The white cascade, p.23
The White Cascade, page 23
It was Tegtmeier who, late on March 10, heard the approach of the first engine to reach Wellington after the avalanche. After spending days blasting through the enormous slide at Berne, J. M. Gruber’s convoy of rotaries and relief train had finally reached Cascade Tunnel Station that morning and was now coming through the tunnel. Tegtmeier, whose trained ear had been listening for this very thing, reportedly grabbed some crutches and pushed aside a frightened nurse in his rush to get outside. The engineer’s eagerness, though, was probably shared by everyone at Wellington. The arrival of Gruber’s train, after all, meant that the town was once again connected to the outside world—after sixteen full days of total isolation.
General manager Gruber, looking as weather-beaten as any of his laborers, hopped off the rotary and headed straight for the bunkhouse hospital. He immediately offered to make up a special train with his own private car to carry the injured eastward to Spokane, where they could be properly hospitalized. Of the nine people remaining at the bunkhouse, though, only Hensel wanted to go to Spokane; the rest, hoping to get to the coast, debated over whether they should wait for the west slope to be cleared, so that they might be taken down to Everett and Seattle directly. Their eagerness to get off the mountain, however, carried the day. Despite the fact that many of them—particularly the Starretts—dreaded the idea of getting back on any train, all nine decided to go east.
Gruber had the special backed up to the bunkhouse. Anna Gray and Mrs. May were able to walk onto the train without assistance, but the other seven were carried on. (Hensel would later remember being lifted through the car window on a stretcher.) Then everyone at Wellington stopped work to see the injured on their way, waving and shouting farewells as the train pulled eastward out of the bruised and battered town.
It was two days later, at 7:00 A.M. on Saturday, March 12, just as the sun was rising over the Cascade peaks, that the rotaries on the western slope finally broke through the last remaining feet of blockage and met on the flanks of Windy Mountain. Word was quickly wired out to all Great Northern stations and the world: “The siege of snows is ended.” After nearly three weeks of punishing labor, the Cascade Division was once again open for business. Time, which had come to a dead stop at Stevens Pass sometime on the morning of February 23, was finally moving once again.
James J. Hill, following the situation from St. Paul, was profoundly relieved. “You have all done well,” he cabled to Gruber when the job was nearing completion. “When you get through, the Company should not forget the men who have worked so constantly and so long. I wish you would thank them for me.” Hill being Hill, he also made sure that no one rested on any laurels: “[I] think it important,” he added, “to get the mail train on a regular run as early as you can without delaying other work.”
Saturday’s victory over the snows unfortunately proved to be shortlived. A few trains did make it successfully over the hump on that day (crowded, according to one report, with an unusually high number of rubbernecking passengers), but the snow-covered Cascade slopes were still not entirely quiet. Sometime after midnight early Sunday morning, a westbound Oriental Limited train ran into some heavy snow that had sloughed onto the tracks near Windy Point. One or two of the cars derailed slightly, so the train was stopped, the wheels were rerailed, and then the entire train was pulled back to the safety of a nearby snowshed to wait for a rotary to clear the heavy snow ahead.
Just as the plow was about to eat through the last of the obstruction, however, a large avalanche came screaming down the slope above it. Twenty gangmen working ahead of the rotary saw it coming and ran for their lives, but the plow itself could not be reversed in time. Hit broadside by the charging mass of snow and debris, the plow, its pusher engine, and five flatcars of coal were sent hurtling five hundred feet down the mountain, smashing one steel bridge and two spans of another. Almost the entire plow crew had been able to escape in time, but one engineer and one Italian laborer were caught by the edge of the slide and sucked into the plunging tumult. The engineer lived, but the laborer was lost, not to be found for many weeks.
For O’Neill, this must have seemed like the reprise of a nightmare—another train full of passengers trapped on the mountain amid faltering snowfields. Fearing any replay of the recent debacle, the superintendent hurriedly conferred with Gruber and Brown, and they decided to immediately evacuate all passengers and send the train itself back to Spokane. The rattled travelers were taken to the top of the much-used slope of Old Glory (now being called “Dead Man’s Slide” by the newspapers) and gently guided down to Scenic.
This latest slide incident, though unsettling, turned out to be a minor setback. By Tuesday, March 15, the line had been cleared again and normal traffic could resume. To the relief of everyone in the division, the stranding of the Oriental Limited would turn out to be the last major problem of the snow season on the Stevens Pass line.
On that same day—March 15—James H. O’Neill was finally able to leave the mountain and return home to Everett. Berenice, who had been awaiting his return for over three weeks, would be there to meet him with baby Peggy in her arms, feeling as relieved as a woman could possibly be. But although the immediate crisis was now past, O’Neill’s own ordeal was hardly over. His work on the mountain might have been finished (even the majority of the mail had been recovered by now), but he would soon be faced with tasks that were in some ways even more difficult. For one, he would have to personally find Earl Longcoy’s mother and sister and inform them of the young man’s death. He would also have to pay his respects to the widow of Lewis Walker, his steward on the A-16. Hardest of all, he would have to explain to them—and later to the world at large—why and how the whole terrible incident had happened in the first place.
14
Inquest
That thousands of tons of snow, rock, and mud came down is quite evident; that the timber was all destroyed by fire; that many lives were lost, caught like a rat in a trap, is equally true. But what does it matter if all the officials have to do is to say, “Well, it is the will of Divine Providence,” and the county authorities accept that as a sufficient explanation? Would it not be proper at this time to suggest that there are some very good reasons why these accidents occurred other than the will of God?
—Seattle Union Record
March 1910
Seattle
The initial reaction of the public to the tragedy at Wellington, as might be expected, had been highly sympathetic to all involved. Passengers, rescuers, and train crews had all been showered with the kind of indiscriminate praise that victims of major disasters often receive. Paeans to the energy and courage of Jim O’Neill were particularly numerous, culminating in an adoring profile by J. J. Underwood in the March 6 Seattle Times under the headline “O’NEILL HAILED NOW AS KING OF SNOW FIGHTERS.” The piece was so adulatory in tone—“He always is cool, deliberate, calculating, methodical, but on the alert, grasping difficult situations like a flash”—that its author may in truth have been trying to flatter the superintendent in order to get greater access to the avalanche site.
As the rescue effort wore on, however, a current of reproach began to surface in much of the press coverage. The stories being told by survivors John Rogers, Henry White, and Edward Boles started raising questions about whether the crisis had really been handled as wisely or as conscientiously as it could have been. Specifically, criticism began to focus on the refusal of O’Neill and trainmaster Blackburn to grant the passengers’ requests to move the trains back from their precarious position on the mountainside. According to Boles, for instance, the trains at Wellington had been left in “what proved to be the most dangerous position possible to find.”
Once the front of unqualified support had thus been breached, other criticisms began to emerge. On March 5 a story appeared in the Seattle Star censuring the Great Northern for allowing forest fires to burn away the tree cover on the slopes around Wellington. Under the execrable headline “DOLLAR-A-DAY JAP COULD HAVE PREVENTED SLIDE,” the story claimed that the GN had failed even to try to stop a fire that had raged the previous summer—a blaze that, if addressed early enough, could have been extinguished by a small force of laborers. Although the railroad later claimed that the forest cover had burned off not the previous summer but rather many years earlier, the Star’s basic point was harder to contradict: “Had the slope been wooded, as it was before the fire, the slide could never have occurred, as the trees would have held the snow and would not have allowed it to start.”
The same day’s Seattle Argus carried a similarly unsympathetic piece called “The Trouble with the GN,” blaming the railroad for not building enough snowsheds on the line between Scenic and Wellington. Two years earlier, the writer had watched as a snowslide came dangerously close to hitting a moving passenger train on the high line above the Scenic hotel. In the author’s opinion, the incident should have been a clear warning of the potential danger there and elsewhere on that stretch of track. “[I] could not help wondering why a more elaborate system of snowsheds had not been provided. Even to an inexperienced eye, it was obvious that they were necessary.”
But it was the labor issue that was proving to be most troublesome for the Great Northern. A letter to the editor of the Seattle Star—given prominent display in the March 5 edition—complained about the railroad’s ingrained practice of hiring the cheapest labor it could find. Here again, the headline was designed for maximum provocation: “DID PENNY SQUEEZING COST 100 LIVES AT WELLINGTON?” And the body of the piece was overtly incendiary: “The Great Northern railroad will never hire able men for its mountains or any of its work,” letter writer W. M. Wilson maintained. “They are the ones that imported Japanese labor because it was cheaper. They could get them for $1.25 a day. When this trouble came, they brought Italians up there to fight the snow. What do the Italians know about snow anyway? Why did they send Italians? Only because they were cheaper.”
The Great Northern was allegedly even skimping on the job of recovering the dead. Another letter published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review —this one from George W. Towslee—complained that the railroad was devoting the bulk of its available manpower to the task of opening up the rail line, and that even those assigned to search the avalanche site were primarily interested in finding lost baggage and express materials. “Relatives and friends of the dead men were obliged to hire men to dig among the wreckage,” Towslee wrote. “I could not afford to hire anyone to dig for my brother’s body and had to wait until the very last. As a result, it was 10 days before he was taken out.”
For its part, the union of the still-striking switchmen was doing everything possible to encourage such expressions of anti-railroad sentiment. Displaying its own brand of cynical disrespect for the victims, the union’s Press Committee was blatantly using the tragedy to score points against GN management, focusing on the issue of the coal shortage. “It was positively known for weeks prior to the Wellington disaster that great danger was imminent in the mountain region, on account of the scarcity of coal,” the committee maintained in the March 12 Seattle Union Record. “Officials were warned of the facts, and contrary to all common sense and reason they would not heed the warning. At different times and for several days in succession, the rotaries, or snow machines, were absolutely useless, because they had no coal on the engines to run them.”
The Press Committee went on to attribute this problem directly to the GN’s refusal to settle the switchmen’s strike: “If the Great Northern had the men who went on strike November 30th doing the switching, the accident, or at least the lives of the people, would not have been sacrificed to greed.” Lest anyone be left in doubt about who exactly was responsible for the tragedy, the committee added, “Mr. Hill thought he was going to crush the manhood out of a few thousand switchmen by starvation, but he has failed utterly, and instead has slaughtered innumerable innocent lives.”
As self-serving as these accusations may seem, they were not entirely without validity. The missed delivery of coal from Leavenworth in the days before the storm suggests that the Great Northern may indeed have been operating at less than peak efficiency during the strike. Accurate or not, the accusations of the switchmen must have been especially galling to Hill. The Empire Builder was on the verge of publishing his magnum opus—Highways of Progress, a distillation of his half century of experience in business and economic development—and he was not about to let a few two-bit labor agitators accuse him of something close to manslaughter. His philosophy of efficient business practices (which John F. Stevens was later to describe as “penny-wise, pound-wise”) could not be held responsible for what was clearly an uncontrollable natural event. The whole notion that labor issues had anything at all to do with the disaster, therefore, was to be pointedly ignored by everyone in the company.
Despite the railroad’s attempts to write off the switchmen’s muckraking efforts, the union did succeed in rousing the ire of the general public. Before long, the uproar became so intense that coroner James C. Snyder saw no alternative but to hold a formal inquest into the Wellington matter, in order to determine officially whether any human fault had played a role in the tragedy. It goes without saying that Hill and the rest of the Great Northern management were not pleased.
Before any inquest could be held, however, Snyder wanted all of the missing persons accounted for, and this was going to take some time. Recovery efforts at Wellington were moving slowly, and even many of the bodies that had been found were not yet successfully identified. About ten days after the avalanche, Ned Topping’s father and brother finally arrived in Seattle from Ohio, delayed by the traffic mayhem that had not totally subsided. William V B. Topping and his son Roger proceeded immediately to Butterworth and Sons to claim Ned’s body, but when the attendant in the morgue pulled back a shroud covering the badly mutilated corpse, neither father nor brother could identify him. Another corpse—also mutilated and of approximately the same height and weight—had been found nearby in the wreckage of the Winnipeg, and the Toppings wondered whether this might actually be Ned. Overcome by uncertainty, the old man and his surviving son could only stand by helplessly while Lucius Anderson, the Winnipeg’s porter, was called in to help. Anderson made the definitive IDs: One corpse he recognized as Ned’s and the other was that of Bert Matthews, who had been sleeping in an adjacent berth. Having no choice but to accept the porter’s judgment, the Toppings claimed the body and made arrangements to carry it back to Ohio to bury alongside Ned’s wife and daughter.
Another case of mistaken identity involved Joseph Benier, a timber cruiser who was supposed to have been a passenger on the Seattle Express. He showed up at Butterworth and Sons a few days later and told undertaker F. R. Lewis that there had been some slight confusion. “My friends say that you have me downstairs dead,” Benier allegedly remarked. “I want to say that I am the livest man in town.” Despite being positively identified as one of the corpses by more than twenty friends and coworkers, Benier had actually been incommunicado in the woods during the storm and had missed his scheduled return train. Now back in Seattle, he wanted to set the record straight. So the overworked undertaker obliged, quietly removing the tag on the body in question and replacing it with one that read: “No. 83, unknown.”
Perhaps the single most farcical ordeal was that suffered posthumously by the rancher John Brockman. After word spread that Brockman’s estate was worth upwards of $60,000 (a prodigious sum in 1910 dollars), several fake relatives showed up to claim the rancher’s body. Apparently none could provide definitive proof of kinship until the arrival of Brockman’s actual brother (who, as a result of some parental whim, bore a name identical to that of his sibling). This second John Brockman proceeded to inform the undertakers that the body they had labeled as his brother was actually someone else. The real Brockman was eventually found (his body had been misidentified as that of J. Liberti, an Italian laborer) and the matter was finally settled, but not before notarized affidavits from several Washington towns had been gathered to close any possible legal loopholes.
By now, many of the other victims were being laid to rest in the places they had come from. Nellie Sharp was buried by her parents in Bloomington, Indiana. In Spokane, George Davis’s widow saw her husband and three-year-old Thelma interred with all due ceremony by the Iroquois tribe of which he was a member. The bodies of all five Becks, meanwhile, were laid into a single grave in Livermore, California, near the home they were returning to after two years in Washington. And in Everett, where twelve hundred people attended a memorial service for the victims at the Everett Theater on Sunday, March 13, Mrs. Joseph Pettit, surrounded by her five children, saw her husband buried in the Evergreen Cemetery at the southern end of town.
At the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Olympia, Sarah Jane Covington was given a large, elaborate funeral, during which she was eulogized for her charitable works, her enduring interest in the reform movement and progressive thought, and her efforts in rearing and educating no fewer than seven children and twenty-two grandchildren. It was a cathartic ceremony for the Covington clan, but perhaps an even more comforting tribute came a few days afterward, in a letter that her son Luther received from his mother’s fellow passenger Anna Gray. “Dear Friend,” the letter began, “Mr. Gray, myself, and Baby are home at last, and while we are all marked for life, we are thankful that God has saved us without the loss of one.”
Mrs. Gray proceeded to tell Luther all about the week she had spent with his mother—about the comfort Mrs. Covington had offered herself and Mrs. Lemman during the crisis, about the stories of her grandchildren she had told to divert them, about the little underskirt they had made together for baby Varden. “Now Mr. Covington,” she continued, getting to the main point, “about the only thing of mine that was saved [from the wreck] was that little skirt. It was her last work and it was a work of love for another. Would you like to have it?”
