What has become of Spokane’s boast that buttercups may always be found in bloom on Cannon Hill by Washington’s birthday?
Perhaps the groundhog heard it and wanted to get even with the inconsiderate people who sneer at his power.
“Coldest day of the year,” said Weather Observer Stewart this morning.
Everyone knew it, anyway, but an I-told-you-so air became general when it was learned that the thermometer at the Government station registered 4 below zero at 7 o’clock this morning. Until today, January 6 held the cold record for the winter, with a mark of 8 degrees above zero.
And the forecast for Wednesday is “More snow.”
—Spokane Inland Herald
Tuesday, February 22, 1910
Spokane, Washington
Early Evening
Time was not going to be a problem. That, at least, was what Lewis C. Jesseph could reasonably assume as he entered the Havermale Island rail station in Spokane on this frigid Washington’s Birthday evening. The thirty-two-year-old lawyer, well regarded for his meticulous preparation of court cases, had planned his trip carefully, giving himself a full thirty-six hours to get from Spokane to Seattle to Olympia, a distance of less than four hundred miles. Even if the train he was now heading for—the Great Northern Railway’s No. 25, known in Spokane as the Seattle Express—ran into significant delays, he’d still get over the mountains in plenty of time to make his connection. That would put him in the capital early enough to enjoy a leisurely dinner, telegraph his wife, Flora, and still get a good night’s rest before his hearing on Thursday morning. Assuming his sleeper wasn’t too crowded or noisy, he’d even have an opportunity to rehearse his presentation once or twice more.
This was to be an important case for Jesseph. Several months earlier he had lost a suit in the Superior Court of Stevens County in Colville, the small city north of Spokane where he lived and practiced. He was now appealing the case to the Washington State Supreme Court, and though he could have filed his brief on paper, he’d decided to argue the case orally before the panel of judges. As a former city attorney for Colville, Jesseph was practiced in the art of legal persuasion, and he was determined to use his argumentative skills to get the lower court’s judgment reversed.
Wintry weather hadn’t figured into his calculations. By late February the Spokane region was typically well on its way to spring thaw. But as Jesseph made his way down the steam-wreathed platform of the GN’s handsome mottled-brick station, sparse, wind-blown snow flurries began to spiral from the dark sky overhead, swirling through the halos of the station’s sputtering arc lights.
It was just after 7:00 P.M. when Jesseph climbed aboard the sleek, burgundy-colored cars of train No. 25. After the chill outside, the warmth of the train’s interior must have come as an enormous relief. Jesseph’s berth was in one of the two steam-heated sleepers—the Winnipeg and the Similkameen—located well behind the chuffing and cinder-spewing locomotive. Built by the renowned Pullman Company and recently remodeled, these sleepers represented the height of early-twentieth-century railroad luxury, with elegantly arched, leaded-glass clerestory windows, ornate gas lighting fixtures, and interiors finished in polished mahogany and plush vermilion. There was even a snug little gentlemen’s lounge at one end of each car and an equally compact ladies’ sitting room at the other.
Train No. 25 offered yet another distinctly modern amenity. Its powerful H-class Pacific engine was also pulling (in addition to two day coaches, a mail car, and a baggage car) a suave and stylish observation car, where the male passengers could gather to play cards, discuss business, smoke, drink, and swap stories without fear of offending feminine sensibilities. Overall, while not the most opulent train on the Great Northern line (that distinction belonged to the famous Oriental Limited, which ran between Seattle and the railway’s corporate home of St. Paul, Minnesota), the Seattle Express did provide a distinctly civilized environment in which to cross the bleak emptiness of central Washington State.
Jesseph had barely settled himself into his seat when a familiar figure appeared in the aisle beside him: John Merritt, an old friend who was also, by chance, the opposing lawyer in Thursday morning’s supreme court case. Despite a more than twenty-year difference in their ages—Merritt was in his late fifties, looking somewhat stooped and overweight these days—the two had become cronies in Spokane years ago, when Jesseph was in law school. Upon hearing that Jesseph was planning to argue the supreme court case in person, Merritt had decided to do likewise, and had by coincidence booked the same train.
At exactly 7:30 P.M., after the conductor’s requisite cry of “All aboard” and two long blasts from the engine’s whistle, the Great Northern Railway’s Seattle Express pulled away from the Spokane station, right on schedule.
Passing under the station’s tall, Italianate clock tower, the train veered slightly to the north and almost immediately crossed a bridge over the Spokane River. Below, barely visible in the evening gloom, was the rushing, partially frozen torrent of the city’s celebrated falls, around which, just a scant few decades earlier, Spokane Indians had pitched their tepees. But here, as in Everett across the state, the railroad had performed its quick transforming act, and the bunchgrass prairie around the falls had long since given way to broad avenues and multistory office buildings. Far from the old frontier town of some eighty ranchers, fur traders, and prospectors it had been in 1879, Spokane was in 1910 a busy modern metropolis of 104,000 souls, with half a dozen daily newspapers, numerous theaters, electric streetcars, and even its own fifteen story skyscraper—the headquarters of the Old National Bank, not quite finished but already magnificent on its prominent corner of West Riverside Avenue. As No. 25 began picking up speed, clattering through the outlying districts west of the city center, Jesseph, Merritt, and the other passengers could look out on what had rapidly become the largest metropolis between the Twin Cities and Seattle.
Even a large western city, however, had little in the way of an electrified urban area in 1910, and it was not long before the lights of downtown Spokane were left behind. The exterior darkness soon turned the train windows reflective, redirecting the passengers’ attention toward the gaslit interior of the cars, toward one another. There would be, by the time the train’s complement was full, about fifty-five passengers aboard—a mix of men and women, children and adults, leisure travelers and those on personal or professional business. Lawyers were the largest contingent; in addition to Jesseph and Merritt, there were three other attorneys aboard. The passenger list also included two real estate men, an electrician, a civil engineer, a clergyman, and the inevitable three or four “drummers” (the ubiquitous traveling salesmen of many a Rotarian’s joke and many a mother’s cautionary tale to her daughter).
Ida Starrett, the recent widow from Spokane, was already on the train, with her three young children seated around her and her elderly parents sitting nearby. The other families were also aboard—the Grays, the Becks, and a young streetcar motorman with his three-year-old daughter. There were also several women traveling alone: a whitehaired grandmother named Sarah Jane Covington, who was coming home from a visit to Spokane; Libby Latsch, the head of her own hairaccessories company; and Nellie Sharp, a young, newly divorced freelance writer working on a travel article.
Mrs. Covington, a petite sixty-nine-year-old of a somewhat intellectual bent, was well known in her home city of Olympia for her charity and reform work. Some weeks earlier she had traveled to Spokane to care for an ailing son. Melmoth A. Covington’s illness had started innocuously enough: one day he’d received a minor scratch on the wrist from a pet cat. But the wound had quickly become infected, and within three days he was in the hospital, his arm grotesquely swollen. Mrs. Covington had arrived in town just in time to witness her son’s harrowing treatment: “Two or three Drs. worked over him,” she later wrote to her daughter. “They injected serum in his breast and that made him extremely weak; then they cut three gashes in his arm, which was swollen very much. … When I first saw him, they were spraying it with stuff that burned and smarted so as to make him holler out.”
Yet Melmoth had recovered steadily. His mother, feeling comfortable enough to leave him, was now heading back home, after nearly a month away from Olympia. And although she was not a confident traveler, she could reassure herself with the thought that she would soon be reunited with her husband, in plenty of time to celebrate their fifty-first wedding anniversary on March 3.
Not far from Mrs. Covington on the sleeper Winnipeg sat Edward W. “Ned” Topping, a curly-haired, powerfully built twenty-nine-year-old salesman from Ashland, Ohio. Employed by his father’s family business—the Safety Door Company, a manufacturer of hardware for barn doors—Ned was ostensibly traveling cross-country in search of new markets. But he actually had another, sadder motive for being on the road. The previous August, his wife, Florence, had died in childbirth. After watching their son grieve for months, Topping’s parents had decided that he needed something to distract himself from the loss of both a wife and an unborn daughter. So they had sent him on this trip west, taking his twenty-two-month-old son, Bill, into their own care until his return. And although the idea behind Ned’s trip was to get his mind off matters back in Ashland, his letters indicate that he was thinking about little but home and family.
“Mother,” he wrote while on the train, “I am so glad that your trip to Akron was so successful & that the doctor found nothing wrong with little Bill. I’d like to have seen him acting up on the train. I suppose the Durrs”—the child’s maternal grandparents—“thoroughly enjoyed your visit, for I know how they like to see him and I’ll be anxious to hear from your own lips the story of the trip.”
Since his departure from Ohio, he’d apparently had news of his younger sister’s engagement: “I can hardly believe that Ruth is wearing a ring,” he continued, perhaps thinking of his own wife’s ring, the stone of which he himself now wore in a setting made after her death. “I know she must be very happy. I’m glad, exceedingly so, and further believe she has made a wise choice. She will have a new life now entirely.”
The subtext in all of this was clear: Despite being surrounded by novelty—the sights and sounds of a strange, new territory very different from the place he had left behind—Ned Topping was yearning for nothing so much as further reminders of home: “I hope father and the rest will get busy pretty soon and write me, for letters do come so good way out here.”
The person with perhaps the oddest reason for being aboard the Seattle Express that night was Mrs. Nellie McGirl—or, as she now preferred to be called, Miss Nellie Sharp. Recently separated from a husband in Oakland, Nellie had been staying in a Spokane hotel with a friend—Mrs. Herbert Tweedie, whose husband also seemed to be out of the picture—planning the next step in their lives. The two women had decided to spend a few weeks researching a travel article about the lingering traces of the old Wild West in Washington and Montana, with an eye to selling the piece to the popular magazine McClure’s. From Spokane, one of them would head east to cover the cowboys and homesteaders of the great Montana plains; the other would go west to interview the loggers and fishermen of the more temperate Washington coast. In the interest of fairness, they had drawn straws to determine who would take which territory.
Nellie, a decidedly stout twenty-six-year-old of ebullient good humor, had drawn the long straw. As winner of the contest, she had chosen what seemed the more desirable option: heading west to the coast. So Mrs. Tweedie had packed her friend onto the Seattle Express that evening. Their plan was to meet again in Spokane after a few weeks in the field—their notebooks brimming with fabulous tales about their escapades—and begin assembling the article. Whether or not they’d be able to get the story published in a prestigious magazine like McClure’s, the project would be a new beginning for them, the start of a bright new chapter in their lives.
This, at least, was what Nellie Sharp had planned for herself. And as the porters on train No. 25 began preparing the Pullman cars for the night, pulling down the cunningly stowed sleeping berths, it was unlikely that Nellie—or any of the others aboard—was anticipating any greater adventure than that. Traveling hundreds of miles over a mountain range was far from the weeks-long ordeal it had been just decades earlier. America at the beginning of the twentieth century was a population on the move, alive with what William Dean Howells once called “the American poetry of vivid purpose.” This kind of journey was a routine affair in 1910, something undertaken for the most commonplace reasons: to visit a son or daughter, to consult on a local engineering project, to sell a few loads of “patented safety door hangers.”
At Wenatchee, one of the last stations before the foothills of the Cascades, Henry H. White boarded the train. A salesman for the American Paper Company, White had been away on business and was now returning home to the Fenimore Hotel in Seattle, where he lived with his wife. A plainspoken, sometimes pugnacious man, he was, by his own admission, “not of a disposition to anticipate trouble,” but rumors of a severe snowstorm ahead were worrisome to him. Though White had been crossing the Cascades monthly for the past six years, this was only his fourth trip on the Great Northern’s line through Stevens Pass, and he had never made the trip during such a bad storm.
Even so, as White climbed aboard the sleeper Winnipeg and found his berth, there was no palpable sense of alarm on the train. News of the storm, while perhaps disturbing for some, didn’t trouble those familiar with the railroad’s operations in the Cascades. As Lewis Jesseph was later to write: “We knew that the Great Northern Railway had constructed many snowsheds to protect the right-of-way from the slides and that the rotary snowplows could clear the exposed track.” The splendid cocoon of a Pullman sleeper would in any case have seemed all but impermeable to those carried within its portable environment of safety and comfort.
“About eleven o’clock we retired,” Jesseph wrote, evincing a sense of trust that was probably shared by most of those aboard. By morning, they knew, the train would already be approaching the coast, with the storm-tossed mountains far behind it.
9:00 P.M.
Berne, clear and calm, no new snow
Cas. Tunnel, snowing light, east wind, 10° above
Wellington, strong wind, snowing, 20° above
Scenic, snowing medium hard, blowing hard, 18° above
Handled freight and passenger traffic with rotary protection and without any unusual delay.
—J. C. Devery,
assistant superintendent
Cascade Division Operations Diary
Wellington, Washington
Toward Midnight
The situation was under control. Twelve hours after his arrival on the mountain, James H. O’Neill could safely say that much. Yes, there had been some small problems—and at least one situation on the west slope that had resulted in significant delays—but his men were taking the storm in stride. From his temporary command post in the tiny station at Wellington, high in the mountains, O’Neill could look out on a railway line that, if not quite running smoothly, was at the very least running—a victory in itself
Unfortunately, however, victories never lasted very long in the Cascade Division. No sooner was one train dragged over the mountains than another was on the way to take its place—a procession that never ended, day or night. Though there were still some reactionaries in the country who opposed nighttime and Sunday operation of trains, railroading in 1910 was emphatically a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week proposition. To a modern railroader, the idea of any kind of downtime for a mainline rail system would have seemed almost unbelievably quaint.
So the superintendent knew that it was far too early to celebrate. The snow had begun in earnest a few hours earlier and was now coming down as thick as he’d ever seen it. Although storms in the Cascades rarely lasted more than twenty-four or thirty-six hours, O’Neill understood that there was still plenty of time for trouble to erupt.
Surprisingly, the only real problem so far had been caused not by snow but by the extreme cold. That morning, after bidding his wife and daughter good-bye and boarding his business car for the trip to the mountains, O’Neill had felt the temperature plummet. By the time he reached the station at Scenic Hot Springs, a small resort on the west slope, it had fallen to ten degrees above zero—cold enough for ice on the tracks to start playing havoc with stopped trains. And this was exactly what had happened. Overnight, an extra-long westbound freight train had become immobilized by ice and hard snow while standing halfway onto the passing track at Scenic. An attempt to pull the freight free had succeeded only in dislocating the drawbar of one of the freight cars. The train had broken in two with its back end sticking out onto the main line, blocking traffic in both directions and delaying no fewer than three first-class trains.
Arriving on the scene and conferring with his trainmaster, Arthur Blackburn, the ever-efficient O’Neill had quickly organized a team of seventy-five to one hundred shovelers to keep the train’s undercarriage free of the drifting snow. Then he’d ordered up a spare engine to extricate the damaged freight car, reconnect the two halves of the train, and pull it completely off the main track. The maneuver had required some complex railroading, but within a couple of hours the job was done. Traffic had begun moving again. Leaving Blackburn in charge at Scenic, O’Neill had reboarded his business car and continued up the hill.
It was already midday by the time he’d arrived at Wellington. Ordering his business car left on a sidetrack, O’Neill had made his way to the depot and established himself in the station’s small telegraph office. And ever since then, he’d been hovering over the operator’s shoulder, receiving reports and issuing instructions by telegraph and telephone up and down the line. As trains passed through the station on their way east or west, he would take time to consult with the engineers and conductor of each, asking them about conditions, weighing their impressions against his own encyclopedic knowledge of the division and its weak points. O’Neill understood from long experience that if he was to have any hope of keeping his trains on time, he’d need every bit of intelligence he could get.
O’Neill’s principal focus was on the deployment of his fleet of Cooke rotary snowplows. These state-of-the-art snow-fighting machines were heavy, reinforced railcars, each with a huge bladed wheel attached to the front. Propelled by one or two trailing locomotives, a rotary would lumber along the tracks at a top speed of ten miles per hour or so, the rotating blades of its fanlike wheel slicing into drifts as high as thirteen feet, throwing the snow in high, parabolic arcs to the edge of the right-of-way. Rotaries were difficult to maintain, awkward to operate, and gluttonous of coal and water—and they certainly weren’t pretty—but they were effective: A fleet of half a dozen could normally keep a division’s worth of track free of snow and open for traffic.
O’Neill currently had four of the division’s five rotaries operating, and he needed every one of them. Earlier in the evening he’d issued an order that all first-class trains (i.e., high-priority, time-sensitive trains such as those carrying passengers and mail) should be directly preceded over the hill by a rotary. With the wind blowing so hard on the west slope, a newly plowed track could be clogged by drifts within an hour or two; a train without a snowplow escort could easily bog down—and the last thing O’Neill needed was a train full of passengers marooned on an exposed mountainside, slowly being buried under windblown drifts of snow.
So far, at least, this plan was working well. Eastbound trains No. 2 and No. 26, under the protection of snowplow X800, were at that very moment climbing in procession up the west slope toward Wellington. Another plow, the X801, was waiting at the western edge of the mountains, ready to accompany No. 44, which had just left Everett. Westbound train No. 1—the Oriental Limited—had passed through Wellington about an hour earlier and was being preceded down the mountain by rotary X807. And O’Neill’s fourth rotary, the X802, was heading off to meet westbound No. 25, the Seattle Express (the train carrying Jesseph, Topping, and the others), which was now approaching Leavenworth, at the eastern edge of O’Neill’s territory. Overall, traffic in the Cascade Division was in remarkably good shape.
But there was one more train approaching the Cascades that O’Neill was worried about more than all the rest: No. 27, the Fast Mail from St. Paul. This was the highest-priority train on the line, rushing mail cross-country from St. Paul to Seattle in a mere 47.25 hours. Inaugurated the previous September, the Fast Mail had quickly become a key (and extremely profitable) element in the GN network, part of a nationally crucial relay system designed to move mail from New York to the West Coast in just three days. In order to maintain this schedule, however, the Fast Mail had to travel significant stretches of its route at speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour. The penalty for late arrivals in Seattle was heavy, and if they occurred too frequently were likely to cause the U.S. Post Office Department to take the lucrative contract to one of the GN’s all-too-willing competitors.
In the first month of its existence, the Fast Mail had turned in a brilliant performance: From its first run on September 27, 1909, until October 30, it had racked up a perfect record of thirty-four consecutive on-time arrivals, often making up significant delays inherited from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, the line relaying mail to the GN from Chicago. One St. Paul-to-Seattle run had even been made in 44 hours and 35 minutes—a blistering pace by all standards of the day. “The Fastest Long-Distance Train in the World” was how one journalist from the Brooklyn Standard Union had described it. “It runs like a scared cat.”
Then November arrived and the Fast Mail’s record took a sudden and decisive turn for the worse. It ran hours late on November 2, 14, and 22. On December 5, the Great Northern’s “hottest train” gave its worst performance yet, arriving a full 12 hours and 45 minutes behind schedule. The main trouble, of course, had been heavy weather in the Cascades.
Now, on the night of February 22, the Fast Mail was threatening to fall short of even that dismal December record. Thanks to delays coming through the Montana Rockies, the train was roughly six hours late already. Getting over the Cascades under current conditions would probably put it even further behind schedule.
So O’Neill faced a conundrum. There were currently two important first-class trains heading west into his territory, but only one rotary—the X802—available to serve them. Should he hold the Seattle Express at Leavenworth until the Fast Mail caught up with it? If he did so, he could send the rotary ahead of both trains, giving both a newly cleared track as they made their way up the east slope of the mountains. Doing so, however, would also mean putting the Seattle Express, a train nearly as time-sensitive as the Fast Mail, several hours behind schedule.
Alternatively, O’Neill could release the Seattle Express promptly upon its arrival at Leavenworth and, without waiting for the Fast Mail, send it up the hill with the X802 ahead of it. Assuming that the mail train wasn’t too far behind—and that the snow wasn’t drifting too quickly—the Fast Mail would still have a relatively clean track ahead of it; but those were two significant assumptions. The fierce winds on the west side of the summit might soon work their way over to the east. Did O’Neill really want to take that kind of chance with his highest-priority train?
There was also a third option, one that O’Neill dreaded even to consider. If conditions on the hill turned critical—if a heavy snowslide came down or another train got iced up on the main line—the superintendent could always request permission to send trains over the line of one of the other GN-affiliated railroads connecting Spokane with the coast—namely, the Northern Pacific or the Spokane, Portland & Seattle. These lines also ran through the Cascades, but their crossings were located far south of the Great Northern’s always dicey route through Stevens Pass. The SP&S line, for instance—also known as the North Bank road—followed a route much less vulnerable to the depredations of mountain snowstorms, tracing the north bank of the Columbia River across the range. If any route remained open during the storm, that would probably be the one.
The inevitable drawback of detouring trains over either line was that it would put them many more hours behind schedule, and there was no reason—yet—for such a drastic measure. If nothing else, it was a matter of pride. To reroute the trains now, because of something as normal as a late-winter snowstorm, would be to admit defeat even before the battle was truly under way.
O’Neill, however, was a careful man, and this storm was beginning to look like a bad one, even by Cascade standards. Just an hour earlier, when the Oriental Limited had come through, O’Neill had asked its engineer, J. C. Wright, what he thought of conditions. Wright, a fourteen-year veteran of the Cascade Division, had given O’Neill something to think about: The storm, he’d said—at least right at the top of the mountain around Wellington—was quite simply the worst he’d ever seen.
It was snowing heavily, very heavily … [as if] somebody was plucking a chicken; it was falling out there so fast that you could not see very far, like looking across the canyon you could not see, on account it was just a dense fall of snow.
—Alfred B. Hensel,
mail clerk
Wednesday, February 23, 1910
Leavenworth, Washington
1:30 A.M.
Most of the passengers had already been asleep for hours when the Seattle Express pulled into the Leavenworth station. A small, picturesque mountain town sitting at the foot of a virtual wall of craggy, snow-covered peaks, Leavenworth was a Great Northern division point, where crews were changed and locomotives could top up their supplies of coal and water. It was also the point at which the really difficult terrain began for westbound traffic. Helper engines were added to the front or back of Seattle-bound trains here; the extra horsepower would assist them on the steep grades and sharp curves ahead. After Leavenworth, the line would enter a slotlike opening in the Cascades massif, following the Wenatchee River up a twisty canyon between brooding, steep-sided peaks of six to eight thousand feet. The effect was like entering a gargantuan maze, and on a slick, ice-covered path heading straight up. Even a relatively light passenger train would need the added help to get through.
It was snowing but calm at Leavenworth as the helper engine was attached to the front of the Express and a few more passengers boarded. Conductor Joseph L. Pettit, coming on duty for the night, took charge of the train. In an era when train conductors were fabled for their arrogance and imperiousness, Joe Pettit was a notable exception, by general consensus a kindly, avuncular man. Tonight, though, even he could be excused for being less than cheerful. Pettit knew what the weather was doing in those mountains up ahead. It was going to be a rough trip, and it was he, as conductor, who would have to deal with disgruntled passengers if they ran into heavy delays.
The train idled, steaming in the cold night while its crew awaited orders. They weren’t long in coming: superintendent O’Neill had decided he could not afford to wait until conditions improved. Time was simply too valuable to waste. So he chose to release the passenger train and let the Fast Mail catch up as it might. According to the latest reports, the mail train was making good time from Spokane, and since the wind had not yet picked up on the east slope, the line up to Stevens Pass was clear. There was no reason, then, to delay the passenger train.
At about 1:30 A.M., O’Neill conveyed his instructions to the dispatcher: Pettit and the crew of the Seattle Express were given the goahead to proceed.
Before the Express could leave, however, one of its passengers—a Mrs. Blanche Painter—stepped down from the train to the station platform. A milliner from Everett, she had been on her way home on a through ticket when she decided quite suddenly to stop over in Leavenworth to see some friends. Though she would later claim that the impulse was spontaneous, it was certainly a strange hour for an unannounced visit, and even finding a hotel room at 2:00 A.M. would have been difficult in a small town like Leavenworth. Nevertheless, Mrs. Painter did detrain, intending to complete her journey the next night. Luggage in hand, she left the Express and headed toward the depot—with no idea of how monumental a decision she had just made.
Meanwhile, final preparations were under way for the train’s departure. At 2:15 A.M. rotary X802 pulled out of Leavenworth, its fan blades spinning, making easy work of the light snow cover on the tracks. The express followed a short time later, carrying its cargo of sleeping passengers. The time was 2:30 A.M. For better or worse, they were heading up into the mountains.