The white cascade, p.12
The White Cascade, page 12
Near Windy Point
Early Morning
Shortly before 4:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, after another protracted night of grinding, unremitting plow work, the westbound double rotary finally broke through the deep slide at Snowshed 3.3. For superintendent O’Neill, this was a heartening development. The two consecutive slides at this spot had been the principal obstacles preventing the escape of those two trains at Wellington.
Plowing away this second blockage, however, had taken nearly thirty-six hours—plenty of time for drifting snow and further slides to have created problems elsewhere on the mountain. Although the line was now clear from Wellington to Windy Point, there were still some seven or eight miles of track between Windy Point and Scenic about which O’Neill knew little. Master mechanic J. J. Dowling and the X808 had been hacking away at this stretch of track since 3:00 P.M. on Friday, working up from Scenic, but they were as yet nowhere to be seen on the line below. And as much as O’Neill wanted to continue plowing downgrade to meet them, the double needed to be coaled and watered again, and the overworked rotary crews needed some refueling of their own. Reluctantly, therefore, he ordered the double rotary back to Wellington.
While his men were eating breakfast at the station shortly after 5:00 A.M., O’Neill gathered whatever news he could about the other rotaries. With all communication down east of the tunnel, nothing had been heard from Harrington on the east slope, but word from the west was hardly more definitive. At last report, Dowling and the X808 were still far closer to Scenic than to Windy Point, delayed by a small slide and a burst flue on the rotary that had taken some hours to repair. There was, in short, still no verifiable path off the mountain in either direction.
O’Neill also had another new predicament to deal with. Over the course of the past few days, his battalions of temporary snow shovelers had been growing steadily less cooperative, grumbling about pay and the harsh and increasingly dangerous conditions. Many had been putting in only halfhearted efforts, working more slowly and resting more frequently with each passing hour. Even the passengers had noticed their tendency to goldbrick. “Hello there, Bill,” one of the male passengers had shouted from the train to a group of idling laborers, “if you aren’t careful you will hurt your shovel!” This taunt had done little to increase the shovelers’ motivation. Then, on Friday, a fistfight had broken out between two drunken section crews at the saloon. O’Neill knew that it would only be a matter of time before the men stopped doing any work at all.
Now even the passengers were starting to turn troublesome. It was sometime on Friday night, probably during one of the double rotary’s quick trips back to Wellington for water, that the superintendent had first heard from Longcoy about the passengers’ request to see him. O’Neill was not at all eager to oblige; after all, he had more than enough to occupy him without having to field unanswerable questions from nervous passengers. And so—understandably if not quite admirably—he had told Longcoy to make excuses for him. O’Neill instructed the stenographer to say that he was “too sleepy” for a meeting that night.
It was no mystery to O’Neill why these men wished to see him; they obviously wanted the Seattle Express moved off the flank of Windy Mountain. Given appearances, their concerns were not unreasonable. O’Neill wasn’t blind to the deepening snowfield on the mountainside above the trains, and he realized that the increasing instability of the snowpack was justifiably worrying to people ignorant of the behavior of slides. But he was convinced that the passing tracks at Wellington were actually one of the least slide-prone places on the mountain. Years of experience had shown that snowslides in the area almost invariably came down on slopes pleated with ravines or draws. There had been a small gully, for instance, creasing the mountainside above the beanery at Cascade Tunnel Station. Here, on the slope above the passing tracks at Wellington, there was no such interruption in the smooth face of the mountainside. That’s why there was no snowshed protecting the tracks there. No protection was considered necessary.
And the simple fact of the matter was that there was no other suitable place at Wellington to put those trains. The tunnel, whatever the passengers might think, was an utterly impractical alternative. The only other sheltered place would have been under one of the snowsheds. Snowshed 2, not far west of Wellington, might have been long enough to cover at least one of the trains, but there was only one track—the main line—going through that shed; leaving a train there would have blocked the double rotary’s access to the coal chute and the water tank. Nor were snowsheds entirely indestructible; it was not unheard-of for a big slide to collapse a wooden snowshed, crushing whatever stood beneath it. Since these sheds were naturally located in places known to be susceptible to avalanches, moving the Seattle Express under Snowshed 2 would also have been taking it from a place with no slide history to a demonstrably slide-prone area.
The last possibility—moving the trains to the spur tracks on the flat area near the tunnel portal—posed its own insurmountable difficulties. Given the amount of snow that had fallen, clearing those tracks would have taken O’Neill’s entire force of men at least two days of hard labor to accomplish. Putting a passenger train on a spur track would also have run counter to the rules of standard operating procedure. Besides, O’Neill wasn’t convinced that the spur tracks were any safer than the passing tracks. Yes, the steep mountainsides were somewhat more distant from the tracks there, but that area—where the switchbacks had been located years earlier—had been the site of frequent slides in the past. A large avalanche coming down that gully-creased mountainside could easily travel far enough to bury any trains standing on the spurs.
Moving the trains was therefore simply out of the question; O’Neill felt he had no better alternative than to keep them exactly where they were. Instead of redeploying all of his manpower and steam power to the futile task of clearing the line between the trains and the tunnel, he would continue to devote all of his efforts to getting the trains off the mountain and out of danger entirely.
To do that, of course, he had to finish clearing the line down to Scenic, which meant working his already exhausted men even longer, not to mention finding more fuel to run the rotaries. After breakfast, O’Neill was relieved to learn that the plow crews had managed to solve at least the latter problem. By raiding supplies in the motor shed, the unused engines, and elsewhere, they’d collected enough coal to fill the rotary train’s tenders to full capacity. Depending on conditions, then, they would have a good ten to twenty more hours of work time—enough, O’Neill hoped, to at least secure access to one of his two potential replenishment sources of coal: either the carloads traveling up the mountain from the west with Dowling or the two or three cars being freed by Harrington to the east.
Shortly after sunrise, refueled but woefully unrested, O’Neill and his force of thirty-five trainmen and snow shovelers reboarded the double rotary and headed back west. The snow was still coming down hard, but the wind had now fallen off to a breeze, promising to make the work of plowing considerably easier. With any luck, they would plow their way to a rendezvous with Dowling sometime that day, opening the line and allowing the trains to head down the mountain at least as far as Scenic.
Luck, however, was in horribly short supply in the Cascades that week: Just a few miles from Wellington, as the rotary was making its way west over the already plowed line, a new slide appeared out of the swirling snow ahead of them. It had fallen sometime in the few hours they’d been gone, and it had come down—incredibly—at Snowshed 3.3, precisely the same point at which the earlier two slides had come down.
What O’Neill may have muttered under his breath at this moment is not recorded. He was known as a man who always kept his temper. Probably he waited for the rotary train to stop, then jumped across to the high bank of snow beside the tracks and, without comment, waded forward through the drifts to examine the slide. From what was visible through the falling snow, he could see it was a large one—almost fifteen hundred feet long, according to his subsequent report. Though the slide was relatively clear of timber, its depth varied from ten feet in some places to over thirty feet in others. It would be at least another full day’s work to clear it up.
Enraging as this situation may have been, there was only one thing O’Neill could do. Returning to the rotary, he called out the shovelers and set them to work breaking down the face of the slide.
Saturday—noon—still here—snowing hard—report this AM that there is six miles of uncleared track—some places 30 ft deep. They are working from Seattle toward us and we may get [out] tonight—tho I’m not believing anyone.
—Ned Topping
Wellington
Saturday Afternoon
By Saturday even the children had grown testy and quarrelsome. There were a total of four boys and four girls on the Seattle Express, and keeping them all peacefully occupied was proving to be a chore. Seven-year-old Raymond Starrett and the three-year-old Beck boy seemed to be getting along well enough; the younger child had a toy train that Ray was simply fascinated by, and the two of them would spend hours pushing it along the floor of the crowded car. But the boys wanted no part of Thelma Davis, the three-year-old girl from Seattle, whom Ray regarded as hopelessly spoiled. Whenever Thelma didn’t get her way, she would dissolve into tears, requiring continual comforting by one of the older Beck girls. Although it was explained to Ray that little Thelma was missing her mother, who was back at the family’s Seattle apartment, he was not very sympathetic. Since he himself had recently lost a father, he felt he could have limited sympathy for a girl who was just missing a temporarily absent parent.
The adults did what they could to keep the children amused. When-ever there was a lull in the storm, some of the younger passengers would take them outside to build snowmen and have raucous snowball fights among the drifts. Sometimes the girls were gathered into sewing circles to patch together makeshift dresses from scraps. When things got really bad, Lucius Anderson, the “jolly” porter on the Winnipeg, would tell stories. Once—to Ray Starrett’s delight—he even did a tap dance.
Back on the observation car, salesman Henry White was still fuming about O’Neill’s failure to appear the night before. Spotting Longcoy, White and a few other malcontents hailed the young man and asked whether the superintendent had received their message. He had, Longcoy replied, but Mr. O’Neill had been too busy and then too sleepy to come over and see them last night. Now he was gone again—down to Scenic on unspecified business. This last bit of information was actually an expedient fabrication—O’Neill was still with the rotary at Snowshed 3.3—but even this answer did not yet satisfy White. “We insisted that [Longcoy] send a message—either a wire or a telephone [call], or send somebody to Scenic and tell Mr. O’Neill we wanted to see him right away.” In reply, Longcoy spun out yet another fib: “He told us that Mr. O’Neill was sick abed and could not get away.”
Whether Longcoy—a devout Baptist who was also an active member of the Everett YMCA—was improvising on his own here or merely passing along excuses concocted by O’Neill is impossible to say. The sickness story was in any case a risky lie to tell, and one that was eventually exposed. (Two days after this exchange, White would ask conductor Pettit about O’Neill’s ill health: “I asked him how Mr. O’Neill was and he said, ‘He is all right.’… I said, ‘Isn’t he sick?’ He said, ‘No, he has not been sick.’”) The pretense of O’Neill’s incapacitation, though, was enough to keep White quiet, at least for the moment. And the salesman was further mollified when he encountered Pettit a short time later and asked the inevitable question about progress. “It looks now as though we will get away this afternoon,” the conductor offered (perhaps because he had not yet heard about the third slide at Snowshed 3.3).
Other passengers found reassurances elsewhere. Lewis Jesseph, approaching the situation with his usual lawyerly thoroughness, busied himself questioning local experts on the issue of moving the trains. He consulted with some old mountain men in Wellington, who assured him that the trains were “perfectly safe” where they were. He also had a conversation with hotelkeeper W R. Bailets, resident at Wellington since 1892, who confirmed that he had never seen any slides on the slope over the passing tracks.
Some of the women, though, still refused to be comforted. Ida Starrett and Anna Gray, both mothers of infant children, were naturally more fearful than others, but the real problem was Ada Lemman, the woman suffering from nervous prostration. Although the Lemmans’ child—a sixteen-year-old daughter—was safe with relatives in Ritzville, Ada had become increasingly unstable since the beanery slide. A graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her day, and was apparently unwilling to take the word of alleged experts over the evidence of her own senses. So she and some of the others used one of the few tactics of persuasion available to women at this time, but to little avail: “On Saturday the strain became too great for the women,” Merritt observed, “and several of them broke down and cried. This was too much for the men in the crowd, and all left the car for the tall timbers.”
The women’s growing alarm was only deepened several hours later when the foreign snow shovelers began walking off the job. The mail clerk A. B. Hensel first noticed their retreat late on Saturday afternoon. The shovelers were leaving in groups of three and four, packs and bedrolls flung over their shoulders in the swirling snow. As they passed the passenger train, some of them paid back the ridicule they’d earlier received from the passengers. “They bade us goodbye as they walked along,” Henry White admitted, “and they said, ‘Goodbye, boys; God only knows when you will get out of there—we are going now.’”
The main cause of this impromptu job action was discontent over wages, which were beginning to seem ridiculously low to many of the laborers. White had been surprised to learn that these men were making only fifteen cents an hour. (Longcoy—who seems to have resorted to flagrant and frequent lying to keep the passengers in line—had told him that the shovelers were being paid twice that.) This already low wage was further reduced by deductions for board. “One or two of them told me [that] if he worked a week, often getting wet through, and his clothes all wet, he could manage to pull down about two dollars for himself. He said it didn’t look good to him and he was going.”
With the example of the retreating gangmen before them, some passengers began to think along similar lines. One particularly impatient man—Solomon Cohen, a mine speculator and former shopkeeper from Everett—began to openly advocate the idea of escaping on foot. “Those men will make a pretty good trail,” he announced on Saturday afternoon, “and it will be a good idea to follow them.” Unfortunately, it was already too late for the passengers to pack up their things and start out for Scenic. No one wanted to be stuck halfway down the mountain when night fell. “The feeling prevailed,” White recalled, “that if we wanted to make a start it ought to be in the morning.”
So nothing further was done that day. Tentative plans were made to leave the next morning, but many people seemed to lack conviction. The storm was still blowing hard, and now, seemingly as they watched, the dense snowfall began to turn into a hard, driving rain. A warming Chinook wind had blown in sometime after noon, pushing temperatures even further above the freezing point. Water was beginning to streak down the sides of the railroad cars and puddle in the impressions left by dirty boots in the snow. This was a discouragement for some—the hike down the mountain was bound to be more slippery and uncomfortable in the rain. For others, it was something more ominous. What would this rain do to the snow covering on the mountainside above them? No one seemed to know for sure. But for many of those aboard—particularly those for whom escape on foot would not be possible—the determination grew to find someone in authority and get those trains backed away from the flank of Windy Mountain. Whatever the high cost in time and manpower, they wanted to be moved.
Situation 8:00 P.M. Raining hard on west slope with a strong Chinook wind. … Mr. O’Neill with double rotary still working about 3 miles west of Wellington. Have had no late news of him. Slides are numerous and continually coming down on west slope.
No wires east of Berne. People at Wellington very much alarmed over slides.
—G. W. Turner,
telegram to W. C. Watrous et al.
On the Line
Early Saturday Evening
In the mountains east and west of Wellington, the railroad’s battle against the storm pressed on. To the east, Harrington and the X801 had spent all of Friday night drilling through a big slide encountered just east of Berne. By Saturday noon they had broken through it, but at a cost—twelve hours of almost constant rotary work had dangerously depleted the coal supply of both plow and pusher engines. It had thus become absolutely essential for them to reach the coal cars at Merritt before too much longer.
At first it had looked as if they might actually succeed. For a mile or two beyond Berne, they’d encountered only drifted snow on the tracks, which the rotary handled easily. But just as they were clearing Gaynor, a small station about nine miles east of the Cascade Tunnel, an avalanche had let loose on the mountainside across the river from the train tracks. It was a powerful, fast-moving slide, and before Harrington and his men fully grasped what was happening, the onrushing snow had surged across the thousand-foot-wide valley and raced up the slope on the other side, covering the tracks right in front of the still-moving rotary. Though the crew managed to stop the plow train in time to avoid being engulfed, the slide at Gaynor put a quick and certain end to any plans for reaching the coal at Merritt. Harrington and his men did continue to work at the new slide until they were down to their last ton of coal, but they found there was no way to get through that vast escarpment of snow before running out of fuel. Nor could they back up and return the way they had come, since other slides had come down behind them in the interim since they’d left Berne.
