In researching a book on the Duke of Wellington, author Gary Krist Googled up a nugget: the Wellington avalanche of 1910.
Never heard of it? Neither had he. In his own words: “I was amazed that I had never heard of it.”
BOOK REVIEW
The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche
Gary Krist; Holt, 336 pages, $26
|
It is the story of two westbound trains – the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail – trapped six days in snow-clogged Stevens Pass in the Cascade Division of the Great Northern Railway; the workmen who struggled in vain to rescue them; and the mountain that rose up and swept 96 souls into eternity.
Krist uncovered a wealth of documentation – letters written by the passengers but never mailed, eyewitness accounts from survivors, the detailed record-keeping of the railroad, and courtroom testimony (oh, yes, the survivors and victims' kin went after the railroad with a vengeance and the Great Northern put up a fight) – resulting in rich, fleshed-out characters.
There is the burly, hands-on superintendent of the Cascade Division, James H. O'Neill, who headed up the rescue operation and shoveled snow alongside 15-cents-an-hour laborers to exhaustion. It was he who ordered the trains placed in a fatal location. And there is the tight-fisted founder and chairman of the Great Northern, James J. Hill, whose battles with organized labor resulted in a critical shortage of manpower and coal on the mountain.
There are the train men, like a side of beef named “Big Jerry” Wickham, who was swept off the mountain while breaking trail for rescuers and lived to tell the tale, and the immigrant laborers, mostly wisps of sinew and attitude, many of whom walked off the job in a dispute over safety and wages. And there are the men, women and children aboard the Seattle Express who put their lives in the hands of the Great Northern.
Train buffs will appreciate Krist's grasp of the golden age (and inherent danger) of steam railroading, from the detailed descriptions of rotary plow operations in deep winter to living conditions aboard the passenger cars, mail cars and in the workmen's shanties. And weather wonks will revel in Krist's explanation of the never-before-seen meteorological conditions and their effect on the snowpack, the physics of a wet slab avalanche, and the freak thunderstorm that in the wee hours of March 1 triggered a 10-acre slab slide that smashed into the trains, hurled them into the canyon and buried them.
Fully half the book is taken up with conditions at tiny Wellington Depot, and the battle to clear the right-of-way and get those trains off the mountain. A quarter describes the avalanche and recovery efforts. Next is an account of the litigation. Was human error to blame? Or did the mountain simply take its pound of flesh, as the sea is wont to do, overwhelming any human effort?
Krist neatly wraps up with an epilogue that follows the main characters, some of whom kept in touch into the 1950s and 1960s – relationships forged in the icy terror of Stevens Pass.
Kelly Murphy is a copy editor for the Union-Tribune.
