In the winter of 1910, an avalanche nearly erased tiny Mace, Idaho, but things were hardly safe in nearby Burke. Another avalanche was building.
Mining engineer George Gibson was drifting off to sleep in his Mace, Idaho, home on the night of Sunday, February 27, 1910, when he awoke to a high-pitched whine. He had lived in the narrow valley long enough to recognize the odd sounds the wind made as it blew through Burke Canyon. But now, at 10:50 p.m., the wind’s howl was different. It had an eerie quality. “My God, George!” wife Sophia exclaimed. “What is that?”
A moment later, a strange and powerful force lifted Gibson right out of bed. The room seemed to fly apart, and pain shot down his arms and hands as he was borne aloft into the cold darkness. He landed in a snowdrift more than 20 feet from where his house once stood. Although buried neck-deep and in agony, he managed to dig himself free. Noting blood drops in the snow, he stared at both arms. Spikes from splintered boards had penetrated both hands, and one had passed completely through one of his wrists.
A thick fog swirled about him, and he wasn’t sure where he was. Although clad only in his sodden nightgown, he wasn’t immediately aware of the cold. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. But nothing was where it should have been; nothing made sense. Heaps of snow and debris covered the surroundings. His house was gone, as were those of his nearest neighbors. The lamps at the mine entrance across the canyon were out, and downed power lines flickered like immense sparklers. In the distance, George heard voices crying out for help. He struggled frantically this way and that. Where was Sophia?
Northern Idaho had been of scant interest to pioneers until mining took hold. Even then, isolated Burke Canyon was little more than a narrow and difficult break in the Bitterroot Range—not even a suitable route to the Montana goldfields. Prospectors had discovered gold deposits along the banks of Canyon Creek, which followed the valley floor, but the discovery of silver on the steep canyon slopes in 1884 became the catalyst for settlement. Small-town Burke and the mining camps of Frisco, Gem, Black Bear and Mace spanned the floor between either side of the chasm. In the 1890s, Burke Canyon was a major mineral-producing area. By 1910 railroad crews had built lines along each side of the canyon to service the mines. At Burke, seven miles up the canyon, the wagon road, railroads and creek took up most of the land. Houses and businesses crowded into the remaining space.
Mace lay little more than a quarter mile west of Burke. Whether merchant, engineer, miner or school janitor, the breadwinners of each Mace family depended, either directly or indirectly, on the canyon’s rich veins of ore. The 700-plus single men of Mace occupied the boardinghouses and bunkhouses near the Federal Mining & Smelting Co. operation on the lower slope of the north side. Some 50 other residents lived on a rise known as George’s Hill, on the south bank of the creek. Houses on the hill were somewhat spread apart, but the snow piling up on the mountain slopes was a growing threat, especially in the last days of winter.
Gibson and his neighbors, aware this was avalanche country, had been keeping an eye on the deep snowpack. Canyon residents had previously recorded significant slides in 1889 and 1894. Few people had settled in Mace by 1889, so there were no casualties then; but the 1894 avalanche had killed three people over in Black Bear, less than two miles west.
The winter of 1909–10 was severe, with much snow piling on Custer Peak, starting point of the earlier Mace slide. On the opposite side of the canyon, above George’s Hill, was a bench created by debris left by an earlier avalanche. Along that bench was a sprinkling of houses. If another slide swept down from Custer Peak, the houses on the hill would be in the path of disaster and, if the slide was powerful enough, homes above the bench would also be at risk. On the night of February 27, the worst fears of Mace residents came true.
The capricious nature of this latest avalanche had sent George Gibson careening through the air while burying his wife in bed beneath layers of snow and debris. George, overcoming his initial disorientation, followed the tracks of his bare feet to where he had dug himself out of the snow. On his knees, he began clawing through the wreckage, calling out for his wife.
Entombed in snow, Sophia could not hear her husband’s voice and was unable to move. She wondered, Had George survived the devastation? What about Elizabeth Kittrell and her two small children, Vernon and Howard? The Kittrells had stayed overnight with the Gibsons prior to moving into their new Mace home. Elizabeth’s husband, bookkeeper Edgar Kittrell, had remained in the neighboring Burke to supervise the moving of their belongings the next day.
The terrible silence Sophia Gibson experienced was finally broken by the cries of children. But when the silence returned, she decided it must have been her imagination. She pressed against the great weight of snow until too cold and exhausted to continue, all but giving up hope of rescue.
Then Sophia heard the voices of men. Managing to break the surface with one hand, she wiggled a finger to draw their attention. It worked. The men started digging above and around her. Minutes later, Sophia was in the arms of her husband and those he had summoned to help. Both Gibsons suffered from injuries and exposure, but they survived.
Elizabeth Kittrell and her children were not as fortunate. They had occupied a room behind their hosts’ bedroom. Searchers removed Elizabeth from her icy prison barely alive, and she died soon after. Her children had died earlier, crushed by the wall separating the two rooms. Edgar Kittrell later recalled that the last time he had seen his family alive, his 3-year-old son had flung his arms around his father and cried, “Papa, don’t leave me!”
The Pascoe family had no better luck. Richard H. Pascoe, superintendent of Federal Mining & Smelting, knew the path the 1889 slide had taken, so he had positioned his house on the east side of a knoll, near Mammoth Draw. Should another avalanche follow the same path, he reckoned the knoll would shield him, his wife and three children. His residence, among the most prestigious homes in the valley, was the only one built on the north side of Canyon Creek. But the “protected” Pascoe house would not be spared. The 1910 avalanche played no favorites.
When it broke, the avalanche raced down the shallow draw from the north. Its eastern edge thundered over the knoll directly onto the Pascoe house. “Its walls [were] crushed as an eggshell might be crushed in the hand of a giant,” wrote a newspaper reporter from Wallace, Idaho, the nearest large town to Burke Canyon. Thirty feet of snow flattened the house, instantly killing the superintendent, daughter Inez and son Eddie. Rescuers pulled Mrs. Pascoe “out of a mangled mass of twisted iron bed rails,” injured but alive. Daughter Kate, rescued within two hours, suffered only a bruised knee. Incredibly, the flow of snow and debris continued beyond the Pascoe house, tumbling downhill to within 120 feet of the company boardinghouse, which housed 300 miners.
From Mammoth Draw, the avalanche spilled into Burke Canyon, sweeping several Oregon Railroad & Navigation boxcars into Canyon Creek and drowning four railroad workers. As the slide continued its rampage, its unearthly sound woke other residents, among them William George, whose family occupied a house near the bottom of the rise, about 100 yards from the mouth of the draw. As he opened his eyes, a dusting of snow swept over him. “A moment later, the crash came, and I was weighted down,” he recalled. “I was held by the lumber from the building and a great quantity of snow.”
George’s 15-year-old son, Peter, shared a second-story annex bedroom with his younger brother. The slide struck with such force that the building shattered, throwing the boys onto the ground behind their house. “It all came so sudden that we did not know what the trouble was,” Peter recalled later. “When we landed out in the snow, I noticed that the electric wires were sparking, and it came to my mind that rockets were being fired for assistance.” After their initial shock, the boys found a comforter in the debris and wrapped it around themselves. At one point, they ventured back to the wreckage of their house and were able to free one of their sisters. Somehow, all eight George family members survived.
Equally fortunate were 7-year-old Dwain Winchester and his pregnant mother. The avalanche swept Dwain from his bed and carried him several thousand feet along the OR&N right-of-way. His extraordinary journey ended without injury. Rescuers dug his mother from the wreckage of their house; she delivered a daughter eight days later.
At a cottage on George’s Hill, 61-year-old Elizabeth Hooper was reading in bed when she heard the oncoming avalanche. Then the window blew in, the light went out and something struck her in the face, knocking her unconscious. She regained her senses soon enough but could not move or make contact with the other cottage inhabitants—daughter Carrie and son-in-law Bert N. Barnett. It was four hours before rescuers could free Elizabeth. She was alive but died several days later at the home of son Leroy. The Barnetts suffered only minor injuries.
After rushing over George’s Hill, the slide continued up the south wall of the canyon, wrecking a number of houses above the bench. The home of coal dealer Ben Rothrock was among the last destroyed. It stood up the canyon toward Burke, about 2,600 feet from the opening of the draw. Rothrock managed to dig himself free and then hurried on foot to spread the alarm in Burke. The disaster had not yet run its course.
At 5:45 the next morning, an earthshaking roar echoed in the mountains above Burke as another avalanche swept down a nearby slope, spilled into the narrow gorge and then rolled over the cribbing above the community. At the edge of town, a mass of snow and debris leveled a boardinghouse and the Catholic church and then advanced swiftly to crush a dozen houses.
Three Burke residents—A.D. Ritchott, Dave Shepherd and James Rogers—had just returned from Mace, where they had freed survivors of the first avalanche. Shepherd and Rogers were staying at the boardinghouse Ritchott managed. The trio apparently felt safe enough there. Surely lightning could not possibly strike twice in one night. They were sadly mistaken, as the boardinghouse was the first structure in the direct path of the second avalanche. The onslaught of snow and debris crushed Ritchott, and Shepherd was found 100 feet from the house, head battered to a pulp. Rescuers found Rogers about eight feet from the room in which he’d been changing his clothes. Though breathing, he was suffering from exposure and later died in the hospital. The avalanche claimed plenty of other victims as well, but at least it largely spared the town of Burke. It is uncertain just how many people died in the two northern Idaho avalanches, but the best estimate is 20 to 24.
Within days another disaster struck the Northwest. In the early hours of March 1, 1910, a slide rumbled down the mountainside at the Cascade Range whistle-stop of Wellington, Wash., rolling two Great Northern trains hundreds of feet down the embankment. One, a passenger train out of Spokane, had been snowbound for five days, and its passengers’ plight was a major news story. The death toll was about 100. It remains the deadliest avalanche in American history.
As for Mace and Burke, they did not escape future tragedy. Avalanches were not the only danger out there. Work crews eventually rebuilt Mace, but in 1923 a spark from a passing train ignited the roof on one of the houses near the tracks. The resulting conflagration destroyed Mace and much of Burke. On March 2, 1956, yet another avalanche tore down the mountainside into Mace, destroying five houses and killing a 10-year-old boy.
Miners ultimately depleted the rich veins, and the last ore shipment rolled out of the canyon in 1991. Today, only a handful of residents remain in the canyon between Wallace and Burke. Of Mace itself, only rubble marks the foundation of a town fading from memory.
Author Robert C. Belyk, of British Columbia, Canada, has written many books about Pacific Northwest history, including Great Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast (2001). Suggested for further reading: The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America’s Deadliest Avalanche, by Gary Krist; and In the Path of an Avalanche, by Vivien Bowers.
Originally published in the December 2010 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here. This article contains affiliate links, from which HistoryNet may earn a commission.
