1915 Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway Postcard, North Bank Cascades of the Columbia with the Steamer Bailey Gatzert, Posted at Spokane 20 October 1915 with a Traveller's Message, Attributed to H. H. Tammen Co., Framed and Matted

The Piece

A colour-lithographed view postcard of 1915, framed and matted, carrying a message written by a woman on the train she is looking at.

The view looks down the Columbia River Gorge. On the left, a grade cut into the basalt, and on it a train running east, reduced to a thin dark line against the rock. Below and to the right, the river, and on the river a sternwheel steamer trailing a plume of smoke. Forest on both walls, water flat and pale in the distance.

The caption is printed down the face in the sky: “7996. Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway on North Bank Cascades of Columbia River and Steamer Gatzert.”

The reverse is a divided back. On the left, a printed paragraph headed NORTH BANK CASCADES: “The Columbia River is navigable to The Dalles, a distance of nearly 200 miles. Its level route reduces the Cascade Mountains… and provides a path for both water and rail transportation of interior traffic to the coast.”

The divider between message and address is not a plain rule but a long printed arrow, fletched at one end, with the letters H-H-T-CO set into the shaft.

A green one-cent Washington stamp sits at the lower right of the address side, tied by a seven-bar wavy-line killer. The circular datestamp reads SPOKANE, WASH. · OCT 20 · 6:30 AM · 1915.

The message is in pencil, in a clear looping hand, dated 10/19/15 at the corner. It reads in full:

“Dear Ed: Arrived in Portland last night at 10:30. Had to stay all night so had a good night’s rest + hot breakfast. Am on train now for Spokane. Arrive there at 9:45 P.M. Transfer N.P. Depot + leave at 10 P.M. for Helena. Was raining hard in Portland last night. Cold enough to freeze me this morning. Mildred.”

History & Provenance

The train in the picture is the train she was riding. The Spokane, Portland & Seattle ran Portland to Spokane along the north bank of the Columbia. That is the leg Mildred describes. She bought a view of the route, wrote on it while travelling the route, and posted it at the end of the route — and the postmark proves it. She says she reaches Spokane at 9:45 in the evening and leaves again at ten; the card was cancelled at Spokane at 6:30 the following morning. She had fifteen minutes between trains and she used them to find a letterbox.

That alignment is what makes this card uncommon. Almost every surviving travel postcard is a generic view, bought in one place and mailed from another, its picture unrelated to anything the writer was doing. Here the image, the message and the cancel all describe the same journey on the same day. The object documents itself.

The North Bank Road was new when this was printed. Built between 1905 and 1908 with James J. Hill’s money, the Spokane, Portland & Seattle drove a water-level route through the Cascades along the Columbia’s north shore — a grade blasted out of basalt cliffs that had been considered impassable. It broke the Union Pacific’s hold on the Gorge and gave Hill’s northern lines their outlet to Portland.

The steamer below is the Bailey Gatzert, and she was the most famous boat on the river. Launched at Ballard in 1890, named for an early Seattle merchant and mayor, she carried twin engines making 1,300 horsepower and ran at close to twenty miles an hour — extraordinary for a sternwheeler. She came to the Columbia in 1892 and is generally reckoned to have carried more passengers than any other steamer that ever worked the river. In the years around this card she was on the Portland–Cascade Locks–The Dalles excursion run, the same Gorge the railway had just conquered.

So the picture catches a contest at its exact turning point. The printed paragraph on the back is a railroad’s sales pitch dressed as geography: the Columbia gives a path for both water and rail. In 1915 that was still just about true. It would not be for long. The Gatzert left the Columbia in 1918, went to Puget Sound as a ferry, and finished her life in 1930 as a floating machine shop. The rails won, and this card shows the last years when the question was open.

The publisher reads as H. H. Tammen Co. of Denver, one of the large western view-card houses, whose initials match the H-H-T-CO set into the printed arrow on the back. Offered as an attribution rather than a certainty.

Nothing here is dated by style or guesswork. The card carries its own date in a postal cancellation: 20 October 1915.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most antique wall pieces are decorative. This one is evidence.

It records a specific woman, on a specific train, on a specific October morning, complaining about the cold and pleased about her breakfast. She gives her arrival time to the quarter hour and her connection to the minute, because in 1915 that was how you travelled and what you told people. You know her name. You know where she slept, what the weather did, and where she was going next.

That is the reason to hang it somewhere people stand close — a hallway, a powder room, the wall beside a desk, the run of a staircase. It is a small object and it rewards proximity. Nobody reads a landscape. Everybody reads handwriting.

It also does something a print cannot: it dates itself out loud. There is no attribution to trust and no expertise required. The postmark says Spokane, 20 October 1915, and that settles it. In a room of objects whose ages are all estimates, one that carries a certified date is quietly authoritative.

The image earns its place on its own terms. A train on a cliff above a steamboat is a good picture in any century, and the muted lithographic palette — forest green, basalt brown, pale river blue — sits easily against warm wood, painted panelling, or a dark wall.

It hangs well alone and better in company. Framed ephemera is one of the few categories that improves in multiples: three or five small frames in a grid read as a collection rather than as clutter, and a single card among maps, letters and botanical plates gives the group a human voice.

For anyone with a connection to the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia Gorge, the railroads, or the river steamers, it is a specific and unrepeatable thing rather than a souvenir of a place.

A note on care, and one rule matters more than the rest. Keep it out of direct sunlight. Early lithographic inks fade, pencil graphite lifts, and a century-old card left on a sunny wall will lose its colour and its message together. Neither comes back.

Hang it on an interior wall rather than above a radiator, a range or a bathroom shower. Heat and damp are what foxes paper and lifts old adhesive.

Do not open the frame to add tape. The stain on the reverse is what adhesive does to a postcard over decades, and it is the one flaw this card has. If it is ever remounted, it should be held with photo corners or a mylar sleeve and nothing else.

Dust the glass with a dry cloth, and if it needs more, spray the cloth rather than the glass — liquid run to the edge of a frame finds its way to the paper inside.