1935 Columbia-Clatsop Brochure

Posted on by November 12, 2013
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Nine years after the Columbia River Historical Expedition, the SP&S was still reminding people of it in this brochure. Page 2 includes a photo of the Wishram monument while page 7 has a photo of the Astor Column.


Click image to download a 7.5-MB PDF of this 12-page brochure.

The brochure mentions, but doesn’t include a photo of, the Lewis & Clark salt works. It does, however, show Ben Holladay’s Seaside Hotel. Round-trip fares from Portland to Seaside started at $3.50, which sounds inexpensive, but that’s close to $50 in today’s money.
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The Scenic Northwest, 1929

Posted on by July 4, 2014
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Like the William Crooks booklet, this brochure is undated but must have been published in about 1929 because the cover picture shows locomotive 2552, a 4-8-4 that was delivered that year. If the booklet had been published a year or two later, it would have shown a locomotive in the 2575 series, which was a slightly more advanced version of the 2552.


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The brochure includes one or more pages each of photos and text on St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, North Dakota, Glacier Park, Spokane, Wenatchee, the Cascade Tunnel, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, the Columbia River, and Vancouver, BC. Following up on the historical interest generated by the Upper Missouri and Columbia River expeditions, the centerfold has a map of the rail line with a comparative map showing the routes of early explorers such as David Thompson, Verendrye, Isaac Stevens, and of course Lewis & Clark. This comparative map is similar to a map in the centerfold of Fladrau’s Historic Northwest Adventureland.

Men of the Empire Builder

Posted on by November 12, 2013
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To mark the opening of the railway’s Cascade Tunnel, on June 11, 1929, the Great Northern inaugurated a new train, the Empire Builder, named for the railway’s founder, James J. Hill. This brochure describes it as a “companion train” for the Oriental Limited, but the Empire Builder was on a faster schedule while the Oriental Limited effectively replaced the Glacier Park Express as the train that carried tour cars to Glacier Park in the summer. As with the 1924 Oriental Limited, the Empire Builder‘s name was painted on each car’s letter boards.


Click image to download a 10.1-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.

The new train included refurbished steel coaches from the pre-1924 Oriental Limited but new sleeping and observation cars. Although the train still included some 12-and-1 sleepers, more common were cars with eight sections, one drawing room, and two compartments (for a total of 23 beds), reflecting a trend towards more private rooms.

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New Cascade Tunnel

Posted on by February 19, 2014
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Even as Ralph Budd was leading the Upper Missouri and Columbia River Historical Expeditions, the Great Northern Railway was planning and building the new 7.9-mile-long Cascade Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the United States. Construction began at the end of 1925, and was completed near the end of 1928.


Click image to download a 3.9-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

After John Stevens had found one of the lowest-elevation crossings of the Rocky Mountains for the Great Northern in 1889, James J. Hill was profoundly disappointed when the crossing of Cascade Mountains located by Stevens was far less desirable. Opened in 1893, the Cascade line required several switchbacks over the pass named after Stevens. By 1900, the railway had replaced the switchbacks with a 2.7-mile-long tunnel. But the 1900 route passed through many avalanche areas, and a 1910 avalanche hit a Great Northern passenger train, killing nearly 100 people.

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Letter from the Oriental Limited

Posted on by September 20, 2016
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This letter was posted on May 14, 1929, from “Mother” to “Master Peter Gantenbein” of Portland, Oregon. As she was writing the previous day, Mother and Dad were riding the Oriental Limited by Glacier Park less than a month before it would be replaced by the Empire Builder as Great Northern’s premiere train. “The train has been creeping along,” she writes, “even with its two big engines it has hard work climbing over the mountains. Lots of snow sheds over the tracks and lovely streams along the way.”


Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this four-page letter.

A little sleuthing reveals that Mother was the daughter and Peter the grandson of Henry Pittock, publisher of the Oregonian and, at his death in 1919, one of the wealthiest men in Oregon. Born in England to a family that migrated to Pittsburgh when he was four years old, Pittock apprenticed to his father, a printer, starting at age 12. When Pittock turned 18 in 1853 he trekked across the Oregon Trail. Unable to get a job at the Oregon Spectator, then Oregon’s largest paper, he talked the owner of the weekly Oregonian into giving him a job in exchange for room and board. He did well enough that the owner eventually agreed to pay him $900 a year, but that pay often came in the form of shares in the newspaper.

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Oriental Limited Train Directory

Posted on by November 12, 2013
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This little (2-3/4″x4-1/4″) booklet was given to passengers aboard the train that Grace Flandrau had described in relatively florid prose. By later standards, the 1924 Oriental Limited was fairly simple: baggage cars, coaches, tourist sleeping cars, a diner, first-class sleeping cars, and an observation car.


Click image to download a 2.3-MB PDF of this 20-page brochure.

Most of the features described in this brochure are crammed into the observation car: a men’s smoking room; a women’s lounge with shower and a maid who can serve as a hairdresser, manicurist, and masseuse; an observation room with 14 seats plus a writing table; a small buffet where passengers could order drinks and snacks; plus a drawing room and two compartments. Elsewhere on the train was a men’s barber shop.

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Historical Expedition Summary

Posted on by February 19, 2014
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Here is your one-stop source for all historical expedition documents and downloads. My collection is still missing a few important documents, and I’ll add them to this page as I find them.


Click image to download an 9.1-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

For example, above is the program for the Upper Missouri Expedition, which I didn’t have when I posted the articles about that expedition. Thanks to the Skykomish Historical Society for making this program available and scanning it for me. Below are links to other expedition documents.

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Seven Sunsets

Posted on by September 6, 2023
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Seven Sunsets was the only non-historical essay Grace Flandrau wrote for the Great Northern. Ostensibly a travelogue, it was in fact a 46-page advertisement for the Oriental Limited, which the railway had completely re-equipped in 1924. The source of the title was that someone traveling round-trip from Chicago to the Northwest would see seven sunsets on the two 70-hour train journeys.


Click image to download a 15.5-MB PDF of this 60-page booklet.

In April, 1924, the Great Northern announced that it had purchased eight sets of luxurious new trains from Pullman for the Oriental Limited that would go into service on June 1. The sleeping cars on these trains had “fixed head boards so that the sections take on somewhat the seclusion of compartments,” while the dining cars “are of very heavy construction, making them practically sound and vibration proof.” More important for passenger safety, the cars were of all-steel construction, while the dining and sleeping cars on the previous Oriental Limited had been wood with a steel underframe.

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After the Columbia River Expedition

Posted on by December 24, 2018
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The Columbia River Historical Expedition yielded much positive publicity for the Great Northern. The Morning Oregonian, for example, followed the expedition with articles almost every day of the trip, five of them on the front page. Other major newspapers along the route provided at least as much coverage. Despite this, the railway did not do a “James J. Hill memorial expedition” in 1927, as officials had suggested after the Upper Missouri expedition, possibly because GN marketing people were busy readying the William Crooks and a number of Blackfeet Indians for the Baltimore & Ohio Centenary Fair, which was held in September and October of that year.

The painting in this ad from a 1926 National Geographic is by Joseph Chenoweth and is in the BNSF art collection. Click image to see a much larger version of the ad (4.7-MB); see below for a color image of the painting in the ad.

John Finley, a New York Times editor and former New York state commissioner of education, wrote a 31-page summary of the expedition for the American Good Will association, but it was not as detailed nor as widely distributed as Agnes Laut’s log of the Upper Missouri expedition. In lieu of publishing a book like The Blazed Trail, Ralph Budd delivered typewritten copies of 17 of the lectures (112 pages, 170 megabytes) given during the expedition to state historical societies in the Northwest. Continue reading →

July 23, 1926: Spokane Plains Battlefield

Posted on by December 24, 2018
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On July 23, after the overnight ride from Astoria, the expedition returned to Spokane to dedicate another monument and attend another Indian Congress. The monument was inspired by the Great Northern monuments built for the Upper Missouri and Columbia River expeditions, but was financed by the Washington Historical Society. Local news reports indicate that Ralph Budd and the Great Northern “cooperated” by providing the land, next to GN right of way, for the monument and deeding it to the state.

The plaque on this monument reads, “The Battle of Spokane Plains was fought near this spot on September 5, 1858, in which U.S. troops under command of Col. George Wright defeated the allied Coeur d’Alene, Palouse, and Spokane Indians. Erected by Washington State Historical Society.”

Considering that the monument commemorated a battle in which local Indian tribes were defeated by the U.S. Army in 1858, by today’s standards it seems in very poor taste to make the dedication coincident with a major Indian congress. The battle was far from the worst massacre of Indians by American troops, but neither did it show Americans in a good light.

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