The white cascade, p.28
The White Cascade, page 28
Seated not far from Stevens at the speakers’ table was a man who knew the ins and outs of that old line as well as anyone on earth. James H. O’Neill, at fifty-six looking heavier but still remarkably hale and energetic, was marking his forty-third year with the Great Northern Railway. Nine years earlier, in 1920, he had been promoted to general manager of the GN’s operating department, in charge of all lines west of Williston, North Dakota. But although he had now reached the heights of upper management, his work habits hadn’t changed much in the past two decades. Despite increasing trouble with rheumatism in recent years, he was still a compulsive workaholic, still more comfortable out on the line than in his office, and still writing apologetic notes and telegrams to Berenice and his three children for his frequent absences. (“Peggy dear,” ran an all too typical note to his daughter. “Account receiving a telegram about 10 o’clock could not wait until morning. You were asleep and of course did not want to awaken you, so left for the station promptly. Hope Boy and everybody else are well when I return Saturday, so you can all take a trip with me to Montana next week. Love to all, Dad.”)
For as hard as it may be to believe, in 1929 James H. O’Neill was still being called away to fight the Cascade snows. Great Northern corporate archives contain telegrams written by O’Neill as late as 1936 that seem virtually identical to those he had written a quarter century before—reporting slides near Leavenworth, an iced-up engine at Skykomish, a disabled rotary plow somewhere east of Berne. Someone else may have been directly responsible for cleaning up those messes nowadays, but they were still, on one level or another, Jim O’Neill’s problems. And each one of them, no matter how minor, must have carried with it an echo of those he had faced—and been blamed for—decades earlier at Wellington.
He was not, however, a broken man. Judging from family archives and stories, the events he’d endured in 1910, while they may have permanently scarred him, had not ruined Jim O’Neill’s life. His humor and playfulness seem to have survived the tragedy intact. One anniversary, for instance, he had a ring for Berenice secretly baked into a loaf of bread, which he then asked her to slice at the dinner table, while his three delighted children looked on. (The ring was henceforth known invariably as “Sunshine,” just as a favorite candelabrum was always referred to as “George,” though for reasons that have been lost to family memory.) O’Neill seems to have gone on to lead an ordinary life of ordinary happiness, hunting ducks and fishing for steelhead in his always scarce free time.
But he had never strayed far from the train whistles that had ensnared him as a child. O’Neill, who had been a young trainmaster at Great Falls when Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch held up their last train, still lived and breathed the railroad in the modern times of the late 1920s. And though he would never advance beyond his current position of western general manager, there would be many more highlights in his career, including a stint as a rail tester for the special train of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934, during which he was once or twice mistaken for the president himself.
Appropriately enough, he would never retire, working right up to the day he died of a sudden heart attack at home in Seattle on January 11, 1937. He was sixty-four years old and had worked for the Great Northern for exactly fifty years. “Our love was the proudest thing in my life,” Berenice would afterward write to their daughter Jean. “Even the memory of a love like that is richer treasure than most lives ever know.” Berenice herself, though so much younger, would die on May 17, just four months later.
In his apparent ability to rebound from the effects of the Wellington Disaster, O’Neill had been more fortunate than many other veterans of the avalanche. Ida Starrett, who lived to be an old woman, refused even to talk about the episode for decades. She eventually remarried, operated a grocery store outside Seattle, and then moved to a chicken ranch near Mukilteo, Washington. And while her mother ended up suffering no permanent physical effects from the avalanche (Mrs. May “danced till she was 80,” according to her grandson), Ida spent her last years in a wheelchair as a result of her Wellington injuries.
Ray Starrett grew up to become a tall, handsome man, the longtime safety supervisor for Puget Sound Power and Light Company in Olympia. Though he would retain few memories of the avalanche in later life, he would forever bear a scar on his forehead from the makeshift surgery he’d undergone on the dining room table of the Bailets Hotel. In 1960, a half century after the avalanche, he received a surprise letter from the maker of that scar, retired telegrapher Basil Sherlock, who asked him—significantly—to send along “a picture of yourself taken recently with your hat off.” Still feeling uneasy about this decision to cut the stick out of Raymond’s head—“nobody ever told me if I did right or wrong”—Sherlock had never forgotten the boy or the episode that had convinced him to leave the Pacific Northwest for good. “Last March first our newspaper came out with a story in the way of a 50-year anniversary of the avalanche at Wellington,” he wrote from Willmar, Minnesota, where he and Alathea now lived, “and since then [I] cannot get you out of my mind. Perhaps you will not remember me now.”
Starrett did remember him, and the two exchanged several letters. Ida was also still alive at this point, living in a nursing home in Everett, but she chose not to participate in the correspondence. “We do not blame her,” Sherlock responded. “For a good many years we were like soldiers coming back from war, we did not wish to talk about it.”
A. B. Hensel also refrained from discussing the avalanche for much of his life. A risk-averse, safety-minded man in subsequent years, he never learned to drive a car and kept all of his money in jars around the house, refusing to trust banks. He eventually married, had two daughters, and continued to work for the Railway Mail Service until his retirement in 1950 (after a career of forty-seven years and two months). Only upon leaving the mail service did he begin to talk and write about his experiences at Wellington.
Many of the railroaders involved continued to work for the Great Northern for the rest of their careers. Ira Clary, the diminutive rotary conductor who went down in the slide, eventually rose to the position of Cascade Division superintendent (he was known as the “Little Giant” among his men). The career of Snow King William Harrington, on the other hand, seems to have peaked sometime before his ill-fated superior court appearance. Having replaced Arthur Blackburn as trainmaster for a time after the latter’s death, he was by 1913 working as a conductor again. In a strange coincidence, he was the skipper in charge of the train (No. 25, again) that was hit by a snowslide near Corea in January 1916. Though nowhere near as large as the Wellington avalanche, the slide hurled a dining car and a passenger coach 250 feet down the mountain, killing eight passengers and injuring twenty-two others. Harrington himself was apparently unhurt. However, after this second narrow escape, it’s not surprising that he soon opted for a safer job, finishing his career as first a yardmaster and later a dispatcher—positions that would allow him to go home to his family every night.
The widow of conductor Joseph Pettit lived to see three of her sons go on to railroad careers. One of them, Paul, died in an accident while on duty, yet another victim of this most dangerous profession. Another son, Joe Jr., lost his job as a GN switchman for violating Rule G—the liquor rule—but was reinstated after the local business agent of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen intervened on his behalf. The agent was none other than Bill J. Moore, much older now, paying a last favor to the dead conductor who had been his good friend.
Other participants in the Wellington story seem simply to have disappeared into the oblivion of ordinary existence. About the later lives of many—Henry White, John Rogers, the lawyers Merritt and Jesseph, R. M. Laville—little or nothing is known. Interestingly, at least one survivor, the baby Varden Gray, would live to capitalize on his avalanche experience; as an adult, he became a traveling evangelist and dubbed himself the “Duke of Wellington.” Most of those who’d lived through it, though, were forever sobered by the event. As Basil Sherlock wrote in 1960 to Ray Starrett, “Perhaps you wish to forget it. For over fifty years, I have. Twenty-five of those years were spent working on the graveyard shift, 12M to 8 A.M. And when the hands of the clock would point to 1:10 A.M. on March first, I would shut my eyes and see it all over again.”
But now, on January 12, 1929, as the Great Northern Railway feted itself at Scenic for introducing a new era of safe, reliable travel through the wilds of the Last Mountains, only one man present truly understood the full price that had been paid for breaching that wilderness with a railroad line. James H. O’Neill listened as the addresses went on and on into the night, full of high-blown rhetoric about progress, technology, and the end of the threat of nature: “The switchback has become tradition,” one speaker opined. “Snow troubles in the Cascades [are] only a memory and the snowsheds antiques.” About the victims of the Wellington avalanche—the unacknowledged impetus behind the engineering marvel currently being celebrated—nothing at all was said. The town itself would soon be abandoned, turned over to the elk, the bears, and the coyotes “howling in the doorways of deserted dwellings.” After thirty-five years of life, it would stand empty and silent and remote once more, four miles above the bustle at Scenic, a now useless concrete snowshed the only monument to its dead.
AFTERWORD
A Final Note on the Wellington Avalanche
Whether the Wellington avalanche was a tragedy that could reasonably have been anticipated by those in charge of the situation was—and still is—a debatable question. Avalanche science was barely in its infancy in 1910, and as the Washington State Supreme Court noted, avalanche predictions at that time were “clearly beyond the knowledge of men.” Several reports published in the wake of that year’s snowslide season, however, indicate that perhaps more was known than the Great Northern cared to admit. An article in the June 1910 edition of the Monthly Weather Review and a report published by the U.S. Forest Service in November 1911 suggest that a basic grasp of what was occurring at Stevens Pass was not beyond the knowledge of the day, and that a slide above the trains should not have been regarded as such an improbability.
Admittedly, the reports do support many of the railroad’s contentions about the unusual nature of conditions in late February 1910. Edward A. Beals, author of the Monthly Weather Review article, confirmed that it had been an unprecedented avalanche season both in the Cascades and in the northern Rockies. “Avalanches in these mountains are of common occurrence every year,” he wrote, “but this year there were more than ever before known.” The period in question actually saw thousands of slides across the Northwest, including large ones in Idaho and British Columbia (such as the Rogers Pass slide, Canada’s deadliest) that resulted in particularly high numbers of casualties. Beals’s report also verified the unusual length of the late-February storm, revealing that it was actually not a single storm but three separate disturbances that passed through the area in close succession.
The type of slide that occurred at Wellington, moreover, was regarded as relatively rare in the area. Witnesses at both the inquest and the trial claimed that the vast majority of slides in the Cascades were what are now called loose-snow avalanches. They were perceived as more or less predictable, coming down in draws and canyons where they had come down in past years. (Thornton T. Munger, author of the Forest Service report, even used the term “canyon slide” for this type of avalanche, as opposed to “slope slide” for what is now called a slab avalanche.) Loose-snow avalanches tend to start at a single point and fan out in the form of an inverted V, and they can start quite literally at the drop of a hat. As the trapper Robert Schwartz testified at the inquest, by shaking a bit of snow off a single tree branch, “a bird or an icicle or a puff of wind can start a snowslide.”
However, the absence of a draw or canyon above the passing tracks certainly did not make that slope immune to the slab-type of avalanche. Weather patterns in the days and weeks before March 1 had in fact created ideal conditions for this type of slide. At roughly thirty-two degrees, the slope of the mountainside at that point was also right within the optimum range for sliding. Even the covering of burned trees that the GN regarded as a factor working against avalanche formation actually had the opposite effect. Thick forest may discourage slides from forming, but sparse tree cover provides weak points in the snowpack where avalanches can start more easily.
It would be unfair to assert that O’Neill and Blackburn should have foreseen the imminent danger of a slide and diverted all of their limited resources to either moving the trains or evacuating those who slept on them. But certainly the particular risk created by a hard freeze followed by a thawing trend was not unknown to the men of the Cascade Division. Even the lowly trackwalker Thomas O’Malley testified as much at the inquest. “Heavy wet snow on the hills will do it,” he said in answer to a question from state railroad commissioner Lawrence on how slides start. “Sometimes the snow is frozen underneath, and [if we] get a couple nights’ fall of snow, it will slide right off the hard crust.”
In retrospect, it’s clear that the situation at Wellington should have been handled differently. As conductor Walter Vogel admitted in his court testimony, other locations around Wellington, “as shown by conditions afterwards,” would have been safer places to put the trains. But “conditions afterwards” are unknowable beforehand. In a crisis of this type, the gaps between foresight and hindsight are invariably great, and the parallax they create is one that historians and other latter-day observers cannot afford to ignore.
APPENDIX
A Wellington Roster
The exact number of people who died in the Wellington Disaster will probably never be known for sure. No official passenger lists were kept by railroads at this time, and even employee records were imprecise and error-ridden (often because many employees worked under a series of false names to escape less than ideal employment histories). The composition of the temporary work gangs was especially fluid, with transient laborers leaving and arriving without notice, often identified in railroad documents solely by number. In a remote place like the Cascade Division, it was all too easy for the death of a foreign laborer with no local ties to go unreported.
The official death toll as compiled by the Great Northern Railway was ninety-six, including a number of unidentified laborers. This total rises to one hundred if it includes the two men who died in the beanery slide on February 25, the watchman who died in the avalanche at Drury on March 1, and the laborer who died in the March 13 slide that reclosed the line once it had been cleared. But mysteries remain. The Seattle Times of March 15, for instance, reported the arrival in Seattle of the body of “Joseph Furlin of Everett,” an alleged passenger whose name did not appear on the official Great Northern list or in the coroner’s death record (though a later newspaper story hints that this may merely have been an alias for John Brockman).
The following is a list of the known dead, the injured, and a few of those who were spared.
NOTES
NB: The dates of all newspaper stories, letters, telegrams, and other primary sources, unless otherwise specified, are from 1910.
Abbreviations Used in Notes
CIT
Coroner’s Inquest Testimony
EDH
Everett Daily Herald
GN
Great Northern
NP
Northern Pacific
NYT
New York Times
SCT
Superior Court Transcript
SDC
Spokane Daily Chronicle
SEC
Spokane Evening Chronicle
SIH
Spokane Inland Herald
SPI
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
SS
Seattle Star
SSR
Spokane Spokesman-Review
ST
Seattle Times
SUR
Seattle Union Record
TDL
Tacoma Daily Ledger
WDW
Wenatchee Daily World
The book’s opening quotation—“The difference between civilization and barbarism …”—is cited in Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 403.
Prologue: A Late Thaw
The recovery and identification of Archibald McDonald’s body was described in newspaper accounts of the time, including articles in the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Everett Daily Herald, and Wenatchee Daily World (July 27-30). Details about the life and experiences of William J. Moore (including the quote about “cordwood”) come from an August 2004 interview with his son Barney Moore and an unpublished letter from the elder Moore to Ruby El Hult, dated June 7, [1960] (Ruby El Hult Papers, Washington State University Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, Pullman, WA).
