The front cover of this brochure says it describes “The Scenic Highway Through the Land of Fortune.” It does so with roughly 10,000 words of fine print about the states and regions served by the NP, from the Twin Cities to Portland. The map of the western United States fills about three-fourths of the back of the brochure, with most of the other quarter continuing the description of the Northwest.

Click image to download a 12.0-MB PDF of this 1910 brochure from the NPRHA Vista-Dome Package.

Issued in April, 1910, the map includes the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway but not the Oregon Electric or Oregon Trunk. The SP&S bought the Oregon Electric later in 1910, while the Oregon Trunk was under construction in 1910 but not completed until 1911.

“Opportunities are waiting in Washington to be plucked by the fruit grower, farmer, dairyman, canner, lumberman, logger, fisherman and miner,” says the back of this brochure. In 1896, the lumber industry employed 10,000 people and generated $7 million in value, says page 3, while fisheries yielded $3.2 million. (Multiply by 40 to get today’s values, although the value of both the timber and fishing industries in Washington today would be measured in the billions, not millions.)

Click image to download a 782-KB PDF of this 1897 brochure from the NPRHA Vista-Dome Package.

Unfortunately, page 2 of this brochure was damaged by someone gluing it into a scrapbook or something, but some of it is readable. Washington can grow barley and butter, pears and poultry, wool and wheat, hogs and honey, it says alliteratively. The climate is “mild and healthy” and not beset by cyclones or tornadoes, which may have been important to some farmers thinking of relocating from the Midwest. In fact, says page 3, Washington has “no winter,” which residents of eastern Washington especially might disagree with. Continue reading →

Today’s map shows that most of northern Idaho was in Indian reservations when the Northern Pacific arrived, so it gained only small portion of that area — roughly 75,000 acres or a little more than 2 percent of the total grant. To make up for that and other areas that weren’t available, NP obtained a lot of land 40 and 50 miles away from the rail line. This included lands more than 30 miles south of the Oregon-Washington boundary.

Click image to download a 27.8-MB PDF of this 1888 brochure from the NPRHA Vista-Dome Package.

NP’s grant specified that it would get 10 square miles of land for every mile of track in a state and 20 square miles for every mile in a territory. Oregon was already a state when the tracks were laid, but since the tracks were in Washington, but as close as 9 miles from the border, NP got many square miles in Oregon as well. Continue reading →

Northern Pacific received the largest land grant of any railroad by far, ultimately claiming nearly 40 million acres between Minnesota and Washington. This brochure shows the status of the land grant in western Washington in 1885. We’ve previously seen a 1888 edition of the same brochure.

Click image to download an 18.8-MB PDF of this brochure from the David Ramsey Map Collection.

The federal government divided its lands into 36-square-mile parcels called townships. Each township was divided into 36 sections, one square mile each numbered 1 to 36. The NP land grant specified that the railroad would receive every odd-numbered section within 10 miles of the rail line in Minnesota and 20 miles west of Minnesota. If some of the odd-numbered sections had already been claimed by homesteaders or others, the railroad could take additional odd-numbered sections as far as 50 miles away from the rail line. Continue reading →