This is not an hour for reciting the chapters thrilling, tragic, [or] pathetic of the calamity in the Cascades. The reality of the facts, the pain of suspense, the throbbing of hearts can never be expressed in words. The story is written in the torn mountain, in the reddened snow.
—Reverend W. E. Randall,
from a sermon delivered at
the First Baptist Church of Everett
Tuesday, March 1, 1910
Scenic Hot Springs
Morning
James H. O’Neill first received word of the Wellington snowslide about six hours after it happened. The superintendent had risen early, intending to check on the rotary before organizing a relief party to Wellington. He had slept well. Although some people at Scenic later claimed to have heard the crash of distant thunder overnight, O’Neill had been too deeply asleep to be roused by anything. (“I would not have heard a cannon that night,” he would later testify.) But when he and Dowling saw J. J. Mackey approaching them at about 8:00 A.M., looking haggard and grim from his overnight rush down the mountain from Wellington, O’Neill must have known instantly that the traveling engineer was not bringing good news.
The three men stood in the gray, drizzling rain as Mackey explained just how bad it was.
Whatever anguish O’Neill felt at that moment—whatever sorrow or guilt or dread of what was to follow—he pushed it instantly aside. Galvanized by the need for immediate action, he gathered his officers and set to work. The first task, he realized, would have to be rounding up as many men as possible to assist in the rescue. There were scores of men now at Scenic, and many had already been preparing to hike up the mountain to bring food and supplies to the stranded trains. This force would have to be augmented, supplied with extra tools and medical supplies, and sent out as quickly as possible.
Word would also have to be sent to the outside world, but with no working telegraph at Scenic it would have to be done on foot. Only O’Neill himself could take on this latter duty. Only he, as superintendent, had access to the telegraph codebook required for secure communication with headquarters in St. Paul. Only he had the authority to orchestrate the larger rescue effort that would be required—the gathering of medical supplies, the requisitioning of doctors, nurses, and extra workmen, the organization of special relief trains from Everett and Seattle. All of this would require the superintendent’s presence at the telegraph key.
So O’Neill put master mechanic Dowling, the second-ranking GN officer present, in charge of the rescue party. Dowling and Mackey would hastily organize their forces and then head up the mountain to Wellington, taking with them J. L. Godby the attendant from the hotel’s hot springs bath, who was the closest thing to a nurse available at Scenic. While this effort was being mobilized, O’Neill himself would hike west down the right-of-way to the first operational telegraph he could find. Assuming the tracks up from the coast were still remotely passable, he figured he should be able to get a well-supplied relief train to within hiking distance of Wellington by nightfall.
O’Neill collected as much additional information as he could from Mackey and set out along the buried tracks toward Skykomish. He may or may not have traveled alone, but the journey would not have been a simple one in either case. Although Scenic marked the western end of the truly extreme mountain terrain, the stretch of track from Scenic to Skykomish was still rugged and slide-prone, and it now had three feet of new wet snow on the tracks. And for a man like O’Neill, whose every instinct drew him toward the site of any trouble, it must have been agonizing to head west, away from the catastrophe for which he bore primary responsibility.
At about 11:00 A.M. he reached Nippon, a small station about nine miles east of Skykomish. Here the communication wires were still operational, so he stepped into the small telegraph office, took off his sopping coat, and sat down to compose what must have been the most difficult telegram of his career:
MARCH 1, 1910
AT 4:00 A.M. [SIC] LARGE SNOW SLIDE EXTENDING ONE-HALF MILE IN LENGTH CAME DOWN AT WELLINGTON, EXTENDING FROM SNOW SHED NO. 2 WEST OF WELLINGTON TO EAST PASSING TRACK SWITCH, TAKING DOWN WATER TANK, NO. 25 AND 27’S TRAIN, CAR A-16, FOUR MOTORS, MOTOR SHED, ROTARY X-807, ENGINES 702, 1032, AND 1418. ALL PASSENGERS NO. 25’S TRAIN MORE OR LESS INJURED. CANNOT SAY TO WHAT EXTENT UNTIL [WE] CAN GET THEM OUT.
This message, which was translated into code and then forwarded to Great Northern officials throughout the Northwest and eventually countrywide, was as straightforward and matter-of-fact as a telegram could be. But anyone reading it would have instantly recognized its import. A huge avalanche had knocked two packed railroad trains off the side of a mountain into a canyon below. Nothing like it had ever happened in eighty years of American railroading. And the death toll, O’Neill’s cautious assessment notwithstanding, was likely to be of historic proportions. Though the superintendent could not know it at the time, the incident he’d just reported was by far the deadliest avalanche in American history. He would be dealing with its consequences for many years to come.
Q: Was the track itself torn away?
A: That could not be determined. … The track was not visible at any place west of the station.
Q: Was there any part of the two trains left on the track?
A: Not a particle of either train.
—J.J. Mackey
Wellington
Tuesday Afternoon
When Dowling, Mackey, and a force of forty-odd men from Scenic finally reached the avalanche site at about three that afternoon, the small baggage room off the Wellington depot was already filling up with corpses. The rescuers initially on the scene had been pulling bodies out of the wreckage for over twelve hours, and more were being found every hour. The scene was gruesome. “The bodies that are to be taken out are fearfully distorted and mangled,” one observer wrote. “The heads of some are smashed and limbs are torn in two and the bowels of some are torn out.” Even for men as inured to carnage as these railroaders, the work was all but unendurable. According to engineer Edward Sweeney, when rescuers unearthed a half dozen crushed bodies pinned down by a fallen tree, one of the stricken shovelers approached the engineer and asked if he had authority to supply the men with whiskey to steady their nerves. “I don’t have any particular authority,” Sweeney replied, “but I’ll get you some whiskey.”
Appalling as it was on its face, the recovery work was even more daunting because of the constant danger of another slide. Although much of the high-lying snow on Windy Mountain had come down the previous night, there was still enough in place to pose a significant threat to the men crawling over the avalanche site, especially given the weather conditions. Rain continued falling, adding more weight to the snowpack.
Dowling and Mackey immediately had their men unpack their tools and fan out over the avalanche run-out zone, relieving some of those who had been digging all night and all day. The situation was still urgent. Scores of people remained unaccounted for—their colleagues Joe Pettit, Earl Longcoy, and trainmaster Blackburn among them—and while it was unlikely that any of them were still alive, it was not inconceivable. If a single car had come through the slide even partially intact, it could be harboring any number of survivors deep beneath the snow, where the oxygen supply would be diminishing by the minute. Only thirteen hours had passed since the slide, and under extraordinary circumstances avalanche victims can survive far longer than that.*
As Dowling and Mackey looked down over the expanse of the debris field, however, they must have realized that finding a submerged intact car—even if one existed—would be a desperately difficult task. Although darkness had veiled the scene from him the night before, Mackey could now appreciate the sheer vastness of the area over which the two trains had been scattered. The heavy engines had not been carried far down the slope, but the remains of the lighter wooden cars were strewn widely over acres and acres of precipitous terrain. The worst damage seemed to have been caused by the electric locomotives, which had been standing on the track nearest the mountainside. Hit first by the wall of snow and debris, these motors—the largest railroad locomotives in the world at the time—had apparently toppled in succession onto the Seattle Express on Passing Track 1 and then the Fast Mail on Passing Track 2, crushing both beneath them. In fact, Mackey and Dowling soon ascertained that the reason so many of the survivors came from the Winnipeg was that it was standing in the clear of the electrics.
Most of the other cars, though, had been quite literally smashed to bits (“as if an elephant had stepped on a cigar box” one witness reported). And as the men from Scenic began chopping away at the scattered bits of cars—the sound of their hatchets, axes, and shovels echoing down the valley—they began to realize that even the rescue effort was dangerous. The snow was littered with jagged pipes, shards of broken glass, and other potentially hazardous debris. Any opening hacked into the side of a car, moreover, would instantly suck snow, lumber, and sometimes even the rescuers themselves into the wreckage. At times they would find bodies inside and pull them out as if “taking them from a river.” More often, the only thing they found was trash—“a car lamp, a sack of mail, a whisk broom, a chunk of coal, a woman’s shoe, a drummer’s shirt samples,” and so on. One rescuer even found a baby carriage on its side near the bottom of the ravine—probably that of Francis Starrett, the infant who had smothered in the wreckage of the Winnipeg. The carriage would still be there days later, as if no one at Wellington could muster the strength of will to move it.
Francis Starrett’s mother, meanwhile, was being cared for with two dozen other survivors at the enginemen’s bunkhouse. When J. L. Godby arrived there at midafternoon, the Sherlocks and Mrs. Miles had already seen to the immediate needs of nearly everyone. One man had reportedly died from the effects of exposure after being placed in the improvised hospital, but the other patients had been more or less stabilized. Some—such as passengers R. M. Laville and Ray Forsyth—had suffered only minor injuries and were already up and around; others—Lucius Anderson, Ira Clary, Homer Purcell—needed mostly bandaging and rest. Snow King William Harrington had a fairly serious head injury, Ross Phillips was badly burned, and Henry White was battered and heavily bruised around the chest. All of these men sat or lay around the stuffy bunkhouse in various states of disorientation and shock.
The ever-conscientious A. B. Hensel, despite suffering from several cracked ribs, a broken arm, and a broken collarbone, wanted to make sure that all of the registered mail in the trains would be secured once it was found. He had been told the fate of his colleagues and felt duty-bound to report the news to the chief mail clerk in Spokane. Ignoring pleas to rest, he insisted on dictating a telegram to one of the hospital volunteers. “I am the only mail clerk to escape alive,” it read. “Though badly injured, I am confident of recovery. Alfred B. Hensel.” Relayed by foot to the closest working telegraph on the line, this wire turned out to be the first message from Wellington itself to reach the outside world.
In the woman’s ward next door, Basil Sherlock was doing his best to assist his wife, Alathea, and Mrs. Miles with the nursing. The toddler Varden Gray, probably the most seriously injured patient, was occupying much of the women’s time, especially after the child showed signs of pneumonia. So Sherlock was tending to some of the less grave cases, bringing them hot whiskey slings “to thaw them out from the inside.” Anna Gray and Mrs. May (Ida Starrett’s mother, who had survived relatively unscathed) smelled the whiskey in the concoction and at first refused to take it, but Sherlock insisted. “[I told them] we were not going to have them coming down with pneumonia and peppering everyone in the hospital,” he explained. In the end, the two women relented. “They took their medicine,” Sherlock reported, “like a good sport.”
Such bullying tactics had no effect on Ida Starrett. Having spent so much time under the snow, she was now severely hypothermic. “I would say she was two-thirds frozen,” Sherlock remembered. “I did not take her pulse, but I did put my ear over her heart, which was beating, but it seemed real slow. She was numb all over.” The telegrapher and some of the patients—even a few with broken bones—began warming blankets by the stove and wrapping them around her, but she was slow to revive. Still not fully aware that two of her children were dead and that her father was missing, she lay silent and stone-faced in her bunk, clearly in deep shock.
Ida’s surviving son, Raymond, his bruised cheek swollen and his cut forehead impressively bandaged, watched her in silence. Finally, feeling desperate, he did whatever he could think of to bring her out of her catalepsy. “I even tried to make her cry,” he later admitted. But though he pleaded with her, pulled at her arm, and pinched her, nothing he did could bring her around. The boy could only sit helplessly by her side, more unsettled by her impassivity than by any other part of his ordeal.
AVALANCHE BURIES SPOKANE TRAIN
30 PASSENGERS MAY BE DEAD
______________
—Everett Daily Herald,
banner headline,
March 1, 1910
Seattle
Tuesday Afternoon Through Wednesday
News of the disaster reached the general public sometime later that afternoon. Although the GN would doubtless have preferred to suppress the story until more particulars could be learned, they’d decided to release an announcement shortly after receiving O’Neill’s telegram, knowing that the story would soon get out in any case: John Wentzel, the only professed witness to the actual slide, had stumbled into Skykomish that morning, having walked the entire eighteen miles from Wellington. ‘All wiped out!” he cried before collapsing in exhaustion. It was several hours before anyone could get a coherent story from the man, but they gleaned enough to comprehend the extent of the tragedy. And once Skykomish knew of what would soon be called the Horror at Wellington, it could only be a matter of hours before the rest of the world knew of it too.
The press had been aware for several days that there were GN trains stranded in the mountains, but had known few details. Wary of bad publicity, the Great Northern had been reluctant to share much information, and the resulting newspaper stories had necessarily been vague. With the emergence of Merritt, Rogers, and the other hikers, however, the papers finally had some specifics to work with. The Seattle Times, after interviewing George Loveberry upon his arrival in town, had printed an article about the situation on Monday morning, under lurid headlines: “TRAVELERS FACE HUNGER AND DEATH” and “60 PASSENGERS FACE BURIAL IN AVALANCHE.” There was also specific mention of the stranded trains in Monday’s edition of the Everett Daily Herald and several other newspapers.
But when word of the actual avalanche arrived on Tuesday—making such sensationalized scaremongering look more like prophecy—the papers instantly threw themselves into a frenzy. Reporters and photographers, equipped with snowshoes and other climbing equipment, were immediately mobilized and sent out on the road toward Stevens Pass. They were apparently given instructions to start generating copy as soon as possible, for as early as Tuesday evening several of the local dailies already had skeletal accounts of the avalanche on their front pages. And by dawn on Wednesday, the story had made it into papers nationwide.
As the news broke, help of all kinds was hastily dispatched to the mountains. Over the next few days, three different special trains were sent out from Everett and Seattle, transporting scores of doctors, nurses, volunteer rescuers, friends and relatives of victims, and anyone else the Great Northern could muster (including some homeless men from the Seattle city jail) to aid in the rescue and track-clearing efforts. Laden with food, medical supplies, tools, and—in one case—a supply of coffins, the trains were able to travel only as far as Scenic (on the very first day, only as far as Nippon). From there, everything had to be packed in on foot, each man carrying as big a load as he could handle.
By the evening of March 1, dozens of rescuers were making the climb up the steep slope to Windy Point. The rain had all but stopped by now, but the wind at higher elevations was still blowing fiercely, making the ascent particularly treacherous. Andy Pascoe, a GN railroader who had joined a relief train at Skykomish, accompanied one of the doctors up to Wellington on that first night. Dr. E. C. Gleason carried a coal-oil lantern to light the way as Pascoe, a man of some size, followed behind with a shovel, a bundle of splints, seventy-five pounds of food, and the doctor’s bag on his back. Above were dozens of other rescuers, their lanterns creating a series of ghostly white halos that meandered shakily up the mountain, throwing erratic shadows on the snow.
Stopping to rest, Pascoe noticed that each lantern seemed to wink out once it reached the top of the slope. He couldn’t figure out the reason—until he and the doctor reached the same point, where a strong gust barreling up from the canyon nearly blasted them off their feet. The flame in their own lantern blew out, and in the confusion of trying to relight it in the total darkness, the two men nearly stepped off a precipice above a several-hundred-foot drop.
The first doctor reached the scene almost exactly twenty-four hours after the avalanche. A. W. Stockwell of Monroe arrived at about two A.M. on Wednesday, accompanied by two professional nurses, Leonora Todhunter and Annabelle Lee, who had donned men’s clothing and made the hike up the mountain among the earliest rescuers. What the three medical professionals found at the crowded bunkhouse was a surprisingly shipshape hospital. Mrs. Sherlock in particular (she would later be extolled in the press as the “Florence Nightingale of the Cascades”) had provided excellent first aid, and by the time the other doctors and surgeons arrived at midmorning, Stockwell realized that he had more medical personnel than he really needed. By the end of the day, he was able to make one of the few positive announcements to come out of those mountains—namely, that all of the injured were now out of danger and would probably recover. Although the more seriously hurt patients could not be moved until the rail line was cleared, they would receive all the care they needed right there at Wellington.
Finally, at about 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday afternoon, James H. O’Neill arrived on the scene. Snowshoeing up the trail from Scenic with a team of undertakers from Butterworth and Sons of Seattle, O’Neill had been astonished at the condition of the right-of-way. So many avalanches had occurred since his last trip down the mountain that the entire four-mile stretch from Windy Point to Wellington was now virtually one continuous slide. And what the superintendent saw once he reached the main avalanche site was sobering.
O’Neill stopped and spent some minutes taking in the scene before him. A thousand feet above the right-of-way, a sharply defined bank of snow ran in almost a straight horizontal across the face of Windy Mountain. This was clearly the line at which the ten-acre slab of snow had broken away. That entire slab had then rumbled downhill, carrying away almost everything on the mountainside. Only a bleak, meager-looking assortment of bent and broken tree trunks remained on the slope above. All the rest—the snow, the rocks, most of the trees, and the underbrush—now lay packed in the canyon below. As hard as limestone in places, the mixture entombed two entire trains, a half dozen engines, a rotary snowplow, several small buildings, and the bodies of roughly a hundred people.
As awful as it may have sounded in Mackey’s report, the scene was far worse witnessed firsthand. O’Neill knew that James J. Hill in St. Paul would be anxiously awaiting his assessment of the situation. But how long it would take to recover all that was lost—let alone to repair and reopen the rail line—was something the superintendent could hardly even guess.
March 3rd, 1910
Following from Supt O’Neill at 2:38 P.M.: “Have recovered 29 bodies since accident, 24 injured being cared for here. All equipment total loss except trucks. Have force of sixty men searching but account so much snow and cars being buried it is slow work. Figure have 25 to 30 bodies yet to recover. Weather very bad and we are having some trouble keeping men.”
W. C. Watrous,
telegram to L. W. Hill et al.
The First Week of March 1910
Wellington
Over the next several days, dozens more victims were located, removed from the wreckage, and identified, one by one. By Thursday, March 3, the body of R. H. Bethel (a.k.a. “Colonel Cody”) had been found, as had that of James McNeny, the friend whom John Rogers could not persuade to hike out with him on Monday. The Lemmans were discovered side by side, their sixteen-year-old daughter now left an orphan with her grandparents in Ritzville. And Nellie Sharp, “the Wild West Girl,” was found carrying a diamond ring and $100 in cash—presumably the money she would have lived on while researching her article for McClure’s.
Many friends and relatives of victims soon began arriving on the scene. Among the first was Edward Boles, who came back from Scenic to search for the brother he’d left behind. A minister from Bellingham arrived on a mission to find the Reverend J. M. Thomson. From Leavenworth (via Seattle and Scenic) came a Miss Katherine Fisher, a “more than ordinarily pretty” woman who had braved the ascent in order to claim the body of her fiancé, a fireman named Earl Bennington.
One associate of Charles Eltinge, T. R. Garrison, had been forced to defy repeated discouragements from railway officials in order to reach the site. After several days of difficult travel—once he even had to climb over two stalled freight trains, “engines and all”—he finally reached Wellington and described the scene: “There was not a sign of anything but a tremendous mass of snow, with here and there a tree trunk sticking out or perhaps a bit of tangled brush. … On crawling down the bank, however, I soon saw evidences of the horror beneath. Here were the irons of the passenger coach twisted around the trunk of a tree like a thread of silk. I stumbled against a piece of polished wood with an iron rod piercing it as clean as a knife.” Garrison spent the rest of the day looking for Eltinge, but with no success. Continuing his search the next morning, he saw some men climbing out of the canyon with several bodies on stretchers. He stopped them and lifted the sheet from the first one; it was Eltinge himself staring back at him, with only “a dull bruise on his forehead to show the cause of death.”
Two sons of Mrs. Covington, Luther and Frank, appeared on Thursday, hoping somehow to find their missing mother still alive. Luther, a prominent Washington clergyman, had traveled with his brother from Seattle to Scenic on Wednesday evening. Hiking up to Wellington the next day, they hurried first to the bunkhouse hospital, but any dim hopes they might have had about their mother’s survival were soon dashed. The only older woman in the grim, silent ladies’ ward was Mrs. May.
The brothers then moved on to the depot’s baggage room and tool-shed, where seven undertakers were already at work, embalming the bodies and preparing them for evacuation. With handkerchiefs held to their noses, the two men paced up and down the long line of bodies, but none even resembled their mother. This, of course, was hardly a relief, since it meant that she could only be somewhere down in the ravine. Bracing themselves, they descended into the debris field, where there were now 150 people crawling over the wreckage. But although they searched all that day, they could find no trace of her.
Frustrated and exhausted, overwhelmed by the sheer ghastliness of the scene and finding no place to sleep at Wellington, they returned to Scenic that night—only to be told that their mother had been discovered in the wreckage of the Winnipeg shortly after their departure. It would have been her fifty-first wedding anniversary. “My heart is well-nigh broken,” their sister Mrs. George P. Anderson wrote to another sister when she heard. “We cannot as yet realize or understand how or why it should happen to one who has lived so noble and glorious a life.”
Most aggrieved was Melmoth Covington Sr., who had held out hope for his wife’s rescue to the very end. “It has come hardest on poor Father,” Mrs. Anderson continued. “The worst pang of intense pain [is] past, yet he will always miss her so intensely; it is very, very sad.”
For other families, however, the suspense was to go on much longer. Among those still missing by the end of the week were George Davis, Ned Topping, and William May. Some of these men may have been among the unidentified bodies already lined up in the baggage room. Since almost all of the victims had been dressed in nothing but night-clothes, with no documentation on their persons, they had to be identified by appearance alone—a particularly difficult task in cases where mutilation was extreme. Eventually, the unclaimed bodies became too numerous for the shed and had to be stored in the station building, where they were lined up so tightly that, according to one report, “survivors, diggers, and newspapermen have accidentally stepped on a discolored hand or foot in getting in and out of the telegraph office.”
Through it all, superintendent O’Neill went on without relief, stoic but clearly devastated. He was receiving accolades from many on the site for his perseverance and determination. King County coroner James C. Snyder, who had come up to Wellington on Thursday with a number of detectives and postal officials, had returned to Seattle the next day with all kinds of praise for the man in charge. “Superintendent O’Neill has handled the railroad end of the affair in a masterly manner,” Snyder said to reporters. “No one could have done more than he did, and I never saw a man show such generalship. … He seems to have an utter disregard for his own personal safety or health.”
No matter how solacing in theory, these encomiums probably did little to ease O’Neill’s torment. Especially hard for him had been the discovery of his business car at 1:00 P.M. on Friday. The A-16 had barely been budged from the tracks by the avalanche. Instead, the slide had sliced off the top of the car and crammed it full of snow and debris. Suffocated inside were steward Lewis Walker, stenographer Earl Longcoy, and trainmaster Arthur Blackburn, found “in an attitude as if he had been sleeping peacefully, his face in his hands.” These had been O’Neill’s friends, men he worked with every day. Blackburn had been a guest at his wedding. When at home with Berenice, O’Neill sat in the fine Morris chair the trainmaster had given them as a gift.
Then the body of conductor Joseph Pettit turned up. This was another difficult death for O’Neill, and not just because Pettit was a friend. The conductor had left a widow and five children back in Everett. In an age before widespread life insurance, they would likely be left with no means of support whatever.
“Last night, when he dropped to rest on the floor, he had aged years,” one reporter wrote of the superintendent on March 4. “His rather boyish face was scarred with lines that will never leave.”
Adding to O’Neill’s woes was the fact that the rescue effort itself was plagued by difficulties and unpleasantness. In the first few days after the avalanche, several of the foreign track workers were caught in possession of clothing from the wreck. Early reports that the men had actually been looting corpses later proved false, but the rumors caused such a xenophobic uproar that O’Neill finally had to send all foreigners from the avalanche site to work elsewhere on the mountain. At least one temporary laborer, a man who gave his name as Robert Roberts, actually had to be arrested—for stealing a gold watch that belonged to victim Solomon Cohen.
Soon the weather, too, was creating problems again. After several days of rain that had done much to melt away the snow covering the wreckage (for a time, the water draining through the debris field had created bloody trails that rescuers could follow backward to their sources), another blizzard had set in on Friday night, forcing a halt to all rescue activity for nearly a full day. Still other crises arose. Three telegraphers were reportedly stranded at the small station at Berne without food. An unidentified body had been seen in a creek somewhere on the east slope. A watchman at Drury had been killed when an avalanche crushed the small cabin in which he had taken refuge.
And always the threat of another slide hung over the rescuers. On the night of March 3, the rain and warm temperatures caused the snow on the roof of the Bailets Hotel to slide off with a loud din, bringing everyone in town out of their beds. Bailets was so anxious about the possibility of a second slide that he took his family to sleep in one of the outfit cars on the spur tracks east of town. In the succeeding days, many workers began walking through the tunnel every night to sleep at Cascade Tunnel Station on the other side. Even O’Neill hiked the three dark miles every night, alone with whatever grim thoughts he might have been thinking.
The press, meanwhile, was churning out as much prose as possible about what was now one of the biggest disaster stories in Pacific Northwest history. The first actual journalist didn’t reach Wellington until the evening of March 2, but the lack of on-site reporting hadn’t prevented some papers from concocting stories of their own imagining, and the wilder the better. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had been especially creative. According to the March 3 edition, for instance, engineer Charles Andrews had been sleeping on one of the trains on the night of the slide but, “moved by a power which appeared to Andrews to come from a source other than the physical,” he had arisen and gotten off minutes before the train was hit—a story that Andrews later vehemently denied. Over the next few days, the Post-Intelligencer and other papers printed more absurdities: that packs of mountain lions and wolves were patrolling the disaster site; that a burbling baby had survived the slide unharmed while both of its parents had perished; that one stranded train crew was forced to kill and eat a cat; and—perhaps most egregious of all—that a buried coach was uncovered by rescuers several days after the slide with ten people still alive inside (a patently implausible story that was nonetheless picked up by newspapers as far away as France).
The Seattle Times, somewhat more measured in its reporting, had the advantage of having the first man on the scene to provide eyewitness testimony. J. J. Underwood had snowshoed up from Scenic on the evening of March 2 and wanted to file his first story the next day, once the telegraph wires were restored between Wellington and Scenic. He went to the office at the depot and asked first-trick operator William Avery to wire the story to the Times offices in Seattle. O’Neill was present and at first tried to stop him. “We’re not going to let you send that stuff out from here,” the superintendent said, all too familiar with the type of embellished misinformation that often passed for news in that age of yellow journalism.
Underwood, however, would not be put off. He told O’Neill that he would hike down to Scenic if necessary to file his reports. When this threat seemed to have no effect, he changed his tack, assuring the superintendent that he was above the tawdry sensationalism practiced by the Times’s competitors. This latter claim is perhaps debatable, given that his first dispatch contained gaudy verbal fugues like “Death every-where, suffering and sorrow most poignant, the wailing of women, the subdued sobs of the few children saved from the grip of the avalanche,” and so on.
Some of Underwood’s subsequent reporting, however, did have a definite evocative power. His descriptions of the rescue scene were especially vivid: “The task of digging for the dead, especially at night, is inexpressively eerie. Surrounded by rugged, snow-capped mountains, with the haunting fear of new slides never absent from the minds of rescuers, scores of men ply diligent shovels in efforts to bring forth the bodies of victims. Twinkling lanterns gleam over the tangled masses of snow, mere specks in the widespread desolation.” Although Underwood did get some of his facts precisely wrong—he claimed, for instance, that the women on the Seattle Express had begged that the train be kept out of the tunnel—his sometimes purple reporting was at least far more reliable than that of the irresponsible journalists who followed him.
Yet another specter hanging over O’Neill’s head was the judgment of his superiors in St. Paul. James J. Hill (probably on the advice of GN lawyers) was making no public comments on the disaster, but O’Neill knew that the old man was probably more wounded by it than he had let on. The perceived freakishness of the accident was generating worldwide publicity. “I was greatly distressed to read of the extraordinary misfortune which has overtaken one of your trains,” an associate from J. P. Morgan wrote Hill on March 3. “I do not think I ever heard of such a thing as an avalanche sweeping [a] train off the track. I trust that the damage will not be anything like as serious as reported in the papers.”
But Hill knew that the damage was much worse. Early public statements about the death toll had been conservative, but the office diaries of the GN general manager reveal that Hill and his corporate staff knew as early as the day of the avalanche that some eighty-five lives had been lost. And although the precise number killed was perhaps not important from a practical standpoint, there was a psychologically critical threshold that would matter a great deal to Hill. If the death toll at Wellington exceeded 116—the number of people who had died in a 1904 train accident in Pueblo, Colorado—the Wellington Disaster would come to be known as the deadliest rail accident in American history. This was clearly a distinction that the chairman was eager to avoid.
Unfortunately, O’Neill simply could not tell Hill or anyone else how many people were dead, since he had no idea how many had been sleeping on the trains on the night of the slide. During the week of the trains’ entrapment, a group of thirty foreign laborers had reportedly been bedding down in a day-coach smoker on the passenger train, but many of these men were probably among those who had walked off the job over the weekend. Until that coach was found, then, O’Neill would have no accurate sense of what the final tally would be.
So rescuers kept digging, turning up a few new bodies every day. Hair-accessories entrepreneur Libby Latsch was found by the end of the week, as was customs official H. D. Chantrell, but no one could find any trace of the missing smoking car. Now that the rescuers were getting deeper into the slide, they were finding the snow even denser and harder to work through. “The snow was packed so hard about the bodies we took out,” one digger reported, “that an impression like an alabaster cast remains in the frozen whiteness.”
By Monday O’Neill was convinced that it would be a full month before all of the victims were found and accounted for. He was even considering running steam hoses over the snow to melt it faster—an idea that seems highly impractical if not desperate. But the superintendent was apparently ready to try anything. With so many people still missing, it was beginning to look as if it might even be well into the spring before the cleanup work was done and O’Neill could finally go back home.
How puny is man in the face of angered nature! And yet how indomitably and hopefully persistent. He is swept from the earth like the wheat before the sickle or the chaff before the wind. His toilsome labors are made nothing of; the greatest achievements are crumbled to dust. Yet, driven by that impulse within him, he buries his dead, clears up the debris, and returns to his task, even while he can yet feel the wings of Death hovering over him.
—Seattle Star editorial
On the Line Between Skykomish and Leavenworth
For many in the Great Northern Railway company—particularly for those at corporate headquarters in St. Paul—the recovery of the dead at Wellington was not the most urgent task to be accomplished in those first two weeks after the avalanche. As general manager J. M. Gruber would later remark, what the Great Northern was facing in its Cascade Division was nothing less than “the greatest blockade of a railway system ever witnessed.” Although some GN traffic was being successfully routed through the Cascades via the Northern Pacific lines, all too much of it—particularly freight, the bread and butter of any railway system—was piling up at rail yards both east and west of the mountains. The backup was already starting to hurt the company’s profit picture: The Great Northern, which had been losing significant revenue ever since the line had become blocked on February 23, would continue to lose money every hour until the line was cleared and open to traffic once again.
Unfortunately, that task was proving to be enormous, even with rotaries working from both directions and supported by hundreds of shovelers. On the east slope, assistant superintendent J. C. Devery had been working west with the borrowed Kalispell rotary since the day before the disaster but had made only moderate progress. One mile-long slide at Merritt had required thirty-six hours of nonstop work to clear; another half-mile slide at Gaynor (the slide that had foiled Snow King Harrington’s rotary on Saturday night) had eaten up more time still. Even after the special relief train from the east had caught up with them, bringing J. M. Gruber and G. H. Emerson and pulling no fewer than ten coal cars, a carload of dynamite, a complete wrecking outfit, and a healthy supply of 250 well-rested laborers, progress had been remarkably slow. Then, on March 6, they encountered a tremendous slide at Berne—“one of the largest I have ever seen,” according to one GN veteran—which had left snow one hundred feet deep on the tracks. Despite having all of that dynamite at their disposal, it was almost four days before they could clear the slide and move on.
Work on the western slope was being plagued by similar delays. The arrival of an extra rotary from the Northern Pacific fleet on Thursday, March 3, helped matters considerably. The subsequent appearance on Saturday of general superintendent E. L. Brown and scores of extra men took even more of the pressure off Dowling and his exhausted crew. But the west-slope effort was soon being hampered by a resurgence of labor difficulties among the temporary snow shovelers. “Have had considerable trouble holding men,” Brown reported to headquarters on Saturday night. “They are quitting as fast as we can get them out here, fearing trouble from slides.”
Even so, by Sunday night, helped by clearing weather and the arrival of a shipment of dynamite and black blasting powder, the west-slope crews had made enough progress to get within hiking distance of the stranded X800-X802 between Windy Point and Wellington. Coal was packed in to the double by three hundred laborers, and once it was revived and ready for work, the railroad had a full contingent of three double rotaries working simultaneously on the line. By Tuesday, March 8—one week after the slide—it was beginning to look as if the Cascade Division might be back in operation within days.
One unavoidable cause of delay was the evacuation of the dead and wounded from Wellington. Blasting and plowing had to be stopped whenever these processions came through, and since some of Brown’s black-powder charges had destroyed parts of the main trail, new routes had to be blazed around the gaps. The first of the injured passengers to be evacuated—Ray Forsyth and R. M. Laville—came down the mountain on March 2 with three of the doctors whose presence at Wellington was no longer needed. Later that same day, a half dozen injured trainmen descended, including conductors Ira Clary and Homer Purcell and fireman Samuel Bates. The largest group came out on Sunday—a “pathetic procession,” according to the Seattle Star, consisting of passenger Henry White, William Harrington, Pullman porters Lucius Anderson and Adolph Smith, and three other trainmen. “As the little party reached the point on the trail where they looked down 1,000 feet of sheer descent,” the Star reported, “guides and survivors alike bared heads and gave silent thanks for their salvation.”
Henry White, still sore and somewhat unsteady from the battering he’d taken in the slide, seemed particularly impatient to be getting off the mountain. “I’d rather take a chance on dying [on the trail] than to stay at Wellington any longer,” he told a reporter when asked why he hadn’t waited for the track-clearing to finish before making his escape. When prompted for a comment by another newsman, the ever-loquacious White obliged. “You can tell the people for me,” he responded blithely, “that I am glad to be out of this place and will welcome the sight of the City of Seattle as a long-lost relative. By the way, I wish you would send me a set of pictures of the gentlemen with me. They are the finest, bravest, jolliest, best-hearted lot of fellows I have ever had the honor of meeting.” Given the role White was to play in the court cases to follow, this bit of hearty bonhomie seems decidedly odd, if not disingenuous. White was already harboring some heavy resentments against the railroad and its employees, and it wouldn’t be long before he would be airing them in public—to the detriment of Snow King Harrington in particular.
As the group made its way down the trail, though, their feeling of camaraderie was apparently genuine enough. Much hilarity ensued when the disheveled survivors proceeded to slide down the slope to Scenic (though at a somewhat less precipitous place than that used by the Merritt and Rogers groups). “It’s not half-bad coming down that hill,” fireman George Nelson told another reporter at the bottom. “If my leg was all right, I could get a lot of fun out of it.”
Evacuating the dead proved to be a somewhat more somber procedure. In the first few days after the slide, O’Neill had ordered a dozen or so Alaskan sleds for the transport of bodies to Scenic, and they were getting plenty of use. As a test case, the superintendent had sent a party with only two bodies (those of Solomon Cohen and R. H. Bethel) on Friday, March 4. When that trip proved successful, he sent a full contingent of thirteen sleds the next day, the bodies wrapped tightly in distinctive brown-and-white-checked GN blankets and strapped securely to the sleds. John Poison, an undertaker from Butterworth and Sons, described the scene:
We left Wellington at noon, with six men to the first Alaskan sled, and four to each of the other twelve sleds, each carrying its body. Two feet of snow had fallen overnight, and the trail was most difficult. We were two hours and a half reaching the summit above Scenic, and then the hardest part of the work faced the party.
It was here, at the slope nicknamed Old Glory, that a lifeline had been tied to a sturdy tree, with the other end secured at the bottom of the thousand-foot drop. Taking each wrapped body from its sled, the workers would tie a rope around its feet. Then they would carefully lower it down the slope, one man below, holding the lifeline and guiding the body headfirst, while the man above controlled the descent with the rope looped around his waist. Once at the bottom, the bodies were held at Scenic until they could be loaded onto a waiting train and transported to the coast.
Among those performing this grim task was Bill J. Moore, the young brakeman who would later help unearth the very last avalanche victim in July. He had been up at Wellington for several days, digging for bodies, and was now manning the sled that carried the remains of Catherine O’Reilly, the Irish-born nurse. He was finding the job unsettling—he seemed particularly rattled by the fact that O’Reilly had lost a hand in the disaster—but the scene at the bottom was what stuck with him for many years afterward. “I seen 90 bodies at Scenic depot,” he would later recall (probably exaggerating the number), “and I was only 19 years and 8 months [old].” Like many of those at work in the rescue effort, this “hardened railroad man” was scarcely more than a boy.
There were many more bodies to come. On March 6 and 7 the crushed mail cars from train No. 27 were finally unearthed, containing the remains of A. B. Hensel’s eight colleagues. William May and George Davis were soon found, and then, at last, Ned Topping, his ongoing letter to his mother lying in the wreckage beside him. But even as late as March 10 there were still well over two dozen of the missing and unidentified to be accounted for. And although part of the long-lost smoking car was finally found on the evening of March 7, it was still uncertain days later how many bodies it actually contained.
As all of this was going on, the nine more seriously injured survivors remained in the bunkhouse hospital, too frail to be moved until a train arrived. A. B. Hensel was still entirely bed-ridden with his injuries, but the two railroaders—engineer Duncan Tegtmeier and brakeman Ross Phillips—were both recuperating well, the latter no doubt helped by the presence of his wife, Carrie, who had made the climb up from Scenic in the first days after the avalanche. Both adult Grays were also doing better now, and even little Varden had regained much of his strength.
Only Ida Starrett remained in grave condition. Physically she was making progress, but her mental state was of some concern to Dr. Stockwell and the other caregivers. She knew now that her daughter and baby son were dead, but she seemed determined not to give up on her father. “Confined to the hospital and unable to comprehend real conditions in the gully beyond the depot,” the Seattle Star reported, “she and her mother clung to the hope that her father would be saved, that he had escaped somehow.”
The news could not be kept from her forever. When told that the remains of William May had finally been recovered, the last of Ida’s will seemed to dissolve away. “Let me die,” she allegedly whispered, and for a time even the comfort of Raymond by her side could do little to ease her suffering.
The next day Basil Sherlock was visiting the hospital when a nurse came up to him carrying little Ray in her arms. “Here is a young man that has been asking to see you for some time,” she said. The boy had been eager to meet the “doctor” who had cut the long piece of wood from his forehead. “I got up and looked at him,” Sherlock later remembered. “He smiled and I smiled back, then we shook hands. [But] I could not talk, for I had seen his two sisters and grandfather lying dead on top of the snow.”
Sherlock was apparently suffering some psychological wounds of his own after the experience he’d been through. The day after being relieved at the hospital by Dr. Stockwell, the telegrapher had decided to quit his job effective immediately and put as much distance between himself and Wellington as he could. With this in mind, he had approached O’Neill on the slope above the avalanche site on March 3, while the latter was looking over the rescue work. When Sherlock appeared, O’Neill spoke to him about his stenographer, Earl Longcoy whose body at that point had not yet been found. The boy, O’Neill said somberly had, been only nineteen years old. He had just moved to the West Coast a few months earlier, and now his sister and widowed mother were at that very moment following him west to take up residence in Everett. As far as anyone knew, they had not yet heard of young Earl’s death.
Oblivious to his chief’s reflective mood, Sherlock chose this moment to hand the superintendent his resignation letter. O’Neill read it with apparent disbelief and handed it back. “You do not want to quit,” O’Neill said simply. “Take a vacation for a while and go back east. Then, when you return, you will want to stay on.” But Sherlock was determined. Though he promised to remain on the job until properly relieved, he told O’Neill the he was going “to some place where the water would not run, let alone the snow.”
Others at Wellington were showing greater resilience. When a reporter asked Duncan Tegtmeier what he planned to do when he recovered from his wounds, the barely ambulatory engineer replied gamely, “Why, get them to give me another engine, of course. Do you think I am going to waste five years I spent learning this trade just because I got this one bad shakeup?”
It was Tegtmeier who, late on March 10, heard the approach of the first engine to reach Wellington after the avalanche. After spending days blasting through the enormous slide at Berne, J. M. Gruber’s convoy of rotaries and relief train had finally reached Cascade Tunnel Station that morning and was now coming through the tunnel. Tegtmeier, whose trained ear had been listening for this very thing, reportedly grabbed some crutches and pushed aside a frightened nurse in his rush to get outside. The engineer’s eagerness, though, was probably shared by everyone at Wellington. The arrival of Gruber’s train, after all, meant that the town was once again connected to the outside world—after sixteen full days of total isolation.
General manager Gruber, looking as weather-beaten as any of his laborers, hopped off the rotary and headed straight for the bunkhouse hospital. He immediately offered to make up a special train with his own private car to carry the injured eastward to Spokane, where they could be properly hospitalized. Of the nine people remaining at the bunkhouse, though, only Hensel wanted to go to Spokane; the rest, hoping to get to the coast, debated over whether they should wait for the west slope to be cleared, so that they might be taken down to Everett and Seattle directly. Their eagerness to get off the mountain, however, carried the day. Despite the fact that many of them—particularly the Starretts—dreaded the idea of getting back on any train, all nine decided to go east.
Gruber had the special backed up to the bunkhouse. Anna Gray and Mrs. May were able to walk onto the train without assistance, but the other seven were carried on. (Hensel would later remember being lifted through the car window on a stretcher.) Then everyone at Wellington stopped work to see the injured on their way, waving and shouting farewells as the train pulled eastward out of the bruised and battered town.
It was two days later, at 7:00 A.M. on Saturday, March 12, just as the sun was rising over the Cascade peaks, that the rotaries on the western slope finally broke through the last remaining feet of blockage and met on the flanks of Windy Mountain. Word was quickly wired out to all Great Northern stations and the world: “The siege of snows is ended.” After nearly three weeks of punishing labor, the Cascade Division was once again open for business. Time, which had come to a dead stop at Stevens Pass sometime on the morning of February 23, was finally moving once again.
James J. Hill, following the situation from St. Paul, was profoundly relieved. “You have all done well,” he cabled to Gruber when the job was nearing completion. “When you get through, the Company should not forget the men who have worked so constantly and so long. I wish you would thank them for me.” Hill being Hill, he also made sure that no one rested on any laurels: “[I] think it important,” he added, “to get the mail train on a regular run as early as you can without delaying other work.”
Saturday’s victory over the snows unfortunately proved to be shortlived. A few trains did make it successfully over the hump on that day (crowded, according to one report, with an unusually high number of rubbernecking passengers), but the snow-covered Cascade slopes were still not entirely quiet. Sometime after midnight early Sunday morning, a westbound Oriental Limited train ran into some heavy snow that had sloughed onto the tracks near Windy Point. One or two of the cars derailed slightly, so the train was stopped, the wheels were rerailed, and then the entire train was pulled back to the safety of a nearby snowshed to wait for a rotary to clear the heavy snow ahead.
Just as the plow was about to eat through the last of the obstruction, however, a large avalanche came screaming down the slope above it. Twenty gangmen working ahead of the rotary saw it coming and ran for their lives, but the plow itself could not be reversed in time. Hit broadside by the charging mass of snow and debris, the plow, its pusher engine, and five flatcars of coal were sent hurtling five hundred feet down the mountain, smashing one steel bridge and two spans of another. Almost the entire plow crew had been able to escape in time, but one engineer and one Italian laborer were caught by the edge of the slide and sucked into the plunging tumult. The engineer lived, but the laborer was lost, not to be found for many weeks.
For O’Neill, this must have seemed like the reprise of a nightmare—another train full of passengers trapped on the mountain amid faltering snowfields. Fearing any replay of the recent debacle, the superintendent hurriedly conferred with Gruber and Brown, and they decided to immediately evacuate all passengers and send the train itself back to Spokane. The rattled travelers were taken to the top of the much-used slope of Old Glory (now being called “Dead Man’s Slide” by the newspapers) and gently guided down to Scenic.
This latest slide incident, though unsettling, turned out to be a minor setback. By Tuesday, March 15, the line had been cleared again and normal traffic could resume. To the relief of everyone in the division, the stranding of the Oriental Limited would turn out to be the last major problem of the snow season on the Stevens Pass line.
On that same day—March 15—James H. O’Neill was finally able to leave the mountain and return home to Everett. Berenice, who had been awaiting his return for over three weeks, would be there to meet him with baby Peggy in her arms, feeling as relieved as a woman could possibly be. But although the immediate crisis was now past, O’Neill’s own ordeal was hardly over. His work on the mountain might have been finished (even the majority of the mail had been recovered by now), but he would soon be faced with tasks that were in some ways even more difficult. For one, he would have to personally find Earl Longcoy’s mother and sister and inform them of the young man’s death. He would also have to pay his respects to the widow of Lewis Walker, his steward on the A-16. Hardest of all, he would have to explain to them—and later to the world at large—why and how the whole terrible incident had happened in the first place.