That thousands of tons of snow, rock, and mud came down is quite evident; that the timber was all destroyed by fire; that many lives were lost, caught like a rat in a trap, is equally true. But what does it matter if all the officials have to do is to say, “Well, it is the will of Divine Providence,” and the county authorities accept that as a sufficient explanation? Would it not be proper at this time to suggest that there are some very good reasons why these accidents occurred other than the will of God?
—Seattle Union Record
March 1910
Seattle
The initial reaction of the public to the tragedy at Wellington, as might be expected, had been highly sympathetic to all involved. Passengers, rescuers, and train crews had all been showered with the kind of indiscriminate praise that victims of major disasters often receive. Paeans to the energy and courage of Jim O’Neill were particularly numerous, culminating in an adoring profile by J. J. Underwood in the March 6 Seattle Times under the headline “O’NEILL HAILED NOW AS KING OF SNOW FIGHTERS.” The piece was so adulatory in tone—“He always is cool, deliberate, calculating, methodical, but on the alert, grasping difficult situations like a flash”—that its author may in truth have been trying to flatter the superintendent in order to get greater access to the avalanche site.
As the rescue effort wore on, however, a current of reproach began to surface in much of the press coverage. The stories being told by survivors John Rogers, Henry White, and Edward Boles started raising questions about whether the crisis had really been handled as wisely or as conscientiously as it could have been. Specifically, criticism began to focus on the refusal of O’Neill and trainmaster Blackburn to grant the passengers’ requests to move the trains back from their precarious position on the mountainside. According to Boles, for instance, the trains at Wellington had been left in “what proved to be the most dangerous position possible to find.”
Once the front of unqualified support had thus been breached, other criticisms began to emerge. On March 5 a story appeared in the Seattle Star censuring the Great Northern for allowing forest fires to burn away the tree cover on the slopes around Wellington. Under the execrable headline “DOLLAR-A-DAY JAP COULD HAVE PREVENTED SLIDE,” the story claimed that the GN had failed even to try to stop a fire that had raged the previous summer—a blaze that, if addressed early enough, could have been extinguished by a small force of laborers. Although the railroad later claimed that the forest cover had burned off not the previous summer but rather many years earlier, the Star’s basic point was harder to contradict: “Had the slope been wooded, as it was before the fire, the slide could never have occurred, as the trees would have held the snow and would not have allowed it to start.”
The same day’s Seattle Argus carried a similarly unsympathetic piece called “The Trouble with the GN,” blaming the railroad for not building enough snowsheds on the line between Scenic and Wellington. Two years earlier, the writer had watched as a snowslide came dangerously close to hitting a moving passenger train on the high line above the Scenic hotel. In the author’s opinion, the incident should have been a clear warning of the potential danger there and elsewhere on that stretch of track. “[I] could not help wondering why a more elaborate system of snowsheds had not been provided. Even to an inexperienced eye, it was obvious that they were necessary.”
But it was the labor issue that was proving to be most troublesome for the Great Northern. A letter to the editor of the Seattle Star—given prominent display in the March 5 edition—complained about the railroad’s ingrained practice of hiring the cheapest labor it could find. Here again, the headline was designed for maximum provocation: “DID PENNY SQUEEZING COST 100 LIVES AT WELLINGTON?” And the body of the piece was overtly incendiary: “The Great Northern railroad will never hire able men for its mountains or any of its work,” letter writer W. M. Wilson maintained. “They are the ones that imported Japanese labor because it was cheaper. They could get them for $1.25 a day. When this trouble came, they brought Italians up there to fight the snow. What do the Italians know about snow anyway? Why did they send Italians? Only because they were cheaper.”
The Great Northern was allegedly even skimping on the job of recovering the dead. Another letter published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review —this one from George W. Towslee—complained that the railroad was devoting the bulk of its available manpower to the task of opening up the rail line, and that even those assigned to search the avalanche site were primarily interested in finding lost baggage and express materials. “Relatives and friends of the dead men were obliged to hire men to dig among the wreckage,” Towslee wrote. “I could not afford to hire anyone to dig for my brother’s body and had to wait until the very last. As a result, it was 10 days before he was taken out.”
For its part, the union of the still-striking switchmen was doing everything possible to encourage such expressions of anti-railroad sentiment. Displaying its own brand of cynical disrespect for the victims, the union’s Press Committee was blatantly using the tragedy to score points against GN management, focusing on the issue of the coal shortage. “It was positively known for weeks prior to the Wellington disaster that great danger was imminent in the mountain region, on account of the scarcity of coal,” the committee maintained in the March 12 Seattle Union Record. “Officials were warned of the facts, and contrary to all common sense and reason they would not heed the warning. At different times and for several days in succession, the rotaries, or snow machines, were absolutely useless, because they had no coal on the engines to run them.”
The Press Committee went on to attribute this problem directly to the GN’s refusal to settle the switchmen’s strike: “If the Great Northern had the men who went on strike November 30th doing the switching, the accident, or at least the lives of the people, would not have been sacrificed to greed.” Lest anyone be left in doubt about who exactly was responsible for the tragedy, the committee added, “Mr. Hill thought he was going to crush the manhood out of a few thousand switchmen by starvation, but he has failed utterly, and instead has slaughtered innumerable innocent lives.”
As self-serving as these accusations may seem, they were not entirely without validity. The missed delivery of coal from Leavenworth in the days before the storm suggests that the Great Northern may indeed have been operating at less than peak efficiency during the strike. Accurate or not, the accusations of the switchmen must have been especially galling to Hill. The Empire Builder was on the verge of publishing his magnum opus—Highways of Progress, a distillation of his half century of experience in business and economic development—and he was not about to let a few two-bit labor agitators accuse him of something close to manslaughter. His philosophy of efficient business practices (which John F. Stevens was later to describe as “penny-wise, pound-wise”) could not be held responsible for what was clearly an uncontrollable natural event. The whole notion that labor issues had anything at all to do with the disaster, therefore, was to be pointedly ignored by everyone in the company.
Despite the railroad’s attempts to write off the switchmen’s muckraking efforts, the union did succeed in rousing the ire of the general public. Before long, the uproar became so intense that coroner James C. Snyder saw no alternative but to hold a formal inquest into the Wellington matter, in order to determine officially whether any human fault had played a role in the tragedy. It goes without saying that Hill and the rest of the Great Northern management were not pleased.
Before any inquest could be held, however, Snyder wanted all of the missing persons accounted for, and this was going to take some time. Recovery efforts at Wellington were moving slowly, and even many of the bodies that had been found were not yet successfully identified. About ten days after the avalanche, Ned Topping’s father and brother finally arrived in Seattle from Ohio, delayed by the traffic mayhem that had not totally subsided. William V B. Topping and his son Roger proceeded immediately to Butterworth and Sons to claim Ned’s body, but when the attendant in the morgue pulled back a shroud covering the badly mutilated corpse, neither father nor brother could identify him. Another corpse—also mutilated and of approximately the same height and weight—had been found nearby in the wreckage of the Winnipeg, and the Toppings wondered whether this might actually be Ned. Overcome by uncertainty, the old man and his surviving son could only stand by helplessly while Lucius Anderson, the Winnipeg’s porter, was called in to help. Anderson made the definitive IDs: One corpse he recognized as Ned’s and the other was that of Bert Matthews, who had been sleeping in an adjacent berth. Having no choice but to accept the porter’s judgment, the Toppings claimed the body and made arrangements to carry it back to Ohio to bury alongside Ned’s wife and daughter.
Another case of mistaken identity involved Joseph Benier, a timber cruiser who was supposed to have been a passenger on the Seattle Express. He showed up at Butterworth and Sons a few days later and told undertaker F. R. Lewis that there had been some slight confusion. “My friends say that you have me downstairs dead,” Benier allegedly remarked. “I want to say that I am the livest man in town.” Despite being positively identified as one of the corpses by more than twenty friends and coworkers, Benier had actually been incommunicado in the woods during the storm and had missed his scheduled return train. Now back in Seattle, he wanted to set the record straight. So the overworked undertaker obliged, quietly removing the tag on the body in question and replacing it with one that read: “No. 83, unknown.”
Perhaps the single most farcical ordeal was that suffered posthumously by the rancher John Brockman. After word spread that Brockman’s estate was worth upwards of $60,000 (a prodigious sum in 1910 dollars), several fake relatives showed up to claim the rancher’s body. Apparently none could provide definitive proof of kinship until the arrival of Brockman’s actual brother (who, as a result of some parental whim, bore a name identical to that of his sibling). This second John Brockman proceeded to inform the undertakers that the body they had labeled as his brother was actually someone else. The real Brockman was eventually found (his body had been misidentified as that of J. Liberti, an Italian laborer) and the matter was finally settled, but not before notarized affidavits from several Washington towns had been gathered to close any possible legal loopholes.
By now, many of the other victims were being laid to rest in the places they had come from. Nellie Sharp was buried by her parents in Bloomington, Indiana. In Spokane, George Davis’s widow saw her husband and three-year-old Thelma interred with all due ceremony by the Iroquois tribe of which he was a member. The bodies of all five Becks, meanwhile, were laid into a single grave in Livermore, California, near the home they were returning to after two years in Washington. And in Everett, where twelve hundred people attended a memorial service for the victims at the Everett Theater on Sunday, March 13, Mrs. Joseph Pettit, surrounded by her five children, saw her husband buried in the Evergreen Cemetery at the southern end of town.
At the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Olympia, Sarah Jane Covington was given a large, elaborate funeral, during which she was eulogized for her charitable works, her enduring interest in the reform movement and progressive thought, and her efforts in rearing and educating no fewer than seven children and twenty-two grandchildren. It was a cathartic ceremony for the Covington clan, but perhaps an even more comforting tribute came a few days afterward, in a letter that her son Luther received from his mother’s fellow passenger Anna Gray. “Dear Friend,” the letter began, “Mr. Gray, myself, and Baby are home at last, and while we are all marked for life, we are thankful that God has saved us without the loss of one.”
Mrs. Gray proceeded to tell Luther all about the week she had spent with his mother—about the comfort Mrs. Covington had offered herself and Mrs. Lemman during the crisis, about the stories of her grandchildren she had told to divert them, about the little underskirt they had made together for baby Varden. “Now Mr. Covington,” she continued, getting to the main point, “about the only thing of mine that was saved [from the wreck] was that little skirt. It was her last work and it was a work of love for another. Would you like to have it?”
The letter was signed simply: “Your true friends, Mr. and Mrs. John Gray and Baby”
As all of this was going on, the Legal Department of the Great Northern Railway was busily preparing its case for the inquest. After failing in their efforts to prevent the investigation in the first place (this would be the first train accident in Washington history to merit such a proceeding), the railroad’s lawyers were doing everything in their power to influence it in their favor. Acknowledging that “nothing in the company’s affairs is of greater importance,” the GN’s assistant general solicitor in St. Paul, J. D. Armstrong, exhorted the Spokane-based legal team that “neither time nor expense should be spared” in ensuring that the best possible face was put on the company’s performance in the crisis. In a March 16 telegram, Armstrong even insisted that “effort should be made to secure jury of representative businessmen,” though exactly what kind of effort was tactfully not specified.
It was clearly understood in all of these communications that the findings of the coroner’s inquest could potentially provide a basis for future negligence claims against the company. An actual negative verdict, finding the railroad directly responsible for the deaths, would obviously be disastrous for the company, setting the stage for numerous suits from passengers and employees alike. But even a positive outcome could create difficulties if the evidence raised during the inquest showed the railroad or its officers as lacking in any way. To prevent such an occurrence, Frederick Dorety the extremely capable litigator who would represent the company, had been preparing a thorough defense, collecting detailed affidavits from many of those present at Wellington in the week before the avalanche. With what little time he had available to him, he tried to immunize the company against every possible issue that could be raised, including the forest fires, the coal shortage, the strike of snow shovelers, and the decision to keep the trains on the passing tracks. “We are making every effort to block the possibility of any litigant ever securing any adverse testimony on any of these points,” Dorety wrote to Armstrong on March 11. He was encouraged, moreover, by an article that appeared in the Seattle Times citing the opinion of several local lawyers that, based on the facts as reported in the newspaper, the railroad was in all likelihood not liable. “On the whole,” Dorety concluded, “we have every reason to believe that the verdict of the Coroner’s jury will be extremely favorable.”
The inquest convened at 11:00 A.M. on Friday, March 18, at Foresters Hall in downtown Seattle. Earlier that morning, superintendent O’Neill had taken the train down from Everett with a party of his colleagues, including master mechanic Dowling, traveling engineers Mackey and Tegtmeier, and assistant trainmaster Harrington. Since emerging from the mountains on Tuesday, O’Neill had barely had a few days to rest and collect himself, and he was still showing the strain. According to one report, “Deep furrows are plowed in the face of Superintendent O’Neill”—and as chief witness in the investigation, he was not to get much respite anytime soon.
“The Inquiry into the cause of the death of John Brockman and eighty-seven or more others, Deceased,” was to be conducted by a young assistant prosecuting attorney named A. H. Lundin. As prosecutor, he would be investigating the case before coroner Snyder and a jury of six “average” citizens, including two mine operators, two real estate developers, a contractor, and (perhaps as a sop to the working classes) a man identified as “a dyer and cleaner.” Given the unusual circumstances, the proceedings would also be observed by the state railroad inspector and by three members of the Washington State Railroad Commission. Created three years earlier in response to increasing demands for regulation of the industry, the railroad commission was now required to examine every train accident that occurred on Washington lines, and here it was combining its own investigation with that of the coroner. Based on what they heard at the inquest, the committee members would make recommendations on how the Great Northern and other railroads could prevent such disasters in the future.
The general public, of course, would be making its own decisions, and as the hearing approached, sentiments seemed not to be going the railroad’s way. “All kinds of rumors are in circulation,” one newspaper reported a few days before the inquest. “The people demand to know the truth. … If the officials of the company, in their zeal to open the road, refused to take time to care for the safety of their passengers, the facts should be made known.”
The source of at least some of those rumors was now sitting in Foresters Hall, eager to be called as a witness. Henry White, the only surviving member of the passenger committee that had repeatedly called for a meeting with O’Neill during the crisis, had been making no secret of his dissatisfaction with the superintendent’s performance. In the days after the avalanche, moreover, he had called on the GN’s claim agent in Seattle to see about compensation for property he had lost in the wreck. Referred to the legal department, the salesman was told that the company wouldn’t pay him a cent—“[not] even for the shirt on his back.” This refusal had naturally only piqued his indignation, and he was now spoiling for a fight.
Shortly after 11:00, O’Neill was called to testify as the first witness. Looking uncharacteristically formal in his suit and narrow bow tie, the superintendent was sworn in and seated before Lundin began the questioning. At first, the prosecuting attorney was as courteous and straightforward as could be, seeking only to establish the particulars of the events leading up to the disaster. O’Neill cooperated willingly Without any trace of defensiveness or evasion, the superintendent explained the rationale behind each of his decisions, taking time to describe the terrain at Stevens Pass, the day-by-day progress of the storm, and the time and location of every important snowslide that had affected operations over the week. He even obliged the jury by giving them a short but cogent summary of how rotary snowplows work.
When it came to fixing responsibility for the orders that put the trains in the path of the avalanche, O’Neill was unequivocal. “I gave them orders,” he stated, a bit of his old Dakota diction slipping into his sentence. In other words, he absolved conductor Pettit of any culpability in the matter, refusing to scapegoat a man who was no longer alive to defend himself. And though the day’s testimony went on for hours more—with Harrington, Mackey, and J. C. Wright all supporting O’Neill’s actions—the papers already had their lead: “O’NEILL ASSUMES ALL BLAME FOR MOVING TRAINS,” ran the Seattle Times headline that evening. The implication was clear: Whether or not O’Neill had made mistakes in his handling of the situation, he at least had the integrity to take the blame on himself.
On Saturday morning, the second day of the inquest, several of the surviving passengers testified, and the jury got a somewhat different perspective on events. One of the first witnesses of the day was R. M. Laville, the electrician from Montana who had walked away from the wreck uninjured, and his testimony proved distinctly hostile to the railroad. “Fear was in every heart for several days before the catastrophe,” Laville said, adding that everyone aboard was “terrified” by the prospect of a slide. According to Laville, the railway had been putting them in jeopardy “by struggling along with an inferior snow-fighting force, which was small because wages high enough to satisfy workmen were not offered.” He also claimed that had men been made available to help them, “every passenger on the train … would have reached Scenic without difficulty.”
Struck by this new light on the situation, the jury members—who were allowed to participate in the interrogation—started peppering Laville with questions. They listened with deep interest as the young man described the mood of increasing desperation among the passengers in the days leading up to the avalanche. Laville took pains to describe their frustration over O’Neill’s refusal even to meet with them, let alone grant their wish to have the train moved back to the tunnel. In perhaps the most arresting testimony of the day, he recounted the February 28 meeting between the passenger committee and Arthur Blackburn, during which the trainmaster had refused to provide sufficient manpower to evacuate all passengers off the mountain on foot. “He said that if he caught any of us trying to take the women out of there,” Laville said, “he would use force, if necessary, to prevent it.”
Dorety did what he could to blunt the impact of these revelations, which hardly cast the railroad in a sympathetic light. And much of the rest of the day’s testimony did go the railroad’s way. Once Laville had stepped down, several other passengers—among them John Rogers, George Loveberry, and the lawyers Jesseph and Merritt—presented testimony that was highly sympathetic to the Great Northern in general and to O’Neill in particular. (“I never met nicer gentlemen in my life than Mr. O’Neill, Mr. Pettit, and Mr. Vogel,” Merritt claimed at one point. “They were working all the time, day and night.”) And perhaps the most convincing witness was the state railroad inspector himself, E. W. Perley who stated categorically that O’Neill’s every decision was strictly in line with standard operating procedure, and that no other acceptable course of action would have altered the outcome:
Q: From the evidence which you have heard here, would you say that [any other course] would have averted this catastrophe?
A: No sir; I do not see that anything could have been done more than has been done.
Q: You consider it was something beyond human ability to cope with?
A: I do.
At this point in the proceedings it was decided that the jury should be taken up to Wellington to see the disaster site in person. The inquest was therefore adjourned until Monday, when the participants were transported by train into the mountains. As the six jury members disembarked at the Wellington depot, they could finally appreciate the full extent of the devastation that had been wrought by the disaster. Enough of the snow had melted by now to reveal the torn and twisted remnants of the trains in the ravine below. Men were crawling over the gleaming wet wreckage like scavengers, preparing the equipment for salvage and searching for the last few victims still to be accounted for. Above it all brooded the high Cascade peaks, still heavy with snow, still looking ominously dangerous against a clear and sunny sky.
O’Neill led the group east from the depot to the spur tracks near the tunnel, where a railway coach had been prepared to receive them. Here more witnesses were called, many of them Wellington residents who had been unable to come to the proceedings in Seattle. W. R. Bailets, the hotelkeeper, got a particularly close questioning. Asked if he thought the spur tracks would have been a safer place to put the trains, he said he did and that he had even encouraged some passengers to make a fuss about it:
A: I asked them, I says, “Why don’t you insist on them moving you up here?”
Q: You thought this was a safer place then?
A: Well, I really did, and [now] I know that it was.
Dorety and O’Neill felt that this could not go unanswered. Recalled as a witness, the superintendent described how impractical such a move would have been during the storm. “These three tracks here contained about six outfit cars,” he said, pointing through the train car windows. “From the switch to the end of the spurs there were six to ten feet of snow. … We had made no attempt to use these tracks at any time during the winter season.”
But the jury and the railroad commissioners (perhaps influenced by the absence of snow in the area three weeks after the disaster) were apparently not ready to let go of the idea of the spur tracks.
“Suppose similar conditions would occur next winter,” one juror asked the superintendent. “Where would you place [the trains] for safety?”
“Could you have pulled back on this track if you had wished to on the 26th?” asked another.
“How many men would it have required to shovel [the spur track] out in one day?”
O’Neill responded convincingly to all of these questions. He also made certain to stress the fact that he and dozens of other veteran mountain railroaders had preferred to sleep in the trains on the passing tracks—a choice that, as the Seattle Argus put it, the men had backed “with their lives—and lost.”
The worst days for the railroad’s case, however, came on Tuesday and Wednesday, when proceedings returned to Foresters Hall in Seattle. The first witness to be called was Henry White, and the four days he’d waited to testify had done nothing to temper the salesman’s vengeful mood. Articulate, vivid in his descriptions, and full of righteous anger against the company that had mistreated him, he turned out to be a railroad attorney’s worst nightmare—an obviously wronged man with the intelligence to match his sense of grievance.
After outlining the various impromptu meetings among the passengers over the course of their week of entrapment (culminating in the creation of the typed petition that O’Neill never saw), White rehearsed the litany of excuses given for not moving the trains: the unpleasantness and impracticality of being in the tunnel, the lack of coal and manpower to clear the track, the inability of a single engine to move the train upgrade, and so on. Unlike most of the other terse and sometimes incoherent witnesses, White was extremely thorough in his answers, giving jury members a much more visceral sense of what it was like to be trapped on that mountain for six long days. And after a particularly extended account of the final meeting with trainmaster Blackburn, the salesman uttered the single pungent sentence that probably did more to hurt the railroad’s case than any other: “So,” White concluded his long speech, “through lack of coal and lack of help, we were forced to remain in that position, right at the base of a thousand-foot mountain.”
This was an extremely damaging comment, the more so for being succinct and eminently quotable. But for O’Neill, who had doubtless been sitting in Foresters Hall in a state of ever greater distress, White’s testimony only became worse:
Q: Was there any demand or request made to be moved back to the tunnel, or near the tunnel, prior to the 28th, Mr. White?
A: No, not of anyone in authority, because we could not get anyone in authority. That was the request we were going to make of Mr. O’Neill, but he was too sleepy to come around and see us. That little sleepy spell cost ninety-five lives.
It was a sentence that would play through James O’Neill’s mind for many years to come. Dorety tried his best to defuse White’s criticism of the superintendent (“Don’t you know that, as a matter of fact, he was working day and night…? Didn’t you feel that he and the men who were working with him had sufficient experience, so that what you would tell him or suggest would not be [of] much assistance?”). The harm, however, could not be entirely undone. And it was only exacerbated when Sarah Jane Covington’s daughter Mrs. George Anderson was called to present some of the more poignant entries in her mother’s diary. “No one can tell anything about when we will get out,” she read to the jury. “Some are in deadly fear that another landslide will come down on us. …”
O’Neill’s discomfort through all of this must have been acute. But to his relief, it didn’t go on much longer. The inquest ended shortly thereafter with testimony from three officials working for other railroads, all of whom supported the superintendent’s actions, and then the jury went into deliberations.
Awaiting the verdict, the GN lawyers were hopeful but wary. “For the present,” F. V Brown wrote to Armstrong on March 22, “I can only say that, in the judgment of Mr. Dorety and myself, there has been no evidence introduced that would in any way tend to show negligence on the part of the Company or its employees. Of course, it is impossible to anticipate what the Coroner’s Jury will do. There seem to be some members of the jury intent upon finding some cause for blame, while other members of the jury seem to be outspoken in their opinion that everything was done by the employees of the Company according to the dictates of good judgment, and that nothing was left undone which could reasonably be required in the exercise of due care.” The Great Northern was also encouraged by the findings of the Chelan County coroner with regard to the east-slope deaths. After looking into the beanery slide that had killed Harry Elerker and John Bjerenson and the slide at Drury that had killed watchman Fred Johnson, coroner Saunders exonerated the railroad of any negligence in either instance.
The opinion of the press as to the strength of the GN’s case was somewhat different. According to a writer for the Argus, the testimony of O’Neill’s fellow railroaders had been all but useless, given their own self-interest in the case. “If I was the manager of a railroad,” the writer observed, “I would [have no trouble] finding men to testify that I had done just as they would have done.” The jury, he insisted, should instead focus on the simple facts of the case, which made the strongest argument of all: “In the Wellington disaster the trains were destroyed, many lives were lost, and there were ways in which those lives could have been saved. In fact, the course adopted [by the railroad] appears to have been the only one by which they could have been lost. The men who came out were saved. There was a spur track at Wellington which was safe. And all the expert testimony in the world won’t change the facts.”
On Wednesday, March 23, the coroner’s jury returned with their verdict. “John Brockman and eighty-eight [sic] or more others,” they announced, “came to their deaths on the 1st day of March, A.D. 1910, by reason of a snowslide at Wellington, King County, Washington, the cause of which was beyond human control.”
That last phrase—“beyond human control”—was the one the Great Northern officials had been hoping to hear. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the end of what the jury had to say:
We find that the trains were not placed in the safest place to avert a possible accident, as the Company had other sidings east of said depot on which the trains should have been placed, that are safe from any snowslides. The evidence shows that the Great Northern Railway Company did not have sufficient coal at Wellington to cope with all possible emergencies. The evidence also shows that by reason of small wages of only fifteen (15) cents an hour for shoveling snow, out of which wages the laborers have to pay $4.50 per week for board, about thirty-five (35) laborers left Wellington who should have been retained regardless of wages, for the purpose of providing for the safety and welfare of the passengers.
For O’Neill, this addition to the verdict must have seemed like a personal attack. All three points of criticism in it concerned issues over which he’d had direct control. By faulting his judgment on these issues, the jury had all but condemned O’Neill’s entire performance as leader of the campaign against the storm.
For the company as a whole, however, it was—as one GN official would later put it—a “hermaphrodite verdict, one-half in exoneration and one-half censure.” Brown fired off a telegram to Armstrong: “WE FEEL POSITIVE NO FOUNDATION IN TESTIMONY FOR CRITICISMS CONTAINED IN VERDICT, ALSO NO LIABILITY IN ANY WAY FOR ACCIDENT.” Later, in a sharply worded comment to the newspapers, Brown took issue with the jury’s judgments, claiming that the entire notion that the trains should have been moved back to the spur tracks “seems to have been an idea originated by the jury after visiting the ground three weeks after the slide and after the snow had disappeared.” He also insisted that the criticisms regarding the coal supply and the shovelers’ job action were “matters of management” that were not within the province of the jury. “If ever a railroad was entitled to a clean bill of health, the Great Northern was in this matter. In justice to Superintendent J. H. O’Neill and other officials whose efforts to relieve the blockade showed more than ordinary devotion to duty, the criticism of the jury should not have been made.”
Such attempts at damage control aside, Armstrong was understandably vexed. “The verdict itself,” he wrote back to Brown, “seems to be thoroughly unsatisfactory.” Specifically, the jury’s statements pertaining to the greater safety of the spur tracks, the insufficiency of coal, and the failure to retain the snow shovelers could all be toeholds for future civil actions against the Great Northern. As Armstrong had pointed out in an earlier letter to Dorety: “If the evidence at the Coroner’s Inquest does not make a fairly clear showing on our part, the company will unquestionably be deluged with suits.” That “clear showing” had obviously not been made, and so now the matter of the Wellington avalanche would be headed to the courts.