What I've Read 1/22/13

It's pretty cold here in St. Louis and I opted to find something seasonally appropriate to read.

Thus my order of The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche by Gary Krist came to be.  The book is the story of the avalanche at Wellington, WA that smothered two trains of the Great Northern Railroad and resulted in dozens of fatalities. 

Krist wrote novels before he decided to jump into writing history and I'll admit, I was somewhat doubtful about how this book would agree with me.  I'm not a huge fan of disaster histories.  I find them too often to be sloppily researched and footnoted and really no better than an accumulation of newspaper accounts of the event.

The White Cascade does have many newspaper sources, but Krist's material mainly comes from the coroner's inquest and the lawsuit testimonies relating to the disaster.  He is also helped by documents that were collected by the railroad related to the event in case they were needed for legal reasons and the papers of James J. Hill that have survived to this day.  While written in a novelist's style, the book is heavily noted and sourced.

Another star for Krist is the pains he takes to describe snow-fighting methods in the Pacific Northwest's rail network, particularly those in the Cascades region of both the Great Northern and Northern Pacific.  Krist covers the methods, procedures and technologies available at the time of the disaster and how the Great Northern specifically worked to keep its tracks open during the winter months.  This provides the reader with helpful background information about how the disaster came to pass, even with the modern methods and technology employed by the railroad during that winter.

Krist then covers the events leading up to the disaster.  The weather system that hits the Cascades, the avalanches that block the trains in Wellington, WA and the efforts of the Great Northern snow-fighters to reopen the line and move the trains to their destination.  I found these parts of the book interesting and also a bit familiar since it almost reads like the early parts of an Airport-style disaster flick.  (Every minor character gets introduced and there's some back-story and problem that they're dealing with and they have to get to Seattle ASAP.)

After the actual avalanche takes place, Krist does a fair job of the recovery efforts, the inquest and the lawsuit that was brought three years after the event.  Here, he does let his bias towards the railroad show through.  Granted, it's easy to not like the GN officers in St. Paul.  You also feel badly for the GN officers who decided to leave the trains in Wellington in the first place but also wonder what they were thinking.  Krist tries to leave these men with an escape by repeatedly mentioning the fatigue they were dealing with in trying to reopen the line and how that COULD have clouded their judgement.  He gives the high-up GN leaders such as Hill no such escape route.

Overall, I liked the book.  It wasn't heavy reading, which was fine.  I wanted something to read during these cold nights after work and this fit the bill adequately.--Nick Fry