This winter is hell of a time.
—Nyke Homonylo, trackwalker
Monday, February 21, 1910
Everett, Washington
District weather observer G. N. Salisbury delivered the bad news early Monday morning: It was going to snow—again. Another late-winter storm, this one chilled by record-breaking low temperatures, would be sweeping into the Pacific Northwest, bringing heavy precipitation to the entire region.
In Everett, some thirty miles north of Seattle, February’s relentless barrage of storms seemed to be making the editor of the Daily Herald giddy: “Cold Wave Is Hieing Hither,” trilled the front-page story in Monday’s paper. “It behooves residents to immediately saly [sic] forth to the woodpile and split a goodly supply of fuel, for indications point to the fact that the mercury is planning to take the toboggan.”
For James Henry O’Neill, standing sentinel in his office at Everett’s Delta rail yards, the news was cause for more serious worry. As superintendent of the Great Northern Railway’s Cascade Division, he was the man responsible for keeping vital mail, freight, and passenger trains moving through the entire western half of Washington State, and he knew that even a minor storm entering his territory could easily balloon into a crisis. Just twenty-four hours earlier—on Sunday, the purported day of rest, when he should have been at home with his wife and baby—O’Neill had been mired in railroad troubles all day. A foot of snow had fallen in the mountains to the east, overwhelming his track-clearing snowplows and delaying two of his most important trains at the station in Skykomish. Today he had another train stranded at Nason Creek with a broken-down locomotive. These all-too-typical headaches could only get worse.
After three years as Cascade Division superintendent, O’Neill had learned a lot about adversity from nature. “Probably no other stretch of railroad in the United States at this time,” wrote railway historian James E. Vance, “was so taxing in its operation.” The problem was simple geography; virtually all mainline Great Northern trains entering or leaving the Puget Sound region had to surmount one huge and unavoidable obstacle: the Cascade Mountains. On clear days O’Neill could actually see them from his office windows, suspended over the horizon like a perpetual taunt.
Rising up precipitously from the coastal plain about forty miles east of Seattle, the Cascades formed an enormous geological wall bisecting the Pacific Northwest from north to south, catching moisture from every weather system that crossed them. The unhappy consequence for those on the west side of the range was Puget Sound’s notoriously soggy weather. For James H. O’Neill, the result was almost constant railroad chaos for seven months of the year: floods and mudslides in spring and fall, blizzards and avalanches through the long mountain winter. Even in a normal year, the rail lines through the Cascades—Seattle’s most direct link with the rest of the country for everything from hat pins to harvesters—were all but impossible to keep open.
This year had been anything but normal. Snow was typically rare in the Pacific-warmed cities on the coast, but in the winter of 1909–10 even Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett were being savaged. With one week left before month’s end, Seattle had already surpassed its previous record for snowy days in February. And in the high Cascades—the snowiest region in the contiguous United States and territories—the snow season had lately turned downright brutal. Long before Christmas arrived, mudslides had already started causing accidents and delays throughout O’Neill’s territory. By January the mudslides had turned into snowslides, coming down with such frequency that a wrecker train sent up into the mountains to clear up a slide-damaged freight had itself been demolished by a slide.
And now, just when the snow season was supposed to be winding down, this new storm was hieing its way hither, promising to make the superintendent’s long winter even longer.
Thirty-seven-year-old James O’Neill—sturdy, austerely handsome, with a chiseled, intelligent face softened by intimations of wry humor around the eyes—had been railroading in and around the northern snow belt for his entire career. Born in Canada in 1872, he’d moved as a child to Buxton, a scrubby Dakota prairie town that owed its existence almost entirely to the fact that the Great Northern Railway (then known as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba) ran through it. His father was a section foreman, and before young Jim had memorized his multiplication tables he could recite the makeup of every scheduled freight train that lumbered past the yard where he played. Railroading and Catholicism being the twin family religions, and Jim showing little inclination for the priesthood, there was never much question about what he was going to do with his life. But as one forty-year railroad veteran would later write, “Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were the sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I’ve heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.”
When he was just thirteen, Jim O’Neill had answered that call, abandoning his formal education and leaving home to start work as a dollar-a-day waterboy for an extra work gang at Devils Lake. By age fifteen he was already operating out of Grand Forks as a freight train brakeman—a notoriously hazardous job and one that, because of his youth, he could keep only by indemnifying the railroad of all liability in case of accident. Two years later, he got a promotion to conductor, running extra freights at three cents a mile. He was dubbed “That Kid Conductor from Buxton” and was soon earning a reputation for keeping his trains on time no matter what the weather.
O’Neill’s education in handling the really deep snow began somewhat later, after he was transferred to the Montana Rockies. Vaulting steadily up through the railroad’s hierarchy, he became first a trainmaster at Great Falls and then, in quick succession, superintendent of the Montana and then the Kalispell divisions. His swift advancement was no mystery: O’Neill was a prodigy, a precociously shrewd manager with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of drive and will. Never content to oversee operations from a steam-heated office, O’Neill became known for assessing and solving problems right out in the field, almost before they happened. And on the Great Northern Railway, the northernmost transcontinental line in the United States, that typically meant dealing with the consequences of snow.
“I never saw more pluck, energy, and determination bundled up into one man,” a colleague would later say of him. “I have known O’Neill to wade snow waist-deep for ten miles to get to a slide. He is first on the scene when there is trouble and last to leave.”
The description is doubtless colored by affection—O’Neill was almost universally well liked—but his willingness to work side by side with his men was fabled at the Great Northern. Once promoted to an office job in the cost-accounting department at company headquarters in St. Paul, he lasted less than a year. “I hated it,” he would later admit to a reporter. “When winter came, I found myself longing to be out in the weather.” Before eight months had passed, he was out on the line again, battling the snow.
But that was over a decade ago. By February of 1910—facing his third winter as head of the Cascade Division—O’Neill had already put in almost a quarter century on the Great Northern. At thirty-seven, he was reaching an age when hiking through acres of deep snow was perhaps better left to younger men. He also had a family to think of now. In October 1908, O’Neill—who had made his own way through life since the age of thirteen—had finally married. Berenice C. McKnight, a tall, doe-eyed, Pre-Raphaelite beauty fourteen years his junior, had followed him from Montana after his promotion to Cascade Division chief. Together they had set up house in a modest, three-story, Prairie-style home at 1713 Hoyt Avenue in Everett. And within ten months of their marriage (O’Neill’s gift for efficiency manifesting itself in all areas of endeavor), Berenice had already given birth to a child: Peggy Jane O’Neill, born August 3, 1909.
By the beginning of November—when the first substantial snows hit the high Cascades—O’Neill would have had precious little time for the delights of fatherhood. He was division superintendent, responsible for the smooth running of several hundred miles of railroad, and his duties were legion. “Fully one-half of his time,” declared an 1893 Scribner’s article about the job of railway superintendent, “will be spent out-of-doors looking after the physical condition of his track, masonry, bridges, stations, buildings of all kinds. Concerning the repair or renewal of such he will have to pass judgment.” Nor did his job stop there:
He has to plan and organize the work of every yard, every station. He must know the duties of each employee on his pay-rolls, and instruct all new men, or see that they are properly instructed. He must keep incessant and vigilant watch on the movement of all trains, noting the slightest variation from the schedules which he has prepared, and looking carefully into the causes therefor, so as to avoid its recurrence.
Add to this the complications of a major mountain crossing and an average of fifty feet of snow per year, and the scope of O’Neill’s job becomes abundantly, even painfully, clear.
As hard as the superintendent’s job was on O’Neill, it can only have been harder on his wife. A woman barely into her twenties caring for a newborn child in a strange town, Berenice must have watched the weather reports as closely as her husband did, knowing that any approaching storm could cause him to disappear for days or even weeks on end. The O’Neills did employ someone to help Berenice with the baby and the housekeeping—Carrie F. Bailey, the only live-in servant on the block—but a forty-five-year-old Irishwoman could hardly substitute for a husband.
These recurring separations must have been especially difficult since, judging from surviving letters and other family memorabilia, the O’Neills’ marriage was one of unusually intense affection. “Here is the most important thing in my life,” Berenice wrote on the back of one of Jim’s studio portraits in her scrapbook. On the back of another she scribbled two lines of the Thirty-seventh Psalm: “Mark the perfect and behold the upright, / For the end of that man is peace.” Never shy about professing her emotions, Berenice regularly presented her husband with notes of such unreserved tenderness that he must have lived in terror of their ever falling into the hands of his railway colleagues.
The couple had met in Kalispell, the Great Northern’s onetime base of operations in the Montana Rockies, probably in early 1907. (In her scrapbook, Berenice kept a photograph of the two of them taken in what appears to be the yard of her family home. Berenice is standing in the shade of a tree, hugging a cat in her arms; Jim, looking rakish in a white, wide-brimmed hat, reclines on the lawn behind her. On the back of the photograph is an inscription in Berenice’s elegant hand: “The summer I met The Man.’”) As a railroad superintendent, “The Man” would have been a figure of some standing in Kalispell, but he was a newcomer to town, barely educated and of no family to speak of. His pursuit of the much younger, much better-connected Berenice—a gifted painter and pianist whose father was a prominent local businessman—would have caused some comment.
Even so, O’Neill approached the task with his usual unflagging energy and efficiency. In the sequence of telegrams he sent to her in the summer of 1907—each one carefully preserved in that same scrapbook—one can trace the swift and steady progress of their intimacy, beginning with a telegram dated June 3, 1907:
—TO MISS BERENICE MCKNIGHT
AM ON MY WAY TO CALIFORNIA, IF CONVENIENT WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU. TELEPHONE ME AT THE BUTLER HOTEL 5 P.M. I LEAVE IN THE A.M. JIM
IF YOU HAVE NO ENGAGEMENT THIS AFTERNOON, COME DOWN ABOUT 3 P.M. AND WE’LL TAKE A RIDE. WILL LOOK FOR YOU. JIM
—BERENICE DEAR
THIS IS A PEACHY DAY FOR BOATING. WOULD YOU COME FOR A BOAT RIDE? YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYBODY ON EARTH. LOTS OF LOVE. ALWAYS, JIM
That the courtship was telescoped into a few short weeks is unsurprising, considering O’Neill’s constant need to be on the road. But by the time he received his next promotion—to Cascade Division superintendent in October of the same year—the couple’s bond was solid enough to weather the separation. Within a year they were married and in possession of a lease. To Berenice’s delight, Jim even managed to carve a few weeks out of his schedule for their honeymoon, a rail trip to the East aboard his private business car—one of the more enviable perquisites of division superintendency—festooned for the occasion with quantities of roses and carnations.
Since then, two full winters of snow had passed; at this point, nearing the tail end of a third, Berenice had a better understanding of what it meant to be the wife of the Cascade Division superintendent. True, the current of playful affection between them seems to have persisted (a February 1909 telegram reads, “Berenice Dear—Expect to be in Seattle tonight. … Have many pretty things to tell you and of course have a few big kisses left”), but Jim’s absences must have taken a toll. To be married to James H. O’Neill was, in a very real sense, to share a husband with the Great Northern Railway—and no number of love telegrams, however effusive, could make up for the fact that the other partner in this threesome seemed to be getting most of the attention.
Everett, Washington, meanwhile, was hardly a town likely to provide Berenice with much distraction. Like many new settlements in the rapidly developing Pacific Northwest, it was viewed as a place with a big future, soon to outstrip those hidebound cities of the East, but at the moment Everett was no Little Paris on Puget Sound. Built on a narrow peninsula between the muddy Snohomish River and a ship-cluttered inlet called Port Gardner Bay, it was—according to one visitor, the Reverend Louis Tucker—a place “with none of the social graces.” Self-promoted as “The City of Smokestacks,” Everett was the quintessential western mill town, a rough and gritty industrial center teeming with
12 sawmills, 16 shingle mills, 2 flour mills. A smelter with capacity to reduce 350 tons of ore a day; a precious metal refinery, arsenic plant, immense paper mill, the largest saw and shingle machinery manufacturers on the Pacific coast, iron works, foundries, creosoting works, shipyards, 6 planing mills, sash and door factories, brewery, stove works, tannery, and scores of other industries.
Having been literally hewn from virgin forest less than twenty years earlier, it was now an outpost of heavy industry plunked down on the edge of a timbered wilderness. And although the town often spoke of itself as a rival to Seattle—“as a terrier yaps at a great Dane”—the claim was still mostly swagger.
Everett’s inhabitants could be as coarse and unpolished as the town itself. “Sailors and lumbermen reeled through the avenue at all hours,” wrote the ever-scornful Reverend Tucker. That these men were likely reeling toward Everett’s infamous Market Street bordello, which drew its clientele from mining and lumber camps for miles around, was something the reverend was apparently too delicate to mention. The town did offer less scandalous types of amusement—everything from The Merry Widow at the Everett Theater to Norris’s Trained Baboons at the Rose—but most townspeople struck the reverend as too overburdened with work to appreciate much of it.
Yet Everett definitely had its appeal. The waterfront areas may have been grim, but the O’Neills’ neat, airy neighborhood was more than pleasant. And although the seventeen-year-old town had already endured several of the boom-and-bust cycles for which raw western settlements were notorious, it was certainly prospering in 1910. On mild evenings the couple could stroll with the baby a few blocks west from Hoyt Avenue to admire the rows of smart new mansions on Grand and Rucker, homes owned by the wealthy mining and lumber barons who had built the town up so quickly from nothing. Once there, standing on the high bluffs overlooking the busy gull-streaked waterfront, they could look down on a vast panorama of healthy and humming industry.
By some standards, of course, that sweep of erupting smokestacks and ramshackle sawmills and shingle mills would have been considered irredeemably ugly. For those less sentimental about unspoiled landscape, however, there was doubtless a rough, mesmeric grandeur to the spectacle, with the feverish glow of all-night furnaces pulsing through columns of rising steam, accompanied by the percussion of great industrial machines and the stark glissando whine of mill saws. Armies of men would march to and from their factories for each of the day’s three shifts, and over the whole scene (at least when the wind was blowing seaward from the pulp mill) would hang the sweet, sherry-wine perfume of newly cut wood—the scent of great fir and cedar forests being transformed, log by log, into the building blocks of a growing industrial civilization.
For a railroad man like O’Neill and his family, there was good reason for pride in the sight of all that furious productivity. It was the railroad, after all, that had made the transformation of the Northwest possible, serving as the essential catalyst for turning a fallow wilderness into the colossal wealth-producing machine they saw below them. ‘All of that land,” a U.S. congressman had once remarked, alluding to the entire American West, “wasn’t worth ten cents until the railroads came.” Unlike most places in the world, where railroads were built primarily to connect existing centers of population and industry, in the American West railroads had actually created those centers. Lines were run out into the wilderness with the expectation that settlement and development would spring up in their wake.
“Railroads are not a mere convenience,” Miles C. Moore, an early governor of the Washington Territory, had once claimed. “They are the true alchemy of the age, which transmutes the otherwise worthless resources of a country into gold.”
The results of that alchemy were now plain to see, in Everett and throughout the West. What once had been considered an undifferentiated wasteland—“the Great American Desert,” as easterners referred to most of the continent west of the Mississippi River—was now a productive part of the American commonwealth, a rich patchwork of cities and towns and farms, of ranchland and forests that could be harvested for their timber, minerals, and coal. Thanks to the railroad, the task of conquering the West, which had begun with the Lewis and Clark expedition back in 1803, had been brought to triumphant completion in just decades.
In Washington, which had remained unlinked to the American rail system until the mid-1880s, development had necessarily started late even by western standards. But once that connection had been made, growth was explosive. The population of Seattle, which in 1880 stood at less than 10,000, had by 1910 mushroomed to over 237,000—a twenty-four-fold increase in thirty years. Growth rates in some of the smaller cities in the state—Spokane, Wenatchee, and especially Everett—had been even more extreme. “Everything seems to have happened within the last ten years,” the journalist Ray Stannard Baker said of the Pacific Northwest in 1903.
The so-called instant civilization of the Northwest, however, was often superficial. Even in that thoroughly modern year of 1910, much of Washington State retained the quality of a raw frontier territory. Cities such as Seattle and Spokane, though vibrant and on the rise economically, were still what journalist Mark Sullivan called “towns with a marble Carnegie Library at 2nd Street and Indian teepees at 10th.” And their main link to the rest of civilization was still a few thin lines of iron running through a vast expanse of mountainous forest and empty prairie—a link that in winter was fragile at best.
No one knew all of this better than Superintendent James H. O’Neill. “The true alchemy of the age” couldn’t work its economic magic unless the trains were kept running, and in the Cascade Division that was never an easy task. That’s why the Great Northern had labored hard over the past two decades to secure its main line through the mountains. Millions of dollars had been spent above and beyond the original cost of construction, principally for the erection of wooden snowsheds, huge rooflike structures built over the track in areas especially susceptible to snowslides.
This work was still ongoing. That very morning, in fact, the GN had announced an ambitious new chapter in its efforts to fortify the line over the Cascades: “Two and a half millions will be spent by the Great Northern Railway company this year in the state of Washington,” the Herald reported. The focus of the work was to be a radical alteration of the railroad’s right-of-way up the west slope of the mountains, where snowslides were typically most troublesome. The company proposed to clean and grade a strip of land five hundred feet wide along a portion of the line, essentially laying down an impregnable thoroughfare through the wilderness, too broad to be burdened by onslaughts of nature like mud- or snowslides.
These promised improvements, however, could do little to help O’Neill as he sat in his office at the Delta yards, contemplating the coming storm. Over the past three winters, he and his men had earned a reputation for their ability to handle massive snowfalls. During O’Neill’s tenure as superintendent there had been remarkably few major line closures on the mountain line and—unusual in those days of frequent rail accidents—no passenger fatalities whatever. This was an impressive record—and one he would now have to defend. Slides were already causing problems in the division’s usual trouble spots, such as Windy Point and Tumwater Canyon. Another foot or two of new snow could only further destabilize the snowpack. This worrisome weather situation would also be exacerbated by another difficulty O’Neill was facing—an ongoing strike of railway switchmen (the workers who assembled and reshuffled trains in rail yards), which had been disrupting the division’s operations ever since the end of November.
With such a bleak outlook before him, O’Neill knew that he could not simply remain in Everett and hope for the best. Telephone and telegraph wires were sure to go down at some point during the storm, severing communications between his office and the field. To stay on top of the situation, he would have to head up into the mountains himself to direct operations on the ground. And he’d have to base himself in the area most likely to experience trouble: Stevens Pass, site of the Cascade Tunnel, the Great Northern’s narrow doorway through the Cascades summit ridge.
Unfortunately, this meant that O’Neill would be gone from Everett for at least several days. Berenice would have to endure yet another lonely, anxious week—lonelier and more anxious than usual, given the fact that she had just learned she was pregnant again. Conceived in December, only three and a half months after Peggy Jane was born, the child who was to be James O’Neill Jr. was already well on his way.
But O’Neill had no other choice. Telegrams calling for help were already pouring into the superintendent’s office from all over the division. So he began issuing instructions to his young stenographer, Earl Longcoy. O’Neill’s business car—the A-16, his portable office and sleeping quarters—was to be prepared for service. Tomorrow it would be tagged onto the end of eastbound GN train No. 4. The superintendent, accompanied by Longcoy and the A-16’s steward, Lewis Walker, would hitch a ride on No. 4 as far as Wellington, the small station at the west portal of the Cascade Tunnel. Along the way, he’d coordinate his team of snow-fighting supervisors: trainmaster Arthur Blackburn, a sixteen-year veteran of the GN, and assistant trainmaster William Harrington, that year’s designated “Snow King,” in charge of rotary snowplows. J. C. Devery, O’Neill’s assistant superintendent, would meanwhile supervise traffic from Leavenworth, at the eastern foot of the range. Wherever and whenever the inevitable crisis developed, O’Neill wanted to be prepared—with all of his troops in the field, ready for battle.
The military metaphor would prove to be apt. What O’Neill would be facing in those mountains over the next long and grueling week would be the equivalent of a campaign of war—a battle unprecedented in the history of American railroading. Like any military campaign, it would involve legions of men in action, hard-won victories alternating with even harder defeats, and countless individual acts and decisions that, in retrospect, would seem foolish, cunning, incomprehensible, or surpassingly heroic. It would be a conflict fought with the most advanced technologies of the age, against unrelenting time pressure and under the most extreme physical and psychological hardships, for stakes as high as they could be.
As in any combat situation, moreover, the credit for success or the responsibility for failure would inevitably fall on the shoulders of one man—the man whose position rendered him accountable for every judgment made and every action taken. Fairly or unfairly, this would be James H. O’Neill’s war. And now, on this cold but still deceptively calm Monday evening, the battle’s first skirmishes were about to begin.