Dark History Today
March 1, 1910
Wellington, Washington
March 1, 1910
The mountain had been patient for nine days. On the tenth, it stopped waiting.
Wellington was not much of a town. A power plant, a post office, a grocery, the Bailets Hotel with its well-stocked kitchen, a saloon, and a handful of shacks clinging to a shelf of rock at the west portal of the Cascade Tunnel, five thousand feet up in Washington’s Cascade Range. The whole place existed for one reason: the Great Northern Railway. Every soul who lived there worked for the railroad, and the railroad was the only way in or out. The nearest real settlement, a whistle-stop called Scenic, sat miles down a treacherous grade to the west. To the east, the tunnel bored through the mountain toward Leavenworth and the dry country beyond.
On the evening of February 22nd, two westbound trains left Spokane three hours apart, headed for Seattle and the ports of Puget Sound. Train No. 25 was the Spokane Local, a passenger train hauling seven cars behind a big twelve-wheeled locomotive. Train No. 27 was the Fast Mail, loaded with letters and parcels and a handful of clerks to sort them. Together the two trains carried roughly 125 passengers and crew. The trip to Seattle should have taken half a day.
It would take the better part of forever.
The trains cleared the Cascade Tunnel and emerged at Wellington on February 23rd to find the world had turned white. Snow fell at a foot per hour. On the worst day, the gauges measured eleven feet. The drifts buried the tracks in both directions and kept piling higher. Great Northern’s rotary plows — massive spinning blades mounted on locomotives — chewed into the snow and choked on the trees and debris mixed into it. One broke down. Two stalled between slides. The fourth got stuck at the east end of the tunnel.
The shovelers fared no better. Hired hands, most of them, paid fifteen cents an hour to dig out the line by muscle alone. After days of backbreaking labor in a blizzard, they demanded a raise to twenty-five cents. Superintendent James O’Neill refused. So they put down their shovels and walked off the mountain. Hard to blame them.
By February 26th the telegraph lines had come down. Wellington was cut off. No messages in. No messages out. No way to know when help might come, or if anyone was sending it. The passengers ate their meals at the Bailets Hotel and stared out the windows at the white wall closing around them. The women cried. The men went quiet. Avalanches thundered down the surrounding slopes at irregular intervals, each one a reminder of what the mountain could do when it felt like it. None hit the trains. Not yet.
Some passengers decided not to wait around to find out. A group set off on foot toward Scenic, picking their way along the buried tracks and sliding a thousand feet down a near-vertical slope to reach the station below. One man leading an earlier party had been swept away by a slide and buried alive. He turned up at a lodge miles away, half-frozen but breathing. Word came back to Wellington: he made it, but nobody else should try.
The ones who stayed had their reasons. Some were too old, too young, or too injured to walk. John Gray had boarded the train in Nooksack with a broken right leg. His wife Anna and their eighteen-month-old son, Varden, were with him. Ida Starrett was traveling with her seven-year-old boy, Raymond, and her mother. Catherine O’Reilly, a twenty-six-year-old nurse from Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, stayed. John Parzybok, a twenty-four-year-old rotary conductor married six months, stayed. Earl Longcoy, nineteen years old, barely arrived from Wisconsin to serve as O’Neill’s secretary, stayed.
There was also the question of the tunnel. Some passengers begged the crew to back the trains inside, out of the path of any slide. The railroad men refused, and not without cause. Steam locomotives belched smoke and carbon monoxide, and everyone knew what happened when trains stalled in tunnels. The passengers at Wellington were caught between two ways of dying and had to pick which one scared them less. They chose to stay in the open, at the base of Windy Mountain, and hope.
On the last day of February, the snow stopped. Rain moved in, warm and steady, and with it came wind. The change in weather felt like mercy. It was the opposite. Rain on a mountain of fresh snow is a trigger. The water seeps between the layers, loosens the bond between old crust and new slab, and turns the whole slope into a loaded gun.
Then the thunder started.
Just after one o’clock on the morning of March 1st, a violent electrical storm rolled through the Cascades. Lightning cracked against the ridgeline. Charles Andrews, a Great Northern employee, was walking toward one of the bunkhouses when he heard a sound that did not belong to thunder. He turned toward Windy Mountain and saw it coming.
A slab of snow ten feet thick, half a mile long, and a quarter mile wide broke loose from the summit and began to move. The slopes above the tracks had been stripped bare by clear-cutting and wildfire, and there was nothing left to slow it down. Andrews would describe the sight fifty years later: “White Death moving down the mountainside above the trains. Relentlessly it advanced, exploding, roaring, rumbling, grinding, snapping — a crescendo of sound that might have been the crashing of ten thousand freight trains.”
The avalanche hit the two trains and picked them up whole — locomotives, boxcars, passenger cars, sleepers, mail cars — and hurled them 150 feet down into the Tye River valley. It wiped out the depot, the water tower, and several cabins. It buried everything under forty to seventy feet of snow and shattered timber. The Bailets Hotel, the largest building in Wellington, stood untouched. The avalanche had passed within yards of it.
Most of the passengers and crew had been asleep. Some were killed instantly by the impact. Others suffocated in the dense-packed snow, alive and conscious in the dark, with no room to move and no air to breathe.
The people in the hotel heard the roar, rushed outside in their nightclothes, and found the trains gone. Where the tracks had been, there was nothing. They scrambled down the slope and began digging with their hands.
Twenty-three people came out alive. Fireman Samuel Bates was pulled from beneath a locomotive after six hours. Ida Starrett was trapped for eleven hours before rescuers reached her. Her son Raymond survived with a gash across his forehead that he carried for the rest of his life. The Gray family — John, Anna, and little Varden, eighteen months old — were all pulled from the snow. John’s broken leg had broken again.
Ninety-six did not come out. Thirty-five passengers. Fifty-eight Great Northern employees sleeping on the trains. Three railroad workers in the cabins. Among them: Earl Longcoy, the kid from Wisconsin. John Parzybok, married six months. Catherine O’Reilly, the nurse. Nine mail clerks, most of them in their twenties. One of them, Alfred Hensel, survived only because he had fallen asleep at the far end of his car. The avalanche broke the mail car in half. The eight men on the other end all died.
The telegraph lines were still down. No one outside Wellington knew what had happened until a traveling engineer named Mackey walked to Scenic with the news. Rescue parties arrived on March 2nd. Newspapers called the site “Death Hill.” Bodies were strapped to toboggans and sledded down the mountain to trains at lower elevations, which carried them to Everett and Seattle. Some were identified. Some were not. The last of the dead was not recovered until late July, twenty-one weeks after the slide.
At the coroner’s inquest, Great Northern called the avalanche an act of God. The jury agreed. No one was held responsible. O’Neill, who had been offsite working on a rotary plow when the slide hit, spent the rest of his career with the railroad. He died in 1937.
The company invested millions in concrete snowsheds. In October of 1910, the name Wellington was quietly retired. The town became Tye, after the creek that ran through it, in the hope that a new name might bury the memory. It did not. When the New Cascade Tunnel opened in 1929, it bypassed the site altogether. The town emptied out, burned, and vanished.
One footnote. A man named Joseph Benier had been identified by several acquaintances as one of the Wellington dead. Benier turned up alive at a funeral parlor and announced, “My friends say that you have me dead downstairs. I want to say that I am the livest man in town.”
Not everyone who walked off that mountain was so lucky. But every single one of them lived. Not one person who left Wellington on foot before March 1st perished in the avalanche.
The ones who stayed, stayed because the railroad told them it was safer to wait.
Today, hikers on the Iron Goat Trail can still find rusted spikes and twisted scraps of rail from the wreckage, half-buried in the overgrowth at the bottom of the ravine, a thousand feet below where Wellington used to be.
The mountain, of course, has not moved.
Dark History Today is a personal service of True Crime Historian.