Great Northern Train Derails into the Wenatchee River
A passenger train falls into a washed-out track near Leavenworth, leaving three dead and passengers clinging to life in the mountain currents.
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.
Leavenworth, Wash., April 13. Three men killed, four injured, and $50,000 worth of equipment at the bottom of the Wenatchee River is the result of an accident which befell the first section of Great Northern train No. 2 last night. The killed are Fred J. Wildman, member of the Red Men, tribe No. 14 and a member of the Painters' union of Butte, Mont., and two unidentified men, all of whom were beating the blind baggage. The injured are Engineer Jack Croak of Spokane; Fireman John Wilson, better known as 'Clinker Hook,' and Jesse Corning, express messenger of Seattle. Since the big rotary ran into the load of section gang laborers here last year, this is the most disastrous wreck that has occurred in this section of the country. The track had been entirely washed out, leaving the ties held together by the rails as the sole support of the 200-ton engine. The engine struck an enormous boulder at the edge of the roaring torrent, turned back up the bank, and rolled over. Passengers, including Judge Ranford and S. D. Bridget of Tacoma, helped form a human life line to pull the injured from the banks where the rising river threatened to engulf them.
“Using themselves as a life line, the rescuers got the dead and injured from the banks, where the fast rising river threatened to engulf them.”
The precarious nature of early 20th-century rail travel through the Cascades often meant trusting infrastructure that could vanish overnight during spring freshets. Today, BNSF still operates this critical artery, though with significantly more advanced track monitoring and geotechnical safety measures than the rail-on-ties system that failed in 1904.
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