Jasper National Park 1948 Brochure

Intensely decorated with red and yellow on one side, but only yellow on the other, this brochure also has an image of Jasper Park Lodge that resembles, but is not identical to, the one on a 1937 menu shown here a few days ago. With advances in color photography between 1937 and 1948, it is more likely that this is an actual color photo while the 1937 image was probably a colorized black-and-white photo.

Click image to download an 2.2-MB PDF of this brochure.

The brochure lists a sampling of many of the activities popular in Jasper Park, including motor drives, saddle trips, hiking, and mountain climbing. It notes that people could also buy one- to four-day all-expense tours that included meals, lodging, and motor drives. Saddle trips were $5 a day; lodging on the American plan (meals included) was $20 a day for two without a bath and $26 with. Multiply prices by ten to approximate today’s U.S. dollars.

Bermuda and the West Indies

In an effort to keep British possessions in the Caribbean loyal to the mother country rather than the much-closer United States, Canada agreed to offer steamship service to the West Indies. This was farmed out to Canadian National just about as soon as the railway was created in 1919. For a time CN also had ships from Canada to Australia, but these lost so much money that those routes were abandoned.

Click image to download a 4.1-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

In addition to merchant marine, CN offered cruises to the West Indies. This booklet generally describes 11 of the most important Caribbean ports reached by CN ships from Halifax (in winter) or Montreal (in summer). The booklet is nicely decorated with some pages printed in red and silver and others in blue and gold.

Mount Edith Cavell 1947 Lunch Menu

We’ve previously seen paintings of Mount Edith Cavell on the cover of a 1927 dining car menu and on various CN booklets used to advertise Jasper Park. Based on the date, the image on this menu appears to be a color photograph, but it could be a colorized black-and-white photo.

Click image to download an 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.

The unpriced lunch menu offers lots of choices: three appetizers, three soups, eight entrées, two vegetables, three kinds of potatoes, five desserts, and no beverages. The only thing missing is a salad.

Indian Chief and Canadian Mountie Menu

This menu was used at a 1947 conference of the National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier, Vermont. The illustration shows an obviously staged and heavily colorized photo of an Indian and a Royal Canadian Mountie and their horses, with the Indian submissively dismounted while the Mountie disdainfully looks away.

Click image to download a 224-KB PDF of this menu.

The National Life Insurance Company must have been especially cheap as this menu offers absolutely no options: one appetizer, one soup, one entrée, one style of potato, one mix of vegetables, no salad, one dessert, and one beverage. Tea wasn’t even offered as an alternative to coffee, though I suspect someone who really wanted it could probably have gotten it at no extra charge. The dessert, African puff glace, was probably similar to what New Orleanians call beignets, or puff pastries, and the glace was probably a sweet sauce. Continue reading

A Century of Railway Progress

Canadian National Railways wasn’t even 30 years old in 1947. However, its earliest predecessor, the Montreal and Lachine Rail Road, made its inaugural trip in 1847, giving CN the excuse for publishing this booklet.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet. Click here to download a PDF of the full front-and-back cover of this booklet.

This is less a history book than a book about the changes in technology between 1847 and 1947. In 1847, the Montreal and Lachine may have been using the latest in technology with a 4-2-2 locomotive (only a few of which were built before 1850) and wooden carriages that were slightly advanced beyond the stagecoaches-on-rails that characterized the first steam railways. The same could not be said for Canadian National in 1947, which was still using steam instead of Diesels and semi-streamlined but heavyweight passenger cars instead of lightweight streamlined cars. Continue reading

On the Way 1939 Dinner Menu

Today’s menu is dated August 22, the day after yesterday’s lunch menu. The colorized photograph shows one of the McLaughlin-Buicks that the lodge owned to give people tours of the park. McLaughlin Motors was a Canadian automobile manufacturer that merged into General Motors in 1918.

Click image to download a 256-KB PDF of this menu.

After writing that yesterday’s lunch menu had a greater variety of soups and entrées (3 and 7 vs. 2 and 6) than the dinner menu from the day before, today’s dinner menu has three soups and seven entrées. The entrées included sole chicken a la king; lamb casserole; broiled ham; broccoli and fried egg; beef tenderloin; and cold lamb and turkey. The orange meringue pie and arctic roll desserts sound especially tempting.

Athabaska (?) Falls 1939 Lunch Menu

We’ve previously seen this photo on a 1940 dinner menu. This one was used for lunch on August 23, 1939. The 1940 menu labeled the photo “Sunwapta Falls” while this one calls it “Athabaska Falls.” These are two different waterfalls, and based on comparative photos it appear this one is labeled in error and the falls in the picture are Sunwapta Falls.

Click image to download an 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.

Like the menus shown in the previous few days, this one had an ad for the new Hotel Vancouver glued in the upper left corner, which I photoshopped out. Unlike other Jasper Lodge menus we’ve seen in which the lunch menus had more choices than dinner, this one has fewer choices than the 1940 Sunwapta Falls dinner menu, but not by much.

On the Trail 1939 Lunch Menu

On August 21, the day after yesterday’s menu, whoever collected these menus must have enjoyed lunch from this card. The photograph, which appears to be colorized, features an unlikely scene of Indians standing by their horses and a teepee high in the Rocky Mountains. I can imagine the Blackfeet hunting in that area, but I can’t see them dragging a teepee along with them.

Click image to download a 245-KB PDF of this menu.

As seems to have been usual for the lodge, the lunch menu offered a greater selection of entrées than the dinner. This one includes bacon and eggs; halibut; hamburg steak; lamb stew; roast ham; chicken salad; and cold salmon. These came with an appetizer, a choice of three soups (compared with two on the dinner menu), veggies and potatoes, a choice of five desserts (same number as the dinner menu), and beverage.

Columbia Icefield 1939 Dinner Menu

On August 20, 1939, someone enjoyed dinner from this fine menu at Jasper Park Lodge. The photo shows the Columbia Icefield, which had been made accessible by a road from Jasper not long before this menu was issued. We’ve previously seen 1948 Jasper Lodge menus featuring the Columbia Icefield, but they used different photographs.

Click image to download a 242-KB PDF of this menu.

The unpriced menu offers a choice of six entrées, including pickerel, lamb chops, t-bone steak, beef sirloin, roast turkey, or cold ham & capon. These came with honey dew melon or shrimp-and-crab cocktail, cream of chicken or turtle soup, veggies, potatoes, salad, dessert, and beverage.

1937 Jasper Lodge Menu

Most of the previous Jasper Lodge menus we have seen have been cards, but this one is a folder. As the cover shows, the menu was used at conference of the Sun Life insurance company, so it may be that lodge management used folders for conferences and conventions and cards for ordinary people. The image on the front cover appears to be a colorized version of a black-and-white photo.

Click image to download an 471-KB PDF of this menu.

Sun Life must have been doing well despite the Depression. In 1933, it completed construction of a new, 26-story headquarters building that at the time had the most square feet of floor space of building in the British Empire. Continue reading