A Man Frozen to Death as the Big Bend Storm Strands Trains and Madness Follows
In Washington's Big Bend country, a blizzard stalls trains, drives a stage driver out of his mind and leaves a young rancher dead in the snow.
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.
COULEE CITY, Feb. 1.—[Special.]—Last Monday saw one of the storms ever experienced in the Big Bend. The passenger train arrived behind a double headed snow plow, about an hour late. It pulled out without waiting for the snow plow to precede it, and got stuck in a drift six miles east of town, where it stayed until Tuesday afternoon, when the snow plow broke the road and the passenger backed into Coulee City. A snow plow left from Cheney on Tuesday and got as far as two miles west of Almira, when it abandoned the work and returned to Cheney.
The stage driver from Waterville arrived about 6 o'clock Monday evening, experiencing a very cold trip. The driver undertook to make the return trip Tuesday and got lost between Moses Coulee and the big draw, and when found by the eastern-bound stage driver in the morning he had lost his mind.
A driver from Chelan brought in some passengers on Monday, and a son of Judge Morgan, of Douglas, went back with him, intending to go to his ranch in the Foster creek country. It is reported that after leaving the conveyance he was frozen to death before reaching his destination.
Range cattle must have suffered severely, and a large loss is looked for when the weather clears up enough to investigate.
John Kearns, the proprietor of the Park house, at this place, has lost two little children by scarlet fever. One child was buried on Tuesday, and the other died Wednesday morning.
“The driver undertook to make the return trip Tuesday and got lost between Moses Coulee and the big draw, and when found by the eastern-bound stage driver in the morning he had lost his mind.”
A February 1893 storm stranded trains, drove a stage driver to madness and killed a young rancher in Washington's Big Bend country. The isolated communities depended on stage lines and railroads that could vanish in a blizzard, with no modern emergency response. The story is a reminder of how winter weather once meant life-or-death isolation on the plateau.
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