Moving Mountains for the Monte Cristo Railroad
Contractors use dynamite to carve a path for the new Everett and Monte Cristo railroad, blowing away a solid granite promontory.
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.
Probably the largest single blast yet made along the line of the Everett and Monte Cristo railroad was set off last week by P. H. Smith & Bro., who have the contract for the construction of the last ten miles of the road. About five miles below Monte Cristo, the line skirts a rocky promontory several hundred feet above the level of the river. Through this 'nose,' it was necessary to make a heavy cut in the solid rock. The contractors determined, as a far cheaper means of securing a passage, to blast away the whole side of the mountain. Two tunnels were run fifty feet into the rock, ending in T-shaped caverns loaded with dynamite. After a month of drilling and $1,500 worth of powder, the blast was a complete success. The mountain trembled and its side rose a few feet into the air and fell back. It drove a clean cut about 150 feet in length, lifting a body of rock above the tunnel about seventy feet high and forty feet in thickness.
“The huge mass of rock seemed raised almost gently and then to fall back like the 'flop' of a kettle of boiling mush; yet it weighed hundreds of tons.”
The Monte Cristo line was the centerpiece of an ambitious attempt to connect the mining riches of the Cascades to the Port of Everett. Today, the dramatic engineering feats of this era are largely reclaimed by the wilderness, and the Monte Cristo ghost town is a popular destination for hikers exploring the ruins of this boom-and-bust era.
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