Writing Popular Science

Earlier this week, David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Through the Sandglass), and Brian Switek (Laelaps) began a series of blog posts about writing and publishing a popular science book. As someone who is bogged down in the middle of the process, I'm finding these posts very helpful. If you are thinking about writing non-fiction or, like me, muddling along and thirsting for practical and actionable advice, this series id a good place to start.

Writing a Book: The Idea, The Proposal, and Publishing
Writing a Book: Part 2, the Writing

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (1): making it interesting, finding a publisher
Thoughts on writing a popular science book (2): Writing and structure
Thoughts on writing a popular science book (3): the tedious but important stuff

So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 1: From idea to agent
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 2: The value of blogs
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 3: Writing the damn thing
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Open thread

I've been interviewed!

The tireless Bora Živcović, AKA Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock, one of the founders of the Science Online conferences, editor of the first Open Laboratory anthology, etc., has interviewed me as part of a series of interviews of participants in ScienceOnline2010. Like the conference, the subject of the interview is science communication. Bora will be putting these interviews up all year. Most of the interviewees are bloggers, many teach, and a few are paid science journalists. It's a very interesting crowd.

I won a t-shirt!

At long last my vast knowledge of mammoth stuff is paying off. If you ever wanted to know more about mammoth molars--and who wouldn't want to more about mammoth molars--this is you chance to learn it.

Noteworthy Day

Today is March 14.

Today is International Pi Day (3.14, get it?), which is traditionally observed by baking a pie.

Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879.

On this day in 1930, an eleven year old English school girl, Venetia Burney, recommended the name "Pluto" for the newly found planet.

Mammoths, Floods, and Whatnot

Construction workers drilling holes for a new overpass on I-5 near Ridgefield, Washington brought up pieces of mammoth ivory this January. Brad Clark, a Washington Transportation Department inspector, collected the pieces that, when reassembled, formed about four feet of the tip of a mammoth tusk. Mammoth ivory in Washington is nowhere near as common as in Alaska or northern Siberia, but it is not rare either. For that reason, the construction is going ahead without any attempt being made to see if there are more remains to be found. Even without digging up the rest of the remains, this tusk makes a departure point for some nice educational stories.


The tusk.
The mammoth in question is almost certainly a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) and not a woolly mammoth (M. primigenius). Columbian mammoths evolved earlier than woollies and immigrated to North America sooner. The simple version of their family tree shows them both as descendants of a common ancestor, the southern mammoth (M. meridionalis), which spread across Eurasia about four million years ago. One group of these mammoths, usually called the imperial mammoth (M. imperator) crossed into North America via the Bering land bridge at the beginning of the ice ages (c. 1.9 mya). The Columbians evolved from the imperials*. Back in Eurasia, the woollies evolved from the main group of southern mammoths. About 500,000 years ago, the woollies emigrated into North America. Both kinds of mammoths went extinct around the same time.

In North America, the two types of mammoths lived in different ecological zones and physical regions. The woollies stayed in northern grasslands close to the ice cap and the Columbians lived in a variety of different zones from the edge of the tundra all the way down to the edge of the tropical rainforests in Central America. So far, no woollies have been found west of the Rocky Mountains. The Ridgefield fragments have been sent to the Burke Museum here in Seattle, where Bax Barton will make a final identification of the species. Some mastodons have been found in the Pacific Northwest, so it is possible that the ivory is not from a mammoth at all. What would be frustrating would be if the ivory turns out to belong to a woolly. That would make the find important enough to warrant further investigation, but an administrative nightmare since the decision has already been made to continue working on the highway, which is the main north-south artery on the West Coast.

It is unlikely that this mammoth has any great scientific significance. However, if we could know its personal history, we would see that the mammoth's last hours witnessed to one of the most dramatic moments in northwestern geological history. The Oregonian article mentions it rather simply at the end of the article, "The tusk was buried about 30 feet deep in sediments piled up during the Missoula floods." I've written about these floods before.

During the last ice age, two ice sheets covered what is now Canada and extended into what is now the United States. The larger sheet, the Laurentian, was centered on Hudson Bay and, at its peak, extended almost to the Ohio River. The smaller ice sheet was a collection of mountain glaciers that grew together to form a single sheet. Geologists call this the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. It only extended to the US/Canada border region. At the end of the ice age, when the Laurentian and Fennoscanian (European) ice sheets began to melt, the changed global weather patterns caused the Cordilleran sheet to lurch south for a couple thousand years before it too melted. Eastern Washington was just as conservative then as it is now. The local mammoths cited this change as proof that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by elitist ground sloths.

The western part of Montana, between the Continental Divide on the crest of the Rockies and the Idaho state line on the crest of the Bitterroot Mountains--an area about the size of West Virginia--is drained by the Clark Fork River. Unlike most rivers in the United States, the Clark Fork flows north. It loops across the Idaho panhandle near the Canadian border and joins the Columbia River in the extreme northeastern corner of Washington. When the Cordilleran Ice Sheet lurched southward, a branch of the ice sheet called the Purcell Lobe pushed into Idaho near the location of the present day town of Sandpoint and blocked the Clark Fork. Behind the Purcell Lobe all of the drainage of the Clark Fork was damned up, eventually forming a Great Lake sized body of water we call Glacial Lake Missoula. When the lake was full, the future location of the town of Missoula was beneath a thousand feet of water.

Because ice is lighter than water, an ice dam needs to be about ten percent higher than the water behind it in order to be stable. If the water gets higher than that, it essentially floats the dam off its foundation. That happened to Glacial Lake Missoula when the water was almost two thousand feet deep at the dam. The collapse of the dam was catastrophically sudden. The lake pressed against the base of the dam with a pressure of nine hundred pounds per square inch. It took no more than a crack for the lake to get under the dam and tear it to shreds. The collapse only took a few hours.

Five hundred cubic miles of water flooded across Eastern Washington tearing up everything in its way. Hundreds of square miles of top soils were scoured down to bedrock. Grass, trees, and animals were carried away. At the Wallula Gap, a narrows where the Columbia River becomes the border between Washington and Oregon, the entire flood was forced into the channel of the river. In the Columbia Gorge, where the river carves its way through Cascade Mountains, the flood appeared as a brown wall of water, several hundred feet high, traveling fifty miles an hour, pushing gale force winds ahead of it. For a brief moment, the Columbia carried several times more water than all the rivers in the world combined.


"Age's End" © 2005 Stev H. Ominski.
The flood waters arrive in the Columbia Gorge east of Portland. The viewer is standing on Crown Point looking toward Beacon Rock. This is one of an ongoing series of paintings by Ominski.
At narrow spots in the river the flood waters backed up forming temporary lakes. Geologists call the lake behind the Wallula Gap Lake Lewis, after Mr. Clark's travelling companion. Another lake formed over the present day locations of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The water that blasted through the Columbia Gorge spread out over the basin where the two cities now sit. About thirty miles below Portland, the river narrows again near a tiny town called Kalama. The Kalama Gap is nowhere near as impressive as the Columbia Gorge or the Wallula Gap, but it was sufficient to force the flood waters to back up and form a lake. Lake Allison, named after the geologist who mapped it, was about four hundred feet deep over downtown Portland and filled the Willamette River valley a hundred miles southward to the outskirts of Eugene. Fans of the University of Oregon fighting Ducks will be happy to know that Corvallis, home of their arch-rivals, the Oregon State Beavers, was underwater.


Lake Allison and Ridgefield, WA. Source.
As the water pooled behind the Kalama Gap, some of the vast amount of debris that it carried began to settle. The topsoil of Eastern Washington filled the Willamette valley to produce fertile farmland. Melting bergs from the ice dam deposited rocks that had been encased in the ice. A large meteorite was dropped near West Linn. A mammoth settled to the bottom near Ridgefield.

Until the radiocarbon dates are back, it will be hard to say exactly when the mammoth met its doom. The problem is, there was more than one Lake Missoula flood. After the first flood, the Purcell Lobe glacier surged forward, once again damming the Clark Fork, forming a new Lake Missoula, which, about fifty years later, breached the dam. This process was repeated as many as forty times over a 2500 year period. As the ice age ended and the glaciers got smaller, each ice dam was lower than the one before and the flood, consequently, smaller than the one before. However, since the Ridgefield mammoth was found only a few feet above the current level of the Columbia River, it could have been deposited by any of the floods.

It's equally hard to say where the mammoth came from. It could have been grazing right under the dam in Idaho when the flood waters caught it. It could have been caught somewhere in Eastern Washington or along the Columbia Gorge. It might have been in the Willamette Valley and been carried to Ridgefield as the waters of lake Allison drained. Or it might have drowned and settled to earth on the same spot.

Was anyone there to see the floods and this mammoth's last days? The answer is a firm "maybe." From organic debris in the sediments laid down, the Lake Missoula floods have been dated to have happened from 15,000-13,000 years ago. Until recently, archaeologists had no undisputed evidence of people in North America before the Clovis culture that began around 13,000 years ago. The Clovis people are believed to have traveled down the center of the continent between the Laurentian and Cordilleran Ice Sheets. This would have put them in Colorado around the same time as the last floods. A fine collection of Clovis tools was discovered in Eastern Washington in 1987, proving they did make it into the Northwest, but neither that site nor the last flood have been dated exactly enough to indicate whether this group was around to witness the floods.

During the 2002, '03, and '04 excavation seasons a group of paleontologists and anthropologists recovered human coprolites (also known as old poop) from the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon. Radiocarbon dating placed the oldest of the coprolites at 14,300 years old and the youngest at 13,000. The dates make it possible for the poopers to have witnessed any of about thirty floods. The Paisley Caves are two hundred miles south of the Columbia River, so it is also possible that the poopers never made it that far north. So far, no human remains or artifacts have been found in the flood deposits. For now, whether or not there were human witnesses to the floods is an open question.

The poop. Source.
Finally, did the floods have anything to do with the extinction of the mammoths and other Quaternary megafauna? On this we can be more definite. No. The last floods happened a good thousand years before the generally accepted date for the North American extinctions. Most disputes about the extinction date put it more recently, not further back.


Columbian mammoths as visualized by the Czech illustrator Zdenek Burian.
One last educational note: It's only appropriate that the Ridgefield mammoth ended up on the Washington side of the river. The Columbian mammoth is the official state fossil of Washington. Over in Oregon, it is the dawn redwood (Metasequoia). Nebraska also claims the Columbian mammoth, but they claim all types of mammoths. If they can't settle on one type of mammoth, I'm not sure they deserve a state fossil at all.

* Not to be confused with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Anthony & The Imperials.

The Wellington Avavlanche, 1910

One hundred years ago, it was snowing in the North Cascade Mountains. By itself, there was nothing unusual about that fact. It always snows in the Cascades around this time of year. We depend on it. The ski resorts need snow to stay open. The cities of Puget Sound rely on the snowpack laid down during the late winter for their water supply during the summer. Farms and orchards on the east side of the mountains depend on that same melting snowpack to water their crops. The salmon who have been spawning in Cascade streams since the end of the last ice age need that same meltwater to make their final journey. But the late February storms of 1910 were something different.

Though the name was not yet in use nor the pattern discerned, the winter of 1909-10 was a la Niña winter. La Niña weather begins when cooler than usual surface water appears in the equitorial Pacific and drifts westward to pile up against South America. As the cool water patch grows it begins to affect weather patterns all over the world. La Niña years, in the Pacific Northwest are colder and wetter than usual. In the mountains, colder and wetter translates as more snow. In 1910, there was lots more snow than usual. Old timers watched the snow get deeper and murmured that they had never seen a winter like this. Records bore them out. All over the northwest, towns recorded their coldest days, deepest snow, and most days of snow since recordkeeping began.

By the beginning of the year, the snow was twenty to thirty feet deep in the high Cascades and over ten feet deep in the passes. Railroad work crews, even with the most advanced rotary plows available, were stretched to the limit trying to keep the tracks open. Accidents and delays plagued the railroads on an almost weekly basis from the beginning of November. A strike in the Great Northern Railway's switch yards added to the stress of getting equipment and supplies were they were needed when they were needed.

Snow is a complicated substance. The temperature, texture of the flakes, and amount of wind during snowfall give each layer of the snowpack its own character. Some layers will be soft and loose, some hard and brittle, some light, and some dense. Some combinations of layers hold together and some slide against each other. The series of storms that began on February 21, 1910 began cold and grew warmer each day the storms continued. The later layers of snow were wetter and heavier than the earlier. Combined with the sheer depth of the snow, it created textbook conditions for a catastrophic avalanche.

I first heard about the Wellington avalanche from my mother, when I was seven. Mom raised my sisters and me to be readers and lovers of words. Thanks to Mom, we all read for pleasure, play word games, have larger than average vocabularies, and talk rilly good. Also. However, being a full-time mom, she never had much time to read for herself. One rare time, during my childhood, that she did read a book just for pleasure, she managed to fit it into her version of good mothering by retelling the story to me.

The book was Northwest Disaster: Avalanche and Fire by Ruby El Hult. One of the other Moms read it first and the book was being passed around the neighborhood in the fall of 1963. Northwest Disaster tells the stories of two catastrophes, both of which happened in 1910. The fire part of he title refers to the Big Blowup, a single wildfire in August of that year that burned about three million acres, destroyed a large part of the town of Wallace, Idaho, killed eighty seven people, and led to the no burn policy that guided the US Forest Service for most of the Twentieth Century. The avalanche part of the title refers to Wellington avalanche in Stevens Pass, Washington, which crushed two trains and killed ninety six people. I suppose bedtime stories like this helped turn me into the person I am today.


You had your bedtime stories. I had mine.
Wednesday, February 23, 1910

In the wee hours of Wednesday, James H. O'Neill faced a hard set of choices. O'Neill was the head of the Cascade Division of the Great Northern Railway. As such, he was responsible for keeping the trains moving through the passes. He was responsible for the condition of the tracks, the equipment, supplies, personnel, and had the authority to make emergency changes to the schedule. That morning, it was, once again, snowing in the mountains and he had an insufficient number of plows to escort the trains over Stevens Pass. With two priority trains approaching the pass from the east, only one plow on that side of the mountains, and snow piling up on the tracks, his choices were limited. He could delay the first train until the second train caught up and convoy both of them over the mountains behind the plow. He could delay both trains and wait for the storm to pass. He could shuttle both trains onto a competitor railroad's track in order to cross on a pass further south. He could send one train through with the plow and hope the tracks were still clear enough when the second train came through a few hours later.

O'Neill was not a long distance manager While he could have monitored events from an office in Everett, he preferred to travel in a private railcar to the scenes of problems and directly involve himself in their solutions. On Monday, when the latest storms began, O'Neill ordered up the car and traveled to Wellington at the top of Stevens Pass. He could see how heavily the snow was falling, but, after forty hours of precipitation, he figured the storm must be near its end. Two trains had just made their way up the west side, where the snow was heaviest. O'Neill chose to gamble that the way would be safe enough for the two trains from the east to get through. He telegraphed the Leavenworth station to send the No. 25 passenger train through and to wave the No. 27 fast mail train through as soon as it arrived.

The first part of O'Neill's gamble paid off. The next two passes to the south, Snoqualmie and Stampede were both closed due to the snow. Even if O'Neill had opted for the expense and embarrassment of begging the Great Northern's competitors for help, that gambit would have failed. His two trains, though separated by two hours, were able to make to the top of the pass without incident. There, things began to go wrong. At about the same time he gave the go ahead to the No. 25, O'Neill sent a plow, under the command of Homer Purcell, west from Wellington. Three miles out of town, at a sharp bend in the tracks called Windy Point,the crew of the rotary ran into a large slide that covered almost a quarter mile of tracks with deep compacted snow and debris. O'Neill did not learn about the blockage until the two trains were already at the top of Stevens Pass.

Stevens Pass was the weakest point in the entire Great Northern line. In 1890, John F. Stevens had been tasked with finding the most direct route between the Wenatchee farm country on the Columbia River and Seattle. Stevens quickly discovered that was no good route in that part of the Cascades, but the least bad route ran in a fairly straight line from Wenatchee to Everett, just north of Seattle. On either side of the mountains, two rivers cut narrow canyons towards each other: the Skykomish and Tye Rivers from the West and the Wenatchee River and Nason Creek from the East. In places, the canyons narrowed to become gorges, but the real engineering challenge lay right at the center of the route. If the two approaches were knife cuts into the Cascades, then the the knife itself was standing on edge blocking the connection. In a few short miles, the mountains shot up over fifteen hundred feet. When the railroad was completed in 1893, Stevens Pass was crossed by a series of switchbacks that were, depending on your point of view, either an engineering marvel or a railroading nightmare. The rough and tumble work camps on either side of the pass--Wellington and Cascade--became stations where Great Northern added engines to haul trains over the hump. By 1900, a tunnel had been built between Wellington and Cascade, cutting five hundred feet off the pass, but the two stations lived on to attach electric engines for the tunnel trip, house railroad workers, and service snow plows.

On Wednesday morning, the passengers aboard No. 25 awoke to find themselves not approaching Seattle, as they expected, but, instead, sitting in Cascade waiting for the tracks on the other side of the pass to be cleared. On the passing tracks next to them, sat No. 27, the fast mail train. As their train had no dining car, the passengers walked over to the railroadmen's cookhouse for breakfast along with the mail train employees and track laborers. Conductor Joseph Pettit managed to quiet some of the grumbling by describing the meal as a wild west adventure. Even so, not all of the passengers were charmed at the thought of rubbing shoulders with working class "scum of the earth" as one passenger described their dining companions.

Thursday, February 24, 1910

On the other side of the pass, that same "scum of the earth" worked all day to clear the Windy Point avalanche. Late in the evening, the plow from Wellington broke through to meet a plow fighting in from the other side. The two combined as a double rotary (capable of plowing forward and backwards) and worked their way back to Wellington, arriving just after midnight on Thursday. For a moment, things looked good. The worst blockage between the Pass and Seattle was now clear and another rotary plow, which till now had been in the shop in Everett, was back on line and bringing two cars of coal up to the pass.

O'Neil's optimism was short lived. While Purcell recoaled the double rotary to finish clearing the tracks down from the pass the storm picked up again. Recoaling the rotaries involved moving up a spur off the main track. The spur itself needed to be plowed first. As each each part of the double--rotary, locomotive, rotary--took on fuel, the snow fell fast enough to stick them in place. A crew of shovelers had to unstick the work train so that the next part could be moved into place. This operation had to be repeated for coal and water. An operation that should have take less than an hour took the entire night. At the same time, the stalled trains at Cascade had been sitting in the falling snow for a full day and needed to be dug out. The double rotary on the east side of the mountains, supervised by William Harrington, had to be brought through the tunnel to repeat the fueling operation. That took up more hours.


Even without new snow or slides the tracks needed constant clearing. Snow that fell onto the tracks from slumping walls was enough to stop a train that was not equipped with a plow. This picture was was taken one week after the avalanche when the had melted and compacted some.
Harrington and O'Neill picked up shovels and joined the crews at Cascade on Thursday evening trying to get the trains moving as soon as possible. The task was completed after dark that evening. By then, new problems had arisen. The power lines on the east side of the pass went down. This meant the telegraphs and telephones didn't work and there was no power for the electric engines to pull the trains through. The latter problem was solved easily enough. The tunnel sloped downward from Cascade to Wellington. All that was necessary was for the locomotives to pull into the tunnel and throttle down, then rolling through in the railroad equivalent of putting a car in neutral and letting gravity do the work. The electric engines had only been available since the year before and the engineers were well practiced in this maneuver.

The lack of communication turned out to be the more important problem. While O'Neill was incommunicado at Cascade, Purcell had taken his double rotary and begun clearing the new snow off the tracks on the west side. At Windy Point, he discovered another major slide. Digging into this obstruction, the rotary plow ran into a stump brought down by the slide. The frozen wood tore up the plow mechanism rendering that half or the double useless. All in all, the day's back breaking labor had managed to move the trains three miles closer to Seattle.

Friday, February 25, 1910

Until Friday morning, being late was the worst thing the passengers and mail clerks on the two trains had to worry about. Lewis Jessup and John Merritt were lawyers on their way to Olympia to argue opposite sides of a case before the state Supreme Court (the court went ahead without them). Sarah Jane Covington was on her way home to celebrate her fifty-first wedding anniversary. Numerous salesmen and business travellers had appointments. Libby Latsch had an hair accessories company in Seattle to run. The mail train was supposed to be an express and faced fines for being late. That all changed around noon.

Not long after the passengers returned from breakfast at Bailets Hotel in Wellington, word began to circulate about a disaster at Cascade. Before dawn, when the cook, Harry Elerker and his assistant, John Bjerenson, were doing their baking for the coming day, an avalanche had tumbled down off the mountain behind the cook shack, crushing the building and killing both men. As the news that the two men who had cheerfully fed the stranded passengers for the previous two days were now dead, additional details arrived. The course of the fatal avalanche not only destroyed the dining hall where they had eaten, it also crossed the tracks and, had they still been there, would have crushed the mail train and at least two cars on the passenger train. Suddenly the passengers felt very vulnerable on the mountain.

Looking at Wellington in the daylight did nothing to reassure the passengers. Wellington was little more than a whistle stop stuck to the side of a mountain. In the shadow of Stevens Pass, Wellington had been built on a speck of relatively level land where the upper reaches of Tye River were joined by Haskell Creek. According to the 1910 census, there were 169 people in Wellington. Most of those were temporary railroad laborers. The biggest buildings in town were Bailets Hotel, a bunkhouse for the railroad, and some buildings for the maintenance of the plows and electric engines. Scattered among them were a few small cabins that were home to railroad employees who lived there full time. On the northeast side of the town, where the railroad emerged from the tunnel, three short spurs fanned away from the main track. These were where most maintenance work was performed. A few hundred yards away, on the other side of town, were four more spurs. On the mountain side of the mainline was a track that led up hill to stop runaway trains. Next downhill was the track where coal and water were taken on. Then came the main tracks. Finally, hanging about a hundred and fifty feet above Tye River were two passing tracks. It was on these that the two trains were parked, the passenger train next to the main line and the mail train next to the edge.


Wellington, 1909. The tall building at the center is Bailets Hotel. The mouth of the tunnel is just off the right side of the picture. The train is crossing the junction of the main tracks, the fueling spur, and the passing tracks.
To the stranded passengers, the slope above their train looked very steep and the snow on it appeared heavy and ominous. Some of the passengers approached Joe Pettit, the conductor, to let him know how nervous they were and to ask about other other places to park the trains while they waited for the road west to finally open. Pettit patiently explained why the the passing tracks were the safest place to be. To those who wanted to move the train into the tunnel, he explained that, in the tunnel, they would have to turn off the heat to avoid suffocation from the fumes and that they could easily be sealed into the tunnel by an avalanche. To those who wanted to be moved into the snow shed downhill, he pointed out that the covered tracks had been built because that was the place where avalanches had happened in the past and that the shed was too short to cover the whole train. To those who wanted to be moved onto the maintenance spurs, he pointed out that the spurs had not been plowed since the storms began and that they would have to recall the plows to clear it and that it would be a full day's to to do it. Finally, he explained that it was the opinion that in the opinion of experienced mountain hands, the slope above the trains was not the type of slope that produced avalanches. To back up this claim, many of the railroad workers moved onto the trains, judging their location to be safer than their bunkhouse.

While Pettit tried to calm the passengers, O'Neill and the two plow supervisors, Purcell and Harrington, worked east and west of the Wellington to open the tracks. Reorganizing the rotary plows had taken some work. The snow continued to fall all day Friday with gale force winds piling it into deep drifts. The temperature had begun to rise making the new snow heavier and wetter. As on Thursday, it took hours just to refuel the rotaries. The damaged plow was pushed up to the end of the fueling track. O'Neill and Purcell took another rotary and returned to the Windy Point slide. Harrington took a double rotary and headed for Cascade to clear the slide that killed the cook house crew, but first he had to plow the rail yard just to get to the tunnel. This along with the refueling took most of the day.

By this time, the storm had lasted longer than any in memory. Later examination of weather records would suggest that it was actually three storms coming in off the Pacific that combined in the mountains to seem like one continuous event. Not that such knowledge would have mattered to O'Neill. Even if the snow had stopped on Friday afternoon, he realized that it might take several days to get the tracks cleared. O'Neill was running out of resources. The rotary plows burned through coal at an alarming rate and they had run through most of the supply at Wellington. J.J. Dowling was bringing two cars of coal and another plow from Everett. He had already passed Scenic Hot Springs, a mere eight hundred feet downhill from Windy Point, but almost eight miles by railroad. By late Friday, O'Neill's mission had been reduced from clearing the tracks down the mountain to the immediate task of getting to the coal. On the east side of the mountain, O'Neill believed there were three cars of coal sitting on a siding at Merritt, a station a dozen mile east of Cascade. During a brief break when the telegraph lines were open, he instructed Harrington to continue past Cascade to retrieve that coal.

Saturday, February 26, 1910

Just before four in the morning, O'Neill, Purcell, and the crew of rotary plow X-801 broke through the blockage at Windy Point. O'Neill was tempted to continue downhill till he met Dowling and the coal, but with no idea how far that might be, he decided the prudent thing was to stay close to Wellington and keep their stretch of the tracks open. He ordered the plow back to the pass to scrounge what coal they could from the other engines and to give the crew a well deserved hot meal. In Wellington he ran into, not one, but two growing mutinies.

The most dangerous came from the manual laborers, the shovelers who accompanied the plows. These men were informal employees of the railroad, mostly immigrants, who were hired on a temporary basis when there was dirty work to be done They were being pushed to perform superhuman tasks and were beginning to break under the strain. What most separated them from the train crews, was pay. Manual laborers for the Great Northern Railway were paid fifteen cents and hour and then billed for room and board. On Saturday many of the workers began a slowdown strike demanding better pay. But many had had enough and were not sticking around to negotiate. They were packing their bedrolls and leaving.

Feeling trapped and needing to do something, the men of the train had begun looking for someone with more power than the conductor, Pettit, to give their complaints. Friday evening, a committee of male passengers had buttonholed O'Neill's secretary, Earl Longcoy, and demanded that he arrange a meeting with his boss. O'Neill knew there would be no point in a meeting. The trains were in the safest place and his time would be better spent getting them off the mountain by clearing the tracks. He told Longcoy to make excuses and returned to work.


A rotary plow at the Wellington coal chute. This state of the art piece of equipment could cut through snow up to thirteen feet deep, but used enormous amounts of fuel. Besides the boiler that powered the rotary blades, the plow needed at least one locomotive to push it. In snow deeper than thirteen feet, the plow depended on a crew of shovelers. The shovelers were also needed to remover rocks, branches and other rubble from avalanche snow. Some of the avalanches that trapped the two trains at Wellington in 1910 were as much as thirty five feet deep.
It was just after sunrise when O'Neill rounded up a crew, boarded the plow and once more headed downhill to do battle with the mountain. During the night, the snow had turned to sleet, and, with the temperature rising in the morning, the sleet turned to rain. The rain saturated the snow making it heavier, more compact, and more likely to slide. And slide it did, covering the tracks at Windy Point once more. Once more, O'Neill ordered Purcell to drive into the wall of snow. Their progress was painfully slow, sometimes measures in inches, and it ate up their coal before they were halfway through. There was nothing to do except head back to Wellington and see if they had missed any coal in their last raid. They did not make it to Wellington. When they turned back they found another slide behind them. O'Neill would not be breaking out. If there was any hope of the trapped trains getting out under their own power, it was up to Harrington.

O'Neill's hope for Harrington was in vain. After battling all night to work their way through a large slide near Berne, about halfway between Cascade and Merritt, Harrington's crew broke through at midday and proceeded east in in fairly good order. The snow was deep but gave way to rotary's blades. For a short time it looked as if he would make it to Merritt and its precious three cars of coal. Nine miles east of Cascade at a narrow spot in the canyon called Gaynor, a huge slide rumbled off the mountains onto the track narrowly missing the plow. Like O'Neill, Harrington pushed into the pack, but he knew he was defeated. By late afternoon, down the last ton of coal, Harrington ordered the crew to stop. He instructed the engine crew to keep the boilers warm and started the long hike back to Wellington to give his boss the bad news. The mountains had won.

The passengers heard about the fading hopes of an early escape after returning from dinner. The men called a meeting in the smoking car. It was a odd affair carried out according to paliamentary procedures. Most of the conversation revolved around moving the train into the tunnel. Once more, Pettit patiently explained why that was a bad idea, adding that it was now also impossible. There was no longer a plow in Wellington to dig the train out and clear the tracks to the tunnel. Even if there had been, there was no longer enough coal. After that other issues were discussed--could a doctor be brought in for the the less healthy passengers, should they write a letter to the editors of the Seattle Times--but the meeting trailed off with no decisions being made. Afterwards, some of the men discussed the possibility of following the quitting laborers and leaving on foot.

Sunday, February 27, 1910

On Sunday, the passengers held a makeshift church service. One of the Passengers, James Thompson, was a Presbyterian minister. The mail clerks from the other train were invited and several other railroad employees and laborers attended. The sermon was on patience.

Even before the first hymn was sung, O'Neill and two companions set out on foot for Scenic Hot Springs to find a working telegraph. O'Neill needed to update his superiors about the situation. He knew he might have to evacuate some of the passengers and pack food in for the others. He would need to replace the departing laborers. He was still the supervisor of the Cascade Division. He could not just call for help and wait for it to arrive. He would have to make all the arrangements himself.

One of O'Neill's companions was a brakeman named "Big Jerry" Wickham who was mostly along because of his size. Big Jerry went first and broke trail for the others. After they passed the stranded rotary, O'Neill had a horrifying demonstration of the danger everyone faced; a mass of snow up slope from them broke loose and swept Big Jerry off the tracks into the canyon below. O'Neill and the rotary crew looked for signs that the brakeman had survived, but none was to be found. This hardened O'Neill's conviction that the safest thing for the passengers to do was to stay put.

After the church service broke up, several of the men on the train began exploring the possibility of hiking down the mountain. The railroad employees all tried to discourage them. One passenger tried to hire a trapper who lived in Wellington. The trapper refused saying he did not want to be responsible when the inevitably killed themselves. In the end, three decided to ignore all the warnings and go anyway. Lewis Jessup and John Merritt, the lawyers who had missed their Supreme Court date, and a dry goods store owner, George Loveberry Bundled up and started out on the trail broken by Big Jerry. On the way, they ran into two younger men, Milton Horn and Milton Rea, who had been checking out the slide. On a whim, the two joined the trek.

Forty seven years later, this is the part of my mother's telling that I remember most vividly. These were businessmen completely unprepared for the mountain. They wore stylish wool coats and city shoes that provided to protection against the cold and wet. The storms had not let up; it was sleeting as they trudged on. Each footstep punched in the snow filled with ice water. I pictured tiny black dots, like ants, crawling over the white slope. Reaching the rotary, they heard about the fate of Big Jerry, but decided to keep going.

At Windy Point, part of the track was covered by a snow shed. They would have entered the dark hole and stomped the slush off their shoes. Right at the point, someone--O'Neill or the departing laborers--had punched a hole in the roof. Climbing out, they could see the lodge at Scenic Hot Springs, eight hundred feet below. The right of way for the telegraph cut a path through the trees straight uphill from the lodge to the snowshed. The slope was too steep to climb down, so they pulled their coattails up between their legs and tobogganed down on their butts. They could have died a half dozen ways, run into a tree or tumbled and broken their necks. In Mom tellings, it's always your neck that gets broken. Either that you your eye gets poked out. Somehow all five made it to the bottom with necks and eyes intact. They ran the last few hundred yards to the lodge and threw themselves through the door--where they found Big Jerry, regaling everyone with tall tales about how he escaped certain doom. Merritt had a drink and and headed straight to the telegraph office where he wrote to the others "Arrived safe. Do not come."


The lodge at Scenic Hot Springs, directly below Windy Point. Trains from Everett were able to reach Scenic with very little trouble. From there, the tracks left the bottom of Tye canyon and climbed over a thousand feet up the canyon wall to Wellington.
Monday, February 28, 1910

The mood among the passengers was decidedly gloomy on Monday. Many had been kept awake by the sound of avalanches in the mountains. One of the passengers, John Rogers, actually saw a small avalanche slide off the old switchbacks behind the employees' cabins. The train was now almost completely buried; by the mail clerks informal measurement, the snow had been falling at a rate of almost three feet a day. Additional demands for a meeting with O'Neill went unheeded. The telegraph lines were down again after operating for only a few hours Sunday evening. The sight of additional small groups of departing laborers left them feeling abandoned and helpless. This feeling was made worse when their patient mother hen, the conductor Joe Pettit, announced he would be hiking out to Scenic in order to organize the supplies being packed in.

Pettit's announcement was the deciding factor for several of the men who had been considering hiking out. At noon, Pettit, six male passengers including Rogers, four Great Northern employees, and one laborer left Wellington. The trail broken by previous groups had been cleared somewhat by rain and melting. The trip, though quite unpleasant, did not take much longer than it would have in dry weather. On reaching Scenic, Pettit telegraphed Wellington to tell the others that it was safe for the able bodied to follow. The message never made it, because the lines were once more out of commission.

The qualification of able bodied was important. The remaining passengers were being whittled down to women, children, the old, and three invalids, along with those who felt duty bound to stay with the train. The latter group included three husbands and fathers, the mail clerks, locomotive crews, and Rev. Thompson.

The lodge at Scenic, normally a quaint spa in the mountains, had become the headquarters for the rescue effort. Several trains bringing supplies and laborers. After determining what was needed and telegraphing instructions to Everett and reports to the corporate offices in Minnesota, O'Neill put together a work crew and joined Dowling on the last functioning rotary plow. Pettit organized the parties who would be packing supplies in the next day, bid farewell to the passengers who he had led out and climbed the mountain back to Wellington.

Pettit returned too late to escort a second group out, but his comforting presence and encouraging news about the trail considerably lightened the mood on the passenger train. A group of men who had declined to join the previous two groups of escapees, decided to make the hike in the morning. Two middle-aged businessmen went to Bailets Hotel and bought a three day supply of food for the two hour journey. Lilly Lasch, the hair accessories manufacturer, and Nellie Sharp, a divorced, aspiring travel writer, defied the men and announced that they would joining their group. A different faction was still leery of the trail. This faction, led by Henry White, a salesman from Seattle, typed up a petition, once more demanding a meeting with O'Neill with the intention of forcing him to send fifty fresh laborers up from Scenic with ropes and other equipment to escort them out. While no one in town would make commitments for O'Neill, the trainmaster, Aurthur Blackburn consented to round up as many free laborers as he could to travel with the passengers on Tuesday.

Tuesday, March 1, 1910, 1:42 AM

Sometime after one, the storm changed character. A lightning storm pushed in from the West and began rattling the mountains. A few people in Wellington were awakened by the first crash of thunder, but most slept on, unaware of this latest change in their situation.

A modern witness to the catastrophe might have recognised one of the great cliches from horror movies and begun the briefest hint of a smile before realizing that the horror was real and all the more awful for that reality. It was a strobe-light disaster that took place in pitch blackness, punctuated by sudden lightening flash illuminations. The only audience to this cinemagraphic production was John Wenzel, one of the few laborers still in Wellington. Wenzel was awake and fully dressed when the lightning storm began. He was standing on the porch of Bailets Hotel nervously watching the storm and just happened to be looking in the right direction.

FLASH

Thirty acres of the mountain broke loose and slowly began slowly to slide.

FLASH

The rumbling mass plucked up a workers shack, the damaged rotary plow, O'Neill's private car, and an electric engine near the coal chute and continued downhill.

FLASH

The slide reached the passing tracks and enveloped the trains.

FLASH

No sign of the trains was to be seen. The moving hillside continued its irresistible slide into the canyon on hundred and fifty feet below. All the while the air was filled wit the rumble of snow and boulders and the snap of entire trees being broken.

Henry White was jolted awake by the sound of the snow hitting the train, not a crash, but a loud splat. He knew right away that this was the end. He felt the damn shame of it all, that the children he had helped entertain should go in manner that should have been prevented. Then he had a brief moment to wonder why things were taking so long. The survivors in White's car all describe the sleeper hitting something and splitting open. White's section began to spin and he was thrown clear. He blacked out. When he came to, he was lying on the snow in his nightshirt. He looked up at the sky and thought, this is "just like an old fashioned Minnesota thunderstorm."

Only a handful of men--all men--were either thrown free of buried shallowly enough that they could struggle out. All of them were in some degree of shock, but tried to find and help others. Soon they were joined by men from the town with lanterns and shovels. In the town, the wives of two railroad employees, Alathea Sherlock and Mrs. Bob Miles, took over the bunkhouse and set up a temporary hospital. As word of the disaster got out, volunteers and supplies, along with reporters and photographers, poured in from Everett, Seattle, and beyond.

There were perhaps one hundred twenty five people on the trains that night. Forty four were passengers on the No. 25. The mail clerks and train crews were all on board their respective trains. In addition, a large number of other railroad employees and laborers were sleeping on the trains because they thought the trains were in a safer location than the bunkhouse. Ninety six people were killed.

That's the story my Mom told me. She left off the aftermath of inquests, recriminations, and lawsuits. Blame for the disaster was fought in law courts and the court of public opinion for over three years. Mom, especially, left out the details of the dead.


The wreckage and the rescuers. John Juleen, a photographer from Everett, was the first to reach the scene with a camera.
As in any disaster, the survivors and rescuers struggled to make sense out of the seeming senselessness of who lived and who died. Of four families on board, two were completely destroyed. The Becks, mother father and three children, were all killed. Originally from California, the family was giving up a homestead and returning there because they could not handle the Washington winters. George Davis and his three year old daughter, Thelma, both died. They were returning from Spokane where they had just buried Thelma's mother. Elsewhere on the train, the Gray family, John, Anna, and baby Varden, were all safely rescued.

To many observers, the most heartbreaking case was the Starrett family. Ida Starrett's husband, a railroad employee had been killed in a yard accident just before Christmas, leaving her with three children to raise. After settling his estate, her parents had come down from British Columbia to take her home with them. The first of the family to be discovered was her seven year old son, Raymond, who was discovered on the snow with a two foot piece of wood sticking out of his head. The hotel owner W. R. Bailets went into shock at the sight. In fact, the wood had not pierced his skull and a telegrapher, Basil Sherlock, performed impromptu surgery with a straight razor to remove it. Raymond had a complete recovery. His grandfather, William May, and his sister, Lillian, were both killed. His grandmother, though injured, was rescued. His mother and baby brother, Francis, were missing. They were together, buried deep under the wreckage. Ida Starrett was pinned, face down, with a log on her back and the baby against her stomach. For hours, she faded in and out of consciousness. She felt felt Little Francis' breathing grow weaker and, finally, stop.

In the daylight, the rescue had turned to the grim business of recovering and identifying bodies. Many of them were torn to shreds by the vast forces of the avalanche. Susan Bailet opened the hotel bar and sent down bottles of whiskey to fortify the men involved in this gruesome job. Even so, it was too much for some. Eleven hours after the disaster, and hours after the last living person had been pulled from the wreckage, Charles Andrews reported hearing a sound, "a mewing far off, like a kitten." Realizing it was a human voice, the men frantically began digging closest to the sound. They found one dead body and then another and still the sound came from deeper down. Finally they found Ida Starrett, pinned under a tree. More time passed while the rescuers worked to cut the log away. Ida Starrett was the last person pulled alive from the canyon.


Wellington after the slide. The avalanche came down off the slope above and behind Bailets Hotel in this picture. The black rubble next to the telegraph pole in the lower right is the remains of a workers' cabin that had been near the coal chute (not visible). It is laying on the passing tracks where the two trains were swept away. Asahel Curtis was a well established photographer in Seattle. He traveled to Wellington on one of the first trains after the tracks were opened and took a series of pictures of the town in the snow on March 10, 1910.
Afterwards

The Great Northern Railway did everything it could to avoid culpability for the Wellington disaster. They refused even to replace the lost luggage of the survivors fearing it would be taken as an admission of responsibility. They gave the families of killed employees shamelessly small pensions. The widow and five children of the supremely dedicated conductor, John Pettit, received a one time payment of one thousand dollars. However, the railroad was unable to pretend that nothing was wrong with the Stevens Pass route. If for no other reason than that the avalanche was a public relations disaster, the top brass at Great Northern knew they needed to make improvements.

Their first change was purely cosmetic; they changed the name of Wellington to Tye so that name would never appear on Great Northern scedules again. The first concrete improvement they made was to build a large coal silo at Wellington so that the plows would never be idled waiting for fuel. These were completed before the summer was over. That same summer, they began construction on a series of concrete snow sheds, which would eventually cover sixty percent of the track between Scenic and the pass, and a short tunnel through Windy Point. It was a temporary solution. In 1925, the railroad began construction on an eight mile tunnel from Scenic to Berne at and altitude of almost a thousand feet lower than the old tunnel. When finished it was one of the longest in the world and hailed as one of the engineering marvels of the day.

The new tunnel signaled the end for most of the place names related to the disaster. The whistlestop towns of Tye and Cascade emptied out and the Great Northern burned the buildings. The lodge at Scenic Hot Springs went out of business because of the disruptions during the construction. The tracks over the pass were torn up and the iron recycled. Only the snowsheds and the old tunnel remained and these were soon overgrown. Even the name Great Northern eventually disappeared. Through mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations its identity faded into what is now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.

In 1992, Volunteers for Outdoor Washington, began a project to save the old rail line. Today the Iron Goat Trail follows the Great Northern route from near Scenic to the pass to the tunnel. The Washington State Department of Transportation operates and interpretive center in an old caboose at the trailhead. There are signs and photographs all along the trail and parts of the trail are wheelchair accessible. Thanks to the work of train and outdoor enthusiasts, the Wellington avalanche and its dead will never be forgotten.

July 12, 1929. Opening the New Cascade Tunnel. James O'Neill is second from the right. He remained with Great Northern, running the Cascade Diivision until his death in 1937.

Draw Columbo the Mammoth

Two years ago, I made a special trip to visit a mammoth excavation outside Yakima, WA. The mammoth was discovered by a construction crew putting the finishing touches on a road to the home of Doug, and Bronwyn Mayo. The Mayos have been civic-minded enough to allow Central Washington University to keep the site as a teaching site. Every summer, CWU professors bring a group of paleontology students over to work on the site for eight weeks and give tours to interested tourists (like me). Besides just letting the University take over their driveway for two months out of the year, the Mayos take an active part in educating the public and have their own website.


2009 winning entry by Kayla Dexter
If you know any budding nature artists, this is their chance to get involved. The Mayos are sponsoring a draw the mammoth contest for K-12 students. The deadline is July 30, 2010 and the winner gets $25 and a Wenas Mammoth t-shirt, which is way cooler than any dinosaur shirt. The details are here. I'll be putting up a reminder closer to the deadline.

The First Great Mammoth

NOTE: The Open Laboratory 2009: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs was released today. I'm excited that one of my mammoth pieces was chosen for inclusion. The story of the Adams Mammoth is something that will be included in my book, so this essay is a sort of sneak peek at things to come.

In the far north, when the sun returns after its complete absence during the debt of winter, it is not yet spring. The temperature remains well below freezing for several months more. But as the days grow longer and the temperature creeps upward, the snow shrinks, first compacting and forming a hard crust, and finally it melts. The thaw, when it arrives, is not the same as the thaw in more temperate latitudes. In the far north, the melt water cannot soak into the ground, because the ground is permanently frozen. Instead, it flows across the surface hunting for a path to the sea. The same frozen ground that prevents the water from soaking in, prevents the rivers from carving deep channels. Instead, they are wide and when the melt water arrives they become wider still. A small river easily becomes a mile wide and a great river, like the Lena, becomes ten, twenty, or even more miles wide. Every year the river explodes onto the land, searching for new channels, tearing at hillsides, carrying away trees and millions of tons of earth. Sometimes the raging waters uncover treasures.

During the short summer that followed the floods, it was the habit of Ossip Shumachov and his brothers to search for ivory along the beaches of the Bykovski Peninsula. Shumachov (various spellings have been given for his name over the years) was a chief of the Batouline clan of the Evenki. Shumachov's people were better off than other Evenki (called Tungoos or Tungus by most Europeans at the time). The land they called home was productive enough that they lived in permanent cabins in a small village. They owned domesticated reindeer and traded with the Russian merchants who worked the Lena and the Arctic coast. In exchange for the knives and other metal tools the Russians brought, Shumachov's people trapped furs and hunted for ivory. However, looking for ivory was not something dependable that Shumachov and his brothers could dedicate a special time to. It was something they did along side their more important hunting, herding, and fishing.

In the summer of the year that the Russians called 1799, after the fish runs in the Lena had ended, Shumachov took his extended family to the Bykovski Penninsula to hunt wild reindeer. After building the teepee-like huts that served as temporary homes for his band, Shumachov went out to examine the coastal bluffs and see what windfalls the spring storms might have exposed. On the seaward side of a hill called Kembisagashaeta, near the top of the bluff, he noticed a dark mass just beginning to be exposed. He climbed and examined it, but couldn't tell what it was. With more important things to do during the short summer, he didn't spend any more time investigating the mass.


Evenki fishing camp on the Lena Delta, 1881. Shumachov's camp would have looked very much like this. The conical tents are constructed in a manner similar to teepees but with walls of birch bark instead of buffalo hide.
The next summer, when his family returned to the peninsula, Shumachov found a dead walrus on the beach below the mysterious mass. I'm not sure why Adams, the person who recorded Shumachov's story, thought the walrus was important enough to mention. It might be that, in stopping to look at the walrus, Shumachov was reminded of the mysterious mass on the hill and stopped to examine it again. Or the connection might through the subject of ivory. A dead walrus on the beach would be a smelly mess in no time, though a welcome buffet to seagulls, foxes, and polar bears. Shumachov's primary reason for investigating a dead walrus would have been checking to see if the thick skin was salvageable and if it had tusks that he could cut off and sell. Whatever his reason for stopping, Shumachov noted that enough of the mysterious mass had eroded out that he could see that it was made up of one large part and two smaller ones. He would later discover that these were the body and two feet of a mammoth.

By the third summer, enough of the side of the mammoth had been exposed for Shumachov to see one of the tusks. Returning to the camp, he told the others about his discovery. Shumachov expected the news to be cause for celebration; instead, the older members received it with expressions of sadness. The old men explained to him that several generations before, a hunter had discovered a mammoth carcass near the same spot. He and his whole family died soon after. Because of that, the people of the region viewed mammoth carcasses as portents of disaster. Shumachov became sick with worry and retired to his cabin to die. After a few weeks of not dying, he decided the old stories weren't true and returned to the bluff to hide his discovery.

The next year was colder than usual and the mammoth didn't thaw any further. Adams' account doesn't mention it, but it's possible that Shumachov's efforts at hiding his treasure might have insulated it from whatever warmth there was that year.

Finally, at the end of the fifth summer, 1803, the bluff had eroded and thawed enough for the mammoth to break free and tumble down onto the beach. The following March--still the debt of winter, but a time of little activity, waiting for the spring hunting and fishing season--Shumachov and two companions left their village and returned to the Bykovski Peninsula to collect the ivory treasure. The tusks were nine feet long and two hundred pounds each. That summer, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk sailed down the Lena and, when passing through Shumachov's village, bought the tusks. The price was fifty rubles worth of trade goods--roughly $975 today. For a people who lived almost completely outside of the money economy, this would have been a great boon to his village. When he heard that the ivory came from a complete mammoth, Boltunov was curious enough to go to the spot and make a drawing of how the animal must have looked in life. Shumachov had watched the mammoth slowly reveal itself and waited to collect the ivory for five years. Having done that he had no further use for the carcass; he left it to wild predators and fed some of it to his dogs. There is no evidence that Shumachov's people ate, or even tried to eat, any of the mammoth.

In the one hundred ten years since Evert Ysbrants Ides first reported the discovery of a mammoth carcass, only four more had been reported and none of them had been recovered or made available for European scientists to examine. Dozens more were probably discovered during that time, but never reported. Shumachov's mammoth would have shared the fate of all the others except for one of those fortunate coincidences of history that placed the right man in the right place at the right time. That man was Mikhail Adams, a naturalist from St. Petersburg (not from Scotland, as is sometimes reported).

Although only twenty-seven, Adams was already a veteran field biologist. Soon after the kingdom of Georgia was annexed to the Russian Empire, he traveled in the entourage of General Apollo Mussin-Pushkin to inspect the new frontiers and brought back several new species of flowers. In 1805, the Foreign ministry began planning a major diplomatic effort to increase trade with China. A naval mission, commanded by Count Adam Krusenstern, sailed around the world, aiming to open Chinese and Japanese ports to Russian trade. A second mission, under Count Yuri Golovkin, was to travel overland, hoping to open the entire Chinese border to Russian merchants (at the time, only one road was open to Russian merchants and it was subject to frequent closure by the Chinese). Both missions included scientific teams. Because of his success on the Georgian mission, Adams was the natural choice for a mission to the other end of the empire.

From diplomatic and commercial standards, both missions were complete disasters. The Golovkin mission, which had swollen to over three thousand members by the time it reached the Chinese border, camped in Mongolia for over three months arguing over protocol. In February 1806, the Chinese told the Russians to leave. The mission broke up in Siberia. While Golovkin and the diplomats returned to St. Petersburg to explain their failure to the emperor, the scientific team stayed in Siberia and split up, each to pursue their own research. One of Adams' colleagues, the linguist Julius Klaproth (son of the discoverer of uranium), collected information from Tibetan and Buryat Lamas about the origin of the word "mammoth" and what they believed about the beast.

Thanks to Golovin and the Chinese getting snitty with each other, Michael Adams found himself in Yakutsk at the beginning of the Siberian summer in 1807.

I was informed at Jakoutsk, by M. Popoff, who is at the head of the company of merchants of that town, that they had discovered, upon the shores of the Frozen-Sea, near the mouth of the river Lena, an animal of an extraordinary size: the flesh skin, and hair, were in good preservation, and it was supposed that the fossile production, known by the name of Mammoth-horns, must have belonged to some animal of this kind.

M. Popoff had, at the same time, the goodness to communicate the drawing and description of this animal; I thought proper to send both to the President of the Petersburgh Academy. The intelligence of this interesting discovery determined me to hasten my intended journey to the banks of the Lena, as far as the Frozen-Sea, and I was anxious to save these precious remains, which might, perhaps, otherwise be lost. My stay at Jakoutsk, therefore, only lasted a few days. I set out on the 7th of June, 1806...

It was well into August before Adams reached the mammoth carcass and he had to work quickly to gather the remains and get back to Yakutsk before the Siberian winter set in. His first sight of the mammoth was not encouraging. For the two years since Shumachov removed the tusks, the carcass had been at the mercy of local scavengers, most of the flesh and organs were gone along with the trunk, the tail, and one of the fore legs. Adams wrote that he could smell the rotting carcass from over a mile away. But further inspection showed it to be a scientific treasure.

Two of the feet were completely intact, with skin and flesh still covering the bones. One eyes and the brain had dried up, but were still in place and undamaged by predators. The eye was later destroyed when the skin was being dried. Most of the skeleton was there and many of the bones were still held together by ligaments and skin. This would make reassembling the skeleton a much easier task and add confidence that the reconstruction was correct. Even with a leg missing, this by far the most complete skeleton ever recovered.

The missing trunk was a disappointment, but not a problem. European naturalists had known that the mammoth was some kind of elephant since the middle of the previous century. The debate had been about what kind of elephant it was. But while Adams knew how an elephant should look and had no doubt that a trunk had once been there, the Siberians he encountered were a little more puzzled. The merchant Boltunov, who bought the tusks, viewed the carcass after the trunk had been carried off. He made a drawing based on what he thought the animal must have looked in life. This was the drawing that Popoff gave Adams in Yakutsk and that he sent on to St. Petersburg.

Boltunov viewed the mammoth after he bought the tusks from Shumachov. His reconstruction indicates that the scavengers had already carried off the trunk and that most of the fur had fallen off the skin. To him, the big blocky body looked like a giant boar. He placed the hair, in boar fashion, as a line of bristles running along its spine. The handlebar mustache placement of the tusks might be intended also to resemble the outward angle of a boar's tusks or it might be a wild fantasy on Boltunov's part.

While Boltunov was completely wrong about the tusks and snout, he bettered Adams on the tail. Adams, on finding the mammoth with no tail, determined that their had never been a tail. Boltunov, who saw the carcass over a year before Adams saw a short tail and included it in his drawing. Adams either did not look closely at Boltunov's drawing or, since the front half of the reconstruction was so wrong, dismissed the back half. When the skeleton was reassembled in St. Petersburg, the academy sided with Boltunov and added a tail, leaving only the exact length open to debate.


Roman Boltunov's drawing.
After the skeleton, the skin was the best preserved part of the mammoth. Adams reported that the skin was "of a deep grey, and covered with reddish hair and black bristles." The hair was over two feet in length. After separating the skin from the skeleton, Adams loaded both on sledges made of drift wood. The skin was "of such an extraordinary weight, that ten persons ... moved it with great difficulty."

After the skin was removed, Adams carefully gathered all the hair he could find, bagging up over forty pounds. Most of the hair had fallen off the skin before Adams arrived and nearly all of the rest fell off when the skin was dried for transport back to St. Petersburg. This left plenty of room for subsequent debate as to whether or not the mammoth was truly adapted to a cold climate.* Adams described the hair as a mane, which was taken to mean that the hair that remained attached to the skin when he arrived was mostly around the neck and shoulders. Boltunov's drawing, which was made a year before Adams arrived, does not show a mane. Either because it was not well distributed or because of the cartoon nature of the drawing, this difference was only noted by a few naturalists during the next century.

With everything packed up for shipping, Adams took a few days to explore the peninsula and make observations on the local geology and botany. The first step of the 11,000 verst (a verst is roughly equivalent to a kilometer) journey back to St. Petersburg, was to load the remains into a boat that would take them up the Lena River to Yakutsk. The boat hadn't arrived when Adams needed it, so he tied his sledges to reindeer and hauled everything down the coast until he located the boat. In Yakutsk, he acquired a set of tusks that he wrote were the very ones Shumachov had sold to Boltunov two years earlier. He added these to rest of his cargo and sent the whole load to capitol.

Word of Shumachov's discovery had leaked out after Adams notified the Academy that he was going to try to recover the mammoth. Copies of Boltunov's drawing were sent to several leading European naturalists, including Cuvier and Blumenbach. Boltunov's reconstruction of the mammoth as a giant boar, though not believed whetted their curiosity to know more. When the mammoth arrived in St. Petersburg, sections of the skin were cut off, packaged with some of the hair, and sent to important museums and collections in Western Europe. Surprisingly little was done with the skin and hair after its arrival in the capitol. Presumably, the naturalists at the academy eagerly examined it, but no detailed report was published.

Back in St. Petersburg, Adams wrote an account of his expedition. The Russian version of his account was published before the end of the year. French, German, and English translations were published the next year and eagerly poured over by scientists and educated laymen. That they got to see Adams' account so quickly demonstrates the different world that scientists inhabited in those days. In August 1806, while Adams was preparing to leave the Lena delta, the War of the Fourth Coalition broke out with France and its German allies on one side and Russia, Prussia and Britain on the other. While Napoleon defeated Russian armies and created a new Polish state, scientists in Paris and St. Petersburg exchanged papers and discussed science unbothered by things like war and politics. After Boltunov's drawing and Adams' expedition narrative, naturalists in Russia and abroad wanted to know the juicy anatomical details. For these they would have to wait longer.

The job of reassembling the mammoth was entrusted by the Imperial Academy of Sciences to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius. Tilesius, like Adams, had been part of Russia's ambitious, but unsuccessful, diplomatic efforts towards China. As the scientific artist for Krusenstern's naval expedition, Tilesius produced ethnographic drawings of Pacific Islanders as well as botanical and zoological drawings of specimens collected in Alaska and Siberia. He produced the first scientific description of the delicious king crab.

In June 1805, when his ship put into Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, Tilesius heard from the captain of the supply ship of a mammoth that the captain had seen. Capt. Patapof claimed to have "lately seen a Mammoth elephant dug up on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, clothed with a hairy skin." As evidence, he gave Tilesius the hair that he had collected from the animal. Tilesius met Patapof over a year after Shumachov harvested and sold the tusks from his mammoth. It's possible that the mammoths are one in the same or the mammoth could be one that Shumachov said had been seen two years before he found his. Scientists have made that speculation for the last two hundred years, but had no way to prove theory. Patapof vanished from history after his conversation with Tilesius and didn't give a more specific location than "on the shores of the Frozen Ocean." If the hairs that Patapof gave to Tilesius could be located and positively identified, it would now be possible to tease enough DNA out of them to finally answer that question**.

Reassembling the mammoth was not an especially difficult task for Tilesius. Craftsmen at the Kunstkamera, the museum established by Peter the Great, made wooden replacements for the missing bones and repaired those that were broken. Tilesius knew that the reconstructed skeleton needed to resemble an elephant's skeleton. As early as 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne had argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant. In 1799, the same year the Shumachov first noticed the mammoth eroding out of the cliffs on the Bykovski Penninsula, Georges Cuvier had published a paper in Paris that proved the mammoth to be a different, and extinct, type of elephant. In that same year, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach provided a formal Latin name for the mammoth--Elphas primigenius. Not everyone accepted the conclusion that mammoths were extinct (Thomas Jefferson was one), but no one doubted the basic elephantness of mammoths. With that information in mind, Tilesius was able to refer to the skeleton of an Indian elephant already in the museum***.

The one detail that stumped Tilesius was the placement of the tusks. No one had yet recovered a mammoth skull with the tusks still attached; the proper placement of them was a mystery. Naturalists who had had the opportunity to examine intact mammoth tusks had all commented on the fact that the curve of them was completely different than that of African or Indian elephants. Mammoth tusks are larger and more curved. The tusks of an old, adult, male mammoth can have a curve of almost three-quarters of a circle. They also curve widely out and then back in. The combined effect is gives the tusks an almost corkscrew shape. Mammoth tusks are much larger than those of an Indian elephant of the same age.

The tusks that Adams sent back were not the ones that Shumachov had cut off and sold two years earlier. There is no reason to believe that Adams intentionally set out to deceive Tilesius and the rest of the world. It's more likely that was sold a pair of tusks that he desperately wanted to believe were the right ones. The tusks Adams sent to St. Petersburg were from a younger, and therefore smaller, mammoth.

Tilesius had to guess at the correct placement and guessed wrong. An adult mammoth's tusks curved down, out, up, and back in with tips facing inward. This made them useless as defensive or offensive weapons. At the time, naturalists believed the sole purpose of an elephant's tusks was to be weapons. Many naturalists used the word "defense" rather than "tusk" to describe them. With that in mind, Tilesius mounted the tusks on the wrong sides so that they curved out and back like giant ivory scythes. His mistake wouldn't be corrected until 1899 and scientists would still argue about proper tusk placement well into the twentieth century.

At the time, attempting to reconstruct an unknown animal from its bones was a new and bold idea. The first reconstruction had been done only eighteen years earlier by Juan Bautista Bru of the Royal Museum in Madrid. In 1789, the museum received the bones of an huge, unknown animal that had been dug up near Buenos Aires. With no living animal to compare it to, Bru reassembled the bones and prepared a set of drawings of the complete skeleton and various details. His reconstruction gives the animal no tail or sternum. Bru chose to mount only the bones he had and not to speculate about the missing bones. Bru never published. In 1796, Georges Cuvier acquired a set of Bru's drawings and decided that the animal was a ground sloth bigger than an elephant. He named it Megatherium americanum (big American beast).

In 1801, Charles Willson Peale oversaw the excavation of a mastodon in the Hudson River Valley. He took the bones to his museum in Philadelphia and reassembled them. Peale's reconstruction was intended as a commercial project as well as a scientific one. In order to give the patrons of his museum the best possible monster (he describe the mastodon as an immense, carnivorous mammoth), Peale's son, Rembrandt, carved wooden replacements for missing bones. The only part that they did not feel confident about producing a replacement for was the top of the skull.


Peale's mastodon. Tilesius wasn't alone in his confusion over tusk placement.
Tilesius worked methodically and slowly; it took him five years to complete his study of the skeleton. He presented his findings to the Academy in 1812 and it took another three years for the Academy to publish them. That little business of Napoleon invading the country and burning Moscow to the ground might have had something to do with the delay. In the mean time, to satisfy the demand for information, Tilesius prepared two large etchings of the reassembled skeleton with details of the skull, jaw, and femur. He sent these, along updates on his work, to his colleagues in the West. Tilesius' main etching of the complete mammoth was copied and republished for most of the century.


Tilesius' etching of his reconstruction. He left the skin on the head and on the feet. From this profile view, the incorrect placement of the tusks isn't as obvious as it would have been viewed from any other angle. The letters refer to descriptions of the individual bones in his detailed report.
An important side effect of having so many anatomical questions answered, was that much of the debate moved to attempting to understand the environment in which the mammoths lived and explaining their preservation. The idea of ice ages was still thirty years in the future when Adams brought his mammoth west. Many, if not most, naturalists couldn't believe that climate in the past could have been that much different that in their present. Permafrost was a complete mystery and many didn't even believe it was real; it had to be an erroneous observation made by ignorant Siberians.

Adams' account was not much more than a short travel narrative. Though interesting in its own right, the actual description of the mammoth and the conditions of its preservation lacked details. Adams' real scientific talent was as a botanist and those skills were of limited use in salvaging a dead mammoth. He couldn't press the mammoth between the pages of a book and drop it into his luggage. Even if he could have, it would have taken a much larger book and traveling bag than anything he had with him. What frustrated later naturalists was that Adams' skills should have made him a better observer than he was. He made no drawings of the mammoth as he found it and none of the location. When Karl von Baer joined the Academy in 1834, he sought out members who had known Adams and been present during the restoration of the skeleton, "but they had heard nothing more special and only said that Adams had embellished his report."

Adams should be forgiven his weakness as a paleontologist and geologist. When he heard about the discovery, he recognized its importance and rushed to recover what he could. Had another year passed, it's likely that there would not have been enough of the mammoth left to add anything to what the European naturalists already knew. Adams also paid far more attention to the people who actually found the mammoth than most naturalists of the time would have. Adams told the story of the actual discovery in Shumachov's voice. He also included some details of the life of the Evenki, though these were strongly colored by a noble savage / happy children of nature ideology. The Siberians did not remember Adams as fondly as he remembered them.

In February 1869, Gerhard von Maydell was in the second year of an expedition to Northeastern Siberia on behalf of the Russian Geographic Society. While wintering in Nizhne-Kolymsk, well above the Arctic Circle, he received a message from Magistrate Ivaschenko of Vekhoyansk (the coldest place in the northern hemisphere), that some hunters had found a mammoth cadaver not far from Nizhne-Kolymsk. Ivaschenko's message gave a detailed description of the location and named the hunters. As soon as the weather permitted, Maydell headed for the location and located the hunters. Their leader, named Foca, denied knowing anything about mammoths. Maydell pressed him and Foca claimed he hadn't seen the mammoth himself and couldn't help Maydell find it. Maydell had to quote Ivaschenko's message to "prove" to Foca that he had seen the mammoth. Faced with proof, and forty pounds of tobacco, Foca finally relented and agreed to take Maydell to the spot.

At the time, the Imperial government was offering a bounty of up to three hundred rubles, supplies, and even a medal to anyone who reported the remains of a mammoth. In 1929, V.I. Tolmachoff wrote, that to his knowledge, between the time Peter the Great first offered a bounty and the Revolution, despite the bounty increasing to one thousand rubles in 1914, only one person ever claimed the bounty. Maydell explained Foca's reluctance this way: "the natives of the area have such a bad memory of Adams's expedition that, where possible, they conceal their discoveries because they are afraid of being forced to work and provide haulage." Pause for a moment and consider that almost three generations had passed since Adams had collected a mammoth five hundred miles from where Maydell was trying to find another, but the memory of his visit had spread that far.

Foca's reluctance was not unique. In 1882 Alexander Bunge landed on Moustakh Island to set up a weather station as part of a grand series of expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the Arctic. Moustakh lies a few miles southeast of the Bykovsky peninsula where Shumachov found his mammoth. Seeing that the Russians were on the island to stay, the local headman reluctantly showed Bunge the remains of a frozen mammoth that had been found twenty-five years earlier. The locals sold the ivory to a trader who told the district magistrate about the mammoth. When he came to investigate, the locals told him that they had chopped the mammoth up and thrown it into the sea.

The casual exploitation of native labor is an ugly subtext to most scientific advances on the imperial frontiers. Even when the laborers who dig up the temples and carry the specimens to coast were paid, we should ask whether they had a choice in that transaction. Adams described Shumachov's village as having 40-50 people, all engaged in putting up food for winter. He then mentions taking "ten Toungouses" with him to excavate the mammoth. If they all came from the village, that would mean he took almost the entire population of able-bodied adult males with him and kept them from hunting during the time of year that was most essential to their survival. This is the reality that lies beneath Adams' flattering narrative.

Perhaps it is reading too much into the event to notice that none of the later scientists and explorers who passed through the region mention being able to interview anyone who knew Adams. It is thanks to Adams that we even know the name Ossip Shumachov, but Shumachov and his people vanish from the historical record after Adams left with his treasure. Again, perhaps that's reading too much into the story. Sacajewea also vanished after her brief moment in the historical limelight. Shumachov's people could not have been destroyed by Adams' visit or there would not have been anyone to tell their neighbors to hide their mammoths.

At a distance of thirty years, Karl Baer could find out very little about Michael Adams. At a distance of two hundred years, there is even less for me to find out. As imperialist exploiters go, Adams was more sensitive than most, but still within the bell curve. As scientists go, he was good enough to recognize the importance of a find outside his specialty, but in over his head when it came to dealing with that discovery. Ultimately, this isn't a story about Adams; it's about the mammoth.


A fanciful, and largely incorrect, illustration of Adams' first view of the mammoth printed in the 1890s.
The Adams mammoth was unquestionably the most important mammoth discovery of the nineteenth century. There wouldn't be another find of this magnitude, until the discovery of the Berezovka mammoth in 1901. That doesn't mean mammoth studies sat still for a century. The Adams mammoth, and especially Tilesius' study, framed the discussion, but didn't end debate. For the rest of the century, paleontologists tried to build on Adams' and Tilesius' work and, sometimes, to argue against their conclusions. A great deal of attention was turned to attempting to understand the world in which the mammoths had lived and how the frozen corpses had come to be in that condition.

Adams and Tilesius were not the last people to study the mammoth. as other mammoths were discovered, conservators at the museum have made minor changes to skeleton. They have modified the line of the vertebrae to show the now familiar high shoulders and sloping back profile. They have remounted the tusks on the correct sides and replaced them with tusks of the appropriate size. They have carbon dated the mammoth to 35,800 14C YBP. They have teased DNA out of his hair. They have located the place where Shumachov found him and, for reasons unrelated to the mammoth, that bluff has become one of the most closely studied bits of permafrost on the planet. Does the Adams mammoth still have secrets to tell us? I like to think so.


The Adams mammoth remains on display in the The Museum of Zoology in St. Petersburg, as it has for almost two centuries. Millions of visitors have probably seen it during that time.

* One piece of skin that could have gone a long way towards settling the question ended up in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. This piece, one of the few that still had the hair attached, clearly showed the hair as being in the form of a thick, woolly undercoat with long guard hairs. While furry and woolly animals exist in all climates, this particular two layer arrangement is most common in cold adapted animals.

** Although police forensics shows on television regularly state that it is only possible to get DNA a skin tab attached to hair and not from the hair shaft itself, this is no longer true. A 2007 experiment successfully extracted DNA from the hair of mammoths, including the Adams mammoth. Obviously, the most important application of this technology will be to prove the guilt or innocence of mammoths accused of heinous crimes.

*** This elephant had been a gift to Peter the Great from the Shah of Persia in 1713. Peter built a special heated house for the elephant, but the climate of St. Petersburg was still more than it could handle.