The Miracle of the Mountain Side
A Great Northern railway worker survives a harrowing 150-foot tumble down a mountainside near Wenatchee.
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.
Last Friday, A. N. Johnson, a workman on the Great Northern, had a fall which should certainly have killed him if he had not been born lucky. Johnson was at work with a gang of men cutting down the mountainside at a point about four and a half miles above here to prevent it from sliding down on the railroad track. He was engaged in prying out a huge boulder which loosened unexpectedly, and Johnson started with it down the incline. Eye witnesses say the fall was something terrific, Johnson's body bounding like a rubber ball from bench to bench, at one place having a sheer descent of thirty feet. The entire tumble covered over 150 feet and occupied only a few seconds of time. It was expected by those who saw the accident, when they went to pick him up, to find only the semblance of a human frame, but strange to relate, outside of a broken collar bone, a slight fracture of the skull, and his body literally covered with bruises, no further serious damage was done, and when the physician left him a few hours later he was smoking his pipe, 'slightly disfigured, but still in the ring.'
“Johnson's body bounding like a rubber ball from bench to bench.”
Workplace safety on the railroads was a matter of grim luck in 1892, a stark contrast to modern OSHA standards. The story captures the dangerous reality of the massive regrade and construction projects that defined the era of Washington expansion.
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