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.
