In the early 1900s, perhaps coinciding with the postcard craze, Cinderella stamps, which looked like postage stamps but couldn’t be used as postage, became popular, with people using them to decorate letters, envelopes, and postcards mailed to friends and relatives. Cinderella stamps issued by companies to advertise their products were called poster stamps because they supposedly looked like miniature posters. Northern Pacific was among several railroads that issued such stamps, either for their marketing employees to use or for any members of the public who wanted to advertise NP destinations.
Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of all ten stamps on this sheet. Click here to download a high-resolution JPG of these stamps.
The stamps were issued in several series with ten stamps in each series. Northern Pacific’s series 1 and 2 both showed scenes from Yellowstone Park, but each stamp also had a banner reading, “Visit California Expositions via Northern Pacific and Yellowstone Park.” This would have referred to San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which were held in 1915. That dates the stamps to that year.
Today’s stamps are labeled series 3 and say nothing about the California expositions, so it is reasonable to assume they were issued in 1916. The ten stamps show six different kinds of Yellowstone wildlife: buffalo (on 3 stamps), elk (2 stamps), bear (2 stamps), bald eagle, deer, and bighorn sheep. The captions on all three buffalo stamps are the same, as are the captions on the two elk stamps and the two bear stamps, probably because whoever created the stamps assumed that only one stamp would be sent to any recipient.
The stamps each say “©B.&B. St.P.,” referring to Brown & Bigalow, a St. Paul company that made promotional materials such as calendars for other businesses. If you’ve ever seen a painting of dogs playing poker, it was probably published by Brown & Bigalow.
Each stamp is about 1-3/4″ high by 2-1/4″ wide. To make them as clear as possible, I scanned them at 600 dpi instead of my usual 300 dpi. The PDF made from these scans is still not as clear as the original JPG, so I’ve offered the option of downloading the 18.7-MB JPG of the stamps.