The white cascade, p.27
The White Cascade, page 27
When the evidence in the case was complete, the GN lawyers made another attempt to get a dismissal or at least a directed verdict on the basis of insufficient evidence. Here again, Judge Humphries felt he simply could not comply. Whatever his own opinion about the strength of the plaintiff’s case, his goal was to let the jury have its say. So he simply gave his instructions to the panel of twelve and then—over the further objections of the GN lawyers, who had their own version of the instructions they wanted the judge to give—allowed them to retire.
The jury’s deliberation was short and apparently uncontentious. The very next day, on November 1, the jurors filed back into the courtroom with their verdict. It was in favor of the plaintiff, William Topping.
O’Neill, when he heard this verdict, must have been crushed: All of the efforts he and his men had made—the days and days of unrelenting, backbreaking work, with few pauses for food or sleep—had suddenly been nullified at a single stroke. According to the jury, Edward Topping and every other victim of the avalanche had died through the negligence of the Great Northern Railway and its officers. And even though the $20,000 award granted by the jury was only half of what was originally sought, the amount was still, by 1910 standards, significant—large enough to dispel any notion that the jury regarded O’Neill’s extraordinary efforts as any kind of mitigating factor.
The GN lawyers immediately appealed. Money aside, this case was simply too important to lose. Over the next few weeks, they regrouped and focused their energies on the appeal. And although it took many months of further legal wrangling, their labors ultimately paid off. In August 1914 the Washington State Supreme Court issued its decision, and it was firmly in the company’s favor: “It is plain, from the evidence in the case and from the undisputed facts,” the court ruled, “that this avalanche was what is known in law as vis major, or an Act of God, which, unless some intervening negligence of the railway company is shown to have cooperated in it, was the sole cause of the accident, and for which the railway company is not liable.” Noting that the Great Northern “was using every energy, almost superhuman efforts, to raise the blockade,” and that avalanche predictions “are clearly beyond the knowledge of men,” the court determined that it was “too plain for argument that no negligence of the appellant was shown. … It was the duty of the trial court, therefore, to have granted a nonsuit, or to have instructed the jury to return a verdict in favor of the appellant.” The original jury’s verdict, in other words, was reversed, with the plaintiff obliged to pay back the $20,000 award, plus 6 percent interest and $264 in court costs.
This ruling was naturally a relief to James J. Hill and to every other railroad owner in the country. Letting the original decision stand would have been a precedent ominous for big corporations of every kind. In some ways, however, the quick reversal of the jury’s decision denied real justice to just about everyone else connected to the Wellington Disaster. For many of the victims—the family of Ned Topping, the parents of Nellie Sharp, the mother of Thelma Davis, even survivors such as A. B. Hensel and Henry White—the decision meant that their moral victory had been shortlived. They now came away from the tragedy with little except bitterness and (for those who would settle their cases) a financial reward that could hardly compensate adequately for their suffering. And for the Great Northern railroaders, the decision provided little in the way of vindication for their monumental efforts. The public, after all, had given its opinion through the jury. The stigma that O’Neill must have felt when he returned to his family in Spokane on that early November night in 1913, after the original trial verdict, would not have been lessened much by a technical legal ruling made by a few aging judges in Olympia.
The supreme court’s decision did in fact prove to be controversial, with some antirailroad observers accusing the justices of being in the pocket of Jim Hill and his powerful friends. However, such inflammatory claims aside—and considering the thrust of the case as it was actually tried—the supreme court probably did come to the right decision. Reading the trial transcript almost a century later, most objective observers would find the jury’s verdict clearly unsupported by the evidence as presented, especially with the high standard of proof required to establish negligence. True, in light of the antipathy felt by much of the public toward the railroads at this time, the original verdict was perhaps foreseeable. In the eyes of many people, the railroads had been abusing the public trust for years, and whether or not the Great Northern was guilty of such abuse in this particular case was irrelevant to many. As one outraged correspondent had written to the GN’s general solicitor after being denied a Wellington claim, “The people are rising up in arms against the injustice that is practiced by concerns such as yours, and the day is not far distant when you and I will see, if you are as young a man as I am, that different tactics will be pursued by the people over whom the railroads are ever prone to take advantage.”
Fortunately or unfortunately, those different tactics—litigation, regulation, governmental oversight—were at this time already making inroads against the power of the great American railroad conglomerates. As James J. Hill was sensing with greater indignation every day, the era of railroad hegemony—that long half century when railroads could do more or less as they pleased, especially in the American West—was rapidly coming to a close. Admittedly, in this one case the Great Northern did win its ultimate day in court, but the tide of history was clearly moving against the Victorian laissez-faire attitudes that had allowed the railroads and other trusts to gain such great influence and authority without any corresponding answerability. A new, more modern conception of the balance of power between Big Business and the people was already surfacing, ushering in a time when labor, government, and the public would all have a say in how the railroads did their business. As Theodore Roosevelt had said back in 1904, “Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and State. … There must come, in the proper growth of this nation, a readjustment.” By 1913, thanks in large part to Roosevelt himself, that readjustment was well under way.
But there was another force, even more formidable than unions and government regulators, that was now working against the supremacy of the railroad industry: competition. The automobile—in the guise of Henry Ford’s revolutionary Model T, the first affordable car for the masses—would soon offer personal mobility of a kind that passenger trains could never hope to match. Trucks would shortly be able to transport goods directly from producer to customer without costly transfers or huge minimum tonnage requirements. As for speed, the airplane, which in 1910 was rapidly becoming feasible as a mode of commercial transportation, would eventually make Fast Mail trains seem as archaic as the Pony Express.
Railroads, of course, would never actually fade away from the American scene. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they remain the most useful form of transportation for many kinds of heavy, high-volume freight. But trains would eventually lose their to the culture of modernity that they themselves had helped create. Total railroad track mileage, after peaking in 1916 at an all-time high of 254,037 miles, would begin to shrink every year thereafter, soon bringing to an end the golden age of American railroading. This slow atrophy was already becoming apparent to perceptive observers in the first decade of the twentieth century—James J. Hill among them. “By the time you’re forty,” he told his son Louis in 1905, “be out of the railroad business.” It proved to be good advice. By the 1920s, the passenger rail industry had entered an era of decline that, except for a brief revival during World War II, would continue for the rest of the century.
Viewed against the background of the great transition in the structure of industry and government that was occurring in the Progressive Era, the Wellington avalanche can not really be regarded as a major impetus of change. Granted, some significant modifications in railway operations did come about as a direct consequence of the tragedy. Shortly after the destruction of the Fast Mail at Stevens Pass, for instance, the U.S. Post Office Department began requiring that all Railway Mail Service cars nationwide be constructed of steel rather than wood. The events of 1910 also forced many changes in the local operations of the Great Northern itself, including an acceleration of the move toward wireless communications and a massive snowshed-building effort in the Cascades that eventually put 95 percent of the track from Wellington (now Tye) to Scenic under snowshed or tunnel protection. However, the Wellington Disaster was not—to cite a much overused bit of current-day parlance—the “Avalanche That Changed America.” It was instead more a symptom than a cause of the great transformations then occurring throughout the country. The decades right around the turn of the twentieth century, after all, were plagued by industrial and transportation disasters of the Wellington type. The newspapers of 1910 were full of such horrors—sinking steamships, exploding factories, devastating fires—culminating in that most famous of all such disasters, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.
It was, in short, a time when mankind’s technological reach had profoundly exceeded its grasp, when safety regulations and innovations in fail-safe communication and operations technologies had not yet caught up with the ambitious new standards of speed and efficiency required by American Big Business. As telegrapher Basil Sherlock would write some fifty years afterward, the events at Wellington would have played out much differently in a more advanced technological age. “Such places would have radio and we would be able to contact the outside world. Helicopters would come to [the] rescue, with tools to work with and help.”
In 1910, unfortunately, there were no radios at Wellington and no helicopters to come to the rescue of the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail. James H. O’Neill and his men were forced to work with the resources they did have available to them—temperamental snowplows, fragile telegraph and telephone connections, and countless man-hours of hard physical labor. Given the limits of these resources, the fact that these men fell short in this one extreme situation was perhaps excusable. As John Rogers pointed out afterward, the railroaders “could not battle the clouds away.” But the failure of their efforts at Wellington, no matter how courageous those efforts may have been, was what history would ultimately remember about the disaster, and it was something that all of them—-Jim O’Neill in particular—would be forced to live with for the rest of their lives.
EPILOGUE
A Memory Erased
The mailed fist of progress will be thrust forward through a mighty mountain barrier on its westward drive when America’s largest tunnel—the Great Northern bore through the Cascades—is formally opened.
—Seattle Times
On the cold, clear evening of January 12, 1929, a select group of railroad officials, politicians, journalists, and other assorted dignitaries gathered in the snow-blanketed Cascade Mountains for the dedication of the Great Northern Railway’s New Cascade Tunnel. The ceremony, which would be broadcast live to some thirty-eight radio stations and an estimated audience of fifteen million Americans nationwide, was to be an elaborate, heavily orchestrated affair, designed to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the railroad history of this country. With the opening of the much-anticipated tunnel—at 7.79 miles, the longest in the Western Hemisphere—the Great Northern’s main line through the Cascades would achieve a new standard of safety and reliability. Those miles and miles of steep, twisting track between Berne in the east and Scenic in the west were to be entirely bypassed—the rails pulled up, the stations closed, the old tunnel boarded up and abandoned. Instead, the new mountain crossing would run deep under that slide-prone territory, shortening the route by nine miles and eliminating the need for some forty thousand feet of snowsheds. As GN vice president L. C. Gilman would later remark, “The weakest link in our transportation chain has been replaced by one of the strongest, and we can now regard our railroad as complete.” The line through Stevens Pass—perhaps the last truly untamed section of the American railway system—was to become a thing of the past.
It had not been an easy decision for the Great Northern to make. The new tunnel had been fabulously expensive to build, costing $25 million in all, including the necessary line electrification and route relocations. Despite the fact that it had been constructed at a record pace of one mile every 4.8 months, it had required almost four years of frantic and disruptive work to complete. But the company had judged the project a wise investment. The Stevens Pass crossing had in recent times become an embarrassing anachronism for any railroad that trumpeted itself as modern. In the years since the Wellington avalanche, a fortune had been spent annually on the construction, maintenance, and repair of snowsheds, and even that effort had not really secured the line. Snowslides had continued to plague the railroad every winter. In one season alone—the legendary winter of 1915-16—slides had hit a passenger train near Corea (eight killed, twenty-two injured), buried a section crew near Leavenworth (four killed), hit another train at Alvin (three killed), and destroyed a bridge near Scenic, closing the line for an entire month. Even the Empire Builder himself had eventually recognized the need for some alternative. “Some of you,” he had said to associates on his very last train trip through this territory in 1914, “will live to see this mountain grade eliminated.”
Hill himself, alas, had not. After retiring as GN chairman in 1912 (having never drawn a salary in his entire career with the company), he had continued working as feverishly as ever for four more years. Then, in the spring of 1916, he’d been laid low by the ailment that had tormented him on and off for years—an acute case of hemorrhoids. Although a bevy of physicians had been brought in on the case—including even the Mayo brothers from their eponymous clinic in Rochester, making their first house call ever—the patient’s condition had only worsened as infection and gangrene set in. Ultimately, there had been little the assembled doctors could do but stand by and watch his decline, lamenting the hardheadedness of a man who had conquered a continent but had proved too stubborn (or too squeamish) to undergo the simple surgery that would have cured his chronic condition long ago.
By May 28 Hill had lapsed into a coma. Family members were hastily summoned; friends and associates were notified. And at 10:00 A.M. the next day—on a gloriously sunny spring morning, surrounded by his wife and all but one of his children—the man whom Yale University had once named “the last of the wilderness conquerors” was dead. “Greatness became him,” an editorialist in the New York Times wrote of Hill the next day. “Whatever he had done, it had been greatly done. We salute the memory of a great American.” His wife of nearly forty-nine years offered a far more personal tribute to her husband. “How desolately lonely the house seems,” Mary Hill wrote in her diary a few days after his death, “and must for time to come.”
On Wednesday, May 31, at 2:00 P.M.—the exact hour of Hill’s funeral—every train operating on the Great Northern Railway stopped for five minutes, no matter where it was or what its schedule. Considering Hill’s lifelong obsession with punctuality, it was perhaps a misguided if well-intended gesture.
Some thirteen years after his death, Hill was now receiving yet another tribute at the opening of the New Cascade Tunnel. As millions tuned in their radios, the ceremony began promptly at 6:00 P.M. Pacific time, with “the dean of American broadcasters,” Graham McNamee, introducing GN president Ralph Budd at the tunnel’s eastern portal. Standing aboard a special inauguration train filled with dignitaries, a flustricken Budd gave the opening speech and formally dedicated the tunnel in the name of James J. Hill. The locomotive was then christened by Leona Watson, that year’s Apple Blossom Queen of Wenatchee, after which the train was supposed to proceed into the flag-draped portal and through the tunnel toward Scenic, where it would crash dramatically through a paper cover stretched over the western portal. Technical difficulties put the train fifteen minutes behind schedule (forcing the NBC engineers to hastily switch over to an unscheduled second musical number), but it finally did burst through the covered portal, to the cheers of hundreds on the other side.
More high-tech radio switching followed—to Washington, D.C., for an address by Interstate Commerce commissioner J. B. Campbell, to San Francisco for a solo by contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, to Philadelphia for a few words from Pennsylvania Railroad president W. W. Atterbury. Then the broadcast veered back to Washington, D.C., where President-elect Herbert Hoover gave the keynote address from his S Street home. “Never have we witnessed a more perfect coordination of the forces of American industry than in this great job,” the future president intoned. “It gives every American the satisfaction of confidence in the virility of our civilization.”
Within months, of course, Hoover would preside over a significant affront to that virility when the stock market crashed in October, plunging the country into a long period of economic impotence. But for the moment, the lions of American politics and industry could roar as loudly as they wanted to. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t earned their bragging rights. Thanks to the combined efforts of these titans, the Last Mountains had been conquered—yet again.
When the radio broadcast ended at 7:00 P.M., about six hundred guests assembled for a banquet at the dining hall of the Scenic construction camp. The guest of honor was none other than John F. Stevens, now much celebrated as the man who’d rescued the Panama Canal project from disaster. After the main course, Stevens addressed the audience, which included such notables as Washington’s Governor Roland H. Hartley, Louis W. Hill Jr. (grandson of the Empire Builder), Arthur Curtiss James (a GN director and one of the world’s richest men), and the presidents of the Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Washington State chambers of commerce. Standing beside a twenty-five-cubic-foot cake depicting the Cascade Range in full relief, the engineer spoke at length about the discovery of the pass that bore his name, the building of the original line, and the new tunnel, for which he had served as consultant. ‘And so the new tunnel is put in operation,” the seventy-six-year-old engineer concluded, “and I am very, very pleased. A long tunnel was a dream for years, and I am so glad to have lived to see it an accomplished fact. But I can’t help feeling a regret to know that the old line is a thing of the past, and that I probably will never see it again, for I put in some of my best days on it.”
