The Brutal Toll of the Great Northern Expansion
Snow-shovelers strike for higher wages while workers battle five-foot drifts and constant mountain slides to complete the transcontinental link.
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A gentleman recently arrived from the Great Northern track construction end reports that through connections will not be made before January 10. The tracklayers are advancing about forty stations a day, but the work is grim. A gang of 200 snow-shovelers recently struck for higher wages; while grading contractors were paying $2.50 a day, the railroad company paid only $2.00. Amid five feet of snow and biting winds, the laborers argued that if the work was worth $2.50 to the grading contractors, it was worth that much to the railroad. Meanwhile, contractors are battling massive earth slides near Martin Creek; one, Contractor Stewart, faces a 60,000-yard slide that keeps moving as fast as it is cleared. Engineers are also debating whether to drill the upcoming mountain tunnel by hand to avoid the structural instability caused by the heavy powder charges used in the Northern Pacific's Stampede tunnel, which remain a persistent maintenance nightmare.
“The wind keeps the snow driving in the faces of the men, and their work is anything but a picnic.”
The labor disputes and massive engineering challenges of the 1892 Great Northern expansion underscore the high human and financial costs required to carve infrastructure into the Cascades. Today, those same mountain passes remain a critical, yet fragile, bottleneck for regional logistics, as modern crews continue to battle the same environmental hazards of slides and deep snow.
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