'Darrington, Wash., on the Great Northern R.R.'

Another one of those head scratchers -- there may well be thousands of these postcards, and variations thereof, still in existence:

Notice anything odd?

Some early enterprising photographer rushed to get this view of Whitehorse mountain and a young Darrington onto the postcard carousels at newsstands, post offices and general stores around the Puget Sound region.

The only problem? The Great Northern Railway never had a route to Darrington. It was the Northern Pacific Railway that built a branch route to Darrington, arriving there in June 1901.

The error continued on several variations of the postcard, including this Puget Sound News Co. version below; its divided back and German origin indicates it would have been published between 1907 and 1915.

Lowman & Hanford Co., a Seattle postcard publisher in business from 1894 to 1955, continued the error on the hand tinted color version below, probably produced between 1915 and 1930.

I don't think the error was ever corrected, as I have never found any newer versions of this card — which is not surprising. Postcard companies routinely updated their images every few years as towns and landscapes changed.

Perhaps Lowman & Hanford commissioned a photographer to return to Darrington to take a new photo — or maybe they gave up on producing postcards of the northwestern Washington region when Arlington's J. Boyd Ellis of the Ellis Postcard Company began producing higher quality real photo postcards.

A bear den in a saw log.

"Two natives of Washington: A Bear Den and Dwelling in a Washington Saw Log."

Here's one of those scratch-your-head items that I found recently in my digital archives, an early tinted color postcard, probably produced around 1915-1920, picturing a bear den and human dwelling carved out of a giant log. The story goes:

"This log was cut four miles from Aberdeen from a spruce log 40 feet from the butt which was 13 feet in diameter at one end and eight feet at the other. It is 40 feet long, 9 feet in diameter at one end of eight feet at the other, cut to show at the St. Louis Fair, and is now in Belle Isle Park at Detroit, Mich. There are chairs, settee and table cut inside of the log. When in St. Louis it housed two bears and a large cougar."

If the card is referring to the St. Louis World's Fair, which took place in 1904, then that would place the photo earlier than the date it was produced as a postcard. But that's not unusual — this postcard has at least one other version I've seen.

If the log ended up in Detroit's Belle Isle Park, I wasn't able to immediately find anything on the internet about that... not that that means anything. The only other clue to the origins of the photo is the Northern Pacific log car it rests on, number 69318.