Promotional Imagery of Glacier National Park

Abstract

The Great Northern Railway vigorously encouraged visitation to Glacier National Park between 1911 and 1930. We reconstruct the railway's promotional imagery of Glacier through an assessment of 796 photographs used by the company to publicize park landscapes and activities. Seven themes in the photographs—Native Americans, scenery, recreation, wildlife, the Wild West, park management, and personalities—reveal a useful portrait of how Glacier National Park was marketed with images of the American West mass distributed for decades by one of the nation's most influential corporations.