Just three days later, disaster struck again at Rogers Pass in the Selkirk mountains of British Columbia near Revelstoke. A slide had blocked the path of a westbound Canadian Pacific train headed for Vancouver. They too were dealing with deep snow caused by successive Pineapple Expresses.
Working through the night to clear the tracks before the passenger train arrived, a work crew of mostly immigrant laborers had nearly finished clearing the tracks. Suddenly, at 11:30 p.m. on March 4, the adjacent mountain let loose its blanket of snow. It fell swiftly and buried the workers. Rescuers and medical personnel were rushed in by rail, but there was only one survivor, a locomotive fireman who had been thrown clear. Sixty-two other men were buried in the snow, some found still standing where they were hit while at work, frozen, it was said, like the victims of Pompeii.
At Rogers Pass, more than half of the victims were Japanese and many remained nameless. The use of immigrants for railroad work was common — the railroads often didn’t even know their names. At Wellington, many of the snow-shovelers were Italian immigrants. They were paid 15 cents an hour. Before the avalanche, some had walked off the job when the railroad bosses refused to up their pay in the miserable conditions. The Great Northern’s railroad baron, James J. Hill, was known as a penny-pincher. Still, the disaster forced him to build a longer railroad tunnel through the Cascades. The town of Wellington was abandoned. Up north, the Canadian Pacific eventually bypassed Rogers Pass and built a new tunnel elsewhere. The avalanche dangers were deemed too great.
Knute Berger
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