The white cascade, p.8
The White Cascade, page 8
As difficult as conditions might be, however, the line was still open as far as anyone knew, and O’Neill was determined to seize the opportunity to get those two trains off the mountain. To make sure that nothing else went awry, he decided to oversee the job of digging them out himself. This would at least give him a reason to get away from that smoke-filled telegraph office and out into the weather. Leaving the grateful telegrapher to his own devices, O’Neill joined assistant trainmaster William Harrington—his “Snow King”—on the other double rotary. Together they made ready to head east to Cascade Tunnel Station, where they would begin the process of extracting those trains from the Cascade cement.
Thursday 10:40 A.M.—This makes 30 hours here in this spot. It’s still snowing hard. … Conductor this morning says snow over there [at Wellington] is 20 ft deep and slides back as fast as taken away. I’d give $10.00 to have the Kodak so’s to bring back to you all my present surroundings.
—Ned Topping
Cascade Tunnel Station
Midmorning Thursday
The passengers awoke on Thursday morning to a scene dishearteningly similar to the one that had presented itself twenty-four hours earlier. Still the snow was coming down; still the two trains sat idle at Cascade Tunnel Station. The character of the snowfall itself, however, had changed overnight. “The flakes became larger and heavier,” Lewis Jesseph would later report, “but did not fall so thick and fast.” The result was better visibility. As the passengers trudged up to the beanery for another breakfast, they could finally see far enough to glimpse the mountain peaks all around them. Faced with those steep walls of white punctuated only by the skeletal remains of burned-off firs and pines, they realized—many for the first time—how isolated and remote they really were.
There probably wasn’t much overt contact at the beanery between the well-dressed passengers and the unkempt and overtired railroaders—one imagines them sitting uncomfortably at opposite ends of the room, sneaking glances at each other through the rising steam of their coffee cups—but word was soon spreading through the dining hall that the food supply was running low. With the storm preventing delivery of any new provisions, chef Elerker’s limited stores were proving inadequate to the task of feeding so many extra mouths. Some said that if the trains were to remain at Cascade Tunnel much longer, food would have to be rationed.
When Mrs. Covington heard this rumor back on the Winnipeg, she confided her growing concern to her diary. “Thursday 24th, 10 A.M.,” she wrote. “They say it has snowed 13 ft in 11 hours. … The mts. loom up a thousand feet or thousands. … They keep saying the provisions are getting low and they can’t get water for the train.”
Right beside the tracks, visible through Mrs. Covington’s frost-rimed window, some workers were trying to clear snow from the roof of the station roundhouse. The old woman drew a small picture of the scene in her diary. The men were digging from the top of the roof down to the eaves, creating trenches whose walls towered several feet above their heads. Under different circumstances, the sight of those dwarfed figures battling feebly against the snow might have been amusing to her. But Mrs. Covington was in no state of mind to be amused. Though her diary indicates that she was well cared for, she confessed to feeling anxious and alone, particularly after news spread through the train that a snowslide somewhere on the eastern slope had taken out the telegraph line. The day before, she’d been able to send a wire to her son Melmoth telling him she was safe. Now, however, she felt adrift, without direct connection to the husband, seven children, and twenty-two grandchildren who were her life.
“The tel. wires are down,” she wrote in her diary—adding, with perhaps a touch of melodrama: “No communication with the world.”
Most of Mrs. Covington’s fellow passengers were taking the situation with somewhat more equanimity. Along about midmorning, lawyers Jesseph and Merritt, retreating to the observation car, blandly took note of the fact that their supreme court case was being called in Olympia even as they sat here, 170 miles away. (Contrary to Jesseph’s expectations, the court ultimately did go forward with the hearing; the justices ended up deciding the case based solely on the written record—in Merritt’s favor.) Two boys—probably the eighteen-year-olds Milton Horn and Frank Ritter—entertained themselves by stepping out to the station platform to play their horns in the snow. Ned Topping was even trying to use the unexpected spare hours to get some work done, hatching new strategies for the family’s barn-door business: “Say father,” he wrote in his letter home, “Don’t you think it would be a good scheme to have the Steel Co. cut us up some steel—that is, shear it to lengths & widths ready for the machine in case we get the new machines before the shear? This would save some time and in order to have it sheared correctly, one of the boys or myself could go direct to the mill and superintend the shearing.”
Meanwhile, three-year-old Thelma Davis was busy charming everyone aboard. Her father, George, a small, half-Iroquois man who worked as a streetcar motorman, was taking her to see her mother in Seattle, and the child had quickly become the pet of the train. With her thick, dark, shoulder-length hair and plump, pretty features, she was apparently finding no shortage of surrogate mothers on the train—to the relief of her father, who doubtless had long ago run out of ideas to entertain her.
Others on the Express were also making a social event of the delay. John Rogers, a Seattle real estate man, had been inspecting mining properties in central Washington with his lawyer, former judge James McNeny. Now the two were taking it upon themselves to spread a little goodwill through the train. “We visited from coach to coach,” Rogers would later recall. “[We] joked with the sick, and did our best to keep everybody reassured. Conductor Pettit,” he added, “was foremost in everything of that sort.”
Joe Pettit, though not out laboring in the wind-whipped snow like most of the other railroaders, was certainly performing a job just as difficult—dealing with fifty-five impatient and underoccupied passengers. Being the father of five young children, he was undoubtedly well schooled in patience and diplomacy. Even so, he can’t have had an easy time of it keeping everyone satisfied.
And there were some among the passengers whose situation made Pettit’s job especially delicate. John Gray, for instance, with his broken leg in a heavy cast, could not even be moved from his berth. Ada Lemman, a slender, thirty-nine-year-old woman suffering from an unspecified nervous condition, was an even more ticklish problem; accompanied by her attorney husband, Edgar, she was now on her way to a hospital in Port Townsend for treatment, and by popular report she was more than a handful to deal with, always on the edge of hysteria.
Perhaps worst off was sixty-year-old J. R. Vail, a sheepherder from Trinidad, Washington, afflicted with a swollen carbuncle on his neck. Little information survives about his illness, but the fact that he was being transported by a professional caregiver—Catherine O’Reilly, a young nurse from the Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane—hints that the infection was already a serious condition, and one that, in this age before antibiotics, could very easily become much worse.
For the majority of Pettit’s other charges, the primary ailment to be endured at this point was cabin fever. “It’s awful being held up like this,” Ned Topping wrote. “Can’t get off the train for exercise on account of snow and storm.” Letting ill temper get the better of him, he even began complaining about the beanery again: “Have had 4 meals now at the camp. A dirty grease hole—oilcloth on tables and half-wiped dishes. Eat alongside of the scum of the earth.”
Toward late afternoon on Thursday, the spirits of Topping and everyone else aboard got a lift when they began to see signs of renewed activity in the Cascade Tunnel yard. The men he’d called “the scum of the earth” were now out in the storm beside the trains, digging away the snow and ice that had accumulated around each car. The double rotary from yesterday was also back, cleaning up the tracks between the trains and the tunnel.
“It’s now about 5:00 P.M.,” Topping wrote as the afternoon light began to falter. “Snow is nearly stopped and clearing up some. Engines are steaming up & this gives a faint hope.”
That faint hope was soon fulfilled. Before long, the good news was spreading like a warm breeze through both the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail. The trains, after the better part of two days, were finally going to proceed west.
Look for Nos 25 + 27 to leave Tunnel about 5 P.M. Rotaries digging them out now
—J. H. O’Neill,
telegram to E. L. Brown,
Great Northern Railway, St. Paul
Cascade Tunnel Station
Late Thursday Afternoon
Anyone looking for an explanation of James H. O’Neill’s popularity among his men need only consider his actions on the stormy Thursday afternoon of February 24. As superintendent, O’Neill was the highest-ranking official on the entire Cascade Division—the rough equivalent of, say, a major general in the army of the Great Northern Railway. Yet here he was, sleepless and badly shaven after two full days on duty, digging snowdrifts from the wheel trucks of a train coach. Having come over to Cascade on the rotary with Harrington and a gang of laborers, O’Neill had quickly checked in with the station operator, issued his instructions, and then grabbed a shovel to help the gangmen dig.
This wasn’t merely a gesture calculated for show. According to more than one report, when O’Neill cleared a frozen switch or crawled under a disabled rotary to lend a hand on the bridge jack, he really did the job. As someone who had worked his way up from the very lowest positions in railway service, he was familiar with nearly every dirty task there was to do on a steam railroad, and he knew how to get cooperation from even the lowest-paid extra gangmen, typically foreigners with whom he didn’t even share a language. “In two minutes,” a colleague once said of him, “he can have a … gang of foreigners doing team work and moving together like oiled machinery.”
It was a scene reminiscent of one involving O’Neill’s illustrious boss, James J. Hill. According to a famous story, the Empire Builder once grew impatient when his train became immobilized in a Dakota blizzard. Seeing the snow shovelers outside his window start to flag, he decided to take matters in hand. As his biographer Stuart Holbrook tells the story: “President Hill of the railroad came out to snatch the shovel from one man and send that bemused working stiff into the president’s private car for hot coffee, while he himself shoveled snow as though driven by steam. One after the other, the gandy-dancers were spelled off and drank fine java in unaccustomed elegance while the Great Northern’s creator and boss wielded a shovel. That was Jim Hill for you.”
That was also Jim O’Neill for you, and it was probably this prodigious work ethic that had first attracted the Empire Builder’s attention. Later profiles of O’Neill depict him as a favorite of Hill’s as far back as his Montana days, when the latter allegedly chose the young conductor to oversee his train whenever business took him to the western divisions. Hill may have been attracted by O’Neill’s similar background (both men were transplanted Canadians with humble beginnings and little formal education), but it was more likely O’Neill’s hardworking competence that truly endeared him to the old man. “He does not sit in his private car writing and directing the work,” a Great Northern colleague once said of the superintendent. “He is ‘on the job’ all the time. He sets the pace for his men, works with them, and accomplishes results.”
Despite O’Neill’s energetic shoveling efforts with the gangmen, however, the task of moving the two trains at Cascade Tunnel Station ended up being anything but simple. Twice during the process the lead rotary of the double was thrown off center, a problem requiring precious time to correct. Even after the trains had been freed of snow, the electric locomotives were still unable to budge them from the passing track. O’Neill and his men were eventually forced to uncouple the individual cars of each train and dislodge them one by one, reassembling them on the track in front of the tunnel portal.
It was a slow, almost unfathomably cumbersome chore. And before it was finished, a snowslide somewhere between the tunnel and its hydroelectric plant in Tumwater Canyon took out the power and communication lines to the east. The job of pulling out the trains therefore had to be finished by the steam locomotives, which would then have to carry them through the unventilated tunnel. The only bright spot in the situation was that the trains would be moving downgrade as they traveled to Wellington. With gravity providing most of the tractive effort, the steam locomotives could “drift” through the tunnel, throttles barely open, making any danger of asphyxiation remote.
Toward evening—with the job of moving the trains now under control—O’Neill finished up at Cascade Tunnel Station and hopped a ride on the rotary west through the tunnel. It was growing late, and he needed to get back to a working telegraph key to report to his superiors in St. Paul.
But there was yet another snag awaiting him at Wellington. The second double rotary—the one that was supposed to have plowed the tracks down to Scenic by now—was instead back at Wellington, sitting idle in the snow. Hard as it was to believe, conductor Purcell and his crew had encountered another snowslide on the line west—near Snowshed 3.3 again, at precisely the same point where the first major slide had come down twenty-four hours earlier. Worse, while attempting to buck through it, the lead plow of the double, the X807, had swallowed a fallen tree stump embedded in the snow. The stump had ravaged the bowels of the plow and broken its hoist mechanism, causing the plow to list hard to one side. Although Purcell and his men had effected a makeshift repair of the machine, it was all but useless for heavy-duty work.
Even a man as stoic as James O’Neill must now have been beyond frustration. With the westward line blocked yet again, those two trains would not be able to continue down the mountain for at least several more hours. Nor could they be held back at Cascade; the dwindling food supply at the beanery had to be conserved for the use of the workers there. So O’Neill decided to put the trains at Wellington, at least for the moment. West of the Wellington station were several passing tracks where both trains could wait until the line was clear again. The passengers could then eat their supper at Bailets Hotel, a small railroaders’ hostelry not far away. The proprietor, W. R. Bailets, reportedly had plenty of food on hand, and would welcome the extra business.
Fortunately, there was at least one encouraging development concerning rotary snowplow X808, the fifth of the division’s rotaries. Under the direction of the division’s master mechanic, J. J. Dowling, it had now reached Scenic, clearing the line from the coast and allowing several eastbound trains stranded since early Wednesday at Skykomish and Scenic to return to Seattle. Dowling’s rotary had also picked up two cars of coal at Skykomish and was pulling them up the west slope. If O’Neill’s rotary crews could somehow limit their consumption of coal, supplementing the supply in the coal chute with coal from various locomotives not in current use, they might just be able to scrape by until Dowling’s two carfuls arrived. Until that time, O’Neill would put disabled rotary X807 on the coal-chute track alongside his own business car, where the rotary’s coal supply could be plundered if necessary.
That still left the matter of clearing up this new slide at Snowshed 3.3, and the rotary crews, many of which had been on duty for two days straight, desperately needed a break. Rather than leave the plows idle while their operators slept, O’Neill decided to supplement their crews with the relatively well-rested men from the electric motors. He and Blackburn would take the double rotary west with these extra men to attack the slide at Snowshed 3.3 overnight. Harrington would meanwhile take the remaining single rotary—the X801—back through the tunnel to deal with the slide that had taken down the power lines on the east slope.
With the process of moving the trains to Wellington well under way, the superintendent and trainmaster Blackburn boarded the double rotary and began to head west toward Windy Point. Weary as he was, Jim O’Neill seemed determined not to rest until his division was back in working order.
24th of Feb. at night. They are moving us through the Tunnel to a little hamlet called Wellington.
—Sarah Jane Covington
Wellington
Thursday Evening
At approximately 7:45 P.M. Great Northern Railway train No. 25 emerged from the western portal of the Cascade Tunnel into the muffled silence of the Wellington yard. Night had already set in, and with the electricity out, the few lights visible in the tiny, snowbound settlement were dim and irregular, the buildings lit only by gas lamps and flickering lanterns. As the train glided past the embattled-looking station, the passengers could see, standing on the slope behind it, a large wooden building with the words HOTEL BAILETS painted in block letters across its facade. It was here, according to conductor Pettit, that they would go to get their supper—a welcome piece of news. After the beanery, Bailets’s dining room was bound to seem like Delmonico’s.
Still moving, No. 25 was shunted off the main line onto one of the sidings that paralleled it for some distance beyond the station. Here the train shuddered to a stop. Happy to have made even this small advance—at the very least they were now “over the hump,” on the westward side of the summit ridge—the passengers peered through the train windows at their new surroundings. To the right of the cars, standing on the various side tracks of the Wellington lower yard, were some of the casualties of the railroad’s ongoing fight against the storm: the disabled rotary X807, an extra steam engine, and three of the four powerful GE electric motors, now paralyzed by the downing of the power lines. At the very end of the spur track, opposite a small sand house and a tall wooden coal chute, sat an elegant-looking business car: the A-16, the private car of superintendent O’Neill, nearly invisible under mounds of snow.
The exact nature of their new position would not be evident to most of the passengers until daybreak, but the passing track on which they had been placed was located on a fifty-foot-wide ledge that had been gouged out of the mountainside during construction of the line. Above the ledge was a steep, sparsely timbered slope running two thousand feet straight up to the top of Windy Mountain. Below, just beyond a second, still-unoccupied passing track to their left, was the continuation of the slope—a sharp drop down to frozen Tye Creek. The train, in other words, was perched on a narrow shelf, with a steep ravine below it and acres of heavy wet snow on a mountainside above it.
