Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1892 — EAGLE GORGE HORROR. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

EAGLE GORGE HORROR.

The Landslide on the Cascade Division of the Northern Pacific. The recent landslide which occurred in Eagle Gorge, near Canton, Wash., was the most, serious of the many that have taken place upon the Cascade division of the Northern Pacific Railway, ten or twelve men having been buried under the debris, two hurled into the river and drowned and six others being seriously injured. A cloudburst and heavy rain caused a serious washout near Canton, a station fifty-four miles east of Tacoma on the Green River, and a force of sixty-two men was set to work repairing the track and putting the roadbed in good condition, but with specific instructions not to disturb the soil at the base of the cliff which towered for 200 feet above them, overhanging the track and forming a portion of the face of the mountain. These instructions were not given be-

cause a landslide was thought probbut to save unnecessary work, and, as was afterward proven, they were implicitly obeyed. The sixty-two men in the construction gang were busily at work, when the foreman, happening to glance upward, noticed two huge bowlders upon the face of the bluff toppling. In another instant the side of the mountain began to move, and, shouting to his men to run for their lives, he took to flight. The laborers needed no second warning, but unfortunately about twenty of the men were in the direct line of the slide, and they hardly had time to throw down their tools before they were overwhelmed with a conglomerate mass of railroad ties, mud and stones, and either hurled to one side or pinioned to the earth and buried beneath the debris, which covered them to the depth of from six to fifteen feet, and borne to the bottom of the river, where many of the bodies still lie. One man was thrown entirely across the stream by the force of the slide and found alive but unconscious in the underbrush a few feet from the bank. Six others who were on the edge of the slide were taken out seriously wounded and two bodies recovered by the surviving workmen, who returned and made a heroic effort to find the bodies of the dead. How many perished in the slide will never be known, some workmen placing the number at nineteen and others varying from six to ten. The railroad was severely censured by the press because it took no immediate steps to recover the bodies of the dead, not beginning the search in earnest until five days after the disaster, when, owing to the affidavits of surviving workmen that they believed a large number of bodies were buried in the debris, an official investigation was ordered, It was oven stated that they caused the debris of the slide remaining upon the track to be shoveled off and thrown into the river at the point where the bodies must have lain, and thus effectually prevented their recovery.

SLIDE ON NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILWAY.