Skagit County, Washington, USA
(Darius Kinsey / Getty)
Building a railroad across the United States was not an easy task, to say the least. In numerous places, the landscape to be traversed was deeply challenging, given the imperative to secure the rails to an entirely flat and smooth pathway. Not only did vast distances need to be spanned, so did deep canyons. Enter the trestle bridge. Rather than waiting for the delivery of permanent supplies to construct a bridge to last for decades, the onus was to build something that would work – fast – and which could be replaced later. More than 100 years later, original trestle bridges can still be found across the US and in Canada.
This train belongs to the Clear Lake Lumber Co. based in Skagit County, near the American–Canadian border. At its peak, the Clear Lake Lumber Co. employed 1,236 men.
Photographer Darius Kinsey worked across the west of Washington State between 1890 and 1940, directing his camera to the area’s loggers and lumberjacks. His career came to an abrupt end in 1940 when he fell from a tree stump, aged seventy-one. He died in 1945.
‘Red Madden, known to the box car fraternity as “Cincy”, last week in two minutes escaped from death by fire, from mangling under a railroad train, from destruction in a terrible fall, and from drowning. His clothes caught fire while he was cooking his dinner, he ran across a trestle bridge to get to the creek below, was caught by an express train, fell sixty feet from the trestle bridge, was swept over a forty-foot falls, and was dragged out by Sam Noradyke, fishing. “You came down fast,” remarked Sam. “I was in a hurry,” said Cincy.’
Omaha Daily Bee, June 18, 1905
