We previously seen a 1918 postcard folder showing scenes along Southern Pacific’s Portland-Oakland route, also known as the Shasta Route. That fold described that route as “The Road of a Thousand Wonders.”
Click image to download a 30.0-MB PDF of this 80-page booklet.
This is a 1908 booklet on the same theme, but this booklet also covers SP’s Coast Line route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The booklet is filled with well over 100 hand-colored photographs accompanied by plenty of text describing the sights along SP’s old route over the Siskiyou Mountains. As near as I can tell, only one photograph can be found in both the 1908 booklet and the 1918 postcard folder, but several photos are of the same scenes taken from slightly different angles.
About half the photos in the postcard folder are of scenes in California and half in Oregon. But since this booklet also covers the LA-San Francisco portion of SP’s lines, only about 20 percent of the photos are in Oregon. Some of these photos show highly destructive gold and copper mining in southern Oregon, which is not something that anyone would celebrate today.
This booklet is perfect bound, which meant I could not scan it on a flatbed scanner without destroying the binding. However, I recently acquired a “book scanner,” which is a camera that includes software to turn curved pages into flat images with only a little distortion. The quality is not as good as a flatbed scanner but still gives a good idea of what the books are like. Thanks to this camera, I’ll be presenting more perfect bound books from my collection over the next few days.
Archive.org has copies of this booklet from 1905 and 1907. The 1905 edition has different photos and text while the 1907 version is pretty much the same as this one. It appears to be scanned at a lower resolution, however, which makes it harder to read. According to archive.org, the versions it has posted were photographed with a Canon 5D mark II digital camera, so whoever scanned them must have had access to similar software.