The Brutal Work of Boring Stampede Tunnel
Deep in the Cascades, a reporter documents the grueling labor conditions of the men carving the Northern Pacific’s Stampede Tunnel through the mountain’s gut.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Cascade division is in the hands of the operating department up to the Cle-Elum. From there, the road goes under the generic name of 'the front.' The Signal reporter found himself in a motley crowd. Chief Engineer Bennett was there, together with Superintendent Powell and Contractor O. W. Hunt. These three were bound for Tacoma. The balance of the travelers were laborers, gamblers, and bawds. The latter were bound for Tunnel City, the Mecca toward which the roughs and toughs of the upper country have their eyes fixed.
At 8 o'clock, the shifts were changed in the tunnel. The heading on the east side was 1,930 feet, against 1,216 feet on the west side. The combined progress from the two ends is about 12 feet per day. The rock, which is conglomerate bluish gray stone, is soft and easily worked. Major Bennett led the way up to the very face of the tunnel, where the men were handling the Burleigh drills. The traversing of this slant cavern carries with it a feeling of awe, which is not lessened by the din of the machinery, the rushing of waters, and the uncanny light of the electric candles. There are four electric candles in each end of the tunnel, and the cost is only six cents to the light per day.
On the way to the face of the tunnel, one encounters damp filled with refuse rock and drawn by a single mule over the tram road. As the front is reached, the four Burleigh drills, two each in the face and bench, are engaged in their ceaseless toil of connecting the agricultural gardens of Eastern Washington with the timber domain of the Sound. The workers look like a ragged army, and well earn the cash they receive. The drill man gets $3.00 per day for eight hours' work, and the muckers, or men who handle the refuse rock, $2.50 per day. Everything moves like clockwork, which is essential. The laborers have been carefully culled until only the best are now employed, and little trouble is experienced on account of inebriety, for a close watch is kept, and when a tunnel employee is found carousing with the spirits (liquid) he is given his walking papers.
“The traversing of this slant cavern carries with it a feeling of awe, which is not lessened by the din of the machinery, the rushing of waters, and the uncanny light of the electric candles.”
The Stampede Tunnel was a brutal marvel of late 19th-century engineering, essential to linking the Puget Sound to the rest of the country. Today, the ongoing debate over rail infrastructure and tunnel safety in the Pacific Northwest echoes this 1887 account of the hazardous and monotonous labor required to carve through the Cascades.
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