Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/189



Railroading in California in the Seventies 179

now and then strike the side of the shed, spreading terror to all hands. This unpretentious pen cannot portray with any degree of adequacy a ride to a snowshed fire on that demon train. Wildly rushing at an outlawed speed, closely confined inside a narrow housing, in constant curvature which reduced visibility to a hundred feet, we placed our trust in God. On a watch depended the certainty of calculations that would avoid a crash into another train, coming or going, or a section gang's car loaded with ties or rails or with the men of the gang. Then there was always danger of running into another fire. Necessarily the fire train ran wild; no schedule protected its right of way to the track.

The family of Superintendent Jerome A. Fillmore spent a summer at the Summit Hotel, and he usually was with them on Sundays. He was playing croquet back of the hotel when the gong rang Box 27. That was Twenty- seven woodshed where a mountain of wood was stacked up adjoining the sheds for winter use. Hearing the gong, Fillmore rushed to the train and, in the effort to get his coat on while running, fell. He yelled for us to wait for him. But Fitzgerald, the engineer, said, "We can't wait for anybody." He did, however, slow down, and the superintendent managed to get aboard. Weighing three hundred pounds, he laboriously climbed up to the fireman's seat in the little cab. By the time he got there we struck the curve at the west end of the Summit yard, and Fillmore was thrown half way through the window. Only his size prevented him from being thrown from the cab. Passing Soda Springs, a similar curve rolled him out over the edges of the broken glass, when he was brought to the realization that his foot was burning against the boiler head. We got him down on the iron floor of the cab and hastily pulled off his boot. "What place was that?" "Cisco," I answered. "Where is the fire?" he yelled. "Twenty-seven woodshed," I answered. "Great God!" exclaimed Fillmore. His facial expression would be envied by the most ardent tragedian. His left side was a mass of blood- stains. We reached the fire before he had gained composure for the journey. Three streams, each of which would knock the planks off the sheds, were at once put into action, and the progress of the fire was soon stopped. Gale's Blue Cafion train had stopped its progress on the west. Between was a raging holocaust fed by a thousand cords of closely laid, pitch-pine wood. Black smoke rose up several hundred feet and broke out in great blazes of fire. The rails coiled up like broken spiral springs.

Fillmore hobbled out some distance and sat on a flat rock nursing his wounds. Toward evening he returned to Summit on an engine detached from a stalled freight train. Both fire trains poured streams of water on that mass of coals for forty hours. Not until the track men had relaid fifteen hundred feet of track was traffic resumed. The fire trains returned to their stations.