Tragedy Strikes the Monte Cristo Road Construction
A rockslide kills five workers on the Monte Cristo road, leaving no survivors and bodies missing in the river below.
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.
Messrs. Hall and Poro, of the Monte Cristo railroad, arrived in the city with particulars of the accident on June 6 by which five men lost their lives. Foreman Archie Wilson, Pat Laviner and three Italians were at work on section 6 of the Monte Cristo road, forty miles east of Snohomish. By the premature explosion of a blast, the mountain fell, with a great mass of rock, into the south fork of the Stillaguamish, taking five men with it. It is not true that the men were on a trail below the rock; just how the accident happened will never be known, for there is no survivor to tell the story. It was not a dangerous place at which they were working. After the disaster, the contractors put a force of men to work removing the fallen rock, but only one corpse was found, that of an Italian. Other bodies were carried away by the river and may never be recovered.
“Just how the accident happened will never be known, for there is no survivor to tell the story.”
The Monte Cristo railroad was a massive undertaking that carved through the rugged North Cascades, leaving a legacy of industrial casualties. Today, the area is better known for its wilderness appeal, but the human cost of these early 1890s infrastructure projects remains a poignant part of the region's history.
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