Dear Mother & all of you,
I wrote you last night that I expected to reach Seattle this A.M. Here I am at the summit of the Cascades, snowed in since 6:30 this morning. Such a snow you never saw. It’s banked up to the top of the window here and we can’t go or come. Can’t get any information as to when we’ll get out.
—Ned Topping
Wednesday, February 23, 1910
Cascade Tunnel Station
7:00 A.M.
When Lewis Jesseph awoke on Wednesday morning, it was immediately apparent to him that something was wrong. The train he was on, which should have been rocking along the flat coastal plain toward Puget Sound, was instead standing at a dead halt. The comforting sounds of a steam train on the move—the deep, resonant churning of the engine, the clatter of metal wheels on metal rails, the far, always wistful cry of the locomotive whistle—were notably absent. Instead, the train seemed to be swaddled in an ominous silence. When he lifted the shade on the window beside his berth, all he could see outside was white.
Jesseph sat up in the tight space of the sleeping berth, pulled on some clothes, and climbed out into the stuffy corridor of the Pullman. He made his way to the men’s lounge at the end of the car, where he shaved and finished dressing. As he cleaned up, the porter assigned to the Winnipeg—a dapper young black man from Mississippi named Lucius Anderson—entered the tiny lounge.
“Good morning, Porter,” Jesseph said to him. “Where are we?”
“We’re at Cascade,” Anderson replied, meaning Cascade Tunnel Station, at the east portal of the two-and-a-half-mile tunnel under the summit of Stevens Pass.
“Have we been here long?” Jesseph asked.
“Several hours, but we hope to be on our way any time now.” Then the porter added an observation that cannot have been welcome to a man intent on making a court date in a still-distant city: “The storm is very bad.”
Jesseph finished dressing and returned to his berth to find John Merritt. The two attorneys discussed the delay, then decided to go outside to assess the situation for themselves. What they saw when they stepped down from the Pullman’s vestibule was not encouraging. “I was born and had lived all my life in a northern climate,” Jesseph would later write, “but never before had I seen a snowstorm like this one. There was no wind … [but] it fell so thick and fast that at a distance of twenty-five feet an object was almost indistinguishable.”
What Jesseph would have seen, had the visibility allowed it, was a tiny alpine village sitting in a small basin surrounded by high serrated peaks. Cascade Tunnel Station, at an altitude of 3,382 feet, was an intensely isolated place with only one reason to exist: to service the railroad tunnel from which it took its name. Built from nothing barely twenty years earlier, the town consisted primarily of a depot, an engine roundhouse and turntable (for turning locomotives and snowplows), an electric substation and motor shed, a few cottages, a bunkhouse for train crews, and a number of makeshift shacks created by removing the wheel trucks from the bottoms of old boxcars. The bulk of its wintertime population consisted of crews of transient snow shovelers, typically down-on-their-luck types recruited from places like Skid Road in Seattle. Cascade Tunnel Station was, in short, a rough, workaday, and sometimes unsavory place, even under a forgiving blanket of snow.
Henry White, the traveling salesman for the American Paper Company, was also up and about by now, and hungry for breakfast. Stopping Joseph Pettit in the aisle of the Winnipeg, he asked the conductor where the dining car was. Pettit told him that there was none on the train (one was usually added farther down the line), but that arrangements had been made to feed the passengers at the station “beanery,” a rudimentary cook shack above the depot where the engine crews ate.
Gathering White and the others into small groups, the conductor and the Pullman porters led them out into the blinding storm, guiding them up a narrow path to the plain, half-buried shack. Essentially a single large room hammered together out of raw lumber, the beanery was hardly a pleasant place. A huge potbellied heating stove radiated at one end of the room, opposite an equally massive flat-topped cookstove. Between them stretched a dozen or so rough-hewn, grime-streaked wooden tables set with white enamelware and dented tin cups.
However primitive the setting, the beanery’s chef, Harry Elerker, and his waiter, John Bjerenson, did know how to produce food in bulk. Finding themselves with so many extra mouths to feed, they rose to the occasion. Before long the passengers and crew of the Express were digging into an ample breakfast of flapjacks, eggs, cooked cereal, and tinned fruit. “It was a dirty hole,” Ned Topping later wrote to his mother of the beanery, “but the stuff tasted good.”
Naturally, the passengers were eager to know what was keeping them stalled there. Gathering information from Pettit and the other railroaders, a few managed to piece the story together: One of the rotary plows, having bogged down during the night in the snow west of the tunnel, was now blocking the main line. Once it was shoveled out, the Seattle Express would be on its way—perhaps by afternoon, but probably not until nightfall. This was hardly comforting news, especially to Jesseph and Merritt, who would now quite possibly miss their Thursday morning court appearance. Since the two lawyers represented both sides of the case, though, they could at least hope that the supreme court would make no decision without them. They returned to their berths in the Winnipeg after breakfast, determined to make the best of their unanticipated leisure.
Back on the train, Sarah Jane Covington was getting up after a long sleep-in. Told of the delay, the old woman was alarmed but tried to be philosophical about her situation. Though she knew no one aboard, the crew and the other passengers were being kind to her; several even offered to bring her breakfast from the cook shack. To help pass the time, she pulled a few sheets of paper from her handbag and started to jot down some notes: “Feb 23,” she wrote. “We are snowed in at the mouth of the Tunnel, 20 minutes of eleven A.M. I just got up from my bed. The mts. are beautiful and we are all resting easy. They say we may be here all day. The cars are warm and very nice.”
Standing behind the Seattle Express by now was the Fast Mail train, which had reached Cascade Tunnel Station a few hours after the passenger train. Alfred B. Hensel, one of the mail train’s crew of eight clerks, was also gazing out at the storm in some dismay. He had been working the Spokane-to-Seattle run for the past six weeks—enough time to know what kind of snowfalls a Cascade storm could unleash—but this one looked particularly ominous. Here at Stevens Pass, in fact, it was coming down more copiously than he’d ever seen it. A careful and conscientious worker (his daughter would later recall watching him practice his mail-sorting skills for hours on end in his bedroom), he took pride in the speed and efficiency of the Fast Mail system. The fact that the current delay had nothing to do with his own performance didn’t ease his frustration much.
Not that his luck had been perfect before this. Hensel, twenty-nine years old and rather stylish with his sleek mustache and neatly parted slicked-down hair, had been a railway mail clerk for almost six years now, and like anyone who’d worked on steam trains for any length of time, he’d experienced his share of misadventures. Once while he was on the Northern Pacific’s mail run to Lewiston, Idaho, his train had been charged by a large, aggressive, and apparently very confused bull. Incredibly, the animal had succeeded in derailing the train’s locomotive. The consequences were not particularly dire—except for the bull, which did not survive the encounter—but the following year the mail clerk was involved in a far more serious accident. His train was being pushed up the Lewiston grade by an extra-large locomotive that, because it was too big for the normal station turntable, had been attached backward at the end of the train. Somehow the weight of the water in the engine’s forward tender shifted on a curve, flipping over the locomotive and the mail car. Hensel was thrown through the skylight of the mail car as it toppled, injuring his feet.
Since then the mishaps had been less dramatic—mostly snow delays like the current one. But for a member of the Railway Mail Service, which operated under the motto “Certainty, Security, Celerity,” anything that interfered with the timely delivery of the mail was a serious matter. A division of the U.S. Post Office Department, the RMS contracted directly with the railroads to carry the mail, and it kept close tabs on the performance statistics for each line. To keep the mail moving efficiently, clockwork precision was required of every service employee, with mail bags being picked up and dropped off at every station—often without the train even slowing down—and then sorted en route.
In February 1910—as Hensel surely would have known—the consequences of any major snow delay were likely to be especially damaging for the GN. Mail contracts were coming up for renewal that spring. Great Northern officials were hoping not only to renew the contract for the company’s lucrative existing run but to secure some contracts now held by its rival Union Pacific. (James J. Hill, who at seventy-one was still chairman of the GN board, had even threatened to discontinue Fast Mail service unless the company was granted a larger slice of the mail business.) Late February was also the time when the quadrennial weighing of the mail was taking place—a sampling process that would help determine the railroad’s entire annual payment from the Post Office Department for the next four years. Given that the GN’s share of mail money in 1909 had been over $44 million, it was clear that a significant amount of the railroad’s revenue was at stake.
Even so, there was little that Hensel or his colleagues could do to help matters. Their part of the delivery job was finished. All of the mail on the train was already sorted, packed away in neatly labeled canvas sacks that now hung on hooks around the mail car like sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. Hensel and his colleagues could only bide their time as the ever more expensive hours ticked by, knowing that it was now up to superintendent O’Neill and his snow-fighting crews to clear the line and get those trains moving again.
Wellington, Feby 23, 1910 Situation 7:30 A.M. … Conditions on west slope very bad. Snowing and blowing so hard cannot see over 100 feet. … Nos. 25 and 27 tied up at Cas. Tunnel until we can get rotary out of snow west of Wellington. … Do not consider it safe to start even passenger trains present weather conditions.
—J. H. O’Neill,
telegram to E. L. Brown,
general superintendent,
Great Northern Railway, St. Paul
Wellington
Midmorning Wednesday
It was one of those ironies that railroaders on the Cascade Division just had to learn to live with: One of O’Neill’s rotary plows, those magnificent specimens of twentieth-century snow-removal technology, had gotten stuck in the very snowdrifts it was supposed to be clearing.
The plow—the X807, under the direction of conductor Homer Purcell—had left Wellington at about 3:30 A.M., heading west to clear the track and meet up with an eastbound train in Skykomish. About a mile and a quarter out of Wellington, the plow had encountered a moderate snowslide on the track measuring about two hundred feet long and twenty feet deep. Purcell and his crew had attempted to buck right through the snow, but it turned out to be of the wet, heavy, late-winter sort that the men called “Cascade cement.” The compacted mass soon clogged the rotary’s cutting wheel, stalling it. Worse, since the plow had been jammed with such great force into the slide, the rotary’s pusher engine couldn’t pull it back out again. Purcell had been forced to send to Wellington for some extra snow shovelers to free it. The whole process had eaten up no fewer than four full hours.
Unfortunately, during that time both the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail had reached the Stevens Pass vicinity. With the line ahead blocked, O’Neill had had no choice but to sidetrack both trains. He’d decided to stop them at Cascade Tunnel Station, on the east side of the summit ridge, where the weather was slightly less extreme. With any luck, it would just be a temporary delay. Within a few hours the trains could be brought through the tunnel to Wellington and then taken right down the west slope of the mountains.
But the storm hadn’t made anything easy that night. No sooner had rotary conductor Purcell and his men gotten through the first slide than they’d encountered a second—a bigger one this time—another mile down the line at Snowshed 3.3, near a place on the mountain called Windy Point. Considering the size of this new slide, they’d figured at least half a day would be needed to work through it. Frustrated, Purcell had relayed the bad news back to Wellington: The delay was going to be significantly longer than expected.
Now, at midmorning—as O’Neill racked up his twenty-fourth sleepless hour on the mountain—the situation was starting to look even grimmer. Other problems were cropping up all over the division, with drifts and small slides blocking the track in several places. The biggest mess was down at Scenic Hot Springs. Because of the extremely low visibility, eastbound passenger train No. 44, following its rotary out of Scenic station, had slammed right into the back of the rotary’s pusher engine. The plow was not damaged—because of the racket of the spinning fan and the howl of the wind, its crew didn’t even realize it had been hit—but No. 44’s locomotive had broken its pilot, as well as a coupler and a drawbar farther back in the train.
O’Neill, a man given to chain-smoking even when not under stress, was finding little reason to cut back now. Since daybreak the storm had only gotten worse. With the wind blowing hard, snow was piling up rapidly against anything that wasn’t moving, including trains. Even at Cascade Tunnel Station, where the wind was less fierce, the snow was drifting at an astonishing rate. Despite the fact that O’Neill had many of his force of three hundred temporary snow shovelers working to keep the two stalled trains free of drifts, the men were barely keeping pace.
It was a type of situation with which O’Neill was all too familiar: Whenever storms got bad enough on the mountain, problems would begin to compound. Trouble at one place on the line would cause a delay at another place, which, by drawing resources off other tasks, would in turn precipitate more trouble somewhere else. Unless the individual crises were resolved quickly, the whole system would eventually start to break down, stranding trains all over the division.
What O’Neill and his men needed to avoid such a predicament was for the storm to abate at least temporarily, giving the rotaries time to work through the buried sections of track and the shoveling crews a chance to make headway against the windblown drifts. Certainly the storm had to pass soon. The snow had started at Wellington at about 4:00 A.M. on Tuesday. It was now after 9:00 A.M. on Wednesday. Judging by his experience with past Cascade storms, the superintendent could reasonably expect this one to end sometime within the next twelve hours.
Until that time came, O’Neill needed to focus on handling the trains already on the mountain. He had explored the possibility of rerouting some of his approaching traffic via the Northern Pacific, but that company’s officials had demurred, having their hands full with slide troubles of their own. So, after consulting by telegraph with his superiors in Spokane and St. Paul, he had made a difficult decision. Trains scheduled to depart for Stevens Pass were to be held at their stations of origin. Those already en route would, if possible, be stopped and turned around, perhaps to await later rerouting. The trains already on the mountain—including No. 25, the Seattle Express, and No. 27, the all-important Fast Mail—would simply have to tie up where they were until the line was clear.
At 9:30 A.M. O’Neill handed a scrawled telegram form to the operator on duty. Addressed to O’Neill’s lieutenants up and down the line and copied to his superiors in the East, it contained a message no railway superintendent ever liked to send: “Will not run any trains until conditions change for the better.” This was news dire enough to reach the ears of everyone in the company, including James J. Hill himself. But O’Neill didn’t see any alternative. As drastic—and expensive—as the action was likely to be, he was shutting down the entire division.
SIX TRAINS STALLED ON GREAT NORTHERN
______________
Everett, Wednesday, Feb. 23—The worst storm of years is heaping snow on the right of way of the Great Northern Railway in the Cascade Mountains as fast as the rotary plows clear away the drifts. … Last night from four to five feet of snow fell and the situation continues bad, as the storm shows no sign of abating.
—Seattle Times
Cascade Tunnel Station
Early Wednesday Afternoon
“Well, it’s 1:00 P.M. now and snow getting deeper all the time.”
Ned Topping, back on the Seattle Express after his excursion to the beanery, had picked up his pen again to continue the letter to his mother. The young widower from Ohio had spent most of the morning reading and writing and smoking, occasionally glancing out the window to marvel at the sheer density of the snowfall. Every time the train jolted or a rotary plow passed by, his hopes of getting under way would rise, only to be dashed again when nothing else happened. Alone with his thoughts now, he found himself again dwelling on his family at home:
“This is the 23rd,” he continued, “six months ago that Florence died, and little Billy 22 months old yesterday—I have been thinking lots about it. There’s a little fellow two seats in front of me suffering with his teeth, and an old man in the back of the car battling with a carbuncle on his neck. All this with other troubles and stalled out in the snow. … I wish you could see the surroundings. You never saw such piles and piles of snow in your life.”
The teething child (who clearly reminded Topping of his own young son) was probably eight-month-old Francis Starrett, squirming in the arms of his mother, Ida. Mrs. Starrett was doubtless having trouble keeping her three young children happy during the delay, and the uncertainty of the weather could not have been helping. Still reeling from the death of her husband, she was in a kind of limbo, not even sure yet whether she would continue living in Spokane or move back to Canada with her parents. Mr. and Mrs. May had persuaded their daughter to come home with them at least temporarily—the $500 she had received from the Great Northern for the death of her husband, they knew, would not go far—but Ida still felt too unsettled to make a choice.
One of the more trying moments of the morning—for Ida and for everyone else aboard—had come after breakfast, when the Seattle Express had been taken into the mouth of the tunnel. This was done to allow the Fast Mail to pull forward to the water tank, but although the train was inside for only half an hour, the experience was decidedly unpleasant, offering passengers a glimpse of a place that would figure more prominently in their future than any of them could then realize. Many had complained to conductor Pettit. “It was draughty and dirty,” passenger George Loveberry would later explain. “And of course there is always a smell of gas, and cold.” Even the Great Northern railroaders found the tunnel difficult to bear. According to engineer J. C. Wright, it was “the dirtiest, blackest hole that a man ever went into.”
Nasty as the tunnel was, it was a distinct improvement over what had been there when the Great Northern first ran trains over these mountains in the mid-1890s. Although a tunnel under Stevens Pass had been planned from the beginning, the time and huge expense of digging through three miles of granite was more than James J. Hill felt he could afford at the time. So for the first seven years of the Cascade Division’s existence, trains were pulled over the pass via an elaborate system of switchbacks.
Depending on the perspective of the observer, the GN’s Cascade switchbacks were either “a miracle of engineering” or “every railroad man’s nightmare.” Consisting of eight long and often sharply curved segments, the switchbacks zigzagged up the face of the steep summit ridge, carrying even heavy freight trains up a slope seemingly impossible for an adhesion railroad to surmount. With powerful 110-ton consolidation locomotives added to both the front and the back, a train would be hauled up one segment of track onto an end spur, where it would stop, reverse, and then start up the next leg in the opposite direction. Three such reverses were required to lift the train to the east summit of the pass, with five more required for the descent on the west side—all at a punishing grade of 3.5 to 4 percent. The maneuver, which had to be handled by specially trained crews, required so much tractive effort that each locomotive consumed over three thousand pounds of coal in the process. And even though the twelve-mile route could sometimes be completed in seventy-five minutes or even less, under adverse circumstances the trip could take up to thirty-six hours—a pace that works out to a blistering average speed of three hours per mile.
This switchback system, though eccentric, did prove to be remarkably safe. Although the route had earned the nickname “Death Mountain” during construction, the switchbacks had operated for seven years without a single fatality—even during the legendary winter of 1897–98, when a reported 140 feet of snow fell at Stevens Pass. Even so, they were always considered a temporary expedient, and so once the American economy began to recover from the 1890s depression, Hill ordered construction to start on the long-delayed summit tunnel.
Begun in 1897, the Cascade Tunnel proved to be a massive three-year, round-the-clock effort employing a huge force of laborers (with, at any given time, “800 working, 800 sleeping, and 800 standing at the bar,” as one account had it). The engineering challenges of drilling through a heavy, water-saturated conglomerate of granite, slate, and rockslide debris proved daunting enough, but the real struggle was retaining the men to do it. Given the remoteness of the construction site, the GN was forced to hire “birds of passage”—transient laborers with no local ties or responsibilities to keep them on the job if the work became too unpleasant. Turnover rates were staggering, often reaching 50 percent per month. Those workers who did stay were not always model citizens. In fact, the construction camp at what would later be called Cascade Tunnel Station became so notorious for drunkenness, violence, and prostitution that at least one eastern journalist gave it that coveted moniker of all Wild West settlements: “the wickedest town on earth.”
Between bouts of debauchery, there was apparently still enough time for the men to get their work done, and by December 1900 the 2.6-mile Cascade Tunnel was complete. Hailed as an unprecedented feat of engineering (despite the fact that in 1882 the Swiss had dug a tunnel in the Alps that was over three times as long), the tunnel certainly did improve the profile of the GN’s Cascade line. But it also created a few new problems of its own. Steam locomotives laboring eastward up the tunnel’s 1.9 percent grade would produce voluminous amounts of smoke, gas, and heat, creating serious ventilation problems. Temperatures in engine cabs often reached two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, leading some crew members to bury themselves in the coal pile to escape the heat. Smoke accumulations sometimes became so intense that even the tunnel’s emergency telephones would cease to operate.
“You couldn’t see for the smoke boiling out of the ends of the tunnel when steam engines entered,” telegrapher Warren Tanguy would later remember. “On a hard pull, if a train got stuck and a brakeman or fireman got down to see what was wrong, he might be put to sleep. The heat reflecting from the roof would burn you up and the gas would asphyxiate you.” In a typical incident in March 1901, a freight engineer, overcome by heat and fumes, either jumped or fell off a locomotive stalled in the tunnel. Trying to find cooler, fresher air, he crawled over to the drainage ditch that carried spring water out of the tunnel. Even here the gases were overpowering: The engineer was found dead in the ditch a short time later.
What could have been a far worse tragedy was narrowly averted two years later, when a train carrying over a hundred passengers broke down in the tunnel. While attempting to fix the problem, the engineer, fireman, and conductor all succumbed to the fumes and collapsed. As the passenger cars slowly began to fill with gas, an off-duty fireman named Abbott, riding as a passenger, fought his way forward to the locomotive and released the brakes. The train proceeded to roll downgrade, gathering momentum until it shot backward out of the tunnel at Wellington, at which time Abbott was still sentient enough to trigger the emergency brakes. The train screeched to a stop in the Wellington yard, its crew and most of its passengers unconscious but still very much alive. In recognition of his valiant action, the quick-thinking fireman received a citation and (perhaps more welcome) a $1,000 personal check from James J. Hill himself.
No one knows how many people actually died in such incidents in the first years of the tunnel’s operation; as one Wellington telegrapher later recalled, “Many a hobo stole his last ride going through the … tunnel” The death toll was evidently sufficient to earn the Great Northern the wrath of the local press. “If Mr. Hill still [refuses] to remedy this worse than evil,” fumed the Seattle Mail and Herald, “then the people have their recourse. They should send him through his own tunnel on his freight train.”
Even Hill, famously impervious to such rhetorical broadsides, couldn’t ignore the problem forever. The obvious solution was to electrify the line from Wellington to Cascade Tunnel Station, allowing trains to be pulled through the bore by smokeless electric locomotives, also called “motors.” This tunnel electrification, completed in July 1909, did effectively solve the suffocation problem, but many of the kinks in its unusual three-phase system were still to be worked out. The electric locomotives failed often, leaving it up to the polluting steam engines to carry trains through. The interior of the tunnel was thus still caked with a soft, slimy layer of soot three or four inches thick. (“You can put your hand on the walls,” O’Neill once remarked, “and your hand would sink into the refuse.”) Little wonder that the passengers had found their half hour in the tunnel so unsavory.
Out on the passing track east of the tunnel, though, they could at least breathe freely and see something beyond their windows besides soot and smoke. And as evening approached on what was to be their first full day in the mountains, there was even a bit of entertainment to watch out there. Two of the rotaries (the X800 and the X802) were being connected end to end in the rail yard, forming a two-headed “double rotary” that could clear snow in either direction without being turned around. The sight of this powerful snow-fighting machine—a plow on either end and no fewer than three steam engines in a row between them—must have given the passengers at least some hope that the tracks could be cleared by morning, even with the storm still raging.
The show didn’t last very long, and once the double rotary had left the yard, traveling west through the tunnel to help clear the still-blockaded line, there was little more for the passengers to see. Most of them retired early, salesman Ned Topping among them. “It’s now nine P.M.,” he wrote in his letter home, “and we are still here so I’m going to turn in.” Then he closed the day’s entry with an observation he’d be repeating in one form or another for more days than he could ever have imagined then: “Outlook now,” he wrote, “is stuck all night.”