Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42955 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-22
• Released on: 2008-01-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

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

Review
Novelist Krist (Chaos Theory, 2000, etc.) turns to nonfiction for a familiar tale of Man-vs.-Nature. As usual, Nature wins.The avalanche that killed 96 Great Northern Railway passengers and crew on March 1, 1910, was the result of a freak late-winter storm combined with an even rarer winter thunderstorm that triggered the slide. It's doubtful any human effort could have prevented it, so the narrative has an inexorable feel that's slightly deadening. The author holds our interest nonetheless with thorough reporting and easy, readable prose. The tragedy unfolded high in the treacherous snowbound Cascade Mountains of western Washington State. A Seattle-bound passenger train was stranded by a three-day blizzard that dumped more than 30 feet of snow on the steep mountain slopes. Great Northern's 37-year-old Cascade Division superintendent, James H. O'Neill, a railroader since he was 14, personally rushed to the scene to supervise the rescue dig. But not even the railroad's massive snow-plowing locomotives could clear the line, and eventually, the snow pack gave way, sweeping most of those on board to their deaths. Krist does a good job of introducing many of the doomed passengers and railroad workers. The most memorable character is O'Neill, who remained haunted by the tragedy despite his dogged rescue efforts. Others include train conductor Joseph Pettit, who labored mightily to calm the agitated passengers and entertain their small children. Also noteworthy is the Great Northern's gruff, haughty owner, 71-year-old James J. Hill, an old-fashioned captain of industry without Carnegie's philanthropic heart.A treat for American-history and railroad buffs, though lacking dramatic fireworks. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Chilling story
Very good retelling of the 1913 avalanche, with nearly 100 killed the worst in US history, involving social, technical, and political crosscurrents which Krist turns into a compelling and inexorably chilling story.

Great Historical Book
This has to be one of my favorite books I have read. At first I was woried that it would just be a story but it has all the historical facts in a style that makes it exciting to read.

The best kind of non-fiction writing
This book is the best kind of non-fiction. The historical rigor doesn't get in the way of the narrative flow of the story, but the narrative flow doesn't water down the historical rigor, either. I think the main reason for this is that the author is primarily a novelist; this is his first non-fiction book.

As he unfolds the story, it becomes an edge-of-your-seat tale of suspense. You can almost hear ominous soundtrack music welling up in the background as the snow falls and falls and falls, the railroad workers make nearly superhuman attempts to clear the tracks so the stranded trains can get off of the mountain, and the passengers sit at the base of a thousand-foot high mountain with millions of tons of unstable snow above them.

While he's telling the human stories, he also explains the background of mountain pass railroading, the economics of the industry, and the technological limitations the equipment of the day created. At the end of the book, he explains the legal issues that arose as a result of the disaster. Most important, he makes it clear that nearly everyone involved made the decisions he made for the best of reasons, even though some of those decisions turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Though the Wellington avalanche is the worst such disaster in US history-- and one of the worst train disasters, too-- in the hundred years that have passed, it has faded into oblivion. The site of the disaster has, too, having been abandoned by the railroad since 1929.

On the one hand, that's just the way it goes; new events push old events into the past. On the other hand, that's a real shame. There are lessons in the Wellington avalanche about corporate responsibility, technological hubris, and government oversight that we might well benefit from.

This book is nearly perfect non-fiction. It's a fast, entertaining read that also teaches the readers important lessons. I recommend it most highly.