Travelling through time
Old advertisements document changing nature of transportation — and tourist destinations
Vancouver is a tourist mecca, renowned around the world for its natural beauty and easygoing vibe. But many locals can hardly wait to get out of here. Vancouverites love to travel, which has made travel stories and ads a staple of The Vancouver Sun over its 100-year history.
The old ads are incredible. A 1917 ad features the headline “Alaska! Land of the Totem Pole,” along with a rendering of that ubiquitous Pacific Northwest icon.
A round trip to Skagway aboard a Canadian Pacific steamship in 1917 was $66, which was $15 less than a voyage to San Francisco. But you didn’t have to venture far for the cruise ship experience: in 1917 the S.S. Bal
lenia offered Sunday excursions from downtown Vancouver to Bowen Island and Squamish for $1.
Rail was the main mode of transport in the early 1900s. The first travel ad to appear in
The Sun was for the Imperial Limited, a Canadian Pacific Railway train that offered “express” daily service to Montreal and Toronto.
The flip side of the ad is for the CPR’S steamship line, and listed sailing times to Victoria, Seattle, Nanaimo, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Hardy Bay, “Upper River Fraser Points,” and “Gulf Island Points.”
By 1922, cars were becoming common, and the Mclaughlin Motor Car company took out a half-page ad for the 1923 Mclaughlin Buick Master Four, which had driven from Edmonton to Calgary and back — a “415-mile Dirt Road Trip!” — in a miraculous nine hours, 26 minutes and 55 seconds.
That worked out to an average speed of 43.5 miles per hour, “breaking all registered world records for endurance and speed on dirt roads.”
Another 1922 Mclaughlin ad advertised a “a real man’s car.” In those days it was called a roadster; today, we know them as sporty convertibles. The roadster ran beside a map urging drivers to “follow the birds to Victoria with your auto.”
No, there weren’t flying cars. But if you drove south from Vancouver to Mount Vernon, Wash., you could board the Anacortes ferry for Victoria, sailing through the picturesque American Gulf Islands.
Once you got to Vancouver Island, drivers could chug up to Nanaimo, then take the ferry back to Vancouver (the major ferry docks were downtown, as opposed to Horseshoe
Bay or Tsawwassen).
The paper often ran stories extolling the virtues of travel within British Columbia. A “Big Game in British Columbia” story on April 9, 1917, lured hunters with lines like “hunting the moose is one of the more attractive of sports, and happy is the hunter who succeeds in shooting one of these antlered monarchs of the forest.”
A 1931 ad beckons readers with “the call of the Cariboo Trail,” a stylish come-on for trips between Vancouver and Kamloops. The graphic shows a mustachioed Cariboo dweller with a big brimmed cowpoke hat, à la the legendary B.C. bank robber Bill Miner, the subject of the movie The Grey
Fox.
The operator of the Cariboo trips was the B.C. Rapid Transit Company. And they operated buses.
On June 6, 1931, there was an ad for the Canadian National’s “Triangle Tour,” an alluring trip where you’d take a ship from Vancouver to Prince Rupert, hop on a train to Jasper, then return from Jasper to Vancouver. The cost was $48.85.
The Triangle Tour ad featured a totem pole.
Right above it was another icon, the art deco Chrysler building, advertising “low cost trips” to New York, Chicago and other cities along the Milwaukee Road, “America’s longest electrified railroad.”
A zeppelin hovers beside the Chrysler building, a fabulous 1931-futuristic image.
Another ad features a zeppelin looming over New York’s other famous art deco skyscraper, the Empire State Building.