Last year I had the great good fortune of hearing about a book that recalled an incident that I have long held a curiosity about. It was an avalanche that occurred here in the Northwest in 1910 near a town that no longer exists called Wellington.
During a stint as an intern at our State Capital in Olympia after college, I was fortunate to visit the historical library. I was on an errand for the Senator I was working for so I wasn't able to leisurely browse (as I would have so loved to do), but I did catch sight of a few books about the big avalanche in Wellington.
Not able to scratch that itch at the time and unable to visit that library again I sought other information about the tragedy. Unfortunately there just was not much our there. Then one day a neighbor was talking to my husband about the snow in the passes and mentioned the book. My husband knowing my penchant for disasters, tragedy and local history dutifully reported back and it took me about 5 minutes to find it on Amazon.
"The White Cascade, The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche" by Gary Krist is a great recounting of one of the more unknown tragedies in American history. Amazon reviewers rate this book at 4 1/2 stars but I will give it 5 because of all the local history included. I can visualize the places that he is talking about and also learn a lot about what life was like around here in 1910. The description of the young town of Everett was fascinating to me.
But, of course, the true strength of this work of non-fiction is the story of the disaster itself. Gary Krist does an excellent job of describing what occurred in Wellington in March 1910 when an enormous avalanche crashed down onto two trains loaded with passengers and crew. The avalanche crushed and then pushed the trains down the steep slope leaving bodies and debris strewn in it's path. The force of the snow buried people and train cars up to 40 feet deep and the last body wasn't found until July of the same year.
The passengers and crew were all asleep aboard the Seattle Express and the Fast Mail when it hit. They had endured 6 days stuck on board the snowbound trains. Gary Krist brings that period back to life by using the diaries and letters of the passengers who were there. Passenger Ned Topping wrote an ongoing letter to his mother describing the ordeal which was discovered on his body after the accident. The eyewitness account is both interesting and poignant to read.
Other survivors wrote memoirs of the event and Krist also makes use of the coverage of papers such as the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Everett Daily Herald. Because of this Gary Krist takes us back in time and allows us to witness these events for the first time.
This is a good book to read in the winter when you are warm by the fire. It would also be great to have while you are hiking the Iron Trail to find traces of the old train town of Wellington. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in these kinds of topics.
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