No sun can penetrate these forests. The very life that is there seems a hushed, awed life. … In the presence of such savage loneliness, one feels how like an acorn’s fall and rotting man’s death would be.
—Hamlin Garland
“Western Landscapes”
To pioneers of the Oregon Trail in the mid-nineteenth century, they were known as the “Last Mountains.” Rough, precipitous, and densely timbered, they erupted from the western plateau like a final geological insult, one last obstacle between exhausted emigrants and the fertile, temperate river valleys of the coast. After the arduous two-thousandmile journey from their starting point in Missouri, westering travelers might have thought that they’d endured just about every hardship the continent could possibly serve up. Then came the Cascades.
“The crossing of the Rocky Mountains … was insignificant in comparison to the Cascades,” wrote an early western journalist of a trip over the Oregon Trail. Few passes penetrated the range, and those that did were swathed in dense, junglelike forests that made any progress agonizing. With little grass to graze on, hungry livestock would eat the poison laurel leaves and die. The danger from rockslides, floods, and avalanches, moreover, was relentless. For would-be settlers transporting their worldly possessions on wagons and oxcarts, these obstacles were all but insurmountable. Many early pioneering groups chose instead to stop at a place on the Columbia River called The Dalles, disassemble their wagons, load them onto rafts, and then brave the perilous rapids of the Columbia gorge in order to get through the range.
Not that the Cascades are particularly lofty. Compared to the giants of the Rockies, most Cascade peaks are of relatively modest height, at least on paper. As a very young and complex mountain system, though, the Cascades are steeper and more rugged than the Rockies, riddled with blind canyons that end at sheer, towering cliffs. Worse still, the Cascades are, as one writer has put it, “restless with the restlessness of youth. They break off in hunks and slide down canyons; they toss off their mantles of trees and sling them down roaring rivers. … It is as though the hundreds of peaks in the Cascade chain remembered the exciting period only a few million years ago when they first boiled up out of the retching earth and threw themselves against the northwest skies.”
Even this forbidding terrain, however, couldn’t hold back the tide of Manifest Destiny for long. Good land lay beyond those mountains, and by midcentury it had been declared free for the taking. Thanks to the massive territorial gains of the 1840s—the annexing of Texas, the winning of California, the Southwest, and the Colorado plateau in the Mexican War, and the signing of an 1846 treaty giving the United States control of the Oregon Country—the nation had increased in size by roughly 50 percent in a single decade. Vast new territories had to be settled, requiring that obstacles to travel be neutralized as quickly as possible.
This need was especially urgent in the Pacific Northwest. By the early 1850s new towns were sprouting up all over the Oregon and Washington coast. If these settlements were to grow into the New Yorks and Bostons of the West, the Cascades would have to be overcome. So travelers began to search for alternative routes to bypass the Columbia River bottleneck. Primitive trails and wagon roads were hacked out of the mountain wilderness, cutting across the mountains wherever a usable pass could be found. But these flimsy connections—slow, hazardous, and virtually useless in winter—could provide only a limited solution. It soon became clear that what was needed to tame this area was the technology of the iron horse.
The dream of a railway connection to the Northwest was as old as the railroad itself. As early as 1835—five years after the first few miles of track had been laid in the East—an Oregon pioneer named Samuel Bancroft Barlow was already mentally projecting those tracks northwestward, writing treatises in support of a railroad line to the Columbia River. Asa Whitney, a prosperous New York entrepreneur, took up the cause ten years later, petitioning state and federal governments for permission to build a railroad from Michigan to the Pacific. By the 1850s, even Congress was convinced, realizing that the sooner the West was linked to the rest of the country by rail, the sooner America’s dreams of an ocean-to-ocean civilization could be achieved.
The sum of $150,000 was therefore appropriated to fund surveys of four possible railway routes to the Pacific. They included the northern route originally proposed by Asa Whitney plus three others, spaced at rough intervals like horizontal stripes across the western half of the country. Also, since the Pacific surveys fell under the jurisdiction of the War Department, led by a regionally loyal young southerner named Jefferson Davis, a fifth, deeply southern route was belatedly added to the list.
In charge of “The Northern Pacific Railroad Exploration and Survey” (the Whitney route) was one Isaac Ingalls Stevens, a young army major who had served honorably in the Mexican War. Having campaigned actively for his friend Franklin Pierce in the latter’s successful presidential bid in 1852, Stevens was due for a political plum. He was granted two of them. Not only was he given command of the northern railway survey, he was also made the first governor of the newly organized Washington Territory.
By the summer of 1853, Stevens had already assembled his reconnaissance party and divided it into three. One group, under his own leadership, was to focus on surveying the northern plains westward from the Mississippi River. Another team would head toward the Rockies and the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and Idaho. To the third group—led by another army major, a moody and irritable young Philadelphian named George B. McClellan—would fall the hardest part, the Cascades. “The amount of work in the Cascade Range and eastward … will be immense,” Stevens warned the future commander of the Union armies in the Civil War. “We must not be frightened [by] long tunnels or enormous snows, but set ourselves to work to overcome them.”
It was not the kind of task to which McClellan was well suited by temperament. Showing the same distaste for action and effort that would later cause Abraham Lincoln such consternation, the prickly young major conducted the shoddiest of surveys in the Cascades, often relying on questionable testimony from local Indians to substitute for the hard work of actual exploration. Unsurprisingly, every pass he considered turned out to be too steep, too rocky, and/or too snowbound for train tracks. Pronouncing himself “thoroughly disgusted with the whole concern,” he quarreled repeatedly with Stevens and with his own subordinates, though he did finally admit, grudgingly, that one particular pass, the Snoqualmie, might just be railworthy. Even so, he remained unconvinced that any truly practicable route existed through the northern Cascades—a doubt he had no qualms about expressing directly to Secretary Davis.
As matters played out, the results of the northern survey would prove to be largely academic. The always partisan Davis eventually selected the route he had probably chosen even before the surveyors took their first steps west: the southern route from New Orleans through Texas and Arizona to California. Not that it mattered. By the end of the 1850s, with the slavery issue turning critical and North-South tensions rising, the idea of a transcontinental line was soon eclipsed by the more pressing matter of civil war.
Paradoxically, the start of the War Between the States proved less of a hindrance to railroad advocates than might be imagined. With southern opponents suddenly and decisively engaged elsewhere, plans for a line to the Pacific could go forward without much regional stonewalling. The first Pacific Railroad bill, approved by Congress in July 1862, did authorize a centrally located line from Omaha to Sacramento, but the second nod went to the Pacific Northwest. On July 2, 1864, the Northern Pacific Railroad bill was signed into law by that former railroad lawyer himself, Abraham Lincoln, mandating that the nation’s second transcontinental line extend from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. And although one arm of it would follow the well-trodden Columbia River Gorge through the Cascades to Portland, the main line to the coast would run through the relative terra incognita to the north of the river, right through the high Cascades.
The Last Mountains, though, had not in the meantime become any less problematic to cross. The Northern Pacific quickly sent several groups of surveyors out to the northern Cascades, but none turned up anything close to an easy pass. After reviewing their reports, the chief engineer of the project reluctantly found himself in agreement with the now nationally prominent George McClellan: “There is no place to cross the mountains north of Snoqualmie Pass where a great deal of money would not be necessary both in first cost of construction and in subsequent operation.”
It ultimately took over two decades (not to mention a bankruptcy or two), but the Northern Pacific did finally put its line through the mountains—at Stampede Pass, a close neighbor of the Snoqualmie. It was hardly an ideal route (in the very beginning the line was forced to include a stretch of track at the ridiculously steep grade of 5.4 percent), but it did get the job done. Upon completion of the NP’s Cascade line in 1887, trains could finally reach Puget Sound on a fairly direct route from the East, giving the Washington Territory what it had been seeking for decades—“the entering wedge,” as one newspaper had put it, to “open our great oyster, the world of enterprise and prosperity.”
But while the Northern Pacific connection did put parts of Washington on the grid of the American railway network, it still left vast portions of the territory underserved—including Seattle, which was stranded at the end of an inconvenient branch line from Tacoma. The city that would eventually become the region’s giant was therefore still without direct connection to the East, almost forty years after its founding.
Fortunately, the person who would finally give the city its own transcontinental was even then hatching plans to take train tracks where none had ever gone before—straight through those same northern Cascades that had given the early pioneers such trouble. Soon to be dubbed the Empire Builder of the Northwest, he was a man who would change the fate not only of Seattle but of the entire northwestern quarter of the United States—and one who would eventually play a critical role in the events unfolding at Stevens Pass in the late winter of 1910.
Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I’ll build a railroad to Hell.
—James J. Hill
He was, according to one of his own biographers, “the shaggybearded, barb-wired, one-eyed son-of-a-bitch of western railroading.” It was a description that even his staunchest admirers would have been hard-pressed to contradict. James J. Hill—conceiver, builder, and eventual éminence grise of the Great Northern Railway—was by all accounts intimidating and irascible. Physically, he was a great wolverine of a man: thick-necked, burly-chested, with stocky arms and legs that over-clever journalists were wont to compare to railroad ties. His bluntfeatured face was framed by a thick, domed forehead and a matted snarl of steel-gray beard. But his most arresting feature was his piercing left eye—his one good eye, the right having been blinded in a childhood archery accident. The angry flash of that eye was to be—over the course of a long and stupendously productive life—a much-feared phenomenon in the highest business and political circles in the land, the bane of countless railroad underlings, business rivals, and more than a few presidents (of banks, of railroads, of the United States). In an age that saw the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan, Jay Gould, and Andrew Carnegie, James J. Hill more than held his own.
Born poor in the Ontario backwoods in 1838, Hill had come to the United States as a young man with little except a few dollars in savings and an almost diabolical capacity for toil. Once established in St. Paul, Minnesota (a.k.a. “Pig’s Eye” in those early days), he had worked his way up the frontier economic ladder from steamship clerk to prominent local capitalist, mainly by investing his extraordinary energies in any and every business that seemed to have a profit in it. Combining a healthy opportunism with an intimate knowledge of the western frontier’s infrastructure needs, Hill soon made a small fortune in such stubbornly unglamorous businesses as warehousing, freight forwarding, and the wholesaling of everything from coal to apple cider.
As the economic potential of the railroad became glaringly obvious, however, Hill quickly turned his attention to that most capital-intensive of industries. Partnering with four other men, he managed to assume control of a small, St. Paul-based railroad that had fallen into bankruptcy after the Panic of 1873. Before long, Hill was hatching big plans for his new acquisition. Like Asa Whitney before him, he saw both wisdom and profit in opening up the great northwestern wilderness with a railway line from the upper Midwest to the Pacific—a modern-day Northwest Passage that could also provide a link to the markets of China, Japan, and the rest of Asia.
Principal among Hill’s many challenges was the fact that the Northern Pacific had already realized a version of his dream with its own line from Minnesota to the coast. This meant tough competition for every potential traveler and carload of wheat or lumber the territory could produce. Unlike the NP, moreover, Hill’s Pacific Extension would have to be built without the generous land grants and subsidies that the US. government had provided to the earliest transcontinentals. Running as it did north of the NP line and south of the Canadian border, it would also have even harsher and more barren territory to traverse, including the worst of the high, dry plains of western Dakota and eastern Montana. So tremendous were the risks that early critics began referring to the entire plan as “Hill’s Folly”—a railroad that would likely end up carrying nothing but buffalo bones.
But while Hill harbored no illusions about the difficulties of implementing his line, he had a clearer sense than anyone of how those difficulties could be surmounted—thanks mainly to his close study of the particulars of the Northwest’s climate, soil, and natural resources. To overcome the route’s geographical disadvantages, he would focus (obsessively, some would say) on keeping costs low and maximizing efficiency in every aspect of construction and operation. By taking advantage of the very latest innovations in railroad technology and traction power, and harnessing them with the organizational principles of what would soon be called “scientific management,” Hill would make the Great Northern the first truly twentieth-century western railroad—the first one worthy of the adjective “modern.”
It remained only to build the thing. “What we want,” Hill famously told his engineers, “is the best possible line, shortest distance, lowest grades, and least curvature that we can build.” This was a tall order, but early surveys through the Rockies were encouraging. The GN’s newly hired locating engineer, John F. Stevens (better known to posterity as the chief engineer of the Panama Canal), quickly located an excellent pass over the continental divide in Montana—the so-called Lost Marias Pass, which turned out to be the lowest and most practicable Rockies crossing of any transcontinental yet built.
Hill had known from the beginning, however, that the greater challenge would be getting the line across those ever-troublesome northern Cascades. The only known viable passes—the Snoqualmie and the NP’s Stampede, as well as the water-level Columbia River route—were all too far south; using any of them would have involved taking the tracks on a long detour, something that the parsimonious Hill could simply not tolerate. So when, in 1890, the time came to plot the route over the Cascades, Stevens was again dispatched, in hopes that the young engineer could repeat the magic of his Marias Pass accomplishment.
But, like numerous locating engineers before him, Stevens soon found himself stymied by the region’s pitiless terrain. “The process of reconnaissance for a railway line,” he would later write, “is largely one of elimination—to find out where not to go.” And for the first few weeks of his reconnaissance, Stevens was finding no end of places not to go. Realizing that his cantankerous employer would accept no failure, Stevens was nonetheless determined to remain in those mountains until he had a feasible pass to recommend. So he persisted.
Finally, following a lead developed by an earlier GN surveyor, A. B. Rogers, Stevens located what seemed the best pass in the region and essentially declared it feasible for a railway line. Stevens Pass was arguably a very poor place for a railroad. The plotting of a workable rail line through the pass eventually proved to be an engineering challenge of mind-boggling complexity, requiring sharp curves, brutal grades, elaborate switchbacks, and even a baroque horseshoe-shaped tunnel—all of which violated Hill’s most cherished principles of efficient railway design.
By this point, though, Hill was a man in a hurry. While he clearly understood the high operational cost of every degree of curvature and every percentage point of grade on Stevens’s proposed line, he also recognized that his Pacific Extension had to start producing revenues immediately for the railroad to survive. So Stevens’s route—no matter how imperfect—was accepted. Over the next two years, three thousand men worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to build it. And on the evening of January 6, 1893—at a point near what would later become Scenic Hot Springs—the last spike of the Great Northern Railway’s Pacific Extension was driven.
Rejoicing was general up and down the Washington coast. In Seattle, some local boosters even started claiming that the city would soon outstrip San Francisco in both size and importance. Such boasts may have been excessive, but they were not entirely without foundation. Within a decade of its completion, “Hill’s Folly” would utterly transform the entire region. Describing the entrepreneur’s accomplishment some years later, Seattle luminary Thomas Burke hailed the new railroad as “the most judiciously planned, the most economically constructed, and the most wisely managed line that has ever served a new country. … [Hill] has, in less than fifteen years, given four new states to the Union with an aggregate population of more than 1,500,000 people!”
True to the old rhetoric, then, the iron horse had worked its alchemy on the Pacific Northwest. The wilds of Washington State were, by the beginning of the new century, tamed and civilized at last. “The twin ribbons of iron or steel,” as historian Carlos Schwantes has put it, “converted inhospitable terrain into friendly space.”
But in the early morning hours of February 23, 1910—as Great Northern train No. 25 began its climb into the high Cascades from Leavenworth—the friendliness of that terrain was starting to look a little doubtful. Even if they’d been awake, the passengers on the Seattle Express could not have seen their surroundings in the snow-seared darkness, but what they were heading toward was a mountain wilderness still as intimidating as any in the country. And they would be crossing it via a stretch of track that even the officials of the Great Northern itself regarded as “the weakest link in our transportation chain.”
In one of his original reports on the discovery of the pass in 1890, John Stevens had noted that “there was no evidence whatever that the pass in question was known to anyone. … There were no signs of any trails leading to or from it, within ten miles in either direction.” Given the massive snows, precipitous alpine terrain, inhospitable remoteness, and always unpredictable weather, there were some very good reasons why this pass had been shunned even by Indians on foot before the coming of the Great Northern Railway—reasons that the passengers aboard the Seattle Express were soon to discover for themselves. For no matter what the railway propagandists might say to the contrary, there were indeed places in the country too wild to be tamed by the technology of the railroad—and Stevens Pass might be one of them.