Racing Against the Cascade Winter
Great Northern railroad contractors scramble to build massive timber snowsheds through the mountains before the deep snows of winter set in.
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.
T. P. Matthews and P. C. Kreeb, of Spokane, who have been awarded the contract for the building of the snow sheds on the Great Northern railroad in the Cascade mountains, arrived in the city yesterday to make preparations for beginning the work. They expect to begin building the sheds within ten days and shall push work as fast as possible in order to finish it before the heavy snows of winter set in. They hope to complete the contract by December 1, and shall certainly do so before Christmas. The largest shed will be about a mile west of Wellington and will be about 1,410 feet long. The next in size will be about a mile east of Wellington on the switchback. The sheds will have walls of round timbers and roofs of 12x12-inch square timbers laid in contact and taking the slope of the hill. All will be bolted together, and they will be sixteen to eighteen feet wide and twenty-two feet high in the clear. The work will employ from 300 to 500 men.
“We expect to begin building the sheds within ten days and shall push work as fast as possible in order to finish it before the heavy snows of winter set in.”
The legendary Wellington snowsheds became the site of the deadliest avalanche in U.S. history in 1910. These timber structures, built to protect trains from the very Cascades environment that would eventually destroy them, remain a haunting symbol of the early railroad era's struggle against the brutal realities of Northwest geography.
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