We’ve previously seen Great Northern booklets advertising dude ranches from 1939, 1940, 1949, and 1950. This one appears to be from 1927 and is the nicest of the lot.
Click image to download a 13.1-MB PDF of this 44-page booklet.
The cover art is signed Cameron Booth (1892-1980), who later became known as the Dean of Montana painters. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Booth’s family moved to Minnesota in time for him to go to high school in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. Upon graduation, he went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where his artistic skills were recognized by the award of a “traveling fellowship,” $425 (more than $10,000 in today’s money) to study art in Europe.
In 1921, he returned to Minnesota to teach at the Minneapolis School of Art. Although he would spend time in New York, Europe, and California, he lived most of the rest of his life in Minnesota, where he specialized in painting Indians, landscapes, and horses. His artistic styles ranged from social realism to cubism, but he maintained that they were all derived from the same source.
The cover painting on this booklet looks a little simplified, which I thought was the difference between commercial art and fine art. But instead that was just his style, or one of his styles, as shown by the above painting which he did almost 50 years after this booklet was issued.
Inside, the booklet is illustrated by four dozen crisp black-and-white photos, many of which are signed either Hileman or H.A. Roberts. Hileman, of course, is T.J. Hileman, whose photograph was on the menu shown here yesterday. Roberts was Armstrong Roberts, whose work for the Canadian Pacific we’ve seen before. Roberts was a pioneer in the field of stock photography, so he offered a distinct alternative to Hileman, who had been named Great Northern’s official photographer in 1923.
The booklet’s text describes more than 60 dude ranches, lodges, hotels, and cabins in northern Montana (plus one in Idaho), as well as some guide services. Great Northern’s own hotels in Glacier Park are included, with the description of the Prince of Wales Hotel noting that “it will open early in the 1927 season.” This is the only date mentioned in the booklet, suggesting that it was probably printed in late 1926 for the 1927 season.
Except for the Glacier Park hotels, almost all of dude ranches and other facilities described in the booklet are gone. One that is still operating is Retiro Cabins on Lake Five, a little south of West Glacier. It is currently doing business under the name Lake Five Resort but is still the same facilities, though no doubt thoroughly updated. Another is Boulder Hot Springs, a huge California Mission-style hotel whose owners recently received a large grant for desperately needed historic restoration work.
Of course, neither of these are dude ranches, and all of the ones in this booklet seem to have gone out of business since 1927, probably during the Depression. Some of the ranch addresses are now ghost towns and at least one such town, Barzee, is not remembered anywhere on the internet that I can find.