Bob Simmons
Book Review
By Bob Simmons
Special to The Seattle Times
"The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche"
by Gary Krist
Henry Holt, 305 pp., $26
They still don't know for certain how many died. At least 96, maybe 100, when the great avalanche of 1910 tossed two Great Northern trains off a ridge on the west side of Stevens Pass.
Gary Krist has written what is surely the most complete and authoritative account of that awful event, in "The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche." The railroad's trapped and desperate passengers were snowbound in their railroad cars on a narrow mountain ledge for six days in late February before a giant slide swept the train into a canyon below the long-ago railroad village of Wellington. (The settlement no longer exists; the site appears on a DeLorme topographic map as Tye, slightly northwest of Highway 2 at Stevens Pass).
Krist provides a gripping hour-by-hour narrative, much of it from diaries and personal letters of the passengers and railroaders, while their trains were blocked in one of the worst snowstorms ever to strike the Western Cascades. Coal, water and food were running out. Seventeen-foot snow gauges disappeared. Huge, locomotive-powered snowplows were stuck in the cementlike mixture of snow and soil that kept sliding onto the tracks.
One railroad worker tried to hike out and was killed by a snow slide in plain sight of the horrified passengers. A few workers and passengers did manage to escape on foot, fighting their way along the railroad track through massive drifts and slides, then glissading down a steep mountainside to what was then the resort village of Scenic Hot Springs.
The undisputed hero of Krist's story is James O'Neill, superintendent of the Great Northern's Cascade Division. The antithesis of today's high-priced suit, O'Neill worked 24-hour days operating snow plows, crawling under train cars with a snow shovel, all the while trying to manage trains throughout his misbegotten miles of mountain railroad. Krist describes with a minimum of pathos O'Neill's despair at the death of his passengers and his fellow railroaders.
Although The Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer gave the most dramatic coverage to the plight of the passengers, two-thirds of those who died were Great Northern Railway workers. They were part of the legions of James J. Hill, an icon of hard-fisted business management described by one of his own biographers, as cited in Krist's book, as "the shaggy, bearded, one-eyed son-of-a-bitch of western railroading."
There's a succinct account of Hill's push into the Cascades, along a route which surveyors had offered, reluctantly, as the least awful of any in the North Cascades, a route that "had been shunned even by Indians on foot." Krist suggests that no railroad should have been built there. But Hill is the mogul who boasted, "Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I'll build a railroad to Hell." (Nineteen years after the hell of Wellington, GN completed a tunnel under the worst reaches of the Cascade crossing).
Hill's notorious, penny-pinching style raised an echo in the miserable scene at Wellington. GN paid its snow shovelers only 15 cents an hour. After endless days of life-threatening work, they began walking away. James O'Neill had no authority to raise their pay. With his shovelers gone, O'Neill was beaten and the passengers and trainmen were doomed.
Krist, a Maryland resident, is a published novelist, but this is his first nonfiction book. He got the idea when he stumbled across a railroad buff's Web site dedicated to the Wellington tragedy, while researching a book about the Duke of Wellington.
Bob Simmons spent more than four decades as a full-time broadcast and print journalist. He is a former commentator for KING-TV and former writer for the Seattle Weekly.