Hardship and Deception at the Cascade Tunnel
Laborers arriving at the Northern Pacific site find empty promises, cold conditions, and a 'regular gouging' by company management.
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.
Edward Cardinal and Joseph Cardinal of Renton have returned from a trip to the summit of the Cascade mountains, where men are working on a tunnel for the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. They left Renton on March 11th, traveling by rail to Black Diamond, then hiking toward the mountains in snow up to three feet deep. At the tunnel camp, they found forty men working. Fifteen were cutting timber for bunkhouses; the others worked in and around the tunnel. Half were hauling rock from the hillside, the rest were taking the tunnel out. At the camp, one could find neither bread nor a night's lodging, although they had the money to pay for it. They spread their blankets on the snow and slept in the open air. The contractor pays labor $2 per day and drillmen $3, but board costs $5 per week, deducted from a man's earnings. When a man quits or is discharged, he does not receive his pay, but a time check payable in twenty days. There is no place for a man to stay while he is discharged, so he must sell his time check to get money to get out of the mountains. One of the men on the works told me that finishing the tunnel in two years was all 'humbug,' and declared that it would take at least four years, and possibly more. Those who went up there because of glowing reports in the papers were disappointed to find them false, and it is but right to denounce those who stand behind such misrepresentations.
“A man cannot get any bread or any place to sleep there, although he has the money to pay for it. We spread our blankets on the snow and slept in the open air.”
The struggle to build the Cascade Tunnel in the 1880s remains a brutal chapter of early regional infrastructure, mirroring current debates about the exploitation of labor in high-stakes construction projects. Just as then, the gap between corporate promises of work and the grim reality of life on site remains a persistent issue in the Pacific Northwest.
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