The Tragedy of Fred Lindholm in the Cascades
A Great Northern Railway laborer is found buried under fifteen feet of snow near Madison station, eight days after disappearing during a violent winter storm.
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.
John Henry, a Great Northern laborer, arrived in the city yesterday and brought news of the finding of the body of Fred Lindholm under fifteen feet of snow near Madison station, about seventeen miles from the summit of the Cascade mountains. There were twenty-seven men in the camp when the big snowstorm commenced. Lindholm went out on an errand and did not return. A search party went out into the blinding storm with lanterns, but the search was unsuccessful. Eight days later, while digging through a cut where the snow was packed fifteen feet deep, one of the workmen felt his shovel strike an object. He laid bare the frozen body of Fred Lindholm. The head was almost on the rail. The men made a rough wooden box and buried the body in a snow grave by the side of the track.
“He kept on shoveling, and soon laid bare to the eyes of his fellow-workmen the frozen body of Fred Lindholm.”
This story highlights the extreme danger faced by the railroad crews building infrastructure through the Cascades, a task that claimed many lives. Modern rail travel through the region, while safer, still navigates the same precarious terrain and unpredictable mountain weather that defined the 1890s rail boom.
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