M. Leone Bracker preferred to draw real people, not models. This suggests somewhere on the Canadian prairie lived a farm family who looked like the people on the cover of this menu. Canadian Pacific must have offered Bracker a pass to visit various parts of the railroad so he could make these drawings.

Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this menu.

While other menus in the 50th anniversary series represented different parts of Canadian Pacific’s operations — railroad, steamships, and hotels — this one represents the settlement of the West that was made possible by construction of the railway. In addition to the railway, steamships, and hotels, a small blurb on the back of all of these menus noted that Canadian Pacific “employs 225,000 miles of telegraph wire” and also offers traveller’s checks. I suspect Bracker didn’t do a menu cover for traveller’s checks but I won’t be surprised if he did one for the telegraph.

This is an a la carte menu but for the evening meal rather than mid-day. However, it really isn’t much different from the mid-day a la carte menus. For entrées, this one has Lake Superior trout or Lake Superior whitefish, roast lamb, mixed grill, mushroom omelet, and chicken Maryland. No doubt when this menu was handed to passengers on the Imperial it included an insert listing full table d’hôte meals.