Wonderland: Emerging Brand Identity of the Northern Pacific Railway at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

• In Event: On the Road with Environmental History: Travel, Transportation, and Tourism

Abstract

Between 1884 and 1910 the Northern Pacific Railway published a series of annual travel guides titled Wonderland, advertising service for its newly established Wonderland Route to the Pacific Northwest Coast. The illustrated booklets reveal the company's emerging brand identity within the national discourse surrounding industry, modernity, and identity with far-reaching implications for women, Indigenous people, and the natural environment. The Wonderland booklets, authored by Olin D. Wheeler, drew upon a tradition of ethnographic portraiture and fashion illustration that developed in Europe and North America, to present train travel from Chicago and St. Paul through North Dakota, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park as both romantic and modern, transforming naturalistic images of the landscape and its inhabitants into stylish emblems of the powerful company. Perhaps most surprising was the Northern Pacific's adoption of a new trademark—a circular medallion with interlocking teardrop shapes—a symbol that fascinated passenger agent, Charles Fee, when he noticed it flying on the national flag of the Korean pavilion at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The symbol, with its exotic connotations, suggested the Northern Pacific's trade connections to Asia. Its visual economy of form was perfectly suited to represent the railway company in printed promotional material and ticket offices, in the architecture of its depots, and in the design of the trains themselves. Just as significant as the extraction of timber and mineral sources for the development for the transcontinental railway was its cultivation of new strategies for advertising travel along its routes. World's fairs and popular print culture thus contributed to settlement and tourism in the western United States in ways that have not yet been fully considered.

Author

• Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University