The white cascade, p.20
The White Cascade, page 20
Concerned that the little hospital might soon be overwhelmed, Flannery decided to send a second messenger down to Scenic. Grabbing another man—probably section crewman John Wentzel—the telegrapher wrote out a note to superintendent O’Neill and sent the man down the mountain in traveling engineer Mackey’s wake. That left one person fewer at Wellington to aid in the rescue, but Flannery’s rationale was clear: If for any reason Mackey didn’t reach Scenic, Flannery wanted to be certain that their cry for help still made it to the outside world.
The men of Wellington were meanwhile discovering just how badly they would need that help. Several dozen rescuers had by now descended into the ravaged canyon, and what they were finding down there was appalling. One man reportedly picked up a detached hand lying on the snow; others claimed to have uncovered a severed head in among the wreckage. Some of these stories, of course, were probably apocryphal, but subsequent coroner’s records confirm that many corpses pulled from the wreckage were badly mutilated. A few were also severely burned, seared by escaping steam from the damaged engines.
The most devastating discovery was the body of three-year-old Thelma Davis. Only the top half of the pretty toddler was found. It had been lashed to a huge tree trunk, tangled in a web of grotesquely twisted steam pipes.
Toward dawn, one rescuer uncovered the submerged form of a baby. It was eighteen-month-old Varden Gray—unconscious, his nose broken, and his scalp split wide open. The child’s parents—John with his healing leg rebroken and Anna injured but still conscious—lay buried deeper in the slide, pinned beneath the wreckage. Judging by modern statistics of avalanche survival, the fact that all three Grays were alive was remarkable. Avalanches generally kill in two ways. Fatal trauma—collision with trees, rocks, or other debris—accounts for about one-third of deaths, but the majority of victims die of suffocation. Densely packed snow asphyxiates some; others die when the pressure of tons of snow on their chests prevents them from breathing; a small minority suffocate when their own breath melts snow around their mouths, which then refreezes as a rigid ice mask. Whatever the situation, though, the chances of survival plummet after just fifteen minutes of burial; only one in ten will normally live longer than a few hours.
In this particular slide, however—where the train wreckage created large air pockets under the snow—some victims had a greater window of opportunity for rescue. Many, like the Grays, lingered on, still able to breathe long after the slide. One man, fireman Samuel A. Bates of the Fast Mail, was buried for hours next to his huge steam locomotive, expecting its boiler to explode at any moment. He tried clawing his way out, digging until his fingers bled, but this only seemed to pack the snow more densely around him. Finally, after six hours, his air supply dwindling and his body near hypothermia, he gave himself up for lost—at which point some rescuers heard his last desperate screams and dug him out.
Once dawn arrived, however, the only casualties being recovered were dead. Solomon Cohen and two electricians who’d been sleeping in a cabin near the motor shed had been among the first of the fatalities pulled out. Now the rescuers were finding others more deeply buried: R. M. Barnhart, the prominent attorney; John Rogers’s companion James McNeny; Catherine O’Reilly, the young nurse from Spokane. Their bodies were carried up the rain-lashed slope and placed in the baggage room next to the depot, which had been set aside as the morgue.
By late morning the rescuers worried that no one could be left alive in the wreckage. Even victims who had survived the fall with an ample air pocket around them would probably have run out of oxygen by now. But then Charles Andrews and some other men heard what Andrews later described as “a mewing far off, like a kitten.” Scrambling over toward the source of the sound, they heard it more distinctly as a cry for help. Certain that someone was still alive under the snow, they began digging feverishly.
The person calling was Ida Starrett, Raymond’s mother. Roused by the initial roar of the slide, she had been fully awake when the train toppled into the canyon. She landed with a jolt when her car hit bottom and was apparently knocked unconscious for a time. After she regained her senses, she understood what had happened. She was lying facedown under the snow, her head in the crook of her elbow and her back pinned painfully by some heavy object; when she tried to move, she found she could do no more than wiggle her fingers.
“I realized,” Ida would later say, “that I was not injured so seriously that I would die from that cause, immediately at least.” Her thoughts turned immediately to her parents and her children—and she realized that her infant son, Francis, was beneath her, pressed against her abdomen. If she held her breath she could even hear the baby breathing. She wanted to reach down and move him or comfort him or at least touch him, but though she tried desperately to free her arms she could do nothing, and the weight on her back seemed only to press down harder.
For hours she lay there in the frigid darkness, suffering terrible pain but with enough trapped air around her to keep her alive. Probably she was drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes losing track of where she was and what was happening around her. But she was certain that she knew just when her baby beneath her stopped breathing and died.
Eventually, nearly eleven hours after the slide, she awoke to hear rescuers shouting somewhere above. “I cried out to them, trying to direct them,” she said. She listened as the shovelers found and removed several dead bodies from the debris above her, but they couldn’t seem to pinpoint the source of her shouts. “I could tell by the sound of their shoveling that they were digging in the wrong place, and [I] told them so. Then they moved nearer and at last I could hear the shovels striking just above my face. I cried a warning.”
Someone—probably Charles Andrews—kept calling down to her, making sure of her location, asking if she could see light through the snow. “I kept answering I could not,” she said, “until finally … a glow of light broke through.”
When the rescuers found her, they realized that she was pinned beneath a thick tree trunk they could not hope to move. Andrews called for more tools, and he and the others began to saw away the two-foot-thick piece of timber. The delay was excruciating, but sometime in the early afternoon the pieces of the tree fell away and Ida Starrett was pulled out of the wreckage—nearly frozen and in deep shock. She was the last person from the trains rescued alive.
13
“The Reddened Snow”
This is not an hour for reciting the chapters thrilling, tragic, [or] pathetic of the calamity in the Cascades. The reality of the facts, the pain of suspense, the throbbing of hearts can never be expressed in words. The story is written in the torn mountain, in the reddened snow.
—Reverend W. E. Randall,
from a sermon delivered at
the First Baptist Church of Everett
Tuesday, March 1, 1910
Scenic Hot Springs
Morning
James H. O’Neill first received word of the Wellington snowslide about six hours after it happened. The superintendent had risen early, intending to check on the rotary before organizing a relief party to Wellington. He had slept well. Although some people at Scenic later claimed to have heard the crash of distant thunder overnight, O’Neill had been too deeply asleep to be roused by anything. (“I would not have heard a cannon that night,” he would later testify.) But when he and Dowling saw J. J. Mackey approaching them at about 8:00 A.M., looking haggard and grim from his overnight rush down the mountain from Wellington, O’Neill must have known instantly that the traveling engineer was not bringing good news.
The three men stood in the gray, drizzling rain as Mackey explained just how bad it was.
Whatever anguish O’Neill felt at that moment—whatever sorrow or guilt or dread of what was to follow—he pushed it instantly aside. Galvanized by the need for immediate action, he gathered his officers and set to work. The first task, he realized, would have to be rounding up as many men as possible to assist in the rescue. There were scores of men now at Scenic, and many had already been preparing to hike up the mountain to bring food and supplies to the stranded trains. This force would have to be augmented, supplied with extra tools and medical supplies, and sent out as quickly as possible.
Word would also have to be sent to the outside world, but with no working telegraph at Scenic it would have to be done on foot. Only O’Neill himself could take on this latter duty. Only he, as superintendent, had access to the telegraph codebook required for secure communication with headquarters in St. Paul. Only he had the authority to orchestrate the larger rescue effort that would be required—the gathering of medical supplies, the requisitioning of doctors, nurses, and extra workmen, the organization of special relief trains from Everett and Seattle. All of this would require the superintendent’s presence at the telegraph key.
So O’Neill put master mechanic Dowling, the second-ranking GN officer present, in charge of the rescue party. Dowling and Mackey would hastily organize their forces and then head up the mountain to Wellington, taking with them J. L. Godby the attendant from the hotel’s hot springs bath, who was the closest thing to a nurse available at Scenic. While this effort was being mobilized, O’Neill himself would hike west down the right-of-way to the first operational telegraph he could find. Assuming the tracks up from the coast were still remotely passable, he figured he should be able to get a well-supplied relief train to within hiking distance of Wellington by nightfall.
O’Neill collected as much additional information as he could from Mackey and set out along the buried tracks toward Skykomish. He may or may not have traveled alone, but the journey would not have been a simple one in either case. Although Scenic marked the western end of the truly extreme mountain terrain, the stretch of track from Scenic to Skykomish was still rugged and slide-prone, and it now had three feet of new wet snow on the tracks. And for a man like O’Neill, whose every instinct drew him toward the site of any trouble, it must have been agonizing to head west, away from the catastrophe for which he bore primary responsibility.
At about 11:00 A.M. he reached Nippon, a small station about nine miles east of Skykomish. Here the communication wires were still operational, so he stepped into the small telegraph office, took off his sopping coat, and sat down to compose what must have been the most difficult telegram of his career:
MARCH 1, 1910
AT 4:00 A.M. [SIC] LARGE SNOW SLIDE EXTENDING ONE-HALF MILE IN LENGTH CAME DOWN AT WELLINGTON, EXTENDING FROM SNOW SHED NO. 2 WEST OF WELLINGTON TO EAST PASSING TRACK SWITCH, TAKING DOWN WATER TANK, NO. 25 AND 27’S TRAIN, CAR A-16, FOUR MOTORS, MOTOR SHED, ROTARY X-807, ENGINES 702, 1032, AND 1418. ALL PASSENGERS NO. 25’S TRAIN MORE OR LESS INJURED. CANNOT SAY TO WHAT EXTENT UNTIL [WE] CAN GET THEM OUT.
This message, which was translated into code and then forwarded to Great Northern officials throughout the Northwest and eventually countrywide, was as straightforward and matter-of-fact as a telegram could be. But anyone reading it would have instantly recognized its import. A huge avalanche had knocked two packed railroad trains off the side of a mountain into a canyon below. Nothing like it had ever happened in eighty years of American railroading. And the death toll, O’Neill’s cautious assessment notwithstanding, was likely to be of historic proportions. Though the superintendent could not know it at the time, the incident he’d just reported was by far the deadliest avalanche in American history. He would be dealing with its consequences for many years to come.
Q: Was the track itself torn away?
A: That could not be determined. … The track was not visible at any place west of the station.
Q: Was there any part of the two trains left on the track?
A: Not a particle of either train.
—J.J. Mackey
Wellington
Tuesday Afternoon
When Dowling, Mackey, and a force of forty-odd men from Scenic finally reached the avalanche site at about three that afternoon, the small baggage room off the Wellington depot was already filling up with corpses. The rescuers initially on the scene had been pulling bodies out of the wreckage for over twelve hours, and more were being found every hour. The scene was gruesome. “The bodies that are to be taken out are fearfully distorted and mangled,” one observer wrote. “The heads of some are smashed and limbs are torn in two and the bowels of some are torn out.” Even for men as inured to carnage as these railroaders, the work was all but unendurable. According to engineer Edward Sweeney, when rescuers unearthed a half dozen crushed bodies pinned down by a fallen tree, one of the stricken shovelers approached the engineer and asked if he had authority to supply the men with whiskey to steady their nerves. “I don’t have any particular authority,” Sweeney replied, “but I’ll get you some whiskey.”
Appalling as it was on its face, the recovery work was even more daunting because of the constant danger of another slide. Although much of the high-lying snow on Windy Mountain had come down the previous night, there was still enough in place to pose a significant threat to the men crawling over the avalanche site, especially given the weather conditions. Rain continued falling, adding more weight to the snowpack.
Dowling and Mackey immediately had their men unpack their tools and fan out over the avalanche run-out zone, relieving some of those who had been digging all night and all day. The situation was still urgent. Scores of people remained unaccounted for—their colleagues Joe Pettit, Earl Longcoy, and trainmaster Blackburn among them—and while it was unlikely that any of them were still alive, it was not inconceivable. If a single car had come through the slide even partially intact, it could be harboring any number of survivors deep beneath the snow, where the oxygen supply would be diminishing by the minute. Only thirteen hours had passed since the slide, and under extraordinary circumstances avalanche victims can survive far longer than that.*
As Dowling and Mackey looked down over the expanse of the debris field, however, they must have realized that finding a submerged intact car—even if one existed—would be a desperately difficult task. Although darkness had veiled the scene from him the night before, Mackey could now appreciate the sheer vastness of the area over which the two trains had been scattered. The heavy engines had not been carried far down the slope, but the remains of the lighter wooden cars were strewn widely over acres and acres of precipitous terrain. The worst damage seemed to have been caused by the electric locomotives, which had been standing on the track nearest the mountainside. Hit first by the wall of snow and debris, these motors—the largest railroad locomotives in the world at the time—had apparently toppled in succession onto the Seattle Express on Passing Track 1 and then the Fast Mail on Passing Track 2, crushing both beneath them. In fact, Mackey and Dowling soon ascertained that the reason so many of the survivors came from the Winnipeg was that it was standing in the clear of the electrics.
Most of the other cars, though, had been quite literally smashed to bits (“as if an elephant had stepped on a cigar box” one witness reported). And as the men from Scenic began chopping away at the scattered bits of cars—the sound of their hatchets, axes, and shovels echoing down the valley—they began to realize that even the rescue effort was dangerous. The snow was littered with jagged pipes, shards of broken glass, and other potentially hazardous debris. Any opening hacked into the side of a car, moreover, would instantly suck snow, lumber, and sometimes even the rescuers themselves into the wreckage. At times they would find bodies inside and pull them out as if “taking them from a river.” More often, the only thing they found was trash—“a car lamp, a sack of mail, a whisk broom, a chunk of coal, a woman’s shoe, a drummer’s shirt samples,” and so on. One rescuer even found a baby carriage on its side near the bottom of the ravine—probably that of Francis Starrett, the infant who had smothered in the wreckage of the Winnipeg. The carriage would still be there days later, as if no one at Wellington could muster the strength of will to move it.
Francis Starrett’s mother, meanwhile, was being cared for with two dozen other survivors at the enginemen’s bunkhouse. When J. L. Godby arrived there at midafternoon, the Sherlocks and Mrs. Miles had already seen to the immediate needs of nearly everyone. One man had reportedly died from the effects of exposure after being placed in the improvised hospital, but the other patients had been more or less stabilized. Some—such as passengers R. M. Laville and Ray Forsyth—had suffered only minor injuries and were already up and around; others—Lucius Anderson, Ira Clary, Homer Purcell—needed mostly bandaging and rest. Snow King William Harrington had a fairly serious head injury, Ross Phillips was badly burned, and Henry White was battered and heavily bruised around the chest. All of these men sat or lay around the stuffy bunkhouse in various states of disorientation and shock.
The ever-conscientious A. B. Hensel, despite suffering from several cracked ribs, a broken arm, and a broken collarbone, wanted to make sure that all of the registered mail in the trains would be secured once it was found. He had been told the fate of his colleagues and felt duty-bound to report the news to the chief mail clerk in Spokane. Ignoring pleas to rest, he insisted on dictating a telegram to one of the hospital volunteers. “I am the only mail clerk to escape alive,” it read. “Though badly injured, I am confident of recovery. Alfred B. Hensel.” Relayed by foot to the closest working telegraph on the line, this wire turned out to be the first message from Wellington itself to reach the outside world.
