A Complex Post Card

There are two parts to the front of this post card. The first part is the train in

the background. It is a Great Northern train. This is what https://www.american-rails.com/great.html has to say about the Great Northern. What became the Great Northern Railway (GN) was the work of a singe individual, James Jerome Hill. The legendary "Empire Builder" pieced together one of America's great transportation companies over the span of nearly four decades. It all began with the small St. Paul & Pacific and, by the time of his passing in 1917, the GN was a transcontinental carrier of more than 8,000 miles. Over time, the company's traffic became highly diversified; what began as an agricultural hauler transformed into a transcontinental carrier handling every type of freight imaginable. It was merged into Burlington Northern Railroad on March 2, 1970. The second part of the post card is the large sphere in the foreground. It is a monument to David Thompson erected by the Great Northern Railway. Here is some information about David Thompson as found in The Canadian Encyclopedia on line. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/david-thompson David Thompson, explorer, and cartographer was born 30 April 1770 in London, England. He died 10 February 1857 in Longueuil, Canada East (what is now Quebec). David Thomson was called “the greatest land geographer who ever lived.” He walked or paddled 80,000 km or more in his life, mapping most of western Canada, parts of the east and the northwestern United States. And like so many geniuses, his achievements were only recognized after his death. Thompson learned to speak several Indigenous languages and was an acute and sympathetic observer at a time when most Europeans still saw Indigenous people as savages. His journals (which numbered hundreds of pages) and his maps provided the most complete record of a territory that was more than 3.9 million square km and contained dozens of different First Nations bands. In all, he spent 27 years mapping the west. “The age of guessing is passed away,” he wrote. Thompson predicted the changes that would come to the west, that it would become farmland and Indigenous peoples would be pushed from their land. As the one who mapped it, he was aware that he was contributing to that future. Wikipedia also tells us about the place in which this monument to David Thompson is situated: Today, Verendrye is an unincorporated community in McHenry County, North Dakota, United States, located approximately eight miles northwest of Karlsruhe and 13 miles northeast of Velva within Falsen Township. Although classified by the USGS as a populated place, it is considered a ghost town. The community was first known as Falsen, founded in 1912 by Norwegian settlers, who named it for Norwegian statesman Christian Magnus Falsen. Falsen was also the name of the station on the Great Northern Railway. The post office was established with the name Falsen in 1913, but the name was changed in 1925 to honor Pierre de la Verendrye, an early French-Canadian explorer who was to tour the North Dakota prairies. The population of Falsen in 1920 was 75. The population of Verendrye in 1938 was 100. The post office closed in 1965, with mail being redirected to Bergen. The last original resident moved away in December 1970 and the townsite sat vacant until it was purchased in 1990 and developed by the current owners into a farmstead, leaving the remains of the school building as the last true remnant of the town. A monument to the later North West Company fur trader and explorer, David Thompson, erected by the Great Northern Railway in 1925, remains on a hilltop overlooking the former townsite.

This post card was posted on February 7, 1957. It was published by the Great Northern Railway. It was printed by The Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut. They were a printer of many fine art books and black & white national view-cards in a deep rich collotype. They abandoned this process in 1967 when they began using offset lithography. They also issued cards printed in a dull blue-green monotone that they called Dutone.