The Northern Pacific Railroad Tour Guide

I so often have a subject in my head that I want to tell you about--I plan it and capture illustrations about it, and eventually I think I've DONE the post when I haven't...sigh!

One such topic is this neat book from 1894:
"The Official Northern Pacific Railroad Guide for the use of Tourists and Travelers over the lines of the Northern Pacific Railroad and its branches....containing descriptions of states, cities, towns and scenery along the route of these allied systems of transportation and embracing facts related to the history, resources, population, industries, products and natural features of the great northwest"

Whew.  The book is fascinating, cuz it really is "PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED", like it says, and there's a description of the towns along the tracks from St Paul, Minnesota to Oregon and Washington state, thru British Columbia to Alaska!

Click HERE to read it online.

The drawings below are out of context and out of order.  Its interesting to see that Great Northern thought the end of the buffalo was a good thing, and also, what they thought was worthy of including in a guidebook!
 Click to enlarge.

Remember Carl Otremba and Mary Jendro who moved to the far end of Montana?  Well, here's the description of Sentinel Butte, North Dakota from the book.  This was the area they knew all their married lives.

BTW, I have pages from the book about how lumberjacks cut a tree down then.  Yeah, they're talking forests 'out west', but the technique was pretty much the same no matter where you were.  But that's another post ☺!