Too high for forest trees, too rocky for even the mountain shrubs to thrive, what was there to tempt men to such an unrewarded climb?
—Seattle Times
on Wellington, Washington
To call it a “town” is to exaggerate its size and population. To call it a “village” would be to romanticize its soot-smeared industrial squalor. To call it just a “station” would be to ignore its roadless isolation and the rough magnificence of its setting. Instead, the men of the Cascade Division had a different name for the place where the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail now stood. To them, it was simply “the end of the world.”
Wellington, Washington, with a year-round population of about one hundred, was a settlement cobbled together in the wilderness of Stevens Pass during the initial laying of the transcontinental line to Seattle—in the early 1890s, when the Great Northern first established a construction camp here. Like Cascade Tunnel Station on the other side of the summit ridge, it was at first a rude and makeshift place, deriving its rough character from the nature of the men who built the early western railroads. “As wild a town as any described in western truth or fiction” was how one journalist described it. “Girls from Leavenworth rode the work trains up the mountain. No conductor collected any tickets, and the workmen were always glad of the diversion of being with them. They gravitated to the bar and dance hall as bees do to honey.”
In the twenty years since, the town had become considerably less infamous. Nowadays the women of Wellington were more likely to be railroad workers’ wives than imported bar girls, and the loose, Wild West anarchy had given way to a quieter Progressive Era-style respectability. But Wellington in 1910 was still as remote as ever, and it was still populated largely by young unmarried men with nothing much to do in their off-hours but drink, play cards, and carouse. And despite catering to trappers and the occasional group of recreational hunters or fishermen, the place was still, above all else, a railroad town. Run almost exclusively for, by, and in the interest of the Great Northern Railway, it was a society unto itself, bound by the rigid hierarchies of a world that is now all but lost—the world of the railroad in the Golden Age of Steam.
It’s almost impossible from the perspective of the early twenty-first century to appreciate either the intricate sociology of the great American steam railroads or their centrality to American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freight trains may still be a vital part of the economy, but long-distance passenger rail service is now considered something of an anachronism—too slow, too expensive, and too inconvenient to be a viable option for most travelers. In 1910, though, railroads were at the very center of American consciousness. As businesses, they still dominated the national economy, even with the rise of large trusts like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. (When the prototype of what would eventually become the Dow Jones Industrial Average was first published in the 1880s, nine of its eleven stocks were railroad or railroad-related issues.) With the national rail network just six years away from its all-time peak of 254,037 miles of track, the railroad industry was actively employing an estimated one-twelfth of the adult male population in America. And for what the astute British observer James Bryce once called “an eminently locomotive people,” the railroad was simply an essential and inextricable part of the American cultural identity.
Granted, attitudes toward the major railway companies in 1910 may not have been as positive as in the past, but the sheer magnetism of the railroad itself was still strongly felt. In cities, towns, and rural areas across the country, the local train station was the symbolic heart of everything considered modern and important. Whereas children given to dreams of future greatness might once have fantasized about becoming Pony Express riders or cattle rustlers, in 1910 they imagined themselves locomotive engineers, footloose brakemen, or (for those with a little more financial savvy) president and chairman of the board of one of the great eastern trunk lines.
Much of this appeal had to do with simple aesthetics. There is nothing in the world quite like the charismatic majesty of a huge steam locomotive on the move. The sight of 140 tons of oiled and intricately orchestrated iron barreling along at breathtaking speeds, pistons and connecting rods pumping, whistles bawling, great clouds of white and black smoke erupting with gorgeous profusion from the stack—it all stood as a vivid symbol, a perfect visual metaphor for the bold animal authority of a nation growing into a new sense of power and command in the world. A steam engine of the early 1900s was a statement—it was potency and prestige incarnate. No wonder children stared at them in awe.
Naturally, once those locomotive-dazzled youngsters actually entered the world of steam railroading, the romance was bound to dim significantly. As any genuine railroader could have attested, it was hardly an easy life, given the long hours and hard physical labor. Still, the cachet of being “on the railroad” was felt by even the lowliest trackwalker or engine wiper; to work for one of the great rail systems was to be a member of a distinct fraternity governed by a highly specialized system of rules and rituals. And as with members of that remarkably similar fraternity—the military—no amount of griping about the unfairness, ineptitude, or maliciousness of those in command could mask the railroaders’ underlying sense of pride.
That the culture of the railroad so closely resembled that of the military should not be surprising, considering that the one was quite consciously modeled after the other. When long-distance rail systems first began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century, they faced problems of organization, administration, and discipline that had never been encountered before by any private enterprise. That’s why, as historian Harold Livesay has pointed out, they turned for a solution to the only model available at the time: “Only one organization, the military, was experienced in moving large quantities of men and material across long distances. The railroads adapted the military’s line and staff organization, often using military nomenclature.”
This helps explain why so many early railroad leaders, such as Grenville Dodge of the Union Pacific and the ubiquitous George McClellan (who eventually became president of the Ohio and Mississippi), were former army generals. “These men and others like them,” Livesay says, “perfected the first modern bureaucracies for management, capable of controlling complex, round-the-clock operations at places distant from headquarters and coordinated with telegraphic speed.”
Crucial to the running of such a complex organization was an attention to procedure expressly designed to minimize any potential for mishap or miscommunication (often as fatal in the world of the railroad as in the world of the army). Hierarchies of authority were rigid, and the chain of command strict and unambiguous. Thus James H. O’Neill, as superintendent of the Cascade Division, was the supreme local authority, the field general in command, responsible for all aspects of the railroad’s day-to-day operations in his division. He stood at the head of a group of senior staff officers that included the division’s roadmaster (in charge of the physical roadway—tracks, bridges, tunnels, and the like—and the men who maintained it), the master mechanic (responsible for the rolling stock of the division and those who kept it in good repair), and the various station agents and yardmasters (overseeing the workings of individual stations and rail yards). And the most visible area of a division’s operations—the movement of the trains themselves—fell under the jurisdiction of the chief dispatcher, who supervised train dispatchers and telegraph operators, and the trainmaster, who oversaw the work of the engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen.
It was these train crews—the junior officers and infantrymen of the railroad army—that lay at the very heart of railroad culture in the Age of Steam. They were the most recognizable railway figures to the general public, and the ones whose functions and duties most directly affected the average passenger. The conductor, for instance, was known as the administrative supervisor of a given train. It was his responsibility to keep the record of the train (the paperwork involved in safely running a railroad was—and still is—mind-boggling). He was also charged with overseeing the work of the brakemen, making sure the schedule was adhered to, and, on passenger trains, collecting tickets and looking after the safety and comfort of the passengers. Consistent with these weighty responsibilities, the steam-era conductor (sometimes known in railroad argot as the “con” or “skipper”) had a reputation for arrogance and imperiousness—though, as we’ve seen, Joseph Pettit, the skipper of the Seattle Express, was a notable exception.
While the conductor may have been officially in charge, it was the engineer who actually made the train go, an arrangement that often led to intense rivalry between the two men. According to one former railroader, the unwritten law of railroading was that the conductor’s authority ceased at the back end of the tender—that is, at the rear end of the engine and the permanently coupled car that carried its coal and water. In the cab of the locomotive it was the swaggering hotshot known as the engineer who was boss. This “engine runner” (also called a “hoghead” or “hogger” or even “throttle jockey”) was the object of the most intense popular fascination—it’s been said that even Sigmund Freud dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer.
Assisting the engineer—and stationed on the left side of the locomotive cab, as opposed to the engine runner’s right-side post—was the train’s fireman. Also known as the “tallow pot” (since it was his responsibility to grease the engine’s valves), he was the man charged with keeping the locomotive well stoked with coal—a job that tended to leave its performer “so black that his best friends would not know him when washed up.” On a particularly fast or difficult run, at least on engines without mechanical stokers, the fireman could spend virtually his entire long shift “shoveling real estate,” or loading coal from the tender into the firebox. It was overall a thankless, exhausting, and poorly paid job, its only compensation being that it served as an apprenticeship for the far more desirable position of engineer.
The real yeomen of the train service were the brakemen, of which there were usually two or more per train, and the switchmen, essentially brakemen who worked in the confines of a single rail yard. Until the widespread adoption of safety appliances such as air brakes and automatic couplers in the 1880s and ’90s, the brakeman’s job was notoriously dangerous. Early “brakies” had to crawl onto the roofs of moving trains, in all kinds of weather and in any kind of terrain, to apply and release each car’s individual hand brake; when assembling trains in a rail yard, they had to stand between converging cars and deftly slip a metal pin into the primitive link-and-pin couplers. Mistakes were frequent, and their consequences often dire. “What’re brakemen for anyway,” a mangled veteran once complained to an early railroad chronicler. “Nothin but fodder for cars ‘n’ engines to eat up.” This was not an exaggeration; it was a rare brakeman who still had all ten of his fingers.
Even with the introduction of ever-safer equipment and practices, steam railroading remained an occupation with on-the-job casualty rates that would be unthinkable today—not just for brakemen but for nearly everyone on the payroll. Some of the busier rail yards in the American system, at least in the 1870s, were virtual slaughterhouses, seeing three to five men killed per week. (According to one yard switchman, his sister kept a clean bedsheet reserved at all times, “for the express purpose of wrapping up my mangled remains.”) Even as late as 1907, one out of every eight trainmen suffered serious injury every year. In a difficult mountain area like the Cascade Division, the odds of avoiding casualty were even slimmer. Railroading was, in sum, “a miserable living gained by the hardest kind of work, with almost a certainty of being crippled, or meeting death by some horrible means.” The fact that there was usually no shortage of applicants for most railroad jobs is, under the circumstances, remarkable—a tribute to the industry’s lingering prestige.
The only amusement we had was manufactured right there in Wellington.
—Basil Sherlock
Given the harsh and hazardous nature of the steam-railroading life, it’s unsurprising that those who led it developed a military-style esprit de corps that manifested itself both on and off the field of battle. In a crisis situation like the one now prevailing at Stevens Pass, they could be counted on to close ranks and make Herculean efforts to meet and over-come the common enemy, whether it be a snowstorm, a mudslide, or even an army of hoboes trying to catch a free ride on a freight train.
On the other hand, in easier times—when the pressure was off and the battle was far in the distance—the fraternity of railroaders could take on a different character entirely. As railroad writer Herbert Hamblen once observed, “It becomes absolutely necessary sometimes for men whose daily lives are passed under the strictest discipline, and in a calling where their nerves are ever at concert pitch, to unbend, relax the rigid tension, and do things which would appear silly under other circumstances, or even vicious.” This need for release was especially pronounced in a lonely, female-deprived place like Wellington, where the community of railroaders often resembled the kind of fraternity more commonly found on college campuses: “There was plenty of kidding, shenanigans, and horseplay at Wellington,” telegrapher Basil Sherlock would later write of this phenomenon. “They seemed to like a joke, [and] the hotter or the more angry the victim of the joke became, the better the joke.”
As one would expect, the victims of these jokes often came from outside the ranks of the railroad family. One favorite target in Wellington, according to Sherlock, was W R. Bailets, the proprietor of the hotel, who was apparently given to moneymaking schemes of all types. One of his scams involved buying a twenty-seven-pound Thanksgiving turkey to raffle off at his saloon. With the preponderance of young, un-married men at Wellington, there was probably little serious interest in such a big bird, but Bailets reportedly hounded each man until he bought a ticket. Upon reaching $15 worth of sales, the hotelkeeper would hold a drawing, the lucky winner of which would then be offered a deal: Bailets would buy the turkey back from him for the sum of $7.50. The winner rarely refused, and so Bailets, back in possession of the bird, would turn around and raffle it off again. “Many thought that [the] turkey had paid for itself time and time again,” Sherlock wrote of the 1909 raffle, “and that something had to be done about it.”
Something was. Seeking revenge for this blatant extortion, several of the railroaders got together at the Wellington station and hatched a plan. It began with two of them faking a fight in the Bailets Hotel saloon. When the scuffle started getting out of hand, “showing signs of possibly damaging the furniture,” Bailets came out from behind the bar with a club in his hands to stop it. In the commotion that followed, an accomplice nabbed the caged turkey and whisked it out of the saloon and down to the station. “The turkey was handed to a train that was leaving town and [was] never recovered.”
Nor was the joke left at that. The next day a counterfeit sign appeared on a tree in front of the saloon: “Reward of 100 dollars will be paid for information regarding a turkey stolen from me November 23rd 1909. (Signed) W R. Bailets.” The hotelkeeper was furious when he saw it. He tore down the sign and threatened to have the perpetrator arrested for forgery. Then other signs began appearing all over Wellington, reading, “Who oh who stole Bailets’ turkey?” One of these signs, posted at the depot, was still there when the Seattle Express pulled into Wellington on the night of February 24.
There seems to have been a distinctly cruel edge to many of the practical jokes played at Wellington. Once—to tease section foreman Bob Harley, a man apparently prone to violating the railroad’s ever-unpopular Rule G (forbidding alcohol use)—telegrapher William Flannery faked a report of a landslide two miles down the line that had to be cleared immediately A quickly sobered-up Harley sprang into action. But Flannery and the rest of the Wellington crew proceeded to frustrate every attempt by the foreman to assemble a work gang and get them down to the alleged trouble area. At the same time, Flannery kept handing Harley fake telegrams from his bosses, chewing him out for the delay. The poor man became increasingly frantic—until, in sheer exasperation, he ran off and drank himself into a stupor.
One recurring prank involved “arresting” strangers in town (usually hoboes or passing hunters) and dragging them before a kangaroo court on trumped-up charges. The ruse was amazingly well orchestrated, commonly involving a cast of dozens, with various local railroaders posing as sheriff (with an old Seattle police badge), prosecuting attorney, witnesses, a jury, and His Honor Judge Grogan, this last played by John Robert Meath, a locomotive engineer who often worked the rotary plows. One such trial—of an itinerant cougar hunter who was hauled in on fake sabotage charges—went on for hours, with the poor defendant never once doubting the legitimacy of the proceedings.
But the denizens of Stevens Pass didn’t always base their entertainment on the mortification of others. Sledding was a popular activity on winter days, and many evenings would find the men gathered in the telegraph office, playing cards, telling stories (one famous tale involved a creature named Wah-too-tie, who supposedly lived in the tunnel), or just bantering among themselves. In less remote railroad stations, the telegraph office was supposed to be a private place, off-limits to anyone who didn’t have business there. Not so at Wellington. “Many times Superintendent J. H. O’Neill had to elbow his way into the office,” Sherlock later recalled, “but [he] never made any objection. I often thought that Mr. O’Neill would rather find the men there than at the saloon.”
Even in this boys’ club atmosphere, however, there were calmer, more serious moments: “One evening, when things seemed rather dull or tame, everyone waiting for something to happen, two of the men begged another to sing a song. He declined, saying it would disturb the telegrapher. … I assured him it would not. [And] with the best Irish tenor voice I ever heard before or since, without a musical accompaniment, he sang The Wearing of the Green.’”
There’s a distinct poignancy to the image of this cluster of workingmen, gathered together in the dim glow of a tiny wilderness station, rapt as one of their number sings a sentimental ballad a cappella in the night. These were rough, hard-laboring types, predominantly of Irish or Scots-Irish background. They were daily facing high danger, extreme isolation, and unbending, often unfair performance expectations. Under such circumstances, the loyalty of these men to one another—their solidarity and almost tribal feeling of brotherhood—makes perfect sense. The job they were doing was hard and largely thankless, but they were railroad men—and mountain railroad men at that. They found in the very rigors of the life they all led together a source of uncommon pride.
With the arrival of those two trains from the other side of the mountain, however, a distinctly foreign element would be introduced into this closed world of Wellington. Normally, railroaders would have little to do with the travelers who passed through their territory. (Many shared James J. Hill’s famous low opinion of passenger service as an annoyance: “like a male teat—neither useful nor ornamental.”) But henceforth these particular passengers, who until now had been passive observers of the railroaders’ battle against the storm, would become active participants in the Wellington drama as it unfolded over the next few difficult days, creating tensions for which the tiny, insular community was ill prepared. And the immediate catalyst for this change was to come before dawn on Friday morning back at Cascade Tunnel Station, where a deadly avalanche was about to darken the character of the entire situation at Stevens Pass.