It was a night of heroism, a night of horror.
—Everett Daily Herald
Tuesday, March 1, 1910
Wellington
1:42 A.M.
After 1:00 A.M. they slept. Rain spattered the windows of the Seattle Express as an edgy quiet filled the train, the darkness relieved only by a dimly flickering gaslight at the end of each car. On the sleeper Winnipeg, Henry White and Bert Matthews had by 1:15 finished their preparations for bed and crawled into their berths—the last of the passengers to retire. Already asleep around them were the other men and women they had come to know so well over the past week—among them Ned Topping, the Gray family, Sarah Jane Covington, George and Thelma Davis, and Ida Starrett, her baby lying quietly on the berth beside her, her son Ray and daughter Lillian in the berths across the aisle. Even porter Lucius Anderson was in bed by now, his long day’s duties finally over. He was sleeping soundly in his usual place, on an upper berth at the very end of the Pullman.
On the Fast Mail train right next to the Express, A. B. Hensel and the other mail clerks had also bedded down. Word of trainmaster Black-burn’s approval of the next morning’s evacuation attempt had convinced the postal employees that it was finally time to make their own move. Eager to end their enforced idleness, the men had locked up all the registered and first-class mail in one of the secure mail cars. Then, at about 11:00 P.M., they’d made up their usual improvised beds, piling empty mail sacks onto thin pallets at one end of the second-class mail car.
For a time, the mail clerks’ rest had been disturbed by a raucous card game going on next door—in the third-class mail car, at the very end of the train. Engineer Joe Finn, brakeman Earl Duncan, and conductors Ira Clary and Homer Purcell had been playing hot rummy for most of the evening (with conductor M. O. White and others looking on) and had been making enough noise to compete with the worsening storm outside. Then the whiskey had run out and they too had settled down for the night. Finn had apparently left the car at about one and hiked through the rain back to Wellington, but Clary, Purcell, and Duncan had instead stretched out on the floor of the mail car, all but played out. Over the past two days they had been chopping wood to keep the double rotary’s engines alive, and they needed to get some rest while they could. Once Dowling arrived with the X808 and its much-needed supply of coal, the double would go back in commission, meaning that its crews would have to start plowing around the clock again.
Even in the town of Wellington itself, few people were now stirring. With the telegraph wires down, second-trick operator Basil Sherlock had found himself with “absolutely nothing to do,” and so had left the office early. Feeling rattled by the increasingly unstable snowpack, he’d returned to his cabin at about 10:00 P.M. and told his wife, Alathea, of his concerns. Their cabin stood in one of the most slide-prone areas in Wellington—perched above Haskell Creek at the east end of town—and Sherlock didn’t like the looks of the mountainside behind it. After some discussion, the two had decided to remain in the cabin only as long as the snow on their pitched, corrugated-iron roof stayed put. If the snow slid off anytime before morning (indicating conditions ripe for a snowslide on the slope behind their cabin), they would gather up their clothes and “beat it for the tunnel.”
That had been several hours ago, and now the couple—like nearly everyone else at Wellington—was asleep in bed. Normally, of course, with trains scheduled to come through the tunnel at all hours of the day and night, the small settlement would be active twenty-four hours a day; any sense of nighttime repose would have been shattered by the regular blasts of steam whistles, the cries of conductors and brakemen, and the clamorous switching of helper locomotives. That night, however—with all traffic stopped and even the telegraph silent—Wellington was uncharacteristically still, lying peacefully under a drenching rain. The town had all but shut down until morning—which was perhaps why almost no one was awake when, sometime in the early hours of March 1, that ever-evolving storm suddenly changed character once again. The prevailing northwestern winds carried in a fierce thunderstorm from the coast. And soon the skies above Stevens Pass were alive with brilliant lightning and the deep, resounding rumble of thunder.
It was a virtually unheard-of phenomenon in the Cascades. Electrical storms were not supposed to happen in the mountains in winter. Even long-term residents of the area had never experienced such a thing. And this disturbance could not have arrived at a worse time. By Monday night, the battered, snow-choked slopes around Wellington had become an enormous trap waiting to be sprung. Already covered with a layer cake of assorted substrata of snow and ice, they were now slathered with a thick icing of dense, wind-packed new snow. The entire mixture, moreover, had been soaked by heavy lubricating rains that had penetrated to its very deepest layers. That beautiful field of white above the trains, in other words, was just a hard, unfathomably heavy slab sitting on top of increasingly unsound layers of highly stressed snow. A single trigger at a single point on that precipitous expanse would be enough to bring down the entire mountainside of snow.
Meanwhile, the noise of the unusual thunderstorm was waking some of the lighter sleepers. On the Fast Mail, Hensel rose from his place among the other clerks. He had been having trouble sleeping even before the thunder started. “My bunk was too hard,” he remembered, “so I moved to the other end of the car.” Clearing space between some wooden crates of registered mail, he remade his bed there—beyond the side door of the mail car, away from his fellows—in hopes of making himself more comfortable.
In a cabin east of the station, telegrapher William Flannery was also roused by the noise. Curious about the thunder, he padded to the cabin window and pulled aside the curtain. He was just in time to see a bolt of stark white lightning zigzag across the sky, and then another streak in the opposite direction. A clap of thunder followed, and though it was powerful enough to rattle the windowpanes, it did not wake his cabin-mate, conductor Felix Plettl. Amazed but not seriously worried by this bizarre turn in an already bizarre storm, Flannery simply returned to bed and tried to fall back to sleep.
Engineer Charles Andrews was more troubled by the change in the weather. Wakened by the storm, Andrews lay in bed, worried by what the rain and earth-jarring thunder might do to the snow on the slopes above his shack, which stood near the bottom of a narrow gulley. To him the prospect of an imminent snowslide was very real, and so, despite the fact that he’d been working all day at the double rotary, he got up and pulled on his still-damp work clothes. He stepped out into the torrential rain and tried to wake some of the other men in nearby shacks. Shouting to them over the thunder, he warned them of the danger, but they refused to budge and merely told him to go back to bed.
Cold, wet, and uneasy, Andrews then walked down to the unlighted depot. In the distance to the west he could make out the tail end of the passenger train—steam rising invitingly from its rear-vent valve—but he knew that the train was probably full and that he’d find no place to lie down there. So he turned east and headed to the bunkhouse near the tunnel, where he felt he’d be safer. He stepped inside, the damp fug of sleeping workmen heavy in the air, and built up the fire that had been smoldering in the stove. He sat there thoughtfully, warming himself in front of the blaze as the lightning strobed outside, until about ten minutes later, when he heard a sharp explosion of thunder, followed by another sound—deep, resonant, otherworldly and unlike anything he’d ever heard before.
Some later said it was a lightning strike that started it. Others said it must have been the percussive impact of thunder (though experts deny that sound alone can trigger an avalanche). All that is known for sure is that at 1:42 A.M. something caused a break in the surface integrity of the snowfield on the side of Windy Mountain. A buried weak layer some-where in the snowpack possibly collapsed with an enormous whump, sending a horizontal fracture shooting across the face of the slope about a thousand feet above the trains. And then, with an ominous rumble, the entire slab began slipping inexorably down the mountainside.
John Wentzel, a member of the Wellington section crew, was at Bailets Hotel at the time, fully awake and dressed. Hearing that uncanny rumble, he rushed outside into the storm. What he saw was something that no witness to a large avalanche ever forgets: “It seemed as if the world were coming to an end,” Wentzel was later quoted as saying. “I saw the whole side of the mountain coming down, tearing up everything in its way.”
Acres of crumbling snow were descending with the magisterial grandeur of a dropping theater curtain. A wet slab avalanche moves slowly—its vast weight causes such intense friction that it can pick up little speed—but its momentum can be tremendous. Scraping up nearly everything in its path, the slide’s leading edge can turn into a roiling juggernaut of snow and debris reaching extraordinary heights. According to one estimate, the wall coming down the mountainside would also have been over a half mile wide by the time it reached the tracks. “Trees, stumps, and snow were rolling together in gigantic waves,” Wentzel remembered. He realized at once that the slide would just miss the hotel and depot, but the two full railroad trains sat directly below it. “I saw the first rush of snow reach the track [and] swallow the trains,” he said. ‘And then there was neither tracks nor trains …”
There were approximately 125 people sleeping aboard the two trains that night. Many probably never even heard the approach of the avalanche, but at least a few were alert enough to recognize what was coming. “I think I was awake when it happened,” Henry White would later testify. “I may have been dozing, but I remember very distinctly [the sound] of the snow striking the car.” What he heard was, to White’s surprise, not a hard, percussive sound but a “squash”—an enormous splat followed by a shrill implosion of shattering glass. As the car in which he lay began tipping and sliding off the bank, he understood at once that the much-discussed avalanche had come.
“The first impression I had was the shame of it,” White would later say, “a feeling of regret and shame.” He thought instantly of the children on the train, children he had been playing with that very day—“very beautiful and bright little tots”—and of the other people who had become his friends over the past week. Somehow, despite all of the discussion and argument of the past six days, they had not been able to prevent this disaster from overtaking them, and the sheer waste of it saddened him.
White closed his eyes and held his breath as he felt the train’s slide turn into a tumble. Oddly, he felt only a vague, detached curiosity “as to what shape the death blow was coming in, and whether it was to be something run through me … like a weapon.” But no blow came. “I have no idea of the lapse of time,” he continued. “It probably appeared to be much longer than it was in reality.”
R. L. Forsyth, in the berth next to White’s, was also conscious from the start. “Suddenly our car was lifted bodily from the track,” he said, describing the first few seconds after the avalanche struck. For a moment the seventy-five-ton sleeper was held “poised in mid-air,” Forsyth claimed. “Then it toppled over the edge and rolled down the steep embankment.” As the car fell, other passengers began to shriek in confusion and fear. “It seemed more like a bad dream than anything else—a grinding and roaring and crashing. … We went down very rapidly.”
At this point, according to several accounts, the plummeting Express seemed to hit an object in its path, veer over sideways, and continue tumbling more erratically, throwing passengers wildly around the car. The sheer violence of the fall must have been awe-inspiring, with the massive locomotives erupting through the passenger cars’ wooden walls as they tumbled. Then at least the Winnipeg collided with a larger obstacle and split apart. “Our car popped open like an eggshell,” Ross Phillips recalled. “I was thrown through the air and into a pocket of snow.”
The men on the Fast Mail were hurled around with even greater force. “Before I was actually awake, the car was tossed up into the air like a football,” Ira Clary reported. “The men inside were rattling about the top, bottom, and sides of the car like pebbles in a pan. The car rolled over and over, bouncing, turning, and twisting with incredible swiftness. Then there was a terrific crash and instantly I found myself in the snow. I was completely covered and began to smother.”
Impressions vary on how long it took for the trains to reach the bottom of the ravine. Some say it was an instant; another said it seemed like twenty minutes. Once the trains juddered to a stop, though, it’s likely that the snow and debris kept coming, burying some cars deeper under the slide, piling ever more weight above them. Finally, after the intense pandemonium of the fall, all movement stopped, and there was silence—an eerie, muffled stillness ruptured only once by the explosion of an acetylene gas tank in the head car of the passenger train. “Everything was still,” Henry White remembered. “I expected to hear cries and groans, but I heard nothing. And I knew then that the death roll would be appalling.”
“My God, this is an awful death to die,” said a voice in the darkness on the last car of the Fast Mail.
Most of those aboard the mail train had indeed perished during the fall, but the vagaries of physics had left a few of them alive—Ira Clary, Homer Purcell, Earl Duncan, and M. O. White among them. These men were sprawled around the shattered third-class mail car, deeply muddled by the fall and now all but buried in snow. At first they managed only to speak a few words to one another in the blackness of the wreck. Then Clary, galvanized by the sensation of smothering, began thrashing like a drowning man, kicking and floundering in the snow. He managed to fight his way to fresh air and soon found himself at the surface, sitting on the wet snow above the ruined mail coach. “I heard Purcell calling and I knew his voice. I asked him, ‘Is that Purcell?’ and he replied, ‘It sure is.’”
In the erratic illumination of lightning, Clary saw a hand sticking out of the snow and began furiously digging around it. It took an agonizingly long time, but he finally freed his fellow conductor and pulled him out of the steep snowbank. Purcell’s boots came out of the hole behind him and fell on top of him. It was a small but fortuitous bit of luck. Both men were barefoot, so Purcell gave his socks to Clary and wore the boots himself. Finding themselves only lightly injured, the two began almost at once to search the wreck for other survivors.
“It was raining dismally and the trees all about us were cracking and screeching,” Clary reported. “We could hear people calling for help and we began to do what we could.” After pulling brakeman Charlie Smart and one or two other men out of the twisted wreckage, they saw one of their friends—fireman J. L. Kerlee, whom they called “Curly”—wedged under some debris. He was trapped near one of the toppled locomotives, its furiously hissing boiler spewing fusillades of hot steam into the air as the intense heat vaporized the snow around it.
Braving the searing white billows, Clary and Purcell ran to assist their friend, but as they approached, the snow collapsed beneath Purcell’s feet. “The steam from the engine had melted a big cavern beneath the snow crust,” Clary explained, “and [Purcell] fell into this steaming cauldron.” Fearing that Purcell would be boiled alive, Clary and Duncan dove to the edge of the molten pit, grasped the rotary conductor’s out-stretched hands, and pulled him away from the wildly sputtering boiler. Miraculously, Purcell was soaked but not burned. But they knew that the damaged locomotive could explode at any moment. Rushing back to Kerlee, the three men tore at the debris around his body until they could extricate him and drag him to safety.
All of these survivors had come from the third-class mail car, which seemed to have been spared the worst ravages of the slide. Those in the second-class mail car, however, had not fared as well as their neighbors. According to Hensel, his car had split in half at the side doors as the train plummeted down the mountainside. It would later be discovered that the part containing the other mail clerks had been crushed and buried deep, killing them instantly. The half to which Hensel alone had moved lay on its side under a thin covering of snow. The heavy rotary snowplow had landed on top of it, splintering the car’s wooden side and penetrating the interior to within inches of Hensel’s chest. Fortunately, though, the crates Hensel had moved to make his bed had protected him.
Nearly pinned now by the ruptured timbers, his left collarbone and several ribs broken, Hensel was rapidly slipping into shock. His first thought was that he was doomed to be trapped there until he froze to death, and he wondered if he could somehow write a last message on the hard-packed snow above him. Coming to his senses finally, he instead kicked with his bare feet at the snow. Despite his injuries, he was able to break the surface and push himself feetfirst out of the debris, but when he got outside above the mail car he realized that his watch, keys, and wallet were down there in the wreck. Still not thinking clearly, he crawled back into the ruined car and actually found the items before scrambling to the surface again. Looking up then, he saw lanterns descending as if from the sky and, above them, the lights of Wellington gleaming in the night, far from where they should have been. He called out to the approaching lantern carriers and then, exhausted and disoriented, passed out on the snow.
By now several of the survivors from the passenger train were wandering around the bottom of the canyon, half-naked and in various stages of shock. Shortly after hearing the acetylene tank explode in the distance, Henry White had gotten to his feet and, to his amazement, was able to walk right through a large rent in the side of the Winnipeg, out onto the surface of the slide. The rain was hammering down now, and in the momentary flashes of lightning he glimpsed Lucius Anderson lying on the ground nearby—injured but alive. Apparently in full possession of his senses, White found some blankets in the debris and offered one to Anderson. But the porter, his mind still addled after being knocked cold in the fall, refused the gesture, saying he would instead “turn the steam on in the car.”
R. L. Forsyth had come through the ordeal in even better shape than White. Finding himself only shallowly buried after the train had come to rest, he’d managed to dig himself out with little difficulty, but he was wet and shivering. “The first person I saw was Mr. Laville,” Forsyth would later testify. “He threw me a curtain and I wrapped up in that.” Seeing the others from the Winnipeg, he moved toward them and recognized White, Anderson, and Ross Phillips, who had been dug out of the wreckage—probably by Clary and Purcell—and was now suffering from a badly scalded right leg. Forsyth sank down beside this group, and then, as the electrical storm raked the canyon with bursts of harsh, bone-colored light, the four of them sat there in a row, staring at the phantasmagoric spectacle in front of them, waiting for someone to come down from Wellington to help them.
The first rescuers into the canyon were Charles Andrews and another engineer, Bob Miles. Picking their way down the steep mountainside, whipped by the wind and rain, the two men could see little evidence of the disaster besides a partially buried electric locomotive and the battered rotary snowplow. The only signs of the wooden passenger cars were a dark curtain from a Pullman berth flapping in the wind and a steel pipe jutting ominously from a mound of snow. Then they came upon a more grotesque sight: a man and a woman buried to their necks in snow but still alive. Miles and Andrews sank to their knees to try to dig the couple out by hand (in their haste to reach the trains, the two men had not stopped to pick up any digging tools), but the compacted snow was too hard. Frantic they struggled back up the mountain to Wellington to get shovels. By the time they had found some and returned, the man and the woman were both dead.
Others at Wellington soon followed Andrews and Miles into the ravine. Ed Clark had been asleep in the bunkhouse when the roar of the avalanche awakened him. Grabbing some axes and a few lanterns, he and several other men ran to the edge of the avalanche track and peered over the side. “There was a faint moaning in the gulch,” he recalled. “Trees were snapping, and you could hear other slides roaring down. … Then the lanterns showed hands beckoning from every little hole in one of the coaches.” They scrambled down the face of the avalanche to reach them. “We chopped between the outstretched hands and began to take people out,” Clark continued. “Some of the passengers were crying for water. … We got some out alive, but some died before we could get at them, although they were alive when we reached the spot.”
William Flannery and his cabinmate Felix Plettl had also reached the wreckage by now—and it was instantly clear to both of them that the danger from the slide was not yet past. “When we got down there, I saw a man laying out on the snow,” Flannery said. “[I] put him on my back and started up the hill with him, [but] while I was going up the hill, an other slide—a portion of the big one that hadn’t come down as yet—hit me and knocked me down underneath it, and I lost this man.” Buried under the shifting snow, Flannery nonetheless managed to pull himself along the side of a fallen tree until he reached the surface again. But the shock of the impact had utterly disoriented him: “I was in such a dazed condition that I walked down and [had waded] into the river up to my shoulders when I came to and realized what I had done.” Desperate to find the man he’d lost, Flannery returned to the wreck and searched for him, “calling and hallooing down through the snow.” He never found that man, but he and some other rescuers did locate two more survivors—conductor M. O. White and engineer Duncan Tegtmeier (a cousin of traveling engineer Irving Tegtmeier, now with the rotary above Scenic). They dug their fellow railroaders out of the snow and then helped them climb the steep slope back to town.
Up at Wellington, even W R. Bailets—at fifty-five, the town’s oldest resident—was trying to do his part. Having been awakened shortly after the avalanche by some railroaders from town, he and his wife had quickly gone downstairs to the hotel’s dining room and saloon to light the fires in their stoves. Concerned about one of the passengers who had been helping his granddaughter wait tables (probably Catherine O’Reilly or Nellie Sharp), he’d decided to run down to the passing tracks to see if he could find her.
“I had no idea that the train was thrown over,” he later testified. “I thought it was just shoved off the track.” Only after reaching the place where the trains should have been did he understand the magnitude of the disaster.
Through the gloom, he saw a man ascending from the canyon with a moaning boy in his arms. It was seven-year-old Raymond Starrett, “with a snag, a big splinter stuck right up through his forehead.” Bailets told the man to take Starrett up to the hotel and put him in front of the fire. Gripped by the sense of emergency, the hotelkeeper then headed over the edge of the right-of-way—and was almost instantly mired in snow. He floundered around in the deep drifts for a time before recognizing the foolishness of his would-be heroism. “I was played out,” he said. “Sometimes I would be in … waist-deep. I would have to draw myself out.” Exhausted, he soon concluded that the rescue was best left to younger, fitter men, and so he climbed back up to the hotel to lie down.
By now all of Wellington was awake. Many residents had gathered at the enginemen’s bunkhouse at the east end of the settlement—believed to be the safest place left in town—and were trying to figure out how to get word to superintendent O’Neill at Scenic, so that doctors, medical supplies, and extra rescuers could be rushed to the scene. With no other form of communication available, the message would have to be delivered on foot—a dangerous proposition, as the surrounding snowfields were now collapsing with such frequency that the whole mountain seemed to be melting in the rain. Traveling engineer J. J. Mackey volunteered to make the trip himself. After consulting with William Flannery on what supplies would be needed, Mackey dressed himself warmly and set off.
Flannery understood, however, that it would be hours before any help could be expected, even if Mackey got the message through. With trainmaster Blackburn and William Harrington both missing, the telegrapher took it upon himself to start making plans. After a quick discussion with the others present—including Charles Andrews, Bob Miles and his wife, and Basil and Alathea Sherlock—it was decided that the bunk-house should serve as a temporary hospital. Sherlock, who professed to be the son of a doctor, joined the two women in preparing the place to receive patients. They designated separate men’s and women’s wards and sent a brakeman over to the hotel to find some linens for bandages. After a few minutes, the brakeman returned, claiming that Bailets (perhaps suffering from the stress of his ordeal in the ravine) was standing on his porch with a gun in his hands, refusing to turn over any merchandise unless it was paid for. Furious, Sherlock ran over to the hotel to confront the man. Although their showdown was undoubtedly exaggerated in Sherlock’s later retelling, it seems certain that someone—either Sherlock himself or, more likely, Flannery—was able to persuade the hotelkeeper to see reason. Soon the temporary hospital had its linens for bandages, along with raincoats and other gear and clothing from the hotel’s store.
Somewhat later a worried Susan Bailets called Sherlock into the hotel to have a look at Ray Starrett, who was writhing around half conscious on her dining room table with the piece of wood still lodged in his forehead. Sherlock was shocked by what he saw: “The stick was about two-and-a-half feet long, an inch wide, and a half-inch thick. … It was an awful sight. From a first glance, one would think the stick ran right through the boy’s head.”
Concerned that young Ray could wind up with blood poisoning before a doctor arrived, Sherlock asked Mrs. Bailets to go and find a sharp razor. She returned a few minutes later with a brand-new blade from the hotel’s shop. Sherlock sterilized it with boiling water and then—clearly out of his depth—proceeded to perform impromptu surgery on the boy’s head, while Susan Bailets and her husband looked on.
“I cut the stick out,” Sherlock explained, “being just as careful as I could to save the skin and flesh.” After bandaging the wound, he bundled Ray up in a blanket and, as the half-conscious boy laughed deliriously in his arms, took him over to the bunkhouse. “While carrying him, I said to myself, ‘If we never find his folks, he is mine.’ ”
The bunkhouse hospital was in the meantime filling up with the injured. First to appear had been the Snow King himself, wearing nothing but a bloodied nightshirt. William Harrington had survived after all and, despite suffering a serious head wound and an injured foot, had managed to climb up from the wreck unassisted. Homer Purcell had come next, with a broken arm and other injuries. Taking charge of the small hospital, Alathea Sherlock quickly saw to their wounds and made her patients as comfortable as possible near the stove. (She even put Purcell to work rolling bandages—with his good arm—on an improvised machine that her husband had hammered together.) No one knew for sure how many people would be carried into the makeshift hospital before the night was over. On the night before there had been about forty-five passengers remaining on the Seattle Express, along with eight or nine mail clerks on the Fast Mail. More uncertain was the number of railroaders on the trains when the avalanche hit. At least a half dozen men from the plow crews were known to have taken the vacated berths on the Express, but many other crewmen and laborers had chosen to sleep elsewhere on the trains that night, thinking the passing tracks a safer place than the section house and the various shacks making up the town of Wellington itself.
Concerned that the little hospital might soon be overwhelmed, Flannery decided to send a second messenger down to Scenic. Grabbing another man—probably section crewman John Wentzel—the telegrapher wrote out a note to superintendent O’Neill and sent the man down the mountain in traveling engineer Mackey’s wake. That left one person fewer at Wellington to aid in the rescue, but Flannery’s rationale was clear: If for any reason Mackey didn’t reach Scenic, Flannery wanted to be certain that their cry for help still made it to the outside world.
The men of Wellington were meanwhile discovering just how badly they would need that help. Several dozen rescuers had by now descended into the ravaged canyon, and what they were finding down there was appalling. One man reportedly picked up a detached hand lying on the snow; others claimed to have uncovered a severed head in among the wreckage. Some of these stories, of course, were probably apocryphal, but subsequent coroner’s records confirm that many corpses pulled from the wreckage were badly mutilated. A few were also severely burned, seared by escaping steam from the damaged engines.
The most devastating discovery was the body of three-year-old Thelma Davis. Only the top half of the pretty toddler was found. It had been lashed to a huge tree trunk, tangled in a web of grotesquely twisted steam pipes.
Toward dawn, one rescuer uncovered the submerged form of a baby. It was eighteen-month-old Varden Gray—unconscious, his nose broken, and his scalp split wide open. The child’s parents—John with his healing leg rebroken and Anna injured but still conscious—lay buried deeper in the slide, pinned beneath the wreckage. Judging by modern statistics of avalanche survival, the fact that all three Grays were alive was remarkable. Avalanches generally kill in two ways. Fatal trauma—collision with trees, rocks, or other debris—accounts for about one-third of deaths, but the majority of victims die of suffocation. Densely packed snow asphyxiates some; others die when the pressure of tons of snow on their chests prevents them from breathing; a small minority suffocate when their own breath melts snow around their mouths, which then refreezes as a rigid ice mask. Whatever the situation, though, the chances of survival plummet after just fifteen minutes of burial; only one in ten will normally live longer than a few hours.
In this particular slide, however—where the train wreckage created large air pockets under the snow—some victims had a greater window of opportunity for rescue. Many, like the Grays, lingered on, still able to breathe long after the slide. One man, fireman Samuel A. Bates of the Fast Mail, was buried for hours next to his huge steam locomotive, expecting its boiler to explode at any moment. He tried clawing his way out, digging until his fingers bled, but this only seemed to pack the snow more densely around him. Finally, after six hours, his air supply dwindling and his body near hypothermia, he gave himself up for lost—at which point some rescuers heard his last desperate screams and dug him out.
Once dawn arrived, however, the only casualties being recovered were dead. Solomon Cohen and two electricians who’d been sleeping in a cabin near the motor shed had been among the first of the fatalities pulled out. Now the rescuers were finding others more deeply buried: R. M. Barnhart, the prominent attorney; John Rogers’s companion James McNeny; Catherine O’Reilly, the young nurse from Spokane. Their bodies were carried up the rain-lashed slope and placed in the baggage room next to the depot, which had been set aside as the morgue.
By late morning the rescuers worried that no one could be left alive in the wreckage. Even victims who had survived the fall with an ample air pocket around them would probably have run out of oxygen by now. But then Charles Andrews and some other men heard what Andrews later described as “a mewing far off, like a kitten.” Scrambling over toward the source of the sound, they heard it more distinctly as a cry for help. Certain that someone was still alive under the snow, they began digging feverishly.
The person calling was Ida Starrett, Raymond’s mother. Roused by the initial roar of the slide, she had been fully awake when the train toppled into the canyon. She landed with a jolt when her car hit bottom and was apparently knocked unconscious for a time. After she regained her senses, she understood what had happened. She was lying facedown under the snow, her head in the crook of her elbow and her back pinned painfully by some heavy object; when she tried to move, she found she could do no more than wiggle her fingers.
“I realized,” Ida would later say, “that I was not injured so seriously that I would die from that cause, immediately at least.” Her thoughts turned immediately to her parents and her children—and she realized that her infant son, Francis, was beneath her, pressed against her abdomen. If she held her breath she could even hear the baby breathing. She wanted to reach down and move him or comfort him or at least touch him, but though she tried desperately to free her arms she could do nothing, and the weight on her back seemed only to press down harder.
For hours she lay there in the frigid darkness, suffering terrible pain but with enough trapped air around her to keep her alive. Probably she was drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes losing track of where she was and what was happening around her. But she was certain that she knew just when her baby beneath her stopped breathing and died.
Eventually, nearly eleven hours after the slide, she awoke to hear rescuers shouting somewhere above. “I cried out to them, trying to direct them,” she said. She listened as the shovelers found and removed several dead bodies from the debris above her, but they couldn’t seem to pinpoint the source of her shouts. “I could tell by the sound of their shoveling that they were digging in the wrong place, and [I] told them so. Then they moved nearer and at last I could hear the shovels striking just above my face. I cried a warning.”
Someone—probably Charles Andrews—kept calling down to her, making sure of her location, asking if she could see light through the snow. “I kept answering I could not,” she said, “until finally … a glow of light broke through.”
When the rescuers found her, they realized that she was pinned beneath a thick tree trunk they could not hope to move. Andrews called for more tools, and he and the others began to saw away the two-foot-thick piece of timber. The delay was excruciating, but sometime in the early afternoon the pieces of the tree fell away and Ida Starrett was pulled out of the wreckage—nearly frozen and in deep shock. She was the last person from the trains rescued alive.