This combination brochure, menu, and postcard features the S.S. Casca, which carried passengers and freight on the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson City from 1937 to 1952. The British Yukon Navigation Company (a part of the White Pass route) had the 180-foot-long sternwheeler built in Vancouver in pieces that were shipped to Whitehorse for final assembly. The ship replaced a 161-foot ship of the same name that had been built in 1911, which itself replaced a 140-foot sternwheeler of the same name that had been built in 1898.

Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this brochure/menu/postcard.

The third Casca (which along with the others was probably named for the Kaska tribe) operated until 1952, after which it was stored in Whitehorse, along with another sternwheeler, the Whitehorse, as the government and historians debated whether to sell or try to preserve the ships as floating museums. The debate ended in 1973 when the two burned in a fire of mysterious origins.

The unpriced menu includes appetizers, soups, fish, entrées, roast, vegetables, desserts, and Hudson’s Bay tea or “five fingers of coffee.” Among the roasts are “loin of Stewart River moose.”

The postcard part of the menu reports that someone named Florence “had a grand trip” that included trying the moose on the ship as well as caribou, presumably on a different part of the trip. “It certainly is good,” she reported to friends in Reading, Pennsylvania. The card is postmarked July 19, 1940.

This video from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, film archive shows something of what it was like to take a trip on the Casca. Unfortunately, neither the video nor the brochure show the dining room or other parts of the steamboat’s interior.