This book features the Shasta Route between Portland and the Bay Area. The stunning cover painting by Maurice Logan shows bald eagles flying over the forests in front of Mount Shasta. Like yesterday’s book, this one has no title page or forward. While yesterday’s book had 74 photos, this one has 65.
Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this 76-page book.
After the photos, the book also presents a map of the United States showing major Southern Pacific routes. The map invites people to send 25 cents to F.S. McGinnis, SP’s passenger traffic manager, to get “this map in full colors” printed at 23″x32″. The David Rumsey Collection has a copy of this map as shown below. In addition to being in color, its size makes it much more readable than the map in the books, revealing that the map itself is surrounded by images representing the history of the Southern Pacific.
Click image to download an 11.8-MB PDF of this map from the David Rumsey Map Collection.
The color version of the map is dated 1928. F.S. McGinnis worked as passenger traffic manager until 1930, so it is possible that some books in this series were released in 1929 or 1930. However, the fact that this book has no title, forward, or list of other books in the series, unlike others that I’ll be showing in the next few days, suggests that it was one of the earlier books to be issued. Thus, I suspect it came out in 1928 along with the map.
The first eleven photos in this book are of scenes in California and at least one of these photos is also in the California photo book presented here yesterday. While there is obviously subject matter overlap between the two books, it seems like the editor could have picked different photos for each one as there was hardly a shortage of beautiful scenery in California.
While most of the rest of the photos are in Oregon, the last fourteen show scenes in Washington and British Columbia including Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Victoria, and Vancouver BC. Some Shasta route trains included cars that went through to Seattle on UP, NP, or GN trains, so SP sometimes called that segment part of the Shasta Route.
The Shasta Route was really two different routes: the older Siskiyou Route and the newer Cascade Route, sometimes called the Natron Cutoff. Both are represented by photos in this book, with Klamath Falls through Westfir showing the Cascade Route and Ashland through the Row River from the Siskiyou Route.
A problem with these books is that the paperback covers are printed slightly larger than the interior pages. This was probably impressive looking when new, but the edges of the covers eventually became bent and worn, especially the bottom edges if someone tried to stand the books up on a shelf. I’ve tried to show the books as they originally appeared but the results aren’t always perfect.