If the cover of Wonderland ’96 looked modernistic, the one for Wonderland ’97 looks like the cover of a Harry Potter story or some other fantasy novel. A Montana State University master’s thesis on early Yellowstone advertising notes that most figures pictured on the covers of nineteenth-century Northern Pacific booklets and brochures were women. Of these women, some were tourists, such as the one on the 1891 booklet, but others were symbolic of “American progress and civilization,” typically wearing robes and depicted with other symbols such as sheaves of wheat.
Click image to download a 39.5-MB PDF of this 116-page booklet.
This one certainly fits that criteria, and the symbolism is also apparent: thanks to Northern Pacific, it was much easier to get to Yellowstone and similar scenic locations than it had been just a few years before.
Inside, the booklet — really, at well over 100 pages the Wonderlands had become more books than booklets — has chapters about the Minnesota Lake Park region, the cattle industry, gold mining, the four major mountain peaks of the Oregon and Washington Cascades that were visible from NP trains, and the Olympics. The frontispiece facing the title page depicted “a Washington road” in such delicate tints of blue, yellow, and green that it almost appears to be a full color photograph.
Beyond this, the booklet contains many photographs but still a few woodcuts. One woodcut on page 30 shows the “Northern Pacific transcontinental express,” a ten-car train led by 4-6-0 number 97. Northern Pacific once had a steam locomotive numbered 97, but it was a 4-4-0, so in this case the 97 must have been more a nod to the year than to accuracy.
Once again, the archive.org PDF of this booklet is smaller than mine. I apologize for the fact that my software produces such large PDFs, but when I adjust the settings to make them smaller the quality noticeably declines. I hope the image quality of my PDFs, which are based on the single-page JP2 files that are also on archive.org, is better than archive.org PDFs. For the record, the archive.org PDF of this booklet is 13 megabytes, compared to nearly 40 for mine, but archive.org’s zip file of single-page JP2 images is 84 megabytes, so I was at least able to obtain more than 50 percent compression with little loss in image quality.