This was the last Wonderland booklet produced by Olin Wheeler. It was also the shortest, at 80 pages including covers. Wheeler’s 1894 Wonderland was about 100 pages and all the others were well over 100.
Click image to download a 26.1-MB PDF of this 80-page booklet.
Although Wheeler continued to work for Northern Pacific until 1908, I can’t find any evidence that the railway published a Wonderland in 1907 or 1909. In 1910, it did publish a beautiful booklet about Yellowstone, Through Wonderland, with a dozen full-color lithographs by Haynes and text by an unnamed author.
The 1906 Wonderland includes the usual articles on Yellowstone and Alaska plus one on the Columbia River and Puget Sound, which had been covered in previous issues. New to this issue were articles on the Bitterroot Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border, and one on the Queniut Indians, now usually spelled Quinault, of northwest Washington.
Wheeler lived until 1925, and the last paper he wrote was for the Great Northern’s Upper Missouri Historical Expedition. For health reasons, he was unable to participate in the expedition and his paper was read for him at the dedication of the Camp Disappointment monument at a railroad siding called Bombay that Great Northern had renamed Meriwether to highlight its historic importance.
Wheeler’s obituary in Montana History was written by none other than Great Northern President Ralph Budd. Like Wheeler, Budd was trained as a civil engineer but had a strong interest in history. Budd pointed out that Wheeler’s credentials as a historian were solidified on publication of his “great work, The Trail of Lewis and Clark,” which was based on Wheeler’s travels over almost the entire route of the expedition. Budd mistakenly claimed that Wheeler conceived of the Wonderland series. What that wasn’t true, he did produce the best issues of the series by far.
The PDF of this booklet is based on a combination of archive.org files and scans of my own copy of the booklet. Most of the wonderland booklets are glue-bound, making it impossible to scan interior pages without harming the binding, so I scanned the covers and used archive.org images of the interior pages.
Though the booklet is 9.5″x6.75″, the archive.org images aren’t wide enough to fill that space. To avoid breaking the binding, the pages were photographed with interior portions cropped out. I had to add those back in to fill the full width of the pages.
In the last three weeks, I’ve presented all but three of the 25 annual issues of Wonderland that Northern Pacific appears to have produced. I left out those three (1892, 1894, and 1899) because I couldn’t find digital copies that met my quality standards: either they don’t include the covers or were scanned in black and white rather than in color. I hope to eventually add those to this collection as well as improved versions of some of the other issues.