A Memory Erased
The mailed fist of progress will be thrust forward through a mighty mountain barrier on its westward drive when America’s largest tunnel—the Great Northern bore through the Cascades—is formally opened.
—Seattle Times
On the cold, clear evening of January 12, 1929, a select group of railroad officials, politicians, journalists, and other assorted dignitaries gathered in the snow-blanketed Cascade Mountains for the dedication of the Great Northern Railway’s New Cascade Tunnel. The ceremony, which would be broadcast live to some thirty-eight radio stations and an estimated audience of fifteen million Americans nationwide, was to be an elaborate, heavily orchestrated affair, designed to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the railroad history of this country. With the opening of the much-anticipated tunnel—at 7.79 miles, the longest in the Western Hemisphere—the Great Northern’s main line through the Cascades would achieve a new standard of safety and reliability. Those miles and miles of steep, twisting track between Berne in the east and Scenic in the west were to be entirely bypassed—the rails pulled up, the stations closed, the old tunnel boarded up and abandoned. Instead, the new mountain crossing would run deep under that slide-prone territory, shortening the route by nine miles and eliminating the need for some forty thousand feet of snowsheds. As GN vice president L. C. Gilman would later remark, “The weakest link in our transportation chain has been replaced by one of the strongest, and we can now regard our railroad as complete.” The line through Stevens Pass—perhaps the last truly untamed section of the American railway system—was to become a thing of the past.
It had not been an easy decision for the Great Northern to make. The new tunnel had been fabulously expensive to build, costing $25 million in all, including the necessary line electrification and route relocations. Despite the fact that it had been constructed at a record pace of one mile every 4.8 months, it had required almost four years of frantic and disruptive work to complete. But the company had judged the project a wise investment. The Stevens Pass crossing had in recent times become an embarrassing anachronism for any railroad that trumpeted itself as modern. In the years since the Wellington avalanche, a fortune had been spent annually on the construction, maintenance, and repair of snowsheds, and even that effort had not really secured the line. Snowslides had continued to plague the railroad every winter. In one season alone—the legendary winter of 1915-16—slides had hit a passenger train near Corea (eight killed, twenty-two injured), buried a section crew near Leavenworth (four killed), hit another train at Alvin (three killed), and destroyed a bridge near Scenic, closing the line for an entire month. Even the Empire Builder himself had eventually recognized the need for some alternative. “Some of you,” he had said to associates on his very last train trip through this territory in 1914, “will live to see this mountain grade eliminated.”
Hill himself, alas, had not. After retiring as GN chairman in 1912 (having never drawn a salary in his entire career with the company), he had continued working as feverishly as ever for four more years. Then, in the spring of 1916, he’d been laid low by the ailment that had tormented him on and off for years—an acute case of hemorrhoids. Although a bevy of physicians had been brought in on the case—including even the Mayo brothers from their eponymous clinic in Rochester, making their first house call ever—the patient’s condition had only worsened as infection and gangrene set in. Ultimately, there had been little the assembled doctors could do but stand by and watch his decline, lamenting the hardheadedness of a man who had conquered a continent but had proved too stubborn (or too squeamish) to undergo the simple surgery that would have cured his chronic condition long ago.
By May 28 Hill had lapsed into a coma. Family members were hastily summoned; friends and associates were notified. And at 10:00 A.M. the next day—on a gloriously sunny spring morning, surrounded by his wife and all but one of his children—the man whom Yale University had once named “the last of the wilderness conquerors” was dead. “Greatness became him,” an editorialist in the New York Times wrote of Hill the next day. “Whatever he had done, it had been greatly done. We salute the memory of a great American.” His wife of nearly forty-nine years offered a far more personal tribute to her husband. “How desolately lonely the house seems,” Mary Hill wrote in her diary a few days after his death, “and must for time to come.”
On Wednesday, May 31, at 2:00 P.M.—the exact hour of Hill’s funeral—every train operating on the Great Northern Railway stopped for five minutes, no matter where it was or what its schedule. Considering Hill’s lifelong obsession with punctuality, it was perhaps a misguided if well-intended gesture.
Some thirteen years after his death, Hill was now receiving yet another tribute at the opening of the New Cascade Tunnel. As millions tuned in their radios, the ceremony began promptly at 6:00 P.M. Pacific time, with “the dean of American broadcasters,” Graham McNamee, introducing GN president Ralph Budd at the tunnel’s eastern portal. Standing aboard a special inauguration train filled with dignitaries, a flustricken Budd gave the opening speech and formally dedicated the tunnel in the name of James J. Hill. The locomotive was then christened by Leona Watson, that year’s Apple Blossom Queen of Wenatchee, after which the train was supposed to proceed into the flag-draped portal and through the tunnel toward Scenic, where it would crash dramatically through a paper cover stretched over the western portal. Technical difficulties put the train fifteen minutes behind schedule (forcing the NBC engineers to hastily switch over to an unscheduled second musical number), but it finally did burst through the covered portal, to the cheers of hundreds on the other side.
More high-tech radio switching followed—to Washington, D.C., for an address by Interstate Commerce commissioner J. B. Campbell, to San Francisco for a solo by contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, to Philadelphia for a few words from Pennsylvania Railroad president W. W. Atterbury. Then the broadcast veered back to Washington, D.C., where President-elect Herbert Hoover gave the keynote address from his S Street home. “Never have we witnessed a more perfect coordination of the forces of American industry than in this great job,” the future president intoned. “It gives every American the satisfaction of confidence in the virility of our civilization.”
Within months, of course, Hoover would preside over a significant affront to that virility when the stock market crashed in October, plunging the country into a long period of economic impotence. But for the moment, the lions of American politics and industry could roar as loudly as they wanted to. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t earned their bragging rights. Thanks to the combined efforts of these titans, the Last Mountains had been conquered—yet again.
When the radio broadcast ended at 7:00 P.M., about six hundred guests assembled for a banquet at the dining hall of the Scenic construction camp. The guest of honor was none other than John F. Stevens, now much celebrated as the man who’d rescued the Panama Canal project from disaster. After the main course, Stevens addressed the audience, which included such notables as Washington’s Governor Roland H. Hartley, Louis W. Hill Jr. (grandson of the Empire Builder), Arthur Curtiss James (a GN director and one of the world’s richest men), and the presidents of the Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Washington State chambers of commerce. Standing beside a twenty-five-cubic-foot cake depicting the Cascade Range in full relief, the engineer spoke at length about the discovery of the pass that bore his name, the building of the original line, and the new tunnel, for which he had served as consultant. ‘And so the new tunnel is put in operation,” the seventy-six-year-old engineer concluded, “and I am very, very pleased. A long tunnel was a dream for years, and I am so glad to have lived to see it an accomplished fact. But I can’t help feeling a regret to know that the old line is a thing of the past, and that I probably will never see it again, for I put in some of my best days on it.”
Seated not far from Stevens at the speakers’ table was a man who knew the ins and outs of that old line as well as anyone on earth. James H. O’Neill, at fifty-six looking heavier but still remarkably hale and energetic, was marking his forty-third year with the Great Northern Railway. Nine years earlier, in 1920, he had been promoted to general manager of the GN’s operating department, in charge of all lines west of Williston, North Dakota. But although he had now reached the heights of upper management, his work habits hadn’t changed much in the past two decades. Despite increasing trouble with rheumatism in recent years, he was still a compulsive workaholic, still more comfortable out on the line than in his office, and still writing apologetic notes and telegrams to Berenice and his three children for his frequent absences. (“Peggy dear,” ran an all too typical note to his daughter. “Account receiving a telegram about 10 o’clock could not wait until morning. You were asleep and of course did not want to awaken you, so left for the station promptly. Hope Boy and everybody else are well when I return Saturday, so you can all take a trip with me to Montana next week. Love to all, Dad.”)
For as hard as it may be to believe, in 1929 James H. O’Neill was still being called away to fight the Cascade snows. Great Northern corporate archives contain telegrams written by O’Neill as late as 1936 that seem virtually identical to those he had written a quarter century before—reporting slides near Leavenworth, an iced-up engine at Skykomish, a disabled rotary plow somewhere east of Berne. Someone else may have been directly responsible for cleaning up those messes nowadays, but they were still, on one level or another, Jim O’Neill’s problems. And each one of them, no matter how minor, must have carried with it an echo of those he had faced—and been blamed for—decades earlier at Wellington.
He was not, however, a broken man. Judging from family archives and stories, the events he’d endured in 1910, while they may have permanently scarred him, had not ruined Jim O’Neill’s life. His humor and playfulness seem to have survived the tragedy intact. One anniversary, for instance, he had a ring for Berenice secretly baked into a loaf of bread, which he then asked her to slice at the dinner table, while his three delighted children looked on. (The ring was henceforth known invariably as “Sunshine,” just as a favorite candelabrum was always referred to as “George,” though for reasons that have been lost to family memory.) O’Neill seems to have gone on to lead an ordinary life of ordinary happiness, hunting ducks and fishing for steelhead in his always scarce free time.
But he had never strayed far from the train whistles that had ensnared him as a child. O’Neill, who had been a young trainmaster at Great Falls when Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch held up their last train, still lived and breathed the railroad in the modern times of the late 1920s. And though he would never advance beyond his current position of western general manager, there would be many more highlights in his career, including a stint as a rail tester for the special train of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934, during which he was once or twice mistaken for the president himself.
Appropriately enough, he would never retire, working right up to the day he died of a sudden heart attack at home in Seattle on January 11, 1937. He was sixty-four years old and had worked for the Great Northern for exactly fifty years. “Our love was the proudest thing in my life,” Berenice would afterward write to their daughter Jean. “Even the memory of a love like that is richer treasure than most lives ever know.” Berenice herself, though so much younger, would die on May 17, just four months later.
In his apparent ability to rebound from the effects of the Wellington Disaster, O’Neill had been more fortunate than many other veterans of the avalanche. Ida Starrett, who lived to be an old woman, refused even to talk about the episode for decades. She eventually remarried, operated a grocery store outside Seattle, and then moved to a chicken ranch near Mukilteo, Washington. And while her mother ended up suffering no permanent physical effects from the avalanche (Mrs. May “danced till she was 80,” according to her grandson), Ida spent her last years in a wheelchair as a result of her Wellington injuries.
Ray Starrett grew up to become a tall, handsome man, the longtime safety supervisor for Puget Sound Power and Light Company in Olympia. Though he would retain few memories of the avalanche in later life, he would forever bear a scar on his forehead from the makeshift surgery he’d undergone on the dining room table of the Bailets Hotel. In 1960, a half century after the avalanche, he received a surprise letter from the maker of that scar, retired telegrapher Basil Sherlock, who asked him—significantly—to send along “a picture of yourself taken recently with your hat off.” Still feeling uneasy about this decision to cut the stick out of Raymond’s head—“nobody ever told me if I did right or wrong”—Sherlock had never forgotten the boy or the episode that had convinced him to leave the Pacific Northwest for good. “Last March first our newspaper came out with a story in the way of a 50-year anniversary of the avalanche at Wellington,” he wrote from Willmar, Minnesota, where he and Alathea now lived, “and since then [I] cannot get you out of my mind. Perhaps you will not remember me now.”
Starrett did remember him, and the two exchanged several letters. Ida was also still alive at this point, living in a nursing home in Everett, but she chose not to participate in the correspondence. “We do not blame her,” Sherlock responded. “For a good many years we were like soldiers coming back from war, we did not wish to talk about it.”
A. B. Hensel also refrained from discussing the avalanche for much of his life. A risk-averse, safety-minded man in subsequent years, he never learned to drive a car and kept all of his money in jars around the house, refusing to trust banks. He eventually married, had two daughters, and continued to work for the Railway Mail Service until his retirement in 1950 (after a career of forty-seven years and two months). Only upon leaving the mail service did he begin to talk and write about his experiences at Wellington.
Many of the railroaders involved continued to work for the Great Northern for the rest of their careers. Ira Clary, the diminutive rotary conductor who went down in the slide, eventually rose to the position of Cascade Division superintendent (he was known as the “Little Giant” among his men). The career of Snow King William Harrington, on the other hand, seems to have peaked sometime before his ill-fated superior court appearance. Having replaced Arthur Blackburn as trainmaster for a time after the latter’s death, he was by 1913 working as a conductor again. In a strange coincidence, he was the skipper in charge of the train (No. 25, again) that was hit by a snowslide near Corea in January 1916. Though nowhere near as large as the Wellington avalanche, the slide hurled a dining car and a passenger coach 250 feet down the mountain, killing eight passengers and injuring twenty-two others. Harrington himself was apparently unhurt. However, after this second narrow escape, it’s not surprising that he soon opted for a safer job, finishing his career as first a yardmaster and later a dispatcher—positions that would allow him to go home to his family every night.
The widow of conductor Joseph Pettit lived to see three of her sons go on to railroad careers. One of them, Paul, died in an accident while on duty, yet another victim of this most dangerous profession. Another son, Joe Jr., lost his job as a GN switchman for violating Rule G—the liquor rule—but was reinstated after the local business agent of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen intervened on his behalf. The agent was none other than Bill J. Moore, much older now, paying a last favor to the dead conductor who had been his good friend.
Other participants in the Wellington story seem simply to have disappeared into the oblivion of ordinary existence. About the later lives of many—Henry White, John Rogers, the lawyers Merritt and Jesseph, R. M. Laville—little or nothing is known. Interestingly, at least one survivor, the baby Varden Gray, would live to capitalize on his avalanche experience; as an adult, he became a traveling evangelist and dubbed himself the “Duke of Wellington.” Most of those who’d lived through it, though, were forever sobered by the event. As Basil Sherlock wrote in 1960 to Ray Starrett, “Perhaps you wish to forget it. For over fifty years, I have. Twenty-five of those years were spent working on the graveyard shift, 12M to 8 A.M. And when the hands of the clock would point to 1:10 A.M. on March first, I would shut my eyes and see it all over again.”
But now, on January 12, 1929, as the Great Northern Railway feted itself at Scenic for introducing a new era of safe, reliable travel through the wilds of the Last Mountains, only one man present truly understood the full price that had been paid for breaching that wilderness with a railroad line. James H. O’Neill listened as the addresses went on and on into the night, full of high-blown rhetoric about progress, technology, and the end of the threat of nature: “The switchback has become tradition,” one speaker opined. “Snow troubles in the Cascades [are] only a memory and the snowsheds antiques.” About the victims of the Wellington avalanche—the unacknowledged impetus behind the engineering marvel currently being celebrated—nothing at all was said. The town itself would soon be abandoned, turned over to the elk, the bears, and the coyotes “howling in the doorways of deserted dwellings.” After thirty-five years of life, it would stand empty and silent and remote once more, four miles above the bustle at Scenic, a now useless concrete snowshed the only monument to its dead.