Fossils (booklet inside spread)

The spread appears to be from an educational or promotional booklet about the Pacific Northwest — the kind issued by state tourism bureaus or transcontinental railroads in the 1930s and 1940s to coax visitors and settlers with geological spectacle and historical depth. The top-left block, headlined "WASHINGTON — Three and One-Half Miles From Bank to Bank," describes what is now known as Dry Falls: a scalloped cliff 3.5 miles wide and 400 feet tall in the Grand Coulee of eastern Washington, left dry when the Ice Age glaciers retreated roughly 15,000 years ago. The text attributes its formation to "Glacial Floods of the Upper Half of North America" — a plain-language nod to the Missoula Floods, the catastrophic glacial outburst events first described by geologist J Harlen Bretz beginning in 1923. The rhetoric ("skeleton of the Daddy of them all") matches the booosterish tone of 1930s promotional literature about the Pacific Northwest's untouched wonders.

The central map plots British Columbia and Washington state with colored markers distinguishing rock carvings from rock paintings, monuments, and petroglyphs. This was active archaeological terrain: the Columbia River Archaeological Society was documenting sites along the Columbia in the 1920s and 1930s, and researchers like Harold Cundy were systematically recording panels — some of which were blasted apart within years of being drawn. The bold claim at the bottom of the spread — "THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MYSTERY OF THE WORLD IS THE SERIES OF ROCK PAINTINGS AND ROCK CARVINGS" — reflects a genuine 1930s fascination with Pacific Northwest rock art before its origins were well understood.

Other historical markers on the map include Fort Colville, the Hudson's Bay Company trading post established at Kettle Falls in 1825, and the "Peace Portal" — almost certainly the Peace Arch at Blaine, Washington, a 67-foot concrete monument dedicated by promoter Sam Hill on September 6, 1921, straddling the U.S.-Canada border. The two flanking text columns recount early Spanish and British exploration of the region and the sequence of events leading to Washington Territory's creation in 1853.

• The photo credit reads Frank Gulbert — likely Frank W. Guilbert, a Spokane-based photographer documented with work around 1932, which provides a loose lower bound for the booklet's production date.
• The rivers named in the Washington passage — "the Columbia — the Fraser — the Yukon — even the romantic Mackenzie" — are all major drainage systems of the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, used here as rhetorical scaffolding to establish the region's continental scale.