herself a prolific writer — by the end of her life she had 25 books and thousands of articles, columns, and book reviews to her credit — so Hyde suggested to NP that they hire her to write the new Wonderland.
Click image to download a 32.4-MB PDF of this 100-page booklet.
In addition to paying her for travelogue, NP covered all her expenses to the Northwest and Alaska. Leaving in the fall of 1889, she would spend a day in each important city, then take an overnight train to the next city. Sometimes she would catch freight trains between cities, getting to know the train crews as well as information about the cities themselves.
Unlike the detached view of Hyde’s travelogues, Peattie’s was written in the first person. For entertainment value, it was partly fictitious — she opened saying that, before this trip, she had never been more than 500 miles west of New York, which was obviously untrue as she was a lifelong resident of the Midwest, having been born in Kalamazoo and spent her working life in Chicago and Omaha.
It may be no coincidence that the cover of the 1890 Wonderland shows a woman and her daughter, rather than a hardy male explorer as portrayed on the 1886 booklet. When combined with the Romance brochure presented here yesterday, NP’s message was clear: the Northwest had been tamed and was perfectly safe for women and even Alice-like little blonde girls.
Unfortunately, in order to rebind it as a hardback book, someone used tape on the cover of the copy of this booklet that is on archive.org. I did my best to fix the damage, and the result looks good at standard size but is a little crude on a close view. At 7.8 MB, archive.org’s PDF is also a lot smaller than mine, so if you have a slow internet connection or limited disc space, you might want to download theirs instead.
A minor point: I noted that Wonderland ’86 used the phrase “thro’ Wonderland” instead of “through.” This one goes one better: “thro” Wonderland.” At first, I thought the double apostrophe was supposed to be a 99. Thro seems strange enough; I have no idea why someone in 1890 thought that a quotation mark was the same as an apostrophe.