The white cascade, p.11
The White Cascade, page 11
These were desperate straits, to be sure, but O’Neill had two important factors working in his favor. The first was that outside help was on its way. Dowling and the X808 were still battling up from Scenic on the west slope, getting closer every hour. Another rotary was now en route from the GN’s Kalispell Division in the Rocky Mountains to the east; this extra plow was farther away than Dowling’s—at this point, it hadn’t even reached Leavenworth—but it was making faster progress. There were also two emergency relief trains with extra men and equipment heading toward the pass; one was traveling from Everett in the west and the other was coming with the Kalispell plow from the east.
O’Neill was probably pinning greater hopes on the second major factor working in his favor—namely, simple meteorological probability. It was now official: Never before in O’Neill’s three-year tenure in the Cascades (or even in the far longer tenure of Wellington veterans like Bailets and conductor Ed Lindsay) had a winter storm lasted as long as this one had. In a typical Cascades snow season there might be seventy-five days on which snow fell, but almost never would there be more than three in a row without a day’s hiatus. Considering this history, O’Neill had every right to expect that the storm would break soon. And once it did break, his three working rotaries might even be able to clear the slides without any outside help at all.
Until then there was the ever-present problem of the coal supply to contend with. O’Neill was doing everything possible to conserve the limited stores he had left, but already the coal chute at Wellington was all but tapped out. On its next fuel run, the double rotary would be forced to pilfer coal from the disabled X807 and a spare locomotive on the coal-chute track. G. W Turner, down in Everett, was furiously buying coal wherever he could find it. The chief dispatcher’s attempts to procure some from the Northern Pacific had failed, so he was finding it necessary to buy on the open market, and for a price that would not please the frugal Great Northern managers. Even if Turner could secure a good supply, however, getting it up to Wellington would be another challenge. O’Neill’s need was immediate, and even the coal cars coming up with Dowling’s rotary were still hours away.
So O’Neill was weighing his other options. He knew that there was a stash of several coal cars at Merritt on the east slope. Once Harrington and his crew had cleared the beanery slide at Cascade Tunnel Station, they would continue east. If they were able to work through the slides as far as Merritt before running out of coal themselves, they could conceivably refuel there, retrieve those coal cars, and bring them back to Wellington.
But that was still just a remote possibility. The frustrating reality was that it would require coal to get more coal, whether it came from Harrington in the east or Dowling in the west. With no other sources at his disposal, O’Neill simply wasn’t sure there would be enough to go around.
The first I heard of the dissatisfaction, or noticed it, was after the slide at the east end that destroyed the eating house and killed the two men there. That seemed to get the women very nervous. They heard of that and they were afraid.
—Henry White
Wellington
Early Friday Evening
By the time evening fell, turning the surrounding slopes from white to blue and then dark gray, it was becoming clear to everyone that the trains were going to remain on the passing tracks at least until next morning. Many of the anxious passengers had been able to cable their families—the telegraph wires west from Wellington were sporadically operational—but that was little comfort against the prospect of another long night on the mountain. One woman on the Winnipeg—probably Libby Latsch, a well-turned-out thirty-year-old entrepreneur whose firm, the Northwestern Sales Company, sold something called Always in Place hair supporters—apparently decided she couldn’t stand it anymore without a cigarette and set upon porter Lucius Anderson. “Our nicely dressed woman just came back in the observation [car] & complained of a lack of accommodations for ladies,” Ned Topping wrote in his letter. “Said she wanted to smoke, so porter fixed her up in a compartment 8C I guess she is happy.” (This, remember, was a time when cigarettes were illegal in Washington State.)
Sarah Jane Covington doubtless disapproved. ‘A good many of the passengers on this train are the smart set,” the old woman wrote to her husband. “Quite a number play cards and drink, talk slang and any old thing.” She herself was finding more productive ways of dealing with the tension—by immersing herself in improving literature. “Am reading the story of a Cooperative Experiment that failed because of the class hatred of its Beneficiaries,” she wrote, referring to an article about the Dutch socialist Frederik van Eeden, founder of a short-lived Utopian community called Walden. Mrs. Covington, a true product of the reform-minded Progressive Era, was fascinated by such social experiments, and with anything else concerning ways to perfect the human condition. “Van Eeden,” she wrote, “became awake to the fact that at least 90% of the misery of mankind was not necessary. It is only the result of bad order, bad organization, inertia, laxity, indifference.”
Meanwhile, Henry White and a few others were growing increasingly dissatisfied with Pettit’s hollow reassurances that the line would soon be clear. Deciding that it was time to make their concerns known to someone truly in charge, they called a meeting in the plush observation car at the end of the train, inviting Jesseph, Merritt, and several other prominent men among the passengers.
The main instigator of the meeting was Charles S. Eltinge, a fifty-year-old banker recently retired as vice president of Traders National Bank in Spokane. Smooth-shaven, with dark black hair and stern, pinched features, Eltinge was of a mind to complain directly to superintendent O’Neill. According to Merritt, “[He] wanted to know if Mr. Jesseph and I would not take up the question with the company and register a kick about their not getting us out.”
This was not something Merritt was prepared to do. He and Jesseph had already talked about the situation and had decided that the train was in no immediate danger. “We would come out and stand on the track and look up the mountain,” he later said, “and it seemed to us that where the train stood was probably the safest place … unless it was in the tunnel.” Being acquainted with O’Neill, Merritt also felt certain that the superintendent was doing everything in his power to free the trains. So he told Eltinge that he wouldn’t join in the complaint. “I did not see that there was anything that the company could do that they were not at that time [already] trying to do, and it would not do any good to kick.”
Others disagreed. Henry White—who traveled enough to have strong ideas about his rights as a passenger—was determined at least to speak to the superintendent. “[We] decided that we would ask Mr. O’Neill to come in that night and have a talk with us and give us some sort of assurance,” White would later report. ‘And so we told Mr. Longcoy, the private secretary. We saw him and asked him if he would not tell Mr. O’Neill to come over that night, and he said that he would.”
At this point in their ordeal, the passengers seem to have been split over the question of whether the trains were in any real peril where they were. Most of the men—at least judging from their own testimony—were still concerned mainly about what the delay was doing to their schedules. (“There was not any question of slides at that time,” Merritt would later claim.) The women, on the other hand, were terrified about the possibility of an avalanche. Unswayed by Pettit’s warnings about the unpleasantness of the tunnel, they continued to hound him on the topic. So the harried conductor tried another tack, noting that never in the seventeen-year history of the GN line through Stevens Pass had there been a snowslide at the place where the trains now stood. This re-assurance did nothing to quiet the women. “They made the argument,” Henry White observed, “that neither had there ever been a slide at [the beanery at Cascade Tunnel Station] … and if it could happen there it would be just as likely to happen where we were.”
Whether or not Pettit and the other men were swayed by this logic, they didn’t act upon it. And, in truth, no one on the trains really had the relevant expertise to judge the level of danger they were in. “There did not seem to be any of us who had any previous experience in snowslides,” White explained. “Most of our information came by what you would call the ‘grapevine telegraph.’ It would come through different parties—so-and-so said this or so-and-so said that—and we concluded it was about time to get something from someone in authority.”
The superintendent had therefore been summoned. But as the evening wore on without any sign of O’Neill, the passengers’ frustration grew. And they were to get no satisfaction that night. “We waited for Mr. O’Neill until about 10 o’clock,” White recalled, “and he did not show up.”
The passengers were beginning to wonder if they were being consciously ignored, or at least forgotten about. The fact that rotaries were throwing snow on top of the passenger train each time they passed on refueling runs just added injury to insult. Wouldn’t every extra bit of snow piled around the train require time and effort to shovel out once the line opened? Then why was the railroad worsening their entombment?
The answers would apparently have to wait until morning. “Nothing doing,” Ned Topping wrote finally, closing out his letter for the night. “Still imprisoned. Conductor thinks we can get out tomorrow.” The young Ohioan seemed resigned to the fact that there was little he or anyone else could do to change their situation. But there were some aboard—Henry White, in particular—who were now determined not to let another day pass without making their displeasure known.
I think the railroad men believed we would [get through]; and we would have, if we could have stopped the snow from falling. But as they would gain one victory … here would come another heavy fall of snow and slides.
—John Rogers
Berne
Late Friday Evening
There was coal to be had at Merritt. William Harrington knew that much for sure. Whether or not he and the crew of rotary X801 would be able to reach that coal was another question entirely. Between their rotary and the loaded cars at Merritt stood an unfathomable amount of snow, and their path through it would be as perilous and uncertain as that of a ship on a storm-rocked sea.
Harrington, a bluff, work-hardened man in his late thirties, was a figure of considerable substance. “Featured like a Roman gladiator, thewed like an ox, with a chest like a cider barrel,” as the sometimes oratorical Seattle Times would later describe him, he had been railroading for over twenty years, and he approached every aspect of his job with a stolid assurance born of long experience. Having grown up on a farm in Wisconsin, he was also no novice when it came to working in extreme weather. Still, the effort required to perform even the simplest task in this storm was astounding. It took hours to water an engine, hours to move a few railcars, hours to work through a small slide that should have taken minutes to dispatch. The most absurd struggle had been simply getting the rotary up to the tunnel portal at Wellington. Even after borrowing the helper engine from train No. 25 for extra pushing power (a six-hour maneuver), making any headway at all had been ridiculously arduous. For a rotary plow with two pusher engines to have such trouble moving a few thousand feet was unheard-of.
Once they were through the tunnel and on the far less windy eastern side of the summit ridge, the going had been much easier. After a few hours spent clearing up the beanery slide at Cascade Tunnel Station, Harrington and the rotary crew had changed engines and, at about 6:00 P.M., proceeded east to continue plowing the line. The official version of their mission was that they were headed all the way to Leavenworth at the foot of the mountains, clearing slides as they went. In light of the weather conditions, though, Harrington must have known that taking a single rotary such a long way was hardly possible. More likely, with coal so short on the mountain, he was on an errand to fetch those coal cars at Merritt and bring them back to Wellington—a far more plausible assignment. In any case, they’d clear what they could of the eastern line, making it that much less difficult for the relief train that would be heading west from Leavenworth to bring supplies and reinforcements.
At least Harrington was well staffed on this run. The plow train under his command carried a good score of men, including two entire rotary crews, one of which could plow while the other slept. He also had an ample contingent of shovelers and several of the best snow-fighting railroaders on the mountain—among them J. J. Mackey, one of the division’s traveling engineers, and conductor Ira Clary, a diminutive but scrappy Irishman known for his waspish wit. Sporting the black bowlers and felt homburgs worn by many trainmen in the Cascade Division of this era, they would have made an incongruously stylish tableau as they swarmed around the bellowing rotary. But these were rugged and determined men, close-knit, loyal to O’Neill, and expert in the technical aspects of mountain railroading. If there was any chance at all of getting a single rotary through that storm, this was the crew to do it.
Was there a chance of getting through? Harrington was likely beginning to doubt it. Though they had left Cascade Tunnel with a full supply of coal, they’d been encountering small slides and deeply drifted snow all evening. The plow and its pushers had been forced to work consistently hard, burning coal at an alarming rate. There was still plenty of fuel left in the engines’ tenders, but the look of the road ahead was enough to have the Snow King worried. Having worked those mountains for several years, he knew that even small slides could be harbingers of much worse to come. Like cockroaches, avalanches didn’t typically run in isolation—once you saw two or three of them, you could be certain that many more were lurking, waiting to make an appearance. Given the right conditions, it would only be a matter of time before they began to swarm.
And as superintendent O’Neill also recognized, the right conditions had been falling into place for days. Common sense might suggest that the likelihood of avalanches depends mainly on two factors—the steepness of a slope and the amount of snow that has accumulated on it—but the physics of sliding are actually far more complicated. “Snow,” as one modern expert has put it, “is one of the most complex materials found in nature, and it is highly variable, going through significant changes even before it has accumulated as a continuous cover on the landscape.” Thus the likelihood of further snowslides in the area would depend not just on what would happen over the next few days, but also on what had already happened in the previous days or even months.
Certainly the enormous amounts of snow falling in the current storm would not be a negligible factor. Precipitation of any type has weight, and lots of new weight will add lots of new stress to the existing snowpack. But whether that new stress can be absorbed safely depends on a number of variables, all determined by the specific conditions under which the snow was deposited. Rapidly changing weather is particularly dangerous, with fluctuating temperatures altering the nature of the snowpack and creating layers of various tensile strength within it.
As everyone at Wellington knew, just such a temperature fluctuation had occurred in the Cascades over the past week. On Tuesday, the current storm had arrived on a blast of arctic air, shattering low-temperature records and forcing the mercury (as the Everett Daily Herald had pointed out) to “take the toboggan” to near zero degrees. Since then, temperatures had risen quickly. High winds, moreover, had come and gone all week, loading certain slopes with much greater depths of hard, compacted snow.
The result was that the snowpack clinging to the slopes around Stevens Pass was already a dangerous mixture of strong and weak layers. Depending on what the weather did next, the snowpack could either maintain its current precarious balance, slipping only in especially vulnerable places, or fail more generally, bringing down slides all over the mountain. In the latter case, Harrington and his crew would find themselves with far greater problems than simply running out of coal before reaching the cache at Merritt.
For the X801, then, there was no alternative but to keep plowing. Returning to the tunnel would have been futile if there was no coal there with which to refuel. Besides, if Harrington or any of the others were ever to see home again, they’d have to get this rail line open. Un-like many of the younger men he worked with, Harrington had a family relying on him. His wife, Lillian, and their three young children were all at home in Everett awaiting his return. During the two-thirds of the year that he worked as a regular conductor, the children would actually get to see something of their father; he’d go over the mountain to Leavenworth one day and come back over the hump to Everett by the next. From mid-November to late March, however—when he served as assistant trainmaster in charge of snow removal—Harrington could go days or even weeks without managing to find his way home.
Fortunately, the end of February was already in sight. Within a few weeks, the Cascades snow season would be over. Even if slides began to swarm over the next day or two, they would likely be the last major headache of the winter. The Snow King would get to retire and return to his regular duties until the following November. If nothing else, this was something for Harrington to look forward to.
8
Closing Doors
Q: Had you had a chance to get a meal more than the two or three meals you have mentioned in that period?
A: No sir, we did not have any chance to get any meals.
Q: Where did you get your sleep?
A: I got no sleep.
—John Robert Meath,
rotary engineer
Saturday, February 26, 1910
