This booklet describes 30 dude ranches in the Big Horn Mountains in 1929. A map in the back unfolds to show the region and the location of each of the ranches.
Click image to download a 16.6-MB PDF of this 60-page booklet.
I’m always curious to see what ranches are still operating today. I didn’t check all 30, but most of the ones I did check are gone. A few might still be operating as ranches, but no longer as dude ranches. Some may be subdivided. Continue reading
Issued 18 years after yesterday’s brochure, this one covers the same ground but does so in a much more visual fashion. We’ve seen the front cover before on a 1963 menu commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Northern Pacific’s last spike ceremony (with ex-President Grant holding the hammer in the painting).
Click image to download a 2.4-MB PDF of this brochure.
The cover illustration is based on a painting by Amédée Joullin (1862-1917) that hangs in the Montana state capitol combined with a photograph of the celebratory train that was taken in St. Paul just before it left for Montana, where the last rails would be laid. Joullin was a French artist who spent many years in the United States painting native Americans and western landscapes. Joullin wasn’t at the last spike ceremony; instead, the 1903 painting was commissioned by NP as a donation to the state of Montana. To place the locomotive in the cover picture, the illustrator reoriented the tracks from Joullin’s straight-on view to a three-quarter view. Continue reading
“The history of the Northern Pacific teems with romance, courage and industry,” claims this hand-typed brochure that, for some reason, NP chose to print on some rather ugly green paper. It might be a little reminiscent of the greens used in the Pine Tree of NP’s original streamlined North Coast Limited, except this was published in 1946, almost two years before that train made its inaugural run.
Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this brochure.
The history extends from 1864, when President Lincoln signed the bill offering the land grant for the railroad, to 1908, when half-subsidiary Spokane, Portland & Seattle completed a line that would carry NP trains from Pasco to Portland. In between it focuses on the dates that the railroad completed construction to various points. Continue reading
The cover of this four-page brochure features a painting by Sydney Laurence (1865-1940), whose art Northern Pacific also used on posters. This painting of a place called Castle Cape is colored quite a bit differently from an image shown on Flickr, yet they are otherwise nearly identical. It seems likely that these are two different paintings that Laurence made of the same subject but with different coloring.
Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of this brochure.
According to Wikipedia, Laurence “more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as “The Last Frontier.” Born in Brooklyn, Laurence studied at the Art Students League of New York and married another artist, Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre, in 1889. Unable to make a name for himself as an artist, he left his wife and two sons in 1904 to search for gold in Alaska. No one is sure whether he intended to return or just abandoned his family, but they never saw him again. Continue reading
We’ve previously seen east- and westbound versions of this guide from 1950 and a westbound one from 1949. Today’s is an eastbound one from 1949. The text of the 1949 and 1950 editions are similar but Great Northern’s conception of its trademark goat changed dramatically.
Click image to download a 1.4-MB PDF of this brochure.
These were probably slipped under the doors of sleeping car passengers early in the morning of their second day out. Although the streamlined Empire Builder entered service in 1947, I’ve only seen these from 1949 and 1950. If those were the only years they were issued, then we now have a complete set.
Ostensibly published by the Franco-American Branch of the American Good Will Association, this booklet promotes the 1926 Columbia River Historical Expedition. The booklet claims the trip was “being organized under the leadership of” the governors of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.
Click image to download a 6.8-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.
In fact, the trip was organized by the Great Northern Railway under the leadership of Ralph Budd. Budd modestly kept his name out of this and most other expedition materials and this booklet mentions the Great Northern only twice (plus a logo on the back cover). Budd clearly wanted to spread “ownership” of the expedition to as many people as possible to gain their participation and support. Continue reading
The David Rumsey Collection dates this brochure to 1910, the year Glacier Park was created. But it is clearly from after that as the map shows all of Great Northern’s Glacier Park hotels, several of which were first opened in 1915. The map doesn’t show the Prince of Wales Hotel, which didn’t open until 1927.
Click image to download a 21.5-MB PDF of this brochure from the David Rumsey Map Collection.
Tour buses like the one on the cover were the first motor vehicles allowed in any national park. They were introduced in 1914 and the Glacier Park Transportation Company began to replace them in 1925. If this brochure were from after 1925, it would show a more recent model of tour bus. Continue reading
Introduced in 1905, the Oriental Limited was the pride of the Great Northern. This 1911 booklet says that the train had “recently been augmented by the installation of entirely new equipment throughout.” The new cars had electric lights, wide vestibules, “vacuum cleaning machines” operated by a uniformed attendant whose sole job was to keep the train “neat and clean,” and an on-board telephone that only worked when the train was in the Chicago, St. Paul, or Seattle stations. Twice a day, the train received telegraphed news bulletins of the latest world events.
Click image to download a 5.3-MB PDF of this 20-page booklet plus map.
“Many people, especially ladies, feel the need of some light refreshment during the interval between luncheon arid dinner,” says the booklet, and Great Northern provided this in the form of an afternoon tea every day between 4 and 5 o’clock. This tea service was available to sleeping car passengers at no extra charge. Continue reading
As of 1887, three different railroads — the Denver & Rio Grande; Denver, Texas & Gulf (later Colorado & Southern); and Santa Fe — had lines from Denver to Pueblo. They competed until 1918, when the federal government temporarily took over U.S. railroads and rationalized the Denver-Pueblo corridor by tearing out the Colorado & Southern route and redesigning the other two so that one would handle northbound trains and the other would do southbound trains. This became known as the Joint Line and was used by all three railroads after the war.
Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this timetable from the Tim Zukas collection.
This timetable shows ten trains a day operating each way between Denver and Pueblo. Half of them were Rio Grande and the other half are listed as joint C&S-Santa Fe trains (though some are listed C&S first and others AT&SF first). Many of the trains stopped only twice along the way and made the 119.5-mile trip in 3-1/2 hours for an average speed of 34 mph. The only named train, Rio Grande’s Panoramic, which continued from Pueblo to Salt Lake City, also made just two stops but for some reason took 4 hours. A local train made as many as 16 stops, including flagstops, but still managed to make the trip in 3 hours 55 minutes southbound and 4 hours 10 minutes northbound. Continue reading
Although issued a year before Amtrak, this is the last Union Pacific passenger timetable I can find. Union Pacific managed to fill 24 pages, but much of it was fluff, with some trains being repeated on five or more pages. While important cities such as Portland still had three Union Pacific trains a day, podunk towns like Chicago and Los Angeles only had one.
Click image to download a 13.6-MB PDF of this timetable.
The City of San Francisco really didn’t exist any more, at least not on Union Pacific. Instead, two coaches and a sleeping car were taken off the westbound City of Los Angeles at Ogden three times a week and added to Southern Pacific’s tri-weekly City of San Francisco. In all, I count nine Union Pacific pure passenger trains, including Salt Lake City-Butte, Portland-Seattle, and Hinkle-Spokane, plus four mixed trains in Nebraska. Continue reading
