For 1896, Olin Wheeler at once simplified the titles but almost completely broke from the travelogue format. In that year and the following ten years, the titles would simply be “Wonderland” followed by the number of the year — two digits in the 1890s and four digits in the 1900s.

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In exchange for this simplified title, readers gained a book with individual chapters providing in-depth information about various new topics. The first part of the 1896 edition seemed to focus on the Northern Pacific in ways that made it more of an ad than an informative book. This included chapters on Northern Pacific’s premiere (but as yet unnamed) train; Northern Pacific country; and Northern Pacific cities. But it also included detailed chapters on the Red River Valley; Yellowstone; hunting mountain goats; the Puget Sound; the north Pacific coast; and Alaska. Some of these chapters provided far more information about certain topics than would be found in a travelogue at the expense of leaving out a more superficial look at some parts of the Northwest. Continue reading →

For 1893, Northern Pacific handed the job of writing its annual Wonderland booklet to Olin Dunbar Wheeler. Over the next fourteen years, Wheeler would transform the series from a mere travelogue to what amounted to an annual magazine with individual articles focusing on different topics each year. While one of the articles was always about Yellowstone, the other topics varied widely.

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Born in Ohio in 1852, Wheeler went to school to become a civil engineer and spent six years helping John Wesley Powell survey the Southwest. He then spent 10 years learning the advertising business in St. Paul, which led to his being placed in charge of Northern Pacific’s advertising in 1892. Continue reading →

After running John Hyde’s travelogue for five years straight with only modest changes, NP must have decided it needed something new for 1890. Hyde, who was living in Omaha, had a new neighbor named Robert Peattie, who had recently moved from Chicago to become the managing editor of the Omaha World Herald. Peattie’s wife, Elia (1862-1935), was herself a prolific writer — by the end of her life she had 25 books and thousands of articles, columns, and book reviews to her credit — so Hyde suggested to NP that they hire her to write the new Wonderland.

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In addition to paying her for travelogue, NP covered all her expenses to the Northwest and Alaska. Leaving in the fall of 1889, she would spend a day in each important city, then take an overnight train to the next city. Sometimes she would catch freight trains between cities, getting to know the train crews as well as information about the cities themselves. Continue reading →

The 1888 Wonderland booklet gives up what I suspect was the fiction that Frederick Schwatka had written the lengthy section on Alaska. In fact, the only mention of Schwatka was to note that in January 1887 he set out “on a snow-shoe expedition through the Park [that] was so loudly trumpeted throughout the length and breadth of the land, but whose inglorious collapse, the second day out, gained no such general publicity.” After that, NP apparently dropped him like a modern-day celebrity implicated with Jeffrey Epstein.

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The booklet does note that one of the members of that failed expedition was photography F. Jay Hayes, who was already known as the “official photographer of the Northern Pacific Railroad.” While previous editions of Wonderland were filled with woodcuts, this one also has a dozen or so actual photographs, most of them taken by Haynes. Continue reading →

The intrepid-looking fellow standing on the cover of Northern Pacific’s 1886 Wonderland booklet is supposed to be Frederick Schwatka, who is credited with writing more than half the booklet. As a U.S. Army lieutenant, Schwatka achieved fame for leading the initial calvary charge in the Battle of Slim Buttes, the army’s first victorious battle after the Custer debacle. Later, he became known for exploring the arctic and Alaska.

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Thanks to Schwatka’s lengthy report on his travels in Alaska, the 1886 booklet was 104 pages, up from 68 in 1885. The first 44 pages of text, a travelogue of sights between Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest, were by John Hyde and were only modestly changed from the 1885 booklet (but in 1886 Hyde at least received credit for his work). Continue reading →