The white cascade, p.21
The White Cascade, page 21
In the woman’s ward next door, Basil Sherlock was doing his best to assist his wife, Alathea, and Mrs. Miles with the nursing. The toddler Varden Gray, probably the most seriously injured patient, was occupying much of the women’s time, especially after the child showed signs of pneumonia. So Sherlock was tending to some of the less grave cases, bringing them hot whiskey slings “to thaw them out from the inside.” Anna Gray and Mrs. May (Ida Starrett’s mother, who had survived relatively unscathed) smelled the whiskey in the concoction and at first refused to take it, but Sherlock insisted. “[I told them] we were not going to have them coming down with pneumonia and peppering everyone in the hospital,” he explained. In the end, the two women relented. “They took their medicine,” Sherlock reported, “like a good sport.”
Such bullying tactics had no effect on Ida Starrett. Having spent so much time under the snow, she was now severely hypothermic. “I would say she was two-thirds frozen,” Sherlock remembered. “I did not take her pulse, but I did put my ear over her heart, which was beating, but it seemed real slow. She was numb all over.” The telegrapher and some of the patients—even a few with broken bones—began warming blankets by the stove and wrapping them around her, but she was slow to revive. Still not fully aware that two of her children were dead and that her father was missing, she lay silent and stone-faced in her bunk, clearly in deep shock.
Ida’s surviving son, Raymond, his bruised cheek swollen and his cut forehead impressively bandaged, watched her in silence. Finally, feeling desperate, he did whatever he could think of to bring her out of her catalepsy. “I even tried to make her cry,” he later admitted. But though he pleaded with her, pulled at her arm, and pinched her, nothing he did could bring her around. The boy could only sit helplessly by her side, more unsettled by her impassivity than by any other part of his ordeal.
AVALANCHE BURIES SPOKANE TRAIN
30 PASSENGERS MAY BE DEAD
______________
—Everett Daily Herald,
banner headline,
March 1, 1910
Seattle
Tuesday Afternoon Through Wednesday
News of the disaster reached the general public sometime later that afternoon. Although the GN would doubtless have preferred to suppress the story until more particulars could be learned, they’d decided to release an announcement shortly after receiving O’Neill’s telegram, knowing that the story would soon get out in any case: John Wentzel, the only professed witness to the actual slide, had stumbled into Skykomish that morning, having walked the entire eighteen miles from Wellington. ‘All wiped out!” he cried before collapsing in exhaustion. It was several hours before anyone could get a coherent story from the man, but they gleaned enough to comprehend the extent of the tragedy. And once Skykomish knew of what would soon be called the Horror at Wellington, it could only be a matter of hours before the rest of the world knew of it too.
The press had been aware for several days that there were GN trains stranded in the mountains, but had known few details. Wary of bad publicity, the Great Northern had been reluctant to share much information, and the resulting newspaper stories had necessarily been vague. With the emergence of Merritt, Rogers, and the other hikers, however, the papers finally had some specifics to work with. The Seattle Times, after interviewing George Loveberry upon his arrival in town, had printed an article about the situation on Monday morning, under lurid headlines: “TRAVELERS FACE HUNGER AND DEATH” and “60 PASSENGERS FACE BURIAL IN AVALANCHE.” There was also specific mention of the stranded trains in Monday’s edition of the Everett Daily Herald and several other newspapers.
But when word of the actual avalanche arrived on Tuesday—making such sensationalized scaremongering look more like prophecy—the papers instantly threw themselves into a frenzy. Reporters and photographers, equipped with snowshoes and other climbing equipment, were immediately mobilized and sent out on the road toward Stevens Pass. They were apparently given instructions to start generating copy as soon as possible, for as early as Tuesday evening several of the local dailies already had skeletal accounts of the avalanche on their front pages. And by dawn on Wednesday, the story had made it into papers nationwide.
As the news broke, help of all kinds was hastily dispatched to the mountains. Over the next few days, three different special trains were sent out from Everett and Seattle, transporting scores of doctors, nurses, volunteer rescuers, friends and relatives of victims, and anyone else the Great Northern could muster (including some homeless men from the Seattle city jail) to aid in the rescue and track-clearing efforts. Laden with food, medical supplies, tools, and—in one case—a supply of coffins, the trains were able to travel only as far as Scenic (on the very first day, only as far as Nippon). From there, everything had to be packed in on foot, each man carrying as big a load as he could handle.
By the evening of March 1, dozens of rescuers were making the climb up the steep slope to Windy Point. The rain had all but stopped by now, but the wind at higher elevations was still blowing fiercely, making the ascent particularly treacherous. Andy Pascoe, a GN railroader who had joined a relief train at Skykomish, accompanied one of the doctors up to Wellington on that first night. Dr. E. C. Gleason carried a coal-oil lantern to light the way as Pascoe, a man of some size, followed behind with a shovel, a bundle of splints, seventy-five pounds of food, and the doctor’s bag on his back. Above were dozens of other rescuers, their lanterns creating a series of ghostly white halos that meandered shakily up the mountain, throwing erratic shadows on the snow.
Stopping to rest, Pascoe noticed that each lantern seemed to wink out once it reached the top of the slope. He couldn’t figure out the reason—until he and the doctor reached the same point, where a strong gust barreling up from the canyon nearly blasted them off their feet. The flame in their own lantern blew out, and in the confusion of trying to relight it in the total darkness, the two men nearly stepped off a precipice above a several-hundred-foot drop.
The first doctor reached the scene almost exactly twenty-four hours after the avalanche. A. W. Stockwell of Monroe arrived at about two A.M. on Wednesday, accompanied by two professional nurses, Leonora Todhunter and Annabelle Lee, who had donned men’s clothing and made the hike up the mountain among the earliest rescuers. What the three medical professionals found at the crowded bunkhouse was a surprisingly shipshape hospital. Mrs. Sherlock in particular (she would later be extolled in the press as the “Florence Nightingale of the Cascades”) had provided excellent first aid, and by the time the other doctors and surgeons arrived at midmorning, Stockwell realized that he had more medical personnel than he really needed. By the end of the day, he was able to make one of the few positive announcements to come out of those mountains—namely, that all of the injured were now out of danger and would probably recover. Although the more seriously hurt patients could not be moved until the rail line was cleared, they would receive all the care they needed right there at Wellington.
Finally, at about 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday afternoon, James H. O’Neill arrived on the scene. Snowshoeing up the trail from Scenic with a team of undertakers from Butterworth and Sons of Seattle, O’Neill had been astonished at the condition of the right-of-way. So many avalanches had occurred since his last trip down the mountain that the entire four-mile stretch from Windy Point to Wellington was now virtually one continuous slide. And what the superintendent saw once he reached the main avalanche site was sobering.
O’Neill stopped and spent some minutes taking in the scene before him. A thousand feet above the right-of-way, a sharply defined bank of snow ran in almost a straight horizontal across the face of Windy Mountain. This was clearly the line at which the ten-acre slab of snow had broken away. That entire slab had then rumbled downhill, carrying away almost everything on the mountainside. Only a bleak, meager-looking assortment of bent and broken tree trunks remained on the slope above. All the rest—the snow, the rocks, most of the trees, and the underbrush—now lay packed in the canyon below. As hard as limestone in places, the mixture entombed two entire trains, a half dozen engines, a rotary snowplow, several small buildings, and the bodies of roughly a hundred people.
As awful as it may have sounded in Mackey’s report, the scene was far worse witnessed firsthand. O’Neill knew that James J. Hill in St. Paul would be anxiously awaiting his assessment of the situation. But how long it would take to recover all that was lost—let alone to repair and reopen the rail line—was something the superintendent could hardly even guess.
March 3rd, 1910
Following from Supt O’Neill at 2:38 P.M.: “Have recovered 29 bodies since accident, 24 injured being cared for here. All equipment total loss except trucks. Have force of sixty men searching but account so much snow and cars being buried it is slow work. Figure have 25 to 30 bodies yet to recover. Weather very bad and we are having some trouble keeping men.”
W. C. Watrous,
telegram to L. W. Hill et al.
The First Week of March 1910
Wellington
Over the next several days, dozens more victims were located, removed from the wreckage, and identified, one by one. By Thursday, March 3, the body of R. H. Bethel (a.k.a. “Colonel Cody”) had been found, as had that of James McNeny, the friend whom John Rogers could not persuade to hike out with him on Monday. The Lemmans were discovered side by side, their sixteen-year-old daughter now left an orphan with her grandparents in Ritzville. And Nellie Sharp, “the Wild West Girl,” was found carrying a diamond ring and $100 in cash—presumably the money she would have lived on while researching her article for McClure’s.
Many friends and relatives of victims soon began arriving on the scene. Among the first was Edward Boles, who came back from Scenic to search for the brother he’d left behind. A minister from Bellingham arrived on a mission to find the Reverend J. M. Thomson. From Leavenworth (via Seattle and Scenic) came a Miss Katherine Fisher, a “more than ordinarily pretty” woman who had braved the ascent in order to claim the body of her fiancé, a fireman named Earl Bennington.
One associate of Charles Eltinge, T. R. Garrison, had been forced to defy repeated discouragements from railway officials in order to reach the site. After several days of difficult travel—once he even had to climb over two stalled freight trains, “engines and all”—he finally reached Wellington and described the scene: “There was not a sign of anything but a tremendous mass of snow, with here and there a tree trunk sticking out or perhaps a bit of tangled brush. … On crawling down the bank, however, I soon saw evidences of the horror beneath. Here were the irons of the passenger coach twisted around the trunk of a tree like a thread of silk. I stumbled against a piece of polished wood with an iron rod piercing it as clean as a knife.” Garrison spent the rest of the day looking for Eltinge, but with no success. Continuing his search the next morning, he saw some men climbing out of the canyon with several bodies on stretchers. He stopped them and lifted the sheet from the first one; it was Eltinge himself staring back at him, with only “a dull bruise on his forehead to show the cause of death.”
Two sons of Mrs. Covington, Luther and Frank, appeared on Thursday, hoping somehow to find their missing mother still alive. Luther, a prominent Washington clergyman, had traveled with his brother from Seattle to Scenic on Wednesday evening. Hiking up to Wellington the next day, they hurried first to the bunkhouse hospital, but any dim hopes they might have had about their mother’s survival were soon dashed. The only older woman in the grim, silent ladies’ ward was Mrs. May.
The brothers then moved on to the depot’s baggage room and tool-shed, where seven undertakers were already at work, embalming the bodies and preparing them for evacuation. With handkerchiefs held to their noses, the two men paced up and down the long line of bodies, but none even resembled their mother. This, of course, was hardly a relief, since it meant that she could only be somewhere down in the ravine. Bracing themselves, they descended into the debris field, where there were now 150 people crawling over the wreckage. But although they searched all that day, they could find no trace of her.
Frustrated and exhausted, overwhelmed by the sheer ghastliness of the scene and finding no place to sleep at Wellington, they returned to Scenic that night—only to be told that their mother had been discovered in the wreckage of the Winnipeg shortly after their departure. It would have been her fifty-first wedding anniversary. “My heart is well-nigh broken,” their sister Mrs. George P. Anderson wrote to another sister when she heard. “We cannot as yet realize or understand how or why it should happen to one who has lived so noble and glorious a life.”
Most aggrieved was Melmoth Covington Sr., who had held out hope for his wife’s rescue to the very end. “It has come hardest on poor Father,” Mrs. Anderson continued. “The worst pang of intense pain [is] past, yet he will always miss her so intensely; it is very, very sad.”
For other families, however, the suspense was to go on much longer. Among those still missing by the end of the week were George Davis, Ned Topping, and William May. Some of these men may have been among the unidentified bodies already lined up in the baggage room. Since almost all of the victims had been dressed in nothing but night-clothes, with no documentation on their persons, they had to be identified by appearance alone—a particularly difficult task in cases where mutilation was extreme. Eventually, the unclaimed bodies became too numerous for the shed and had to be stored in the station building, where they were lined up so tightly that, according to one report, “survivors, diggers, and newspapermen have accidentally stepped on a discolored hand or foot in getting in and out of the telegraph office.”
Through it all, superintendent O’Neill went on without relief, stoic but clearly devastated. He was receiving accolades from many on the site for his perseverance and determination. King County coroner James C. Snyder, who had come up to Wellington on Thursday with a number of detectives and postal officials, had returned to Seattle the next day with all kinds of praise for the man in charge. “Superintendent O’Neill has handled the railroad end of the affair in a masterly manner,” Snyder said to reporters. “No one could have done more than he did, and I never saw a man show such generalship. … He seems to have an utter disregard for his own personal safety or health.”
No matter how solacing in theory, these encomiums probably did little to ease O’Neill’s torment. Especially hard for him had been the discovery of his business car at 1:00 P.M. on Friday. The A-16 had barely been budged from the tracks by the avalanche. Instead, the slide had sliced off the top of the car and crammed it full of snow and debris. Suffocated inside were steward Lewis Walker, stenographer Earl Longcoy, and trainmaster Arthur Blackburn, found “in an attitude as if he had been sleeping peacefully, his face in his hands.” These had been O’Neill’s friends, men he worked with every day. Blackburn had been a guest at his wedding. When at home with Berenice, O’Neill sat in the fine Morris chair the trainmaster had given them as a gift.
Then the body of conductor Joseph Pettit turned up. This was another difficult death for O’Neill, and not just because Pettit was a friend. The conductor had left a widow and five children back in Everett. In an age before widespread life insurance, they would likely be left with no means of support whatever.
“Last night, when he dropped to rest on the floor, he had aged years,” one reporter wrote of the superintendent on March 4. “His rather boyish face was scarred with lines that will never leave.”
Adding to O’Neill’s woes was the fact that the rescue effort itself was plagued by difficulties and unpleasantness. In the first few days after the avalanche, several of the foreign track workers were caught in possession of clothing from the wreck. Early reports that the men had actually been looting corpses later proved false, but the rumors caused such a xenophobic uproar that O’Neill finally had to send all foreigners from the avalanche site to work elsewhere on the mountain. At least one temporary laborer, a man who gave his name as Robert Roberts, actually had to be arrested—for stealing a gold watch that belonged to victim Solomon Cohen.
Soon the weather, too, was creating problems again. After several days of rain that had done much to melt away the snow covering the wreckage (for a time, the water draining through the debris field had created bloody trails that rescuers could follow backward to their sources), another blizzard had set in on Friday night, forcing a halt to all rescue activity for nearly a full day. Still other crises arose. Three telegraphers were reportedly stranded at the small station at Berne without food. An unidentified body had been seen in a creek somewhere on the east slope. A watchman at Drury had been killed when an avalanche crushed the small cabin in which he had taken refuge.
And always the threat of another slide hung over the rescuers. On the night of March 3, the rain and warm temperatures caused the snow on the roof of the Bailets Hotel to slide off with a loud din, bringing everyone in town out of their beds. Bailets was so anxious about the possibility of a second slide that he took his family to sleep in one of the outfit cars on the spur tracks east of town. In the succeeding days, many workers began walking through the tunnel every night to sleep at Cascade Tunnel Station on the other side. Even O’Neill hiked the three dark miles every night, alone with whatever grim thoughts he might have been thinking.
The press, meanwhile, was churning out as much prose as possible about what was now one of the biggest disaster stories in Pacific Northwest history. The first actual journalist didn’t reach Wellington until the evening of March 2, but the lack of on-site reporting hadn’t prevented some papers from concocting stories of their own imagining, and the wilder the better. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had been especially creative. According to the March 3 edition, for instance, engineer Charles Andrews had been sleeping on one of the trains on the night of the slide but, “moved by a power which appeared to Andrews to come from a source other than the physical,” he had arisen and gotten off minutes before the train was hit—a story that Andrews later vehemently denied. Over the next few days, the Post-Intelligencer and other papers printed more absurdities: that packs of mountain lions and wolves were patrolling the disaster site; that a burbling baby had survived the slide unharmed while both of its parents had perished; that one stranded train crew was forced to kill and eat a cat; and—perhaps most egregious of all—that a buried coach was uncovered by rescuers several days after the slide with ten people still alive inside (a patently implausible story that was nonetheless picked up by newspapers as far away as France).
