The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "District weather observer G. N. Salisbury delivered the bad news early Monday morning: It was going to snow-again..." (more)
Key Phrases: passenger hiked, rotary conductor, bunkhouse hospital, Great Northern, Seattle Express, Fast Mail (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by David Laskin

"The Wellington Disaster was not . . . the 'Avalanche That Changed America,' " Gary Krist concedes with appealing frankness near the end of his book about America's deadliest avalanche. After all, "only" 96 passengers and crew died in the 1910 slide that descended on two snowbound trains in Washington's Cascade Mountains. In his first foray into nonfiction, novelist and short story writer Krist proves that you don't need an epoch-altering event -- a Katrina or a Dust Bowl -- to make an engrossing disaster narrative. In the hands of such a skilled and respectful writer, a week-long, late-winter snowstorm, stalled trains, and a cast of ordinary, unlucky people are more than enough to keep us turning pages.

Before letting things rip in the mountains, Krist briskly sketches in some useful background and context. At the time of the disaster, railroads "still dominated the national economy," he writes -- and the man who dominated the railroads was the irascible old empire builder James J. Hill. It was Hill who insisted that his Great Northern Railway punch a route through the treacherous northern Cascade Mountains -- at whatever cost in cash, engineering ingenuity and environmental hubris. "Modern railroads like the Great Northern . . . were supposed to be unstoppable," writes Krist, "the ultimate symbols of twentieth-century America's new mastery over its own geography and climate." But, of course, in a disaster narrative, geography and climate, not technologies, have mastery -- and whoever challenges them pays dearly.

The passengers and crew aboard the westbound Seattle Express and the Fast Mail train from St. Paul, Minn., paid first with a long stretch of inconvenience. In the early hours of Feb. 23, 1910, heavy snow stranded the two trains near the top of Stevens Pass, Wash., and continuing snow and wind kept them stuck there. A glimmer of hope came a couple of days into the ordeal, when the conscientious superintendent James O'Neill ordered the trains dug out and hauled a few miles farther down the line to the tiny wilderness station of Wellington, where there was more food, and, O'Neill believed, a safe set of passing tracks. But hope died as the storm hung in, and repeated avalanches rendered the tracks between Wellington and Seattle unpassable.

The passengers whiled away the time writing letters, entertaining their children, smoking cigars and complaining. A few got out by hiking and sliding down to the next station. Then, shortly after midnight on March 1, following a period of heavy rain, a freak winter thunderstorm dislodged a huge swath of cement-like snow. It plunged onto the trains, crushed them and swept them over a precipice. There was "a grinding and roaring and crashing," wrote one of the few survivors. "We went down very rapidly."

Krist's chapter on the aftermath of the avalanche -- the blood-reddened snow, the ever-fainter cries for help, the heartbreak of a mother pinned on top of her slowly suffocating infant -- is utterly gripping, all the more so for his restrained style. Equally riveting is the courtroom drama that ensues as two juries and then the Washington State Supreme Court determined whether God or the railroad was to blame.

The main problem with the book is the pacing -- the tight, clipped initial chapters setting the scene and period give way to a frustrating lull when the trains stall and little happens but more snow, boredom and leaden attempts to build suspense. By the time disaster strikes, the victims have grown fuzzy in our minds. The most memorable figure, and the most sympathetically drawn, is the tireless, beleaguered superintendent O'Neill -- which also poses a narrative problem, since he was never on the trains when they were snowbound. By making O'Neill his flawed hero, Krist shifts the emotional focus away from the victims.

As a weather nut, I was also disappointed with how little meteorology there is here -- no discussion of the genesis of the disturbances that piled up epic volumes of snow, nothing on what triggered the freak thunderstorm, no more than a passing glance at the physics of snow slides. Krist is clearly more fascinated by trains than by weather -- and readers who share this interest will love his portrait of the despotic Hill and the many digressions into the challenges, dangers and arrogance of sending fast trains through untamed mountain passes.

The Wellington avalanche, like all natural disasters, was compounded by human frailty. Perhaps the signal contribution of The White Cascade is how deeply and delicately Krist probes the moral complexities of this fatal combination.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

In February 1910, a massive blizzard trapped two trainloads of passengers high in the Cascade Mountains. Crews from the Great Northern Railway worked around the clock to rescue the trains stranded on the edge of a precipice near Wellington, Washington. Then an avalanche half a mile wide descended from the pinnacles, forcing the trains and their passengers down the mountainside. Bodies were scattered all over the area, some buried as deep as 40 feet. The last body was found in July, 21 weeks after the avalanche. The lost passengers included business leaders, women, and children, but nearly two-thirds of the 96 fatalities were trainmen, railway mail clerks, and track laborers. Many others were injured and a few were unharmed. Krist's research includes documents such as telegrams and diaries, newspaper articles of the time, court affidavits, and corporate archives. To his credit, Krist has avoided using any invented dialogue or other undocumented re-creations. The book is an astonishingly rich chronicle of this catastrophe. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805077057
• ISBN-13: 978-0805077056
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #68,793 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great Train Disaster, February 6, 2007

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

We hear of avalanches now and then, taking to their deaths skiers or climbers, but as disasters they are these days relatively small scale. That was not the case on the night of 1 March 1910, when bizarre weather in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State brought down an avalanche that was half a mile wide. In its path were two trains pinned in by the snowstorms, and the cars were hurled down a mountain. The official death count was 96, although the number is an estimate, and the toll on the wounded and on the rescuers cannot be tallied. Gary Krist, whose previous books have been fiction, has become a historian of this disaster, telling it with a novelist's skill in _The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche_ (Henry Holt). The disaster was not, as Krist modestly admits, the "Avalanche That Changed America", because it was in many ways just one aspect of changes that were happening in railroading at the time anyway. It remains, however, a gripping tale of human endeavor against natural forces; it is all historical fact, but Krist has produced a page-turner.

Krist dutifully sets up the scenes in the mountains with historical context. In 1910, railroads made the American economy, and they had changed the American Northwest forever. The representative of the Great Northern Railway, the Superintendent of the Cascade Division was James H. O'Neill, in many ways the flawed hero of the book. He was a lifetime railroad man, "a precociously shrewd manager with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of drive and will." His were the responsibilities of the tracks, stations, buildings, and the movements of the trains through his region, a major mountain crossing that got an average of fifty feet of snow a year. The late February snow was bad enough to stop two trains, the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail, in transit between Spokane and Seattle. The passengers on the trains were at first merely annoyed by the delay. The passengers were kept fairly well in their cars; there was no lack of food, and though there was worry about having enough coal to move trains around, there was always sufficient coal to keep the cars warm. They socialized, and the porters and conductor circulated, trying to keep the passengers' spirits up, but cabin fever eventually set in. The tracks at the little trainyard town of Wellington had never been subject to avalanches as had others in the area, and indeed, avalanches at other parts of the tracks soon sealed the trains where they were. Early in the morning of 1 March, an avalanche came down the mountain, carrying all the cars with it, and smashing them to bits. The chapter on the avalanche itself is only sixteen pages, but it is followed by descriptions of the excruciating steps that O'Neill and his team took to rescue the few survivors, and then to recover bodies. The press, which had taken an exuberant and morbid interest in the case, printed absurdities like reports of mountain lion or wolf packs patrolling for cadavers. Newspapers originally praised O'Neill's work, and then looking for someone to blame, turned to reproach.

The book winds up in the courts, as humans attempted to decide how fairly to assess blame against God or against the railroad in an overwhelming natural disaster. Not only is this a fine book about people in the middle of a looming catastrophe, but it is also strong on the history and day-to-day operation of the railroads of the time. There is little left to remind us of the great avalanche; the railroad changed the name of Wellington, and then made a tunnel that would safely bypass the area. Passenger service peaked in the 1920s, so that any similar disaster became less and less likely. We don't have any lack of disasters in our own time, though, and Krist's great theme of "the gaps between foresight and hindsight" is one with which any reader will sympathize.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well Done, March 1, 2007

By	Charles Oppermann (Woodinville, WA USA) - See all my reviews

I agree with the other reviewers. This book is historic retelling done with a novelists flair. There is amazing detail and the characters are presented with balance. The author does a good job of presenting the way of life in 1910. I appreciated the detailed notes on the source of the material .

Living in the foothills of the Cascades, I was dimly aware of this disaster, but after reading this book, I plan on hiking the original railbed - now part of the Iron Goat Trail - to Wellington this summer and see for myself what occured there nearly a century ago.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History in the Novelist's Hand, February 15, 2007

By	Douglas J. Klapec (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Gary Krist does a superb job of placing the reader everywhere the historical characters go, mentally and physically. His writing style is readable but academic at the same time, neither pandering to base instinct or even ability, nor inundating the reader with words that need constant referral. He also makes the social, economic, and political issues of the day seem real and as pressing as any of today's problems. Finally, the technical detail Krist parlays is succinct and historically accurate without boring one to tears. All in all a very nice piece of work.