The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche
by Gary Krist

Summary

In February 1910, a monstrous, record-breaking blizzard hit the Northwest. Nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town called Wellington, perched high in the Cascade Mountains, where a desperate situation evolved: two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers and their crews found themselves marooned. For days, an army of the Great Northern Railroad's most dedicated men worked to rescue the trains, but just when escape seemed possible, the unthinkable occurred—a colossal avalanche tumbled down, sweeping the trains over the steep slope and down the mountainside. Centered on the astonishing spectacle of our nation's deadliest avalanche, The White Cascade is the masterfully told story of a never-before-documented tragedy.

Praise

"Mr. Krist does wonders...Adopting a restrained, documentary tone, he slowly builds a picture of massing natural forces and helpless humanity, brought closer and closer to catastrophe with each tick of the clock. The pacing is expertly judged, and the potentially confusing narrative threads, involving multiple actors in scattered locations, are tied together neatly...Dispassionately, Mr. Krist describes the frantic rescue efforts, the mounting fears of the passengers and the malevolent, unending storm. In a thrilling climactic chapter, he conjures forth the avalanche and its aftermath." — William Grimes, The New York Times

"Gary Krist's smart page-turner, "The White Cascade," documents [the Wellington] disaster with verve, humanity and purpose. Krist's story goes beyond the recounting of a tragic event and becomes a study of individual heroism and failure, corporate avarice and the era's misguided faith that humans and their technology could tame Mother Nature...To research the book, Krist mined personal journals of the passengers, telegrams, letters, the inquest testimony, later court proceedings, newspapers and a veritable library of books on railroading. The results couldn't be more pleasing, as Krist crafts a tale of drama and compassion while slipping in a social history of railroads and their effect on the economic boom in the Northwest in the early years of the 20th century." — Mark S. Luce, Los Angeles Times

"In his first foray into nonfiction, novelist and short story writer Krist proves that you don't need an epoch-altering event—a Katrina or a Dust Bowl—to make an engrossing disaster narrative. In the hands of such a skilled and respectful writer, a week-long, late-winter snowstorm, stalled trains, and a cast of ordinary, unlucky people are more than enough to keep us turning pages...Krist's chapter on the aftermath of the avalanche—the blood-reddened snow, the ever-fainter cries for help, the heartbreak of a mother pinned on top of her slowly suffocating infant—is utterly gripping, all the more so for his restrained style. Equally riveting is the courtroom drama that ensues...The Wellington avalanche, like all natural disasters, was compounded by human frailty. Perhaps the signal contribution of The White Cascade is how deeply and delicately Krist probes the moral complexities of this fatal combination." — David Laskin The Washington Post

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