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Rare map and promotional brochure, promoting the Alaska Pacific Navigation Company's winter steamer lines to Valdez, Alaska.
The brochure includes an unsual map of Alaska, highlighting the route from Sitka to Valdez and showing the location of the U.S. Military Telegraph Cable, the Alaska Pacific Navigation Company's inside route from Seattle to Juneau and the Alaska Pacific Navigation Company's outside route.
The Alaska Pacific Navigation Company's Steamer route from Valdez to Unalaska is also shown.
The map also shows the route of the Alaska Central Railroad from Seward to Atwood on the Tanana River.
The map also illustrates an overland trail, starting at Valdez and proceeding north to Copper Center, Gokona Road House., Gulkana Road House, Casey's Road House, Bennett Barnett and Salcha, before arriving at Fairbanks.
The brochure includes a table of distances and road house rates.
Alaska Central Railroad
In 1903, the Alaska Central Railroad began to build a rail line beginning at Seward, near the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, northward. The company built 51 miles of track by 1909 and went into receivership. This route carried passengers, freight and mail to the upper Turnagain Arm. From there, goods were taken by boat at high tide, and by dog team or pack train to Eklutna and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. In 1909, another company, the Alaska Northern Railroad Company, bought the rail line and extended it another 21 miles northward. From the new end, goods were floated down the Turnagain Arm in small boats. The Alaska Northern Railroad went into receivership in 1914.
About this time, the United States government was planning a railroad route from Seward to the interior town of Fairbanks. William Howard Taft, authorized a commission to survey a route in 1912. The line would be more than 470 miles long and provide an all-weather route to the interior. In 1914, the government bought the Alaska Northern Railroad and moved its headquarters to "Ship Creek," later called Anchorage.
Rarity
The map and brochure are complete unrecorded.
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