Q: Had you had a chance to get a meal more than the two or three meals you have mentioned in that period?
A: No sir, we did not have any chance to get any meals.
Q: Where did you get your sleep?
A: I got no sleep.
—John Robert Meath,
rotary engineer
Saturday, February 26, 1910
Near Windy Point
Early Morning
Shortly before 4:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, after another protracted night of grinding, unremitting plow work, the westbound double rotary finally broke through the deep slide at Snowshed 3.3. For superintendent O’Neill, this was a heartening development. The two consecutive slides at this spot had been the principal obstacles preventing the escape of those two trains at Wellington.
Plowing away this second blockage, however, had taken nearly thirty-six hours—plenty of time for drifting snow and further slides to have created problems elsewhere on the mountain. Although the line was now clear from Wellington to Windy Point, there were still some seven or eight miles of track between Windy Point and Scenic about which O’Neill knew little. Master mechanic J. J. Dowling and the X808 had been hacking away at this stretch of track since 3:00 P.M. on Friday, working up from Scenic, but they were as yet nowhere to be seen on the line below. And as much as O’Neill wanted to continue plowing downgrade to meet them, the double needed to be coaled and watered again, and the overworked rotary crews needed some refueling of their own. Reluctantly, therefore, he ordered the double rotary back to Wellington.
While his men were eating breakfast at the station shortly after 5:00 A.M., O’Neill gathered whatever news he could about the other rotaries. With all communication down east of the tunnel, nothing had been heard from Harrington on the east slope, but word from the west was hardly more definitive. At last report, Dowling and the X808 were still far closer to Scenic than to Windy Point, delayed by a small slide and a burst flue on the rotary that had taken some hours to repair. There was, in short, still no verifiable path off the mountain in either direction.
O’Neill also had another new predicament to deal with. Over the course of the past few days, his battalions of temporary snow shovelers had been growing steadily less cooperative, grumbling about pay and the harsh and increasingly dangerous conditions. Many had been putting in only halfhearted efforts, working more slowly and resting more frequently with each passing hour. Even the passengers had noticed their tendency to goldbrick. “Hello there, Bill,” one of the male passengers had shouted from the train to a group of idling laborers, “if you aren’t careful you will hurt your shovel!” This taunt had done little to increase the shovelers’ motivation. Then, on Friday, a fistfight had broken out between two drunken section crews at the saloon. O’Neill knew that it would only be a matter of time before the men stopped doing any work at all.
Now even the passengers were starting to turn troublesome. It was sometime on Friday night, probably during one of the double rotary’s quick trips back to Wellington for water, that the superintendent had first heard from Longcoy about the passengers’ request to see him. O’Neill was not at all eager to oblige; after all, he had more than enough to occupy him without having to field unanswerable questions from nervous passengers. And so—understandably if not quite admirably—he had told Longcoy to make excuses for him. O’Neill instructed the stenographer to say that he was “too sleepy” for a meeting that night.
It was no mystery to O’Neill why these men wished to see him; they obviously wanted the Seattle Express moved off the flank of Windy Mountain. Given appearances, their concerns were not unreasonable. O’Neill wasn’t blind to the deepening snowfield on the mountainside above the trains, and he realized that the increasing instability of the snowpack was justifiably worrying to people ignorant of the behavior of slides. But he was convinced that the passing tracks at Wellington were actually one of the least slide-prone places on the mountain. Years of experience had shown that snowslides in the area almost invariably came down on slopes pleated with ravines or draws. There had been a small gully, for instance, creasing the mountainside above the beanery at Cascade Tunnel Station. Here, on the slope above the passing tracks at Wellington, there was no such interruption in the smooth face of the mountainside. That’s why there was no snowshed protecting the tracks there. No protection was considered necessary.
And the simple fact of the matter was that there was no other suitable place at Wellington to put those trains. The tunnel, whatever the passengers might think, was an utterly impractical alternative. The only other sheltered place would have been under one of the snowsheds. Snowshed 2, not far west of Wellington, might have been long enough to cover at least one of the trains, but there was only one track—the main line—going through that shed; leaving a train there would have blocked the double rotary’s access to the coal chute and the water tank. Nor were snowsheds entirely indestructible; it was not unheard-of for a big slide to collapse a wooden snowshed, crushing whatever stood beneath it. Since these sheds were naturally located in places known to be susceptible to avalanches, moving the Seattle Express under Snowshed 2 would also have been taking it from a place with no slide history to a demonstrably slide-prone area.
The last possibility—moving the trains to the spur tracks on the flat area near the tunnel portal—posed its own insurmountable difficulties. Given the amount of snow that had fallen, clearing those tracks would have taken O’Neill’s entire force of men at least two days of hard labor to accomplish. Putting a passenger train on a spur track would also have run counter to the rules of standard operating procedure. Besides, O’Neill wasn’t convinced that the spur tracks were any safer than the passing tracks. Yes, the steep mountainsides were somewhat more distant from the tracks there, but that area—where the switchbacks had been located years earlier—had been the site of frequent slides in the past. A large avalanche coming down that gully-creased mountainside could easily travel far enough to bury any trains standing on the spurs.
Moving the trains was therefore simply out of the question; O’Neill felt he had no better alternative than to keep them exactly where they were. Instead of redeploying all of his manpower and steam power to the futile task of clearing the line between the trains and the tunnel, he would continue to devote all of his efforts to getting the trains off the mountain and out of danger entirely.
To do that, of course, he had to finish clearing the line down to Scenic, which meant working his already exhausted men even longer, not to mention finding more fuel to run the rotaries. After breakfast, O’Neill was relieved to learn that the plow crews had managed to solve at least the latter problem. By raiding supplies in the motor shed, the unused engines, and elsewhere, they’d collected enough coal to fill the rotary train’s tenders to full capacity. Depending on conditions, then, they would have a good ten to twenty more hours of work time—enough, O’Neill hoped, to at least secure access to one of his two potential replenishment sources of coal: either the carloads traveling up the mountain from the west with Dowling or the two or three cars being freed by Harrington to the east.
Shortly after sunrise, refueled but woefully unrested, O’Neill and his force of thirty-five trainmen and snow shovelers reboarded the double rotary and headed back west. The snow was still coming down hard, but the wind had now fallen off to a breeze, promising to make the work of plowing considerably easier. With any luck, they would plow their way to a rendezvous with Dowling sometime that day, opening the line and allowing the trains to head down the mountain at least as far as Scenic.
Luck, however, was in horribly short supply in the Cascades that week: Just a few miles from Wellington, as the rotary was making its way west over the already plowed line, a new slide appeared out of the swirling snow ahead of them. It had fallen sometime in the few hours they’d been gone, and it had come down—incredibly—at Snowshed 3.3, precisely the same point at which the earlier two slides had come down.
What O’Neill may have muttered under his breath at this moment is not recorded. He was known as a man who always kept his temper. Probably he waited for the rotary train to stop, then jumped across to the high bank of snow beside the tracks and, without comment, waded forward through the drifts to examine the slide. From what was visible through the falling snow, he could see it was a large one—almost fifteen hundred feet long, according to his subsequent report. Though the slide was relatively clear of timber, its depth varied from ten feet in some places to over thirty feet in others. It would be at least another full day’s work to clear it up.
Enraging as this situation may have been, there was only one thing O’Neill could do. Returning to the rotary, he called out the shovelers and set them to work breaking down the face of the slide.
Saturday—noon—still here—snowing hard—report this AM that there is six miles of uncleared track—some places 30 ft deep. They are working from Seattle toward us and we may get [out] tonight—tho I’m not believing anyone.
—Ned Topping
Wellington
Saturday Afternoon
By Saturday even the children had grown testy and quarrelsome. There were a total of four boys and four girls on the Seattle Express, and keeping them all peacefully occupied was proving to be a chore. Seven-year-old Raymond Starrett and the three-year-old Beck boy seemed to be getting along well enough; the younger child had a toy train that Ray was simply fascinated by, and the two of them would spend hours pushing it along the floor of the crowded car. But the boys wanted no part of Thelma Davis, the three-year-old girl from Seattle, whom Ray regarded as hopelessly spoiled. Whenever Thelma didn’t get her way, she would dissolve into tears, requiring continual comforting by one of the older Beck girls. Although it was explained to Ray that little Thelma was missing her mother, who was back at the family’s Seattle apartment, he was not very sympathetic. Since he himself had recently lost a father, he felt he could have limited sympathy for a girl who was just missing a temporarily absent parent.
The adults did what they could to keep the children amused. When-ever there was a lull in the storm, some of the younger passengers would take them outside to build snowmen and have raucous snowball fights among the drifts. Sometimes the girls were gathered into sewing circles to patch together makeshift dresses from scraps. When things got really bad, Lucius Anderson, the “jolly” porter on the Winnipeg, would tell stories. Once—to Ray Starrett’s delight—he even did a tap dance.
Back on the observation car, salesman Henry White was still fuming about O’Neill’s failure to appear the night before. Spotting Longcoy, White and a few other malcontents hailed the young man and asked whether the superintendent had received their message. He had, Longcoy replied, but Mr. O’Neill had been too busy and then too sleepy to come over and see them last night. Now he was gone again—down to Scenic on unspecified business. This last bit of information was actually an expedient fabrication—O’Neill was still with the rotary at Snowshed 3.3—but even this answer did not yet satisfy White. “We insisted that [Longcoy] send a message—either a wire or a telephone [call], or send somebody to Scenic and tell Mr. O’Neill we wanted to see him right away.” In reply, Longcoy spun out yet another fib: “He told us that Mr. O’Neill was sick abed and could not get away.”
Whether Longcoy—a devout Baptist who was also an active member of the Everett YMCA—was improvising on his own here or merely passing along excuses concocted by O’Neill is impossible to say. The sickness story was in any case a risky lie to tell, and one that was eventually exposed. (Two days after this exchange, White would ask conductor Pettit about O’Neill’s ill health: “I asked him how Mr. O’Neill was and he said, ‘He is all right.’… I said, ‘Isn’t he sick?’ He said, ‘No, he has not been sick.’”) The pretense of O’Neill’s incapacitation, though, was enough to keep White quiet, at least for the moment. And the salesman was further mollified when he encountered Pettit a short time later and asked the inevitable question about progress. “It looks now as though we will get away this afternoon,” the conductor offered (perhaps because he had not yet heard about the third slide at Snowshed 3.3).
Other passengers found reassurances elsewhere. Lewis Jesseph, approaching the situation with his usual lawyerly thoroughness, busied himself questioning local experts on the issue of moving the trains. He consulted with some old mountain men in Wellington, who assured him that the trains were “perfectly safe” where they were. He also had a conversation with hotelkeeper W R. Bailets, resident at Wellington since 1892, who confirmed that he had never seen any slides on the slope over the passing tracks.
Some of the women, though, still refused to be comforted. Ida Starrett and Anna Gray, both mothers of infant children, were naturally more fearful than others, but the real problem was Ada Lemman, the woman suffering from nervous prostration. Although the Lemmans’ child—a sixteen-year-old daughter—was safe with relatives in Ritzville, Ada had become increasingly unstable since the beanery slide. A graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her day, and was apparently unwilling to take the word of alleged experts over the evidence of her own senses. So she and some of the others used one of the few tactics of persuasion available to women at this time, but to little avail: “On Saturday the strain became too great for the women,” Merritt observed, “and several of them broke down and cried. This was too much for the men in the crowd, and all left the car for the tall timbers.”
The women’s growing alarm was only deepened several hours later when the foreign snow shovelers began walking off the job. The mail clerk A. B. Hensel first noticed their retreat late on Saturday afternoon. The shovelers were leaving in groups of three and four, packs and bedrolls flung over their shoulders in the swirling snow. As they passed the passenger train, some of them paid back the ridicule they’d earlier received from the passengers. “They bade us goodbye as they walked along,” Henry White admitted, “and they said, ‘Goodbye, boys; God only knows when you will get out of there—we are going now.’”
The main cause of this impromptu job action was discontent over wages, which were beginning to seem ridiculously low to many of the laborers. White had been surprised to learn that these men were making only fifteen cents an hour. (Longcoy—who seems to have resorted to flagrant and frequent lying to keep the passengers in line—had told him that the shovelers were being paid twice that.) This already low wage was further reduced by deductions for board. “One or two of them told me [that] if he worked a week, often getting wet through, and his clothes all wet, he could manage to pull down about two dollars for himself. He said it didn’t look good to him and he was going.”
With the example of the retreating gangmen before them, some passengers began to think along similar lines. One particularly impatient man—Solomon Cohen, a mine speculator and former shopkeeper from Everett—began to openly advocate the idea of escaping on foot. “Those men will make a pretty good trail,” he announced on Saturday afternoon, “and it will be a good idea to follow them.” Unfortunately, it was already too late for the passengers to pack up their things and start out for Scenic. No one wanted to be stuck halfway down the mountain when night fell. “The feeling prevailed,” White recalled, “that if we wanted to make a start it ought to be in the morning.”
So nothing further was done that day. Tentative plans were made to leave the next morning, but many people seemed to lack conviction. The storm was still blowing hard, and now, seemingly as they watched, the dense snowfall began to turn into a hard, driving rain. A warming Chinook wind had blown in sometime after noon, pushing temperatures even further above the freezing point. Water was beginning to streak down the sides of the railroad cars and puddle in the impressions left by dirty boots in the snow. This was a discouragement for some—the hike down the mountain was bound to be more slippery and uncomfortable in the rain. For others, it was something more ominous. What would this rain do to the snow covering on the mountainside above them? No one seemed to know for sure. But for many of those aboard—particularly those for whom escape on foot would not be possible—the determination grew to find someone in authority and get those trains backed away from the flank of Windy Mountain. Whatever the high cost in time and manpower, they wanted to be moved.
Situation 8:00 P.M. Raining hard on west slope with a strong Chinook wind. … Mr. O’Neill with double rotary still working about 3 miles west of Wellington. Have had no late news of him. Slides are numerous and continually coming down on west slope.
No wires east of Berne. People at Wellington very much alarmed over slides.
—G. W. Turner,
telegram to W. C. Watrous et al.
On the Line
Early Saturday Evening
In the mountains east and west of Wellington, the railroad’s battle against the storm pressed on. To the east, Harrington and the X801 had spent all of Friday night drilling through a big slide encountered just east of Berne. By Saturday noon they had broken through it, but at a cost—twelve hours of almost constant rotary work had dangerously depleted the coal supply of both plow and pusher engines. It had thus become absolutely essential for them to reach the coal cars at Merritt before too much longer.
At first it had looked as if they might actually succeed. For a mile or two beyond Berne, they’d encountered only drifted snow on the tracks, which the rotary handled easily. But just as they were clearing Gaynor, a small station about nine miles east of the Cascade Tunnel, an avalanche had let loose on the mountainside across the river from the train tracks. It was a powerful, fast-moving slide, and before Harrington and his men fully grasped what was happening, the onrushing snow had surged across the thousand-foot-wide valley and raced up the slope on the other side, covering the tracks right in front of the still-moving rotary. Though the crew managed to stop the plow train in time to avoid being engulfed, the slide at Gaynor put a quick and certain end to any plans for reaching the coal at Merritt. Harrington and his men did continue to work at the new slide until they were down to their last ton of coal, but they found there was no way to get through that vast escarpment of snow before running out of fuel. Nor could they back up and return the way they had come, since other slides had come down behind them in the interim since they’d left Berne.
With so little fuel remaining and only a single east-facing rotary in his train, Harrington understood that he must abandon the X801. Leaving J. J. Mackey and a small crew of five to keep the rotary alive (since large steam engines could take up to twelve hours to start up once they’d gone cold, it was wise to avoid letting them “die” entirely), Harrington took the remainder of his men and started on the nine-mile hike back to Cascade Tunnel Station. For the moment, at least, the eastern front of this battle against the storm would have to be relinquished.
The outlook was only somewhat brighter on the western front. Since discovering the third slide at Snowshed 3.3 that morning, O’Neill and the double rotary had been making slow but significant progress digging through it. Even so, every foot of cleared track had been hard-won. The wind, after tapering off for much of the day, had returned in full force, sweeping up drifts and making a chore of just standing upright. (“When the wind was blowing its hardest,” one fireman would later recall, “it was … strong enough to blow a chew of tobacco out of a man’s face.”) The “Cascades cement” deposited by this new slide was also proving to be particularly intractable. An excerpt from the court testimony of engineer J. C. Wright describes the agonizingly deliberate procedure required to make headway in such a difficult slide.
A: The knives will not cut the snow [in a hard-snow slide], and the engine, if she is being pushed gradually against this, the knives won’t take hold—you have to put her into it hard.
Q: What do you mean by putting her into it hard?
A: Well, you have to back away from the face of the slide, probably eight or ten or fifteen feet, and then when you are ready … [the engineer] just pushes the rotary against the face of the slide as hard as he can.
Q: It goes into it with a jolt?
A: Yes sir. And then when the wheel quits throwing the snow out, he will back away from it again, and then go at it the same way again.
Even this dogged approach, painstaking as it was, yielded only limited results. “The progress was so slow,” fireman Floyd Stanley Funderburk later reported, “that we only made six to eight inches in the drift every time the rotary would come in.”
This was hard, brutal, unrelenting work. Choked by steam and coal smoke, deafened by the roar of the engines, and buffeted this way and that by the repeated collision of unstoppable force and immovable object, crews would be worn out after a few hours of this grueling labor. And yet they had been at it for days on end. O’Neill had to be wondering how much longer they could all go on.
For at least the temporary snow shovelers, the answer to that question was becoming obvious. ‘Almost impossible to get them to work,” O’Neill would report of the shovelers in one of his Saturday telegrams. The going rate of fifteen cents an hour for temporary gang work apparently did not inspire these men with much company loyalty, and they were at times pointedly refusing to lift a shovel, forcing the trainmen to shovel down the slides on their own. Left to his own judgment, O’Neill might have been willing to hike their wages at least temporarily, but he was familiar with Chairman Hill’s well-publicized feelings about worker blackmail. So he knew that handling this situation would require considerable delicacy. If pushed too far, these temporary employees would be gone in an instant. Unfortunately, this meant pushing his more loyal employees even harder.
Toward evening, when they had worked through about half of the slide at Snowshed 3.3, the engines and the west-facing rotary began to run low on coal and water. Stopping work, O’Neill ordered the plow train back to Wellington to refuel. This would at least allow some of the men to flop down on the floor of the rotary and doze. But whether they’d be able to scrape up enough coal in Wellington to refill the tenders was very much an open question. With the coal chute now all but empty and the extra engines on the sidetrack already plundered at least once, O’Neill was running out of places to look for extra fuel.
Then, halfway back to Wellington, about a mile and a half from the coal chute, the rotary ran into yet another problem—and it was a major one. “We started back toward Wellington to get more coal,” brakeman Earl Duncan recalled, “and found a slide behind us, just west of [Snow-shed 2.2]. This was about 900 feet long and 30 feet deep, and full of snags and green timber.”
This latest slide, as O’Neill understood instantly, was a truly devastating blow. Even if they’d had enough coal left on the notaries, a slide so large and so thickly littered with timber would take at least forty-eight hours to work through. Without access to more fuel, this was clearly going to be impossible.
For the first time that week, superintendent O’Neill had to admit that he was beaten. The double rotary—his last real hope for clearing the main line off the mountain—had become useless. It was now obvious to him that those two trains at Wellington weren’t going anywhere until outside help arrived. After days and days of punishing, nonstop work, those trains, and all the people aboard them, were now truly stranded, and for how long he could not even guess.
Ordering the double rotary back to a safe place on the mountain, O’Neill assigned four men to remain behind and keep the engines alive. Then he and the rest of the crews headed back to Wellington on foot, trudging wearily through the rain and the shrieking wind.
Q: Was there ever a time, up to the evening of the 26th, when you did not expect to get the train through within twelve to twenty-four hours?
A: No sir, [there] was not a time.
Q: When did you first give up hope of getting it through in some such time as that?
A: On the night of the 26th. … That was the night that tied us up.
—James H. O’Neill
Wellington
Saturday Evening
Sometime after supper on Saturday, several of the passengers decided to call another meeting in the observation car. The impetus this time came from the attorney Edgar Lemman. His wife Ada’s condition was only getting worse, and he was eager to do whatever he could to relieve her anxiety.
“Mr. Lemman came back [to the observation car] with a solemn look on his face and a number of people following him,” John Rogers would later recall. “They seated themselves, and [Lemman] gravely arose and said, ‘Now, to the point, gentlemen. …’”
What followed was, in Rogers’s words, “a very peculiar meeting”—a curiously formal proceeding amid the cigar smoke and boardroom-like appointments of the observation car—during which little was ultimately decided. According to accounts by several men who were playing cards there that night, the discussion focused mainly on the issue of moving the train back into the tunnel. Some members of the group also wanted to ask O’Neill about the feasibility of transporting a doctor up from Scenic to look after the sick passengers. At one point the men tried to elect Solomon Cohen as their chairman, but he refused to serve. “With that refusal,” Rogers observed, “the meeting seemed to pass away into nothing, and so nothing was accomplished.”
The appearance of Joseph Pettit in the observation car seems to have revived the conversation. The conductor had been trying to accommodate the passengers as best he could, bringing them buckets full of melted snow for their drinking water and carrying hot food from the hotel to the shut-ins on board, but this time he had bad news to impart—namely, that the coal supply had now run out entirely. In other words, even if the tracks behind the train could be cleared (which they couldn’t), even if the tunnel were a better, safer place for the train (which it wasn’t), and even if the single engine remaining on the Seattle Express could manage to haul the train upgrade to the tunnel (which it couldn’t), there was now insufficient fuel available at Wellington to accomplish the job. According to one eyewitness, Pettit claimed that “if they burned up the coal to get up steam enough to push the train back there, why, he was afraid that they would not have enough to heat the coaches.”
This argument still failed to persuade some members of the passenger committee. It seemed preposterous to them that there was not enough coal in all of Wellington to move a single train several hundred yards upgrade. Again they requested to see superintendent O’Neill. Pettit agreed to go and look for him, but he returned a short time later, saying that the superintendent was still out working with the double rotary. By this time, moreover, the lawyers Jesseph and Merritt had joined the meeting, and both of them were adamantly against bothering O’Neill with these grievances. “I did all I could to keep down any protest that was attempted once or twice to get out and send to the Superintendent,” Jesseph admitted. “I did not believe that the Superintendent or the trainmen or the shovelers or anybody else in there could have done any more than they were doing under the circumstances.”
This second meeting therefore trailed off as inconclusively as the first had. No one seemed capable of settling on any definite course of action whatsoever. It was as if time itself had come to a halt, stranding the passengers in a limbo of helplessness. “Everyone who was on the trains was in a state of quandary,” Rogers would later recall. “Their minds seemed to be bewitched, as … in the legend of Sleepy Hollow. I know that I myself scarcely knew what to do.”
In truth, there was nothing that the passengers realistically could do—at least not until morning, when they would have a full day in which to act. Some were determined to follow the striking laborers off the mountain on foot, no matter how dangerous the trip might be. Others were content to trust the judgment of the Great Northern Railway and stay put. A few still clung to hopes of somehow getting the train moved back to the tunnel. Perhaps the only thing they all agreed on at that moment was the sentiment expressed by Ned Topping in his letter that night. “If I ever make this [indecipherable] trip again it will be in the summer or fall,” he wrote, the strain of imprisonment apparently affecting even the legibility of his handwriting. “This is the fourth day and it seems like a month.”