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Murray C. Morgan
Nelson Bennett and the Stampede Pass Tunnel
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Copyright, 1960, Murray Morgan
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Nelson Bennett and the
Stampede Pass Tunnel
 On
January 22, 1886, Captain Sidney Bennett, temporarily resident in
Yakima, received a telegram from his younger brother Nelson, then
visiting in Philadelphia. The wire said the Bennett brothers had
won the contract to drive a tunnel 16 feet wide, 22 feet high at
the crown, 9,850 feet long through the north shoulder of Mount
Rainier. "Get going," said the kid brother, who was
boss.
Sidney
Bennett needed no urging. Haste was imperative. He and Nelson were
not only undertaking an assignment of formidable difficulty, but
they were betting more than they possessed that they could finish
the job in twenty - eight months. Their contract pledged a one -
hundred - thousand - dollar performance bond plus 10 percent of
the contract price if they failed to have trains rolling under the
Cascades by May 22, 1888.
Back
in Philadelphia where the bids had been opened, the defeated
contractors, who numbered a dozen, were predicting that the
Bennett brothers' victory would not make them but break them.
Their bid had been so low - less than half that by some of their
more experienced rivals - that even if they beat the deadline they
could still lose a fortune. But if anyone could get the job done
on time, it was agreed, the Bennetts were the ones.
Nelson
Bennett was forty - three years old, five feet nine inches in
height and almost as wide: put a mustache and goatee on a
bulldozer and you would have a reasonable facsimile. Born in
Canada, left fatherless at six, Nelson quit school at fourteen to
work on a farm. He came to the United States during the Civil War,
helped build Army barracks for a time, then caught on as a
brakeman on the Dixon Air Line.
Nelson
was in Detroit in 1864 when he received a letter from one of his
brothers In Pennsylvania: "I have found the Eldorado - Come
at once. I am boring for oil and we can slip into a fortune as
easy as eating mince pie." Nelson could not draw his railroad
pay until the end of the month, so he got himself fired on his
next run. He arrived in the oil fields with two dollars, worked
four weeks as a day laborer, then passed himself off as a
contractor and agreed to bore a six - hundred - foot well ("
I hired a competent man to manage then stood round looking wise
until I learned something").
He
sank twenty - seven wells before the boom tapered off. He took a
small fortune west but lost it in land speculation in Missouri and
Iowa. Next he taught school in Missouri (he had gone through the
sixth grade), fought Indians (twenty personal acquaintances were
killed in the race wars of the West), prospected in the Dakotas,
organized a mule - train freight service in the Southwest. He was
in Salt Lake City, broke again, when the copper rush to Montana
began.
Bennett
contracted to move a quartz mill from Ophir, Utah, to Butte, six
hundred miles, on mule back, and did it. He put the profits into
building Butte's first street railway and the profits from that
into moving a steam sawmill into the Lost River region of Idaho.
He was rich again.
His
Rocky Mountain activities brought Bennett into contact with
Washington Dunn, who was building the Utah and Northern for Jay
Gould. Bennett teamed up with Dunn, doing the outside work while
Dunn hustled contracts. They undertook to dig a thirty - five -
mile irrigation ditch in Idaho to carry Snake River water to
270,000 acres.
The
job required six hundred men, twelve hundred horses, and an
arsenal of drilling and blasting equipment. On this project Sidney
Bennett, Nelson's leaner and meaner older brother, a cavalry
captain in the Civil War, demonstrated what an admirer called "a
peculiar genius for slave-driving." Dunn died, and Nelson
Bennett went into the negotiating end of the business, leaving
Sidney to direct field work. The Bennetts won the contract for the
first 134 miles of the Cascade Division, Pasco to Ellensburg,
before securing the Stampede assignment.
A
human bulldozer and a slave - driving genius were needed on the
Stampede. just getting men and machines to the work site required
prodigious effort. Nelson shipped west five engines, two water
wheels, five air compressors, eight seventy - horsepower boilers,
four large exhaust fans, two complete electric arc-light plants,
two miles of six - inch wrought - iron pipe, two miles of water
pipe, two fully equipped machine shops, assorted tools, thirty -
six air - drilling machines, several tons of steel drills, two
locomotives (named "Sadie" and "Ceta" after
his daughters), sixty dump - cars, two sawmills, and a telephone
system.
On
the east side of the Cascades, the rails toward the mountains
ended just beyond the village of Yakima; on the west they had been
run from Tacoma through Buckley to Eagle Gorge. Beyond the
railheads only vague pack - trails twisted through the forests, up
to the mountainsides, to the portals.
An
even sketchier path went up through the pass to connect the east
and west work sites. It was so indistinct that the veteran John
McAllister and a companion lost their way and their horses in a
snowstorm, and survived for a week on nothing but boiled oats.
When a search party reached them McAllister was shoveling a path
down the mountain through ten feet of snow.
"Have
you any grub?" McAllister asked his rescuers.
"Yes."
The
old settler sat down and wept.
Through
such country, in the dead of winter, Sidney Bennett had to move an
industry, a work force, and living facilities, against a deadline.
The first wagons started from Yakima only eleven days after the
contract was signed. In the dry, rocky hills around Yakima the
crews chipped away at the road with picks, but as they approached
the mountains they came to a stretch of fifteen miles where a warm
Chinook wind had melted the snow.
The
wagons sank above the axles. So they built a moving roadway of
planks. Boards were laid end to end across the bog, the rear
boards being hand - carried forward as soon as the back wheels of
the wagon cleared them. It proved impossible to keep the wheels on
the planks with the horses hitched in the normal way. They rigged
block and tackle, fastened one end of the rope to the wagon
tongue, the team to the other end, and drivers slogged ahead of
the wagon shouldering the tongue to guide it. When all went well
they could make a mile a day.
Things
were worse in the mountains. The trail led along gorges five
hundred to a thousand feet deep; it crossed creeks and rivers; it
threaded through a tangle of forest. Where the grades were
steepest and not even double - teaming could move the wagons, the
block and tackle was rigged from trees to allow the horses to pull
downhill. In some stretches the machinery was put on scows that
could be skidded across the frozen snow. The weather was awful,
alternating rain and snow. The winds could knock down a horse.
An
advance party under Master Builder W. H. Buckner reached the east
face on February 9. "Before we could get to the portal,"
he reported, "we had to shovel a road through snow 800 feet
long and eight feet deep. At the face of the tunnel there was 200
inches of water falling from the top of the bluff 170 feet, which
had to be turned.
There
was ice eight to ten feet deep across the cliff. We made a cut
through snow and ice twenty feet wide, eight to ten deep and 150
feet long just to get at the portal at the east end. In order to
reach the west portal it was necessary to shovel a trail through
snow four to ten feet deep, four feet wide, and four miles long."
Hand
- drilling on the approach to the east face began February 13.
Entries in Sidney Bennett's work journal are laconic:
Feb. 15. Work on
excavation on approach to tunnel will be prosecuted until point of
heading is reached.
March 15. 36 inches
of snow fell within the last 36 hours.
March 21. Rained for
last 24 hours.
March 27. Began work
on the "bench" inside east portal.
March 31. Commenced
timbering; put 12 sets in - the first used.
April 1. Sixty men
worked in east end. Completed excavation of the approaches to the
heading at west end.
April 2. Commenced
running the heading of the west end. The extent of the day's work
was 51/2 feet by hand drills. The excavators at the east end have
made to this date 200 feet.
April 6. Harder rock
- blue trappite in the west end.
May 1. Snow retarding
the work in the east end.
May 5. The first man
injured. It was by falling rock.
On
the trail, organization replaced improvisation. A hundred wagons
were moving men and machinery up the roads. Stations had been
built every twelve miles. These were "rag shows" - tent
camps - where teamsters could get food and sleep. It had been
found that sleds that worked on the slanted snow fields could be
hauled across mud as the freezing line rose with the temperature.
At the portals the men lived in real houses, though on the east
side workers had to shovel away fifty feet of snow to reach solid
ground for the foundation of what was called Tunnel City.
The
first compressor boiler left Yakima on February 22. It was eight
weeks reaching the portal but on June 19 the equipment was
assembled. Sidney's notes say triumphantly, "Two Ingersoll
drills started in the east end - the first machinery that started."
If
the Bennetts were to beat the deadline, it would be with the help
of technology. They planned to attack the rock with six Ingersoll
Eclipse drills at each end of the tunnel, the power to be
generated on the east side where six large boilers were installed
to supply four 480 - horsepower compressors. A pipe 12,500 feet
long was run over the pass to carry air to the drills at the west
face.
Captain
Sidney hoped to drill 400 feet of rock a month when under full
steam.
More
than 122,000 cubic yards of rock were to be chipped out of the
mountain. Just finding a place to put the debris was a problem. On
the west end the rock was run down a spur for a quarter of a mile,
then dumped into a ravine that was eventually filled and used as
roadbed for the track. A visitor who rode one of the dump trucks
reported that it went downhill "with a speed that made a
person's hair rise like the quills of a fretful porcupine."
Reporters
trooped "to the front." Those from Tacoma tended to be
enthusiastic, those from Seattle and Portland dubious. A favorite
rumor was that there had been an engineering miscalculation and
when the east side and west side meet in the middle they'll be a
mile apart." Tilton Sheets, a civil engineer and surveyor,
visited the digs in July to assure readers of the Tacoma Ledger
that all was well. His tone was that of a recruiting sergeant:
Any
man who will work can find employment and command from two dollars
all the way to three per day according to how he can work. If he
is worth three he can get it.
How
do the men live - their board and all that? Very well - as cheaply
and well as they could live in Tacoma. The contractors have built
camps and the men are well fed - plenty of beef and good food
otherwise, for all of which they pay $4.50 a week. Of course it's
roughing it a little - that's understood. Every man provides his
own blankets. Good meals can be obtained at points along the road
towards Ellensburg at two - bits, but up towards the summit they
come higher, naturally enough - say four - bits. For parties
visiting the scene on a flying excursion it is advisable to take
provisions along.
Saloons?
Oh, yes - too many of them. That's one trouble. Many of the men
get caught by them every pay day and don't work till they have to.
Another
Ledger reporter met a professional gambler coming down from the
west portal. He was in complete agreement with Surveyor Tilton
about the opportunities for diversion on the mountainside:
His
smile was contagious even across a hundred feet of space. He
carried only a little hand satchel such as ladies affect. Shaking
this and smiling over the clash of ivory and what - not within, he
asked: "Poker? Roulette? Chuckluck? Try your hand. Anything
you wish." Pleased at the reception of this sally, he
continued. "What's your racket? I can tell you, it's no good
up there. I've been all through it, from Ellensburg to the Gorge,
all through. It's worked out.
"There's
saloons and restaurants every fifty feet. You can get a good meal
for two - bits - as good as you can at Tacoma. There's nothing
left in it for us. What's your game? Whiskey?"
Such
prosperity and luxury proved more than some men could stand. The
week that Tilton Sheets' effusion appeared in the Ledger, Captain
Sidney penned an unusually long entry in his daily journal:
About
150 men in east end struck for nine hours as a day's work. [They
were working twelve - hour shifts, seven days a week.] It lasted
two days but did not prevail. In this matter the sheriff of
[Yakima] county was called upon the ground to prevent disorder and
injury to persons or property. One man was shot by him in his
attempt to escape arrest on a criminal charge.
In a
letter to Nelson, who was at company headquarters in Tacoma,
Sidney remarked that they were using three crews at all times, "one
coming, one drilling, one quitting." But the work went on.
August 9. Electric
lights were extended in the west end, having previously been
placed in the east end. The rock in the east end is getting so
hard it has to be blasted with No. I Giant Powder.
August 18. One man
killed and another injured by blasting.
Sept. 1. Three
Ingersoll drills started for the first time in the west end.
At
this point Sidney added up progress and estimated what remained to
be done to meet the deadline. They would have to average 13.58
feet a day through May 21, 1888. The crews had yet to make as much
as 13 feet on any day.
Sept. 5. Work was
advanced so far that the smoke and gas incident from blasting had
to be remedied, and the steam fans were applied, which helped
clean the tunnel thereof.
Sept. 25. Drilling
delayed because of the breaking of rock above the face of the
tunnel caused by blasting shots. Five days to remedy.
Oct. 1. The end of
this month found us 33 feet short of the daily average required.
Oct. 15. Air boxes
were extended 265 feet in the west end.
Oct. 29. The tunnel
is in bad shape. The roof is cracking and rock is falling, which
causes delay.
Oct. 31. This month
showed a gain of 17 feet over the daily average required.
Nov. 1. A Foreman and
five men have quit because of some grievance and left camp.
Nov. 18. Snow sheds
over the dump track to be built.
Nov. 29. A land slide
into the crib became so extensive we had to stop work in the east
end for a week, which delays progress.
Nov. 30. This month
work fell behind 231/2 feet.
Dec. 1. Work delayed
by rain which caused east end of tunnel to be flooded.
Dec. 31. There was a
loss of the required average in December of 9 feet. Five months of
machine work in tunnel during year. 48 feet behind schedule.
The
delays in construction and the increasing stridency of the
campaign in Congress for forfeiture of the unearned land grants
caused NP President Harris early in 1887 to decide to lay a
temporary switchback track through the pass. That way train
service could begin before the tunnel was complete.
A
thousand more men were hired in March to shovel snow off the
mountain above the tunnel so that rails could be zig - zagged over
the summit. With the realization that they would have a direct
connection with the east a year ahead of schedule, Tacomans were
caught on a rising tide of enthusiasm. Tourist excursions were
organized to visit the end of the line and applaud the workers as
they marched off to the front, shovels on their shoulders.
"Beyond
the end of the track," wrote the Ledger's front line
correspondent, a clearing very like a new country road extends
along the edge of the river and fringes the hill and is soon lost
at the turn. A few men may be seen lifting and letting fall their
shovels here and there where the road leads over into full view.
Columns of blue smoke rise above the trees at irregular intervals.
A
few workmen are building a footbridge across the river back of the
station. The large tents are in the midst of a partial clearing
and about 30 horses and mules stamp and whinny under the trees
while pack men are binding to their backs bales of hay, barrels
and bundles of every description, while for every switch of the
tail or misstep of the burdened animal his heart is sent to
perdition forty times in the loud prayers of the drivers.
They
are leaving now, as late as 11 A.M., starting away by the trail,
which, a mere pathway, begins at once a precipitate ascent of the
mountain. They go in single file, the drivers or pack men more
noisy than before, keeping the horses in line. A few laborers have
just come in and are directed on toward the picks and the new dirt
and the smoke in the shadowy gap further along.
A
sound, as of distant cannonading, seems to shake the earth as it
rolls down from out of the mysterious shadows of the gulch and
beyond. Every few moments a thunder and crash through the woods
tells of the blasting rocks and the fall of giant trees.
And
this is the front.
By
March 28, 1877, the shovel brigade had cleared enough roadbed for
the start of track - laying above the tunnel. The rails sashayed
up the slope in a series of three switches on each side of the
mountain. At each switchback the train would run up to a dead end
and back onto the track climbing to the next switch. This Z -
route reduced the grade to 297 feet per mile.
The
last spike on the switchback was driven at two minutes past six on
the afternoon of June 1. Assistant General Manager J. M. Buckley
(for whom the Northern Pacific named the town of Buckley) served
as master of ceremonies. Mrs. H. S. Huson, wife of the assistant
project engineer, made the final tap on the spike with a bottle of
champagne. An experimental first train - two locomotives, a
baggage car, caboose, and a wooden - seated coach - was sent from
Yakima to Tacoma on June 6.
The
route having been tested, Charles Wright was carried over it in
triumph the next day in his private parlor car.
Scheduled
traffic over the Stampede began July 3. The first regular overland
train to the east - four coaches, with twenty passengers - left
Tacoma at 1:45 P.m. The first westbound passenger train arrived at
7:15 - seven hours late.
On
the Fourth of July Tacoma for the second time celebrated the
completion of the transcontinental. President Cleveland was
invited to speak but the celebrants had to settle for lank,
scruffy Eugene Semple, the governor. A grandstand was built at the
present site of Stadium High School. The papers claimed that
eighteen thousand visitors came to town, which would have been
more than the combined populations of Seattle and Olympia.
Festivities
lasted three days, marred only by a dispute in the hose - laying
contest between the Seattle and Tacoma fire departments. Somebody
recognized one of the Seattle volunteers as a professional
sprinter who specialized in running at carnivals with the handicap
of a fifty - pound flour sack on his shoulders.
The
switchback served more as a symbol of the Northern Pacific's
intention to complete the route than as a serviceable means of
transportation. The track had been laid so hastily on frozen
ground that much of it had to be replaced after the first thaw.
The grade was too steep to permit heavy freight. Crews drew hazard
pay for running the huge decapod lokeys that were hooked fore and
aft to trains of five passenger coaches or five light - loaded
freight cars for the eight miles between Martin on the east side
and Stampede on the west. There was a brakeman for every two cars.
Notwithstanding
the precautions there were accidents. Engineer Harvey Reed was
taking a decapod over the pass with a load of heavy bridge
timbers. The engine broke down. Reed tried to jockey the load over
the top with a little Baldwin, Engine 457. He pushed the freight
car up the first leg of the switchback but, as he backed up the
second leg, snow jammed into the sand pipes. When he called for
sand, none spilled onto the track.
The
wheels of the Baldwin began to spin on slick steel. Engine and car
slowed, halted, and, after a desperate wheel - spinning pause,
slipped backwards, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Reed
and his firemen jumped, landing safely in snowdrifts. Engine and
car sped down the slope, rocking around curves until they came to
a curving trestle where two men were working.
The
engine struck one man killing him instantly. His companion dropped
face down on the ties. Just as it reached him the engine lumped
the track, hurtled over the side without touching him, and plunged
into the ravine.
Engine
457 was restored to service, as was Engineer Reed. He was at the
throttle of the little Baldwin three months later when it was
overtaken and rammed from behind in a tunnel. The coal tender was
knocked loose but there was enough water left in the boiler for
Reed to get back to Marlin. For years old - timers yarned about
the arrival of the bob - tail lokey.
While
the trains ran the slalom course over the summit, Captain Sidney's
work gangs moled below, none too expeditiously. There were slides,
strikes, cave - ins, deaths from blasting, and some mayhem at
management level. Sidney persuaded Nelson to persuade President
Harris to remove the project engineer, with whom Sidney did not
see eye to eye.
And
somebody, somewhere along the line of authority, decided to
furnish slave - driver Sidney with a carrot as well as a club. A
bonus was offered. Each month, for every foot gained over the
necessary average of 13.58 feet a day, laborers doing continuous
duty were paid twenty - five cents extra, drill men and expert
workmen, fifty cents. The pace increased phenomenally.
On
September 1, 1887, a year after the Ingersolls were put at both
faces, work was 410 feet behind schedule. In the next eight and a
half months they made up 4541/2 feet - 1321/2 in April alone. It
cost the Bennetts thirty - three dollars extra for every man who
had worked steadily that thirty days - and it saved the
performance bond.
Moving
into May, when each blast might mean open space ahead, the
Bennetts offered a thousand dollars to the first man through the
bore with the fringe benefit of a steak dinner and whiskey for the
side he represented. Each team picked a tough little powder -
monkey who could wiggle and struggle. Foremen had problems keeping
the chosen men out of the area of flying rock when shots were
touched off.
Shortly
after noon on May 3, 1888, the men who rushed into the smoke and
rock dust after a blast felt a draft. The west side representative
wriggled into the hole and collided, head - on, with the eastern
representative.
As
the delegates butted each other, their constituents pushed in
behind, heaving and struggling, until at last the man from the
west was shoved through - skinned, bleeding, triumphant. For the
west this offset the statistic that through the long campaign the
east had moved more rock.
Captain
Sidney's wife had long insisted she would be the first person to
walk under the Cascade range. She at least was the first of her
sex. On her first crawl, Mrs. Bennett, a lady of heroic
proportions, became stuck. The eastern team managed to pull her
back by her ankles.
Chagrined
but determined she went down the tunnel, shed some undergarments,
and, according to legend, sent out for a bucket of lard to coat
her shoulders and hips. This time the men of the west gallantly
pulled her through. She arose, her dark hair powdered with blasted
basalt, and uttered the immortal words, "The drinks,
gentlemen, are on my husband."
In
Tacoma, along Cliff Avenue, the cannons thundered again. For the
third time the Northern Pacific had been completed, this time for
real.
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