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<ANTIMG id="coverpage" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake" width-obs="500" height-obs="748" /></div>
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<h1><span class="smaller">THE NIGHT THE MOUNTAIN FELL</span> <br/><span class="smallest"><i>THE STORY OF THE</i></span> <br/><span class="ss">MONTANA-YELLOWSTONE <br/><span class="large">EARTHQUAKE</span></span></h1>
<p class="jr1">—<i>by Edmund Christopherson</i></p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p01a.jpg" alt="Mountains" width-obs="390" height-obs="149" /></div>
<p class="center"><i><b>Cover by Elwood Averill</b></i></p>
</div>
<p class="tbcenter">Copyright © 1960, 1962 by Edmund Christopherson
<br/>All rights reserved.</p>
<p class="center"><i>Illustrations and maps by DeLynn Colvert except for page 56, which was done by Beverly Linley</i></p>
<p class="center">For correspondence or further copies of these books, write:</p>
<p class="center">YELLOWSTONE PUBLICATIONS
<br/>Box 411
<br/>West Yellowstone, Montana 59758
<br/><span class="smallest">LAWTON PRINTING, INC.</span></p>
<h2 class="center">CONTENTS</h2>
<br/><SPAN href="#c1">Foreword and Dedication</SPAN> 3
<br/><SPAN href="#c2">Real Shook</SPAN> 5
<br/><SPAN href="#c3">Trapped</SPAN> 16
<br/><SPAN href="#c4">Outside World</SPAN> 26
<br/><SPAN href="#c5">First Patrol</SPAN> 32
<br/><SPAN href="#c6">CD’s Puzzle</SPAN> 37
<br/><SPAN href="#c7">Rescue—first MD</SPAN> 39
<br/><SPAN href="#c8">CD Wrapup</SPAN> 48
<br/><SPAN href="#c9">Untrapped</SPAN> 54
<br/><SPAN href="#c10">Mystery—Who Got It?</SPAN> 60
<br/><SPAN href="#c11">CD and Natural Disasters</SPAN> 67
<br/><SPAN href="#c12">Aftermath</SPAN> 72
<br/><SPAN href="#c13">Living Geology</SPAN> 75
<br/><SPAN href="#c14">Now You Can See</SPAN> 84
<div class="pb" id="Page_3">3</div>
<h2 class="center" id="c1"><span class="small"><i>FOREWORD AND DEDICATION</i></span></h2>
<p class="center"><i>To those who experienced, suffered
<br/>the helping and the helped, the surviving and the lost
<br/>all members of the involuntary fellowship
<br/>of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake,
<br/>to those who come to see and wonder,
<br/>and especially to those who assisted in this book’s realization,
<br/>“The Night the Mountain Fell” is cordially dedicated.</i></p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p02.jpg" alt="Slanting boulder" width-obs="500" height-obs="492" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_4">4</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig1"> <ANTIMG src="images/p03.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="599" /> <p class="pcap">80 million tons of rock crashed off the right wall, blocking the mouth of the Madison Canyon.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig2"> <ANTIMG src="images/p03a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="493" /> <p class="pcap">Where the mountain fell. The tremendous slide tumbled off snow-chuted sections of mountain in center.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Power Company)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_5">5</div>
<h2 id="c2"><span class="small">REAL SHOOK</span></h2>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p03b.jpg" alt="Illuminated A" width-obs="300" height-obs="324" /></div>
<p>August is a busy month in the exciting mountain vacation
area that centers in West Yellowstone, Montana,
and includes Yellowstone National Park, the restored
ghost town of Virginia City, the nationally famous trout
fishing reach of Madison Canyon that runs through the Gallatin
National Forest, plus dude ranches and lakes in the parts
of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho where the three states come
together.</p>
<p>Geologically, it’s a new area, where enormous forces are
still thrusting up mountains, where volcanic craters still exist,
and where the heat of the earth still spouts its imprisoned
fury through the geysers that have made Yellowstone Park’s
Firehole Basin famous.</p>
<p>At 11:37 P. M. on Monday, August 17, 1959, one of the
severest earthquakes recorded on the North American continent
shook this area. It sent gigantic tidal waves surging
down the 7-mile length of Hebgen Lake, throwing an enormous
quantity of water over the top of Hebgen Dam, the
way you can slosh water out of a dishpan, still keeping it upright.
This water—described as a wall 20 ft. high—swept
down the narrow Madison Canyon, full of campers and vacationers
who were staying in dude ranches and at three Forest
Service campgrounds along the seven-mile stretch from the
dam to the point where the canyon opened up into rolling
wheat and grazing land. Just about the time this surge of
water reached the mouth of the canyon, half of a 7,600-ft.-high
mountain came crashing down into the valley and cascaded,
like water, up the opposite canyon wall, hurtling house-size
quartzite and dolomite boulders onto the lower portion
of Rock Creek Campground.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_6">6</div>
<p>This slide dammed the river and forced the surging water—carrying
trees, mud, and debris, back into the campground.
The campers who’d escaped being crushed under part of the
44 million cubic yards (80 million tons) of rock found themselves
picked up and thrown against trees, cars, trailers, the
side of the canyon, etc. Heavy, 4,000 pound cars were tossed
40 ft. and smashed against trees by the force of the ricocheting
water and the near-hurricane velocity wind created by
the mountainfall. Other cars were scrunched to suitcase thickness
and thrown out from under the slide.</p>
<p>And the water stayed—held by the earthquake-caused natural
dam. It began to flood the lower end of the canyon. At
the upper end, big sections of the road that would take the
300 people trapped in the canyon to safety crumpled and fell
into Hebgen Lake, cutting them off from the world outside.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p04.jpg" alt="Earthquake-blocked road" width-obs="600" height-obs="144" /></div>
<p>When the quake hit, summer Alternate Rangers Fred Tim
and Lamont Herbold were on duty at the West Yellowstone
entrance of Yellowstone National Park. They had just cleared
a semi-load of Pres-to-Logs. As the truck pulled on through
the gate, the plywood gatehouse shook so violently, with the
lights flashing off and on, that Herbold shouted,</p>
<p>“Stop the truck, you ____, you’ve hooked the shack!”</p>
<p>Truck drivers Jack and Lyle Tuttle thought the frantic
way their truck was flopping around meant the motor had
broken loose from the mounts. Driving into the Park, they
were halted by huge rocks blocking the road. Renewed shaking,
with tons more rocks rolling down the mountainside sent
them scurrying for cover behind trees. Lyle took refuge in
a tree, where, he later said, the shaking seemed twice as
rough.</p>
<p>When the quaking stopped briefly, they turned the truck
around and were happy to get out before more boulders
blocked their exit.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_7">7</div>
<p>In the confusion that followed when the first shock hit,
Jerry Yetter, who operates the Duck Creek Cabins near West
Yellowstone, jumped out of bed and knocked on all the cabin
doors to warn the occupants of the quake. Only after he’d
finished the job did he realize that he was wearing no clothes
at all.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p04a.jpg" alt="Blocked road" width-obs="600" height-obs="378" /></div>
<p>His wife, Iris, ran onto the front porch. The porch dropped
into the basement. She climbed out, got into the car, and
didn’t stop until she reached Bozeman, 90 miles to the north.</p>
<p class="center">■</p>
<p>Just west of the Duck Creek Junction of highways 1 and
191, the first shocks wakened Rolland Whitman as it sent
dishes and furniture crashing to the floor. When he couldn’t
reach his wife’s folks in West Yellowstone, 10 miles south, by
phone, he rushed his wife, Margaret, and their six children
into the car, started out, and immediately crashed over a 13-foot
drop-off scarp that the quake had jutted up between his
home and the highway.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_8">8</div>
<p>On the night of the quake Mrs. Grace Miller, a widow
who, in her seventies, is still sprightly enough to run, single-handed,
the Hillgard Fishing Lodge cabin and boat rentals on
the north shore of Hebgen Lake, found herself suddenly
wakened about midnight. She didn’t know what was happening,
but she felt she had to get out of the house. She
threw a blanket around herself. The door was jammed, and
she had to kick to get it open.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p05.jpg" alt="Fleeing a cabin." width-obs="472" height-obs="593" /></div>
<p>Outside the door she saw a big, 5-foot crevice. As she
leaped across it, the house dropped from under her into the
lake. More crevices kept opening in the moonlit ground as
she walked away from the lake. “Rabbits were skedaddling
in every which direction,” she said, but her Malamute dog,
Sandy, was so frightened he wouldn’t even notice them.</p>
<p>After quite a spell of hiking in the nightmare-like night,
she found refuge along with about forty other people at Kirkwood
Ranch, which itself was considerably damaged, but a
<span class="pb" id="Page_9">9</span>
safe distance from the lake. She was safe there, while next
day skin-divers, alerted by worried friends, searched her
floating house for her body.</p>
<p>Later next day she boated past her 9-room home—which
contained everything she owned, floating on the lake.</p>
<p>“I hope it stays upright,” she said. “My teeth are still on
the kitchen counter, right next to the sink.”</p>
<p>When she arrived at the dam, she greeted an acquaintance
with, “I’ve been a pretty tough old bird, but I wouldn’t want
to go through that again!”</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig3"> <ANTIMG src="images/p05a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="540" /> <p class="pcap">Mrs. Grace Miller’s house, which dropped into Hebgen Lake, floating along what used to be Route 287.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<p>In a forest fire lookout on top of 10,300-ft.-high Mt. Holmes
in Yellowstone Park, the first shock threw Penn State College
student David Bittner out of his bunk.</p>
<p>“By golly, they’ll believe me this time,” he said with satisfaction
as he picked himself up off the floor.</p>
<p>Several days earlier he’d phoned a report of substantial
tremors, but no one would take his report seriously.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_10">10</div>
<p>Charles Godkin, chef at the Frontier, and his wife, Ruth,
a waitress, were driving home at 11:37.</p>
<p>“We must have a flat,” she said as the car thumped and
shook along the road.</p>
<p>When Godkin got out to look, the ground was bucking so
strenuously that he could hardly stand up. Back at the Frontier,
he found steak plates all over the floor. In the establishment’s
walk-in freezer he found the floor covered with mayonnaise—a
foot deep!</p>
<p class="center">■</p>
<p>At the Emmett J. Culligan place, dubbed the “Blarneystone
Ranch,” the Santa Barbara water softener tycoon spent
hundreds of thousands of dollars building a refuge from the
possibility of atomic attack.</p>
<p>Ironically, the main fault of the earthquake rammed
through one end of his building’s cement block foundation,
raising the ground 15 ft., twisting and cracking the whole
150-ft. length of the building.</p>
<p>Ironically, too, Culligan’s spread was perhaps the only
one reputed to be covered by earthquake insurance.</p>
<p>His caretaking family, John and Doris Russell, were trapped
in their cottage and had to crawl out and pass their children
through a chin-high 15-inch square window.</p>
<p class="center">■</p>
<p>At the proud dude ranch, Parade Rest, where Bud and Lu
Morris capitalize on the area’s superb fishing, the shock toppled
chimneys atop the massive log buildings and sent the
guests scurrying outdoors.</p>
<p>Huddled around a huge campfire in the courtyard, where
it seemed safer, they felt bewildered and helpless as the
ground continued to heave and writhe throughout the night.
For hours, the shocks continued at the rate of one every
minute.</p>
<p>By morning the kitchen was a shambles—“like a cabin a
grizzly bear had worked over. Dishes, flour—everything
crashed to the floor. The only thing to do was to clean it
up with a broom and shovel,” Lu Morris said.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_11">11</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig4"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="566" /> <p class="pcap">The fault scarp running through the Culligan place. <span class="jri jr">(U. S. Geological Survey)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig5"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="539" /> <p class="pcap">This ground was level before the quake. <span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_12">12</div>
<p>Elsewhere throughout the earthquake area, crockery and
goods in glass containers were at a premium; drug stores,
bars, groceries were shard-piled shambles.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p07.jpg" alt="Antique shop after earthquake" width-obs="600" height-obs="253" /></div>
<p>After the quake, the proprietor of the antique shop next
to the West Yellowstone Post Office took one look at the disheartening
spectacle of his shop and took off. The shop floor
was strewn with a fortune in broken antique glass and
dishware.</p>
<p>“The ground just got up and bucked like a horse,” one
West Yellowstone citizen put it.</p>
<p>The only man who was enthusiastic about the earthquake
from the start was geologist Irving J. Witkind of the U. S.
Geological Survey, who was living in a trailer on a rise to
the north of Hebgen Lake, above the Culligans and Parade
Rest, while he surveyed and mapped the area.</p>
<p>When the first shock hit, he figured his trailer had somehow
broken loose and was rolling down the hill. He charged
out, intent on stopping it. From the way the trees were
swaying in the absence of any wind, he knew it was a genuine
earthquake. He hopped in his jeep and headed down
toward the lake. He saw the scarp that the Whitmans soared
off just in time to stop.</p>
<p>“It’s mine! It’s mine!” he shouted as he got out of the
jeep and realized the full measure of his fortune. His words
will echo wherever geologists gather in years to come. Professionally,
his once-in-a-thousand-lifetimes fortune in being
on the scene of a major quake meant as much as discovering
an unfound Pharaoh’s tomb would to an Egyptologist.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_13">13</div>
<p>At Mammoth, the old army post which is still headquarters
for Yellowstone Park, Superintendent Lon Garrison was
sitting up in bed reading when the quake hit. His wife and
daughter were watching TV when the big chimneys and
rocks from the massive old 1909-built masonry buildings began
crashing through the porches and roofs.</p>
<p>“We got out and fast. We prided ourselves on being cool.
It wasn’t for an hour or so that I remembered that I was
still wearing my Park Service uniform coat over pajama
pants.”</p>
<p>Every time there was a new tremor, the coyotes, abundant
thereabouts, would let out a fresh howl. The phone
lines to Old Faithful and West Yellowstone weren’t working.
The quake had taken them out. The 18,000 people who
were overnighting in the Park when the quakes began were
on the edge of panic.</p>
<p>“What can we do?”</p>
<p>“How can we get word out?”</p>
<p>“Can we get out?”</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig6"> <ANTIMG src="images/p07a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="493" /> <p class="pcap">At Golden Gate, south of Mammoth, in Yellowstone Park, the road was blocked by this deluge of rock loosened and shaken down by the quake.<span class="jri jr">(National Park Service)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_14">14</div>
<p>Everyone wanted answers to these questions at once.</p>
<p>At Old Faithful, 800 people were in the recreation hall
enjoying a college talent program. In the best entertainment
tradition, the MC played it cool, continuing his patter while
the Park Rangers opened the doors. Everyone exited in good
order.</p>
<p>But there was to be little comfort that night. Everyone
who’d made it to bed got up after the first shock.</p>
<p>At the massive, log-built Old Faithful Inn, the timbers
gave out loud creaking and popping noises as the structural
torment continued.</p>
<p>“We had to evacuate the building,” Superintendent Garrison
said. “Hot water from a broken pipe in the attic was
running down the floor of the east wing. Half an hour later
the fireplace and chimney crashed through the dining room
floor, activating the sprinkler system. The water damage
was horrible.</p>
<p>“A few hours earlier, with the dining room full, the casualty
list would have been gruesome.</p>
<p>“As it was, our only casualty was a woman who sprained
her ankle leaping out of bed after the first tremor.</p>
<p>“Later in the week a ranger, exhausted from quake duty,
skidded on a rain-slick pavement and went off the road.</p>
<p>“We feel that God had his arm around us all the way.”</p>
<p>The quakes continued with especial violence at Old Faithful.
Evacuees from the Inn sat out the night, wrapped in
hotel blankets, in their cars and in the big, distinctive Yellowstone
Park Co. busses, trembling with fear at each new
quake.</p>
<p>At the new Canyon Village, guests were reassured by the
big-voiced man who, in the midst of the turmoil, marched
up to the reservations desk and demanded accommodations
for an additional two nights.</p>
<p>Canyon, too, was the place where, they say, another guest
left a note on his pillow for the chambermaid, saying,</p>
<p>“An awfully rough bear stayed under my cabin last night.
Had an awfully hard time sleeping. Better tell the night man
to do something about it.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_15">15</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig7"> <ANTIMG src="images/p08.jpg" alt="" width-obs="669" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap">The force of the quake shook this retaining wall loose—threatening the Gibbon Falls Road in Yellowstone Park.<span class="jri jr">(National Park Service)</span></p> </div>
<p>As the shocks continued, the summons to exodus was clear.
Quake-broken roads blocked all the exits from West Yellowstone
except the route, 191, through Idaho south to Pocatello.
For the rest of the night it was bright with the lights of cars
streaming away from the earthquake country to the solid
security and comfort of the outside world.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_16">16</div>
<h2 id="c3"><span class="small">TRAPPED</span></h2>
<p>For trailer and tent campers, attractive Rock Creek
Campground, less than a mile from the mouth of Madison
Canyon, was a favored site. So much so that it was full
most of the summer season. Campers who pulled into the
canyon too late to find campsites in the formal, or improved,
area just pulled off the road and overnighted on any level
spot they could find along the road.</p>
<p>Two vacationing families, the Osts and the Fredericks, felt
lucky when they found adjacent campsites at Rock Creek on
Monday, August 17. Rev. Elmer Ost, who teaches psychology
at Biblical Seminary in New York City and doubles as pastor
at Bethany Congregational Church in Corona, Queens, his
wife, Ruth, youngsters, Larry, 14, Geraldine, 13, Joan, 11,
and Shirley, 6 had been enjoying a leisurely camping vacation
in the Northwest.</p>
<p>The Melvin Fredericks family (he’s a biscuit salesman
for B & B from Elyria, Ohio) included Mrs. Laura, Melva,
16, Paul, 15, and George Whitmore, 15, who lives with the
Fredericks in Elyria, Ohio, while his folks are missionarying
in Brazil.</p>
<p>The two families met in Columbia Falls, Montana, at the
home of Rev. Ralph Werner, who was a relative of the
Fredericks and a college chum of the Osts. They’d both
toured Glacier National Park and were headed for Yellowstone
Park and the Black Hills, and decided to camp together
the next night. Ost told Fredericks that if you didn’t
make it to Yellowstone Park before noon, the campsites
would all be filled. But, he knew of camping areas in the
Madison Canyon, near West Yellowstone, and not too far outside
the park where they’d be more likely to find room. The
Osts got to Rock Creek Campground at 6 o’clock Monday,
August 17, found a site, and stationed Larry by the road to
stop the Fredericks.</p>
<p>The two families chose a small open area near the stream
and pleasant evergreen trees at the east end of the camp
near the entrance.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_17">17</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig8"> <ANTIMG src="images/p09.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="496" /> <p class="pcap">The Elmer Ost family were special guests at the Madison County Fair at Twin Bridges, five days after their earthquake ordeal.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<p>They set up camp, ate together, socialized, and made plans
to get up at 6 o’clock next morning, breakfast on dry
cereal, and get an early start for Yellowstone. They swapped
stories about their vacations, joked about the bear that was
supposed to be scavenging around the campground, and decided
to walk down to the highway where they’d be away
from the trees and able to see the moon, which lit the mountain
behind them. But the mountain that looked high on
the south side of the canyon kept them from seeing the moon
directly.</p>
<p>They turned in early—at 9 o’clock. The two younger
Ost girls, mildly concerned about the bear, decided to sleep
in the car, a 1950 Buick. Larry and Geraldine and their
parents all slept in their tent. Mrs. Fredericks and Melva
slept in their station wagon, while the men stretched out in
a tent.</p>
<p>Everyone was nicely settled by 11:37, when a thunder-like
commotion outside awakened them. Ruth and Gerry
Ost shouted something about bears as they jumped out of
the tent.</p>
<p>“It’s a cyclone!” Mrs. Ost was screaming in half-wakened
terror as Rev. Ost emerged from the tent.</p>
<p>The sky was clear, the moon bright, as Rev. Ost looked
up and to the west. There were no clouds or wind.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_18">18</div>
<p>But terror ran through the whole party as they saw tents
swaying, trees shaking as though torn in a violent wind.
Then the Osts’ 1950 Buick began to rock from front to rear
as if men were jumping energetically on the bumpers. The
brake lights went on as one of the gals jumped on the brake.</p>
<p>Then came a tremendous roar, like several express trains
passing right through the camp. The trees shut off their
view of the huge, 7,600 ft. mountain falling, of the huge
boulders, big as houses, hurtling down one side of the canyon
and up the other side, a mile away, throwing sparks and dust
as they fell. Rev. Ost sensed the rushing of the wind and
water trapped by the avalanching mountain, and thrown back
at the dazed campers—at tornado speeds—from under the
slide. “Hang onto a tree!” he shouted. Mrs. Ost ran for the
car as she saw the wave of water coming. Larry was caught
in the tent when the wall of water, mud, and trees hit them
with such violence that it crumpled trailers and hurled the
Osts’ 4,000 pound car thirty feet and smashed it against a
row of trees. Although Mrs. Ost was holding onto the steering
wheel, the violence of the surging water threw her
against the side of the car so violently that it made a pulp
out of the right side of her face. In the midst of the mud,
water, and floating and flying debris, Larry managed to
tear his way out of the tent.</p>
<p>Dust from the slide obscured the moon and heightened
the sense of tragedy and terror.</p>
<p>The tent was gone. The deluge of water had jammed
cars and trailers together. The rocks had covered the site
of a trailer where a family had been playing earlier in the
day.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p10.jpg" alt="Remains of campground." width-obs="600" height-obs="152" /></div>
<p>The night rang out with the bewildered crying out for
lost relatives. Stunned like the others, Rev. Ost shouted for
“Fran.” After hitting the brake pedal she’d jumped out of
the car and scampered, like a deer, to higher ground.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_19">19</div>
<p>He found Gerry, unharmed, except for being wet and an
injury to her hand. Sloshing through water to his knees, he
found Ruth still in the car. After several minutes hunting
and shouting “Larry” he found his son, soaked, clad only in
shorts.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig9"> <ANTIMG src="images/p10a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="595" /> <p class="pcap">Mel Fredericks, lifting Rev. Elmer Ost, shows how he tried to free his trapped son, Paul.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<p>The screams of the lost and losing continued. A woman
handed a baby to Melva Fredericks, saying, “Comfort him.”
One dazed man walked around crying out for his missing
wife. From the wet and dark came the cry of another woman
calling out, “It’s safe here!”—hoping to attract someone to
help or keep her company.</p>
<p>The Ost women and Mrs. Fredericks struggled to higher,
safer ground. When the Fredericks men didn’t show up, Ost
left the women praying while he went to look for them. He
heard Mr. Fredericks call for help for his son, Paul. With a
flashlight he borrowed, he was able to see the difficulty. The
surge of water and trees had caught 15-year-old Paul and
pinioned him in a sitting position in the water, with one
log across the small of his back and another across his lap.
The ends of the log were jammed between a smashed trailer
and the Ost car, so solidly they wouldn’t budge.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_20">20</div>
<p>Paul cried out with pain as the two men tried to pull him
loose. The water kept rising as the men tried to pry the
logs apart with sticks. A 2 × 12 plank, ten feet long, even
though full of spikes, seemed a promising tool to pry with,
but with it they were only able to gain an inch or so further
separation of the logs that held Paul prisoner.</p>
<p>The men felt Paul’s and their own helpless panic as
the water swelled up to his chest, his neck, his chin. Raised
in a soundly religious family, Paul bravely faced the realization
that he was gasps from death. In desperation, Ost called
on Mel Fredericks to pull as hard as he could, not to care if
Paul cried, or if they pulled his arms or legs out of joint. In
this last, desperate straining try they found that miraculously
they could raise him six inches. The rising water had buoyed
the trailer. In their next few feverish tries they were able
to pull him loose and helped him to walk to high, dry ground.</p>
<p>One stranded group, calling for help, included a wheelchair
case, and, mucking shoeless through the water, they
portaged him out, chair and all. George Whitmore had a
badly injured eye—from running into a rope, and it looked
like he might lose its sight.</p>
<p>They all moved to the highway, which was still dry. A
motley crew they were, in pajamas, or almost unclothed, some
shoeless. By this time the water had covered their cars.
Some of the wounded were taken by car toward Hebgen
Dam—away from the slide.</p>
<p>Marooned, without their cars, in a strange, shaking canyon—prisoners
of a night in which everything seemed mad,
somehow word reached them that their ordeal might not be
over. There was possibility that a dam several miles upstream,
which they’d never seen, was likely to give way any
minute. So they scrambled up the sagebrush hillside and
built a fire on a level and fairly open site.</p>
<p>Others joined the two families. One group, whose car
hadn’t been flooded so suddenly, managed to save groceries,
a camp stove, sleeping bags, pans and a 9 × 12 ft. plastic
tarp.</p>
<p>Without worrying about modesty, they dried themselves
around the fire. There were 17 in the party. It cleared, and
then clouds obscured the moon. The ground kept shaking.
<span class="pb" id="Page_21">21</span>
With almost every new tremor came sparks and puffs of
dust, and the terrifying, crashing echoes of another avalanche
across the valley, and the realization that the valley
side above them might go any time. The air was full of
dust and the sickening smell of mud and torn fir trees. All
through the night they heard the haunting cries of “Help,
help—we’re freezing,” from the Grover Maults, who’d been
marooned on top of their trailer and by this time were hanging
onto a tree.</p>
<p>They worried about forest fires, and sang hymns to keep
up their courage.</p>
<p>At 3:00 A. M. there was a thunderstorm and a light, continuing
rain. They huddled under the plastic tarp—all 21 of
them—and wondered what would happen next.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p11.jpg" alt="Water rescue." width-obs="500" height-obs="228" /></div>
<p>An elderly couple, the Grover C. Maults, a 72-year-old
retired decorator and his wife, Lillian, 68, of Temple City
Calif., had parked their trailer at the scenic Rock Creek
Campground for a week before the especially beautiful, bright
moonlight night of August 17th. There were lots of bears in
the area, and like many other campers, when the first jolt
hit them, they figured that the bears were trying to get into
their trailer.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_22">22</div>
<p>“No, it must be an earthquake,” Mrs. Mault said.</p>
<p>Looking out through the trailer window, the moon made it
seem like daylight. Everything was going upside down. An
instant later their trailer was tossed end over end, landing,
miraculously, on its wheels. Then it seemed as though something
picked the trailer up and hurled it into the water.</p>
<p>Mault got his “nightie-clad missus” out of the trailer and
lifted her on top, and went back into the trailer to get sweaters
or something. It suddenly turned dark. The moon disappeared
in dust. The water had risen to Mault’s chin by
the time he got out of the trailer.</p>
<p>By the time he’d crawled on the trailer roof, put on
trousers, a shirt and sweater, and wrapped clothing around
his wife’s legs, the water was beginning to cover the trailer
roof and rising fast. They prayed that the trailer would
drift toward a nearby tree. It did. The first branch broke
as Mault grabbed it. He barely had time to get one arm
around the tree and hold onto his wife with the other when
the trailer was swept out from under them.</p>
<p>“It was horrible,” he says. “As I tried to pull the missus
up the limbs kept breaking off. I tried to grab higher limbs
and cling to the missus with my legs. The limbs still kept
breaking off. Finally we found a limb that would hold.</p>
<p>“We were surrounded by deep water. Through the night
we hollered and hollered for help. People tried to get to us
with ropes, couldn’t reach us, and yelled that we should hang
on, they were going for a boat.</p>
<p>“While we struggled to hold on, we could see the mountains
sliding and falling every few minutes. There’d be a
terrific roar, followed by more slides. I thought the world
was coming to an end. It turned hazy, with thunder, lightning,
then began to rain.</p>
<p>“As we clung to the tree, with water up to our necks,
my wife slipped under three or four times. The last time
she was gasping for breath, I managed to pull her out.</p>
<p>“‘Let me go and save yourself,’ she begged. ‘If you go,
I’ll go, too,’ I told her.</p>
<p>“About 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning they came for us in
a boat. It was just in time. We couldn’t have held out for
another ten minutes. The water was rising so fast that the
<span class="pb" id="Page_23">23</span>
rescuers had to move their truck three times before they
could unload the boat.</p>
<p>“At first, when rescued, we could see lights, then everything
went black. We couldn’t hear anything over the roar
of the tumbling mountains. We were froze stiff from hanging
on so long. We couldn’t move our legs. The men had to
help us into the boat.”</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p12.jpg" alt="Lodge by the lake" width-obs="500" height-obs="87" /></div>
<p>In contrast to those who stood around and wondered was
L. D. Smith, of Greeley, Colorado, who with his family was
camped in a trailer at the Beaver Creek Campground a couple
of miles downstream from Hebgen Dam. The loud noise
and rumbling woke him. Outside the trailer, he found the
water rising. The ground was shaking violently. He didn’t
know what was causing it, but his first thought was that
the dam had broken. The steep-walled canyon didn’t seem
like a safe place for his family. As soon as the shaking subsided
temporarily, he loaded his wife and two youngsters
into the car and drove away from the dam, the collapse of
which he instinctively felt was the greatest danger, as fast
as he could.</p>
<p>A mile or two before he reached the slide, he ran into
heavy dust. Still fearful of what the dam’s collapse would
mean for those trapped in the deep canyon, when the slide
blocked his path he turned off the road and drove up the
north side of the canyon wall to a point where he couldn’t
get any more traction. He then got his family out of his car
and moved them to still higher ground.</p>
<p>Later in the evening his family joined the Osts and
Fredericks around the fire on the hillside.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_24">24</div>
<p>At about 8:00 o’clock on the same gorgeous moonlight
night of August 17, the Purley Bennett family of Coeur
d’Alene, Idaho, pulled their trailer off alongside the road on
the flat at the mouth of the Madison Canyon Gorge. They
didn’t plan to set up camp—just to rest for a few hours before
continuing to the park. They talked a bit with others
camped in the same informal area, then turned in. Purley,
a 43-year-old truck driver, and his wife, Irene, slept in the
trailer. The youngsters—Carole, 17; Phillip, 15; Tom, 10, and
Susan, 5, stretched out in bedrolls outside on the ground.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig10"> <ANTIMG src="images/p13.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="482" /> <p class="pcap">“A car blew past, rolling over and over.”<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<p>They were awakened a little before midnight by a loud
rumbling noise. They wondered what it was, but weren’t
concerned enough to get up or move their equipment. Some
time later, in response to a much louder noise, Bennett left
the trailer to see about the children. Mrs. Bennett was right
behind him. As she stepped out of the trailer, she felt a
strong wind coming up. There was a great rumbling, whooshing
sound, and as the wind reached hurricane velocity she
saw her husband grab a small tree for support. The wind
swept him off his feet—he hung on like a flag tied to a mast.
After a little bit he let go and was blown away. She never
<span class="pb" id="Page_25">25</span>
saw him again. She couldn’t see her children, except one
flying through the air. A car was blown by, rolling over
and over, and she found herself swept along with the trees,
the rocks, and water.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig11"> <ANTIMG src="images/p13a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="581" /> <p class="pcap">The Bennett car—thrown out from under the huge slide onto the dried-up stream bed below.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<p>“When I came to,” she said, “I was jammed against a tree
with a log on my back. I don’t know how I got out. I
thought I was the only one of my family still alive.”</p>
<p>Then, over the awful moaning of the boulders grinding
and crashing and the sound of the tree trunks howling
through the air, she heard the voice of her son, Phillip,
calling.</p>
<p>Slowly, painfully, in spite of crippling injuries, they dragged,
an inch at a time, toward one another over the rocky,
oozy bed of the river which the huge slide had instantaneously
stopped. Highway Patrolman Stevens, who found them
several hours later, noticed how torn their hands were from
this agonizing crawl.</p>
<p>That morning, in the hospital at Ennis, Mrs. Bennett told
reporters, “They say my husband and my boys are dead, but
I have faith. I know they will be found.”</p>
<p>They already had been—dead.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_26">26</div>
<h2 id="c4"><span class="small">OUTSIDE WORLD</span></h2>
<p>The Montana-Idaho, Wyoming area where the quake hit
is a big, sprawled-out area where it’s easy to get the feeling
of isolation when everything’s normal—the roads open, the
phone lines and lights working.</p>
<p>In one shattering blow, the earthquake cut most of this
area’s access and communication. Big sections of the Yellowstone
Park roads were blocked by slides and boulders. The
road north of West Yellowstone was impassable. Big hunks
of the road between the Duck Creek Y and Hebgen Dam had
crumbled and slipped into the lake causing four major breaks
and several minor ones. The big slide formed an 80 million
ton block at the west exit of the canyon, and at Wade Lake,
road breakup had immobilized another group of terrified
campers.</p>
<p>For the first few hours after the quake, one of the biggest
problems for the trapped was to get word out, and for those
outside to get some idea of just what had happened.</p>
<p>At the instant of the quake, the Berkeley seismograph
showed shock in the West Yellowstone area.</p>
<p>The first man to get word out was amateur radio operator
Warren Russell, who operates station K7ICM from his
trailer house in West Yellowstone, who began broadcasting
news of the quake at 11:43 P. M.</p>
<p>At 11:50, another ham, Fr. Francis A. Peterson of St.
Anthony, Idaho, contacted Idaho State Police, who relayed
the word to HQ in Boise, and thence to the National Warning
System at Battle Creek, Michigan.</p>
<p>At 12:25 A. M. on the first detail report from the Western
Section of the Alert System it was reported that Hebgen
Dam was demolished and that there were 6 feet of mud and
water at the town of Ennis.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_27">27</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig12"> <ANTIMG src="images/p14.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="637" /> <p class="pcap">This upside-down Cadillac and the shook-up-road between West Yellowstone and the Duck Creek Y are typical of quake damage.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p14a.jpg" alt="Shook-up road." width-obs="800" height-obs="487" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_28">28</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig13"> <ANTIMG src="images/p15.jpg" alt="" width-obs="795" height-obs="590" /> <p class="pcap">Several sections of road along the north shore of Hebgen Lake just slumped into the lake.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Geological Survey)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig14"> <ANTIMG src="images/p15a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="570" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_29">29</div>
<p>When the quake hit at 11:37 P. M., it woke Austin Bailey,
resident maintenance man for the Montana Highway Department
at Duck Creek Junction—where the road takes off along
the north side of Hebgen Lake and through Madison Canyon.
He noticed the light overhead jumping, furniture moved
from the wall, the lights weren’t working. Realizing that such
a shaking would topple rocks onto the highway, he knew
that he should get out and clear the roads before the heavy
tourist traffic got underway next morning.</p>
<p>Outside everything seemed normal. He got into his own
station wagon to make an initial check, started out, and 30
feet later drove over the 15 feet high scarp embankment—the
main earthquake fault that had dropped off between the
maintenance shed and the highway.</p>
<p>Shaken, but not hurt, he crawled out of the car, aware
that something was seriously haywire, and that he had to
call for outside help.</p>
<p>He went a mile to the nearest telephone. It was out. In
the maintenance shed, where the heavy equipment and trucks
are stored, he found the 16-ton rotary snowplow had been
jolted eight feet out of its position the night before.</p>
<p>The radio transmitter in his pickup either wasn’t working,
or couldn’t reach the area Highway Department HQ in
Bozeman. The road, when he managed to reach it, was shredded
by long cracks, running along the length of the road.</p>
<p>He loaded up his family and started north to get the word
out that they needed help on the roads in the West Yellowstone
area. At the Y he found an overturned Cadillac that
had flipped coming over a continuation of the same scarp
which ran through his own yard. Driving carefully—at times
it was like straddling a grease rack—he finally found a phone
that worked at Almart Lodge, 40 miles north of West Yellowstone.
Highway District Engineer George Barrett logged
Bailey’s call at 1:50 A. M.</p>
<p>The quake caught Montana’s Civil Defense Director Hugh
K. Potter in bed. Potter, a grizzled former Montana Highway
Patrol Captain and Helena Police Commissioner, had
lived through Helena’s 1935-6 earthquake. This earlier quake
had logged some 3,000 recorded tremors, killed 4 people and
destroyed several buildings, including Helena’s City Hall.
Potter wasn’t greatly impressed by the somewhat diminished-by-distance
initial shock, and went back to sleep.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_30">30</div>
<p>At 1:30 A. M., the Helena Police rousted out city fireman
Ed Cottingham and reported that fragments of information
about an earthquake which had caused severe damage in the
state were coming in on police radio. At 1:32 Cottingham
called Potter, and they went down and set up state Civil
Defense HQ in Helena’s City Hall, an Arabic-style former
Shriners’ building which also houses the capital city’s fire
and police department.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig15"> <ANTIMG src="images/p16.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="567" /> <p class="pcap">Standing on top the slide, with the fallen mountain as a backdrop, Civil Defense Director Hugh Potter and Madison County Sheriff Lloyd Brooks discuss problems created by the quake.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p>
</div>
<p>For the next two hours, their life was a turbulence seething
with rumors. The steep walled canyons and high mountains
which obstructed normal police short wave radio added to
the problem of already disrupted communications in getting
information out of the quake area.</p>
<p>Trying to piece together just what had happened, the damage,
and what help was needed was like a horror movie
about “THE THING,” with the exact nature of the horror
emerging through the confusion and hysteria in small clues
and fragments.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_31">31</div>
<p>At CD HQ, Potter realized the possibility of Hebgen Dam’s
collapse, bursting, shattering, breaking in the quake. It’s an
un-reinforced concrete-core earthfill dam 721 feet long, built
in 1913 by the Montana Power Co. to regularize the flow of
the Madison for downstream power generation. Its failure
would threaten the tourists in the valley, and the sleepy
600 population town of Ennis, 65 miles below the canyon
mouth.</p>
<p>Conflicting rumors filled the air—that the dam was destroyed.
By 2:00 A. M., the police and Highway Department
radio frequencies were zinging with these and other unconfirmed
reports leaking in about the plight of the dam and
the canyon. In Helena, Potter struggled with a vision of a
smaller re-enactment of the Johnstown Flood in Ennis if the
dam did, or had, let go.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig16"> <ANTIMG src="images/p16a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="757" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_32">32</div>
<h2 id="c5"><span class="small">FIRST PATROL</span></h2>
<p>Montana Highway Patrolman Glen Stevens made the first
probe up the Madison Valley after the quake. In response to
a request for help from Madison County Sheriff Lloyd
Brooks in Virginia City, Stevens and Deputy Sheriff “Dutch”
Buhl wheeled down to Ennis, arriving at about 2:30 o’clock.
The telephone lines were out. It seemed important to warn
people farther up the valley of the danger they were in.
Some of the folks had already fled. One ranch family was
still in bed. There were three groups of sleeping campers.
They didn’t argue or waste time. When Stevens suggested
they get out, they just left.</p>
<p>As Stevens and Buhl proceeded up the valley, they radioed
in at frequent intervals that everything seemed normal.
They reported rock on the road at various intervals from
26-mile hill on south to the place above Hutchins Bridge,
where boulders tumbling from a rock cliff made the road
impassable. Cabin camp operator Otto Kirby had got his
people out, but there were two house trailers parked farther
up, near the river. Stevens warned the occupants, and got
them started out. They gassed up at Kirby’s ranch. It was
cloudy and dark. At 3:15 o’clock Stevens radioed in that the
water was muddy but otherwise seemed OK, and that he
planned to cross the bridge and drive up along the river on
an old road on the south side. Sheriff Brooks tried to discourage
them, shouting via radio—“Don’t do it, you crazy
bastards, the dam’s broke, and you’ll get killed too. Come
back!”</p>
<p>It was this message which, picked up on other radios, and
relayed to Helena, sparked CD director Hugh Potter to order
the evacuation of Ennis.</p>
<p>With Sheriff Brooks’s warning fresh in mind, Stevens says,
“Every turn we got off that bench, I thought we were going
to meet swimming water.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_33">33</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig17"> <ANTIMG src="images/p17.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="632" /> <p class="pcap">These huge boulders crashed down onto Cliff Lake Campground killing the Lloyd Strykers of San Mateo, California, without disturbing the food on their campsite table.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p>
</div>
<p>As they moved up the valley, they got the message that
a couple of people had been killed in the campground at Cliff
Lake, to the south of the Madison, so when they hit the Raynolds
Pass road, they headed that way.</p>
<p>They got there at daybreak, about 4:45 A. M. They found
that a rock cliff had fallen across the road which ran along
the lake, marooning the campers.</p>
<p>At the campground they found two campers dead, killed
in a bizarre and gruesome accident. The E. H. Strykers of
San Mateo, California, were camped on an improved campsite,
with a fire site, a picnic table, and a place to park their
car. Their three youngsters slept in a tent 100 feet away.
The quake dislodged huge, eight-ton chunks of rock, and set
them bounding downwards in a freakish, crescent shaped
path, tearing the ground, and toppling 60-year-old fir trees
in their downward rush. Nimbly, two of these boulders
bounded over the picnic table, stacked with food, and landed
squarely on top of the sleeping bags in which the Stryker
parents slept.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_34">34</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig18"> <ANTIMG src="images/p18.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="662" /> <p class="pcap">Cliff Lake tragedy—another view.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<p>“It wasn’t pretty,” Stevens said. “But there wasn’t anything
we could do. The rocks were too big to move, so we
went down toward the Shaw Ranch and got Frank Shaw to
take his 4×4 truck up and move the rocks off them.</p>
<p>“We drove back down to the highway to continue up to
the canyon. In the freshening daylight on the way down
from the high bench back into the valley we could see a
couple of trailers down the highway near the mouth of the
canyon. A Fish and Game Commission plane flew over, radioing
something about an obstruction across the lower end of
the canyon, and having two to three hours to get the people
out. We had no idea what they meant. We got to the trailers.
They wanted to know how to get out—the next section of the
highway was blocked with rocks and boulders. We routed
them across the river and out Raynolds Pass way into Idaho.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_35">35</div>
<p>“One of the guys said he thought there were a couple of
people still alive across the river. We got to the slide about
5:45 o’clock—the huge pile of millions of tons of rock where
the highway used to be. You couldn’t believe what you were
looking at.</p>
<p>“Somebody said something about a ‘little slide’.</p>
<p>“‘Little!’ I said to Dutch, ‘I’d hate like hell to see a big
one!’</p>
<p>“The after-shocks that kept happening—with rocks crashing
down and dirt and dust blowing up—didn’t contribute to
our peace of mind, either. But we didn’t have much time to
look.</p>
<p>“We struggled across the river—the slide had stopped the
water, but left a muddy ooze and some water lying around
in pools as much as three feet deep. We found Mrs. Irene
Bennett lying in the rocky stream bed. She was cold and
shivering. She didn’t have a stitch on. Neither did her son,
Phillip, who was lying near her. Both of them were bruised
and bashed. The Bennett boy had a broken right leg, shoulder,
etc. We put Mrs. Bennett on an old wooden frame canvas
cot and started across the slippery river bed with her. She
must have weighed 180. As we struggled through the slippery
muck she kept apologizing for causing us so much trouble,
and told us about her husband and three other children,
the other folks who were camped near her, and the tremendous
spurt of wind and mud that threw them out from under
the slide. She told how she’d come to—believing herself the
only one of her family who’d survived. Despairing, she heard
Phil calling from a spot 75 feet away where the water had
thrown him. Their torn hands gave the story of the agonizing
effort these crippled survivors had made to drag themselves
together over the rocky stream bed.</p>
<p>“By radio we asked the Fish and Game Commission plane
flying overhead to go to Ennis and get Dr. Losee and fly
him back, and land him on the highway nearby. We didn’t
want to disturb Mrs. Bennett by moving her off the cot, so
we put her into a station wagon. Morris Staggers, who lives
nearby, showed up with an old iron bedstead, older than anyone
there, and heavier, too. I’ll never forget the struggle we
had carrying the Bennett boy across on it.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_36">36</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig19"> <ANTIMG src="images/p19.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="655" /> <p class="pcap">Rescuers prepare to move body of T. Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah, who perished as he was thrown out from under the slide. Note tremendous water damage and dry river bed.<span class="jri jr">(United Press International)</span></p>
</div>
<p>“We took the Bennetts up to where the plane landed on
the highway and turned them over to the doctor. Returning
to the slide area, the increasing light made the slide seem
even more formidable. That morning, working with Fish &
Game Commission, etc., we found all of the people Mrs. Bennett
had told us about except one. Like Mrs. Bennett and
her son, all of these bodies had been stripped of their clothing
and showed the effects of being beat to hell by wind
and water. The coroner said all five of them died by drowning.
We never did find Mrs. Marilyn Stowe, wife of Sandy,
Utah elementary school music teacher T. Mark Stowe, whose
body we did find—she must still be under the slide.</p>
<p>“I just don’t care to go through any more mornings like
that,” Stevens said.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_37">37</div>
<h2 id="c6"><span class="small">CD’S PUZZLE</span></h2>
<p>At 2:00 A. M. Potter called in Montana State Highway Engineer
Fred Quinnell, Don Brown of the Montana Fish and
Game Department, and Captain Alex Stephenson, Chief of
the Montana Highway Patrol, to help sort out the rumors in
the tense hours ahead. At 2:15 A. M. George Barrett, highway
engineer in Bozeman, radioed to Helena Austin Bailey’s
report on road conditions in the West Yellowstone area.</p>
<p>Another report from a road maintenance man in the
Ennis area brought some word of a rise in the Madison, way
downstream from the Canyon. When asked by phone, Jack
Corette, president of the Montana Power Co., said that he felt
it unlikely that the dam had gone out. As a precautionary
measure to protect communities farther downstream on the
Madison, an immediate drawdown of Meadow Lake and Canyon
Ferry reservoirs was begun.</p>
<p>At 2:53 Bozeman Sheriff Don Skeritt reported that through
the ham radio net that was rapidly taking up the slack in
communications, he’d messaged his deputy, Everett Biggs, in
West Yellowstone. A short time later he’d received word that
there was still much violent shaking in the area ... that the
lake had gone down substantially ... and the dam was still
holding.</p>
<p>Associated Press sent a man over to CD HQ in Helena
at 2:55 A. M., to keep in touch with developments. At 3:15
o’clock, when out of the communications box came the cry,
“It’s gone! It’s gone!” it was difficult to keep the press from
rushing to the phones and announcing nationally that the
dam had collapsed. There was no confirmation, but the impact
of the moment impressed Potter to the extent that he
immediately called the marshal, George Hibert at Ennis,
the first settlement downstream from Hebgen Dam, and
urged him to get the people out.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_38">38</div>
<p>The sirens blasted 15 times. As one crusty old Ennis
evacuee, Ray “Tuffy” Kohls, put it—“They wake you up in
the middle of the g.d. night with the story that the dam’s
going to go,—still the people packed up and got out in pretty
good order. Of course there was some confusion. One guy
grabbed a flashlight and a thermos of coffee. His wife got
into the car wearing a coat over her nightgown, and carrying
a girdle she’d been sewing on that evening.”</p>
<p>Some of the evacuees drove over the hill to Madison
County’s exciting, historical county seat town of Virginia
City to wait out the expected flood. But most Ennis folks
spent the rest of the night perched in their parked cars on
a hillside overlooking the town—like penitents waiting for
Judgment Day.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig20"> <ANTIMG src="images/p20.jpg" alt="" width-obs="600" height-obs="578" /> <p class="pcap">Refugee family from Ennis stalk the streets of historically fabulous Virginia City the morning after the quake.<span class="jri jr">(Ken Lewis—Montana Standard)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_39">39</div>
<h2 id="c7"><span class="small">RESCUE—FIRST MD</span></h2>
<p>August 17 was the first time that Dr. Raymond G. Bayles,
an active Bozeman MD, had got to bed at a decent hour in
weeks. The tremors he felt in Bozeman were strong enough
to damage buildings on Montana State College campus in
Bozeman. Recently Bayles had bought the 50-room Stagecoach
Inn at West Yellowstone, and he was concerned about
the Inn and its employees. The phone service to “West”
was out. As the night dragged on, the radio brought him the
news that “West Yellowstone was close to the center of the
quake, and that the road to ‘West’ was impassable.”</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig21"> <ANTIMG src="images/p20a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="529" /> <p class="pcap">Road dropoff on Route 287 along north shore of Hebgen Lake between Hebgen Dam and the Duck Creek Y.<span class="jri jr">(Wide World)</span></p> </div>
<p>He chartered a plane at daybreak. On the way to “West,”
he had the pilot fly down over the Madison Canyon. The
dust had pretty much settled so they could see the massive
slide in detail. Just above it a group of people (the Osts,
Fredericks, Smiths, etc.) were waving for help. The lake
was beginning to form in the canyon behind the slide. More
people were standing near their cars and trailers halfway
between the slide and the dam. Just below the dam was
<span class="pb" id="Page_40">40</span>
another caravan which included many station wagons. On
the dam spillway someone had spelled OK-SOS with pancake
flour in big white letters, and marked a big cross on
the highway, in a spot suitable for a helicopter landing. Dr.
Bayles realized that there were injured among those trapped
in the canyon.</p>
<p>As they flew low over the lake, they saw where buildings
and big sections of highway had dropped into the lake. On
the usually clear surface of the lake, somehow as a result of
the quake, thousands of logs appeared, probably submerged
logs shaken off the bottom. There were virtually no boats
visible.</p>
<p>At the Stagecoach Inn he found the staff huddled around
a bonfire under the trees across the street, where they’d been
since the heavy tremors began cracking plaster in the building.
The exception was Jane Winton, a nurse, who managed
the hotel, and had bravely stayed on duty at the desk.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig22"> <ANTIMG src="images/p21.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="638" /> <p class="pcap">Stranded docks raised by the quake action which raised the south shore of Hebgen Lake eight feet.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Geological Survey)</span></p> </div>
<p>They gathered splints, medicines—whatever emergency
material they could find—and went to the airport. The pilot
<span class="pb" id="Page_41">41</span>
flew to a field big enough to land on at the Watkins Creek
Ranch, on the south side of the lake about two miles from
the dam.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p21a.jpg" alt="“OK SOS” signal to airplane." width-obs="600" height-obs="428" /></div>
<p>In walking toward the dam, they found debris where the
tidal wave had thrown it half a mile up from the shore. The
entire south shore of the lake had risen about eight feet.
After a mile’s walking they came to a spot where people
were dragging their boats higher out of the water. They believed
the dam was going out, and at first didn’t want to
lend Dr. Bayles a boat, but he finally persuaded them. Dodging
the many logs in the lake made the trip difficult. As
they approached the dam, Jane Winton was frightened at
the big crack in the dam’s concrete core.</p>
<p>“Just you keep watching that crack,” Dr. Bayles told her.
“If it gets bigger, you’ll know what’s going to happen. If not,
you’ll be telling your grandchildren about all this.”</p>
<p>“To reach the bank, we had to land through a lot of debris
that had gathered at the dam. We went over the top of the
concrete at 9:00,” Dr. Bayles said.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_42">42</div>
<p>“We were met by a girl who seemed to have more authority,
Mildred (Mrs. Ramon) Greene of Billings, Montana,
a former nurse who was one of the real heroes of the disaster.
She told us that no one had been there, and that they’d had
no word from outside since the quake, more than nine hours
earlier.</p>
<p>“Mrs. Greene had the injured—there were sixteen serious
cases—in the back of station wagons—two to a wagon, except
for one elderly couple who were in their fishing trailer.
Ray Painter, 46, a service station operator from Ogden, Utah,
and his wife, Myrtle, 42, they were perhaps the most seriously
injured. She had flesh torn off her arms, a crushed chest, a
punctured lung, and hemorrhages from an arm artery. Her
husband had deep lacerations over 90 per cent of his legs.
Like the other injured, they were suffering terribly, yet not
one of them was complaining.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig23"> <ANTIMG src="images/p22.jpg" alt="" width-obs="640" height-obs="700" /> <p class="pcap">Quake victim, Mrs. Margaret Holmes of Billings, Montana is given plasma as she is taken off the first Air Force rescue helicopter at West Yellowstone. She died Tuesday night in Deaconess Hospital, Bozeman.<span class="jri jr">(Wide World)</span></p>
</div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_43">43</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig24"> <ANTIMG src="images/p22a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="555" /> <p class="pcap">Loading victims off Air Force helicopter at West Yellowstone.<span class="jri jr">(United Press International)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig25"> <ANTIMG src="images/p22b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="491" /> <p class="pcap">Settling quake victim in West Yellowstone Airport shed before flight to Bozeman.<span class="jri jr">(Salt Lake Tribune)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_44">44</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig26"> <ANTIMG src="images/p23.jpg" alt="" width-obs="600" height-obs="742" /> <p class="pcap">Nurses care for Mrs. Warren Steele, 37, of Billings and other quake injured campers in the interior of Johnson Flying Service DC-3 on flight from West Yellowstone to Bozeman.<span class="jri jr">(Wide World)</span></p>
</div>
<p>“As Mrs. Greene took us around, and gave the case histories,
we saw what a resourceful job she and another nurse,
Mrs. Fred Donegan of Vandalia, Ohio, had done in the absence
of drugs, medications, and even proper bandages. We
helped with the dressings we’d brought, and the medicines
for pain and shock.</p>
<p>“We were there an hour to an hour and a half. These
injured needed hospital care, and there were no plans, as
yet, to get them out. They couldn’t travel by boat. So we
got in our boat and went back to West Yellowstone to
arrange for the injured to get from there to Bozeman and
to the hospital when the helicopters did arrive.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_45">45</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig27"> <ANTIMG src="images/p23a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="606" /> <p class="pcap">Slide victim Ray Painter, 46, of Odgen, Utah is carried by volunteers from helicopter to evacuation plane at West Yellowstone airstrip.<span class="jri jr">(Wide World)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig28"> <ANTIMG src="images/p23b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="467" /> <p class="pcap">Reporters, photographers, and doctors all giving attention to quake victims, resting on bales of hay at West Yellowstone Airport hangar shed.<span class="jri jr">(Salt Lake Tribune)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_46">46</div>
<p>Shortly after noon, the first helicopter, a two-rotor silver
Air Force H-21 from Hill Air Force Base, Utah, took its first
load of four injured from the dam.</p>
<p>At West Yellowstone Airport, as arranged by Dr. Bayles,
these injured—in sleeping bags—were immediately loaded
onto the floor of a converted B18, which had brought cargo
to “West,” and flown to Bozeman. There Dr. Bayles had organized
a fleet of station wagons to rush them to the hospital
for the care that was to save most of their lives.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig29"> <ANTIMG src="images/p24.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="712" /> <p class="pcap">Associated Press reporter Robert Moore interviews victim Warren Steele of Billings at West Yellowstone Airport.<span class="jri jr">(Wide World)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_47">47</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig30"> <ANTIMG src="images/p24a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="616" /> <p class="pcap">Dr. Bayles, first M.D. to reach trapped quake victims, watches as rescued are loaded off Johnson Flying Service DC-3 at Bozeman Airport.</p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig31"> <ANTIMG src="images/p24b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="477" /> <p class="pcap">Station wagons were pressed into service as ambulances, to take victims from Bozeman Airport to the hospital.<span class="jri jr">(Oliver Campbell, Manhattan, Mont.)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_48">48</div>
<h2 id="c8"><span class="small">CD WRAPUP</span></h2>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p25.jpg" alt="Road repairs." width-obs="600" height-obs="384" /></div>
<p>By 3:45 o’clock the highway department was in full action.
Major road repair help was on the way to get the roads
open. George Barrett at the department’s Bozeman HQ called
Spike Naranche of the Naranche & Konda contracting outfit,
which was building a big stretch of road in the Gallatin Valley,
about forty miles north of West Yellowstone, and got
their big-scale road-building equipment rolling toward West
Yellowstone and the Hebgen Dam area. There was still no
definite idea of the exact damage or the road blockage, but
they’d begun to suspect major damage to the dam, the roads,
or both. If the Highway Department couldn’t use the equipment
for road repairs, the Power Company could for dam
repair.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_49">49</div>
<p>Pilot Ralph Cooper took off in the Fish and Game Commission
plane at 3:45 A. M. from Helena to reconnoiter the
Madison area. Shortly thereafter Quinnell and Alex Stephenson
took off in the Highway Department’s plane.</p>
<p>With daybreak came the first word on just what had
happened. At 6 o’clock the planes reported (CA-1) as recorded
in the Highway Department’s log.</p>
<p>“Slide area 43 mi. so. of Ennis. White sign on the top of
dam reading OK-SOS. Road has gone into the lake on the
road side. Mountain has gone into lake on opposite side.
Cracks 6 to 8 ft. across the road. Slide is estimated to be
½ mi. long and 300-500 ft. deep. Water rising fast. About
50 cars stranded in the area. Estimated 150-200 people. The
only way out by helicopter.”</p>
<p>Potter immediately called Johnson Flying Service, a pioneer
regional flying outfit in Missoula, 200 miles from the
slide, and ordered a helicopter for rescue work. He also
asked for helicopter assistance from Malmstrom Air Force
Base in Great Falls, Montana, 190 miles to the north. Malmstrom’s
rescue copter had blown a tire the day before, so
they sent a jet to Salt Lake for a new one. Potter hollered
for helicopters on the National Alert Warning System hot
line.</p>
<p>“How many do you need?” he was asked.</p>
<p>“All you can get,” he answered.</p>
<p>In response, everything, flying amphibians, transports, in
addition to helicopters, started moving toward the quake
area—from the 41st Air Rescue Squadron, Hamilton Air
Force Base in California, the 2849th Air Base Wing Rescue,
Hill Air Force Base, Utah, the 3638th Flying Training Squadron,
Stead AFB, Nevada, and the 4061st Support Group,
Malmstrom AFB, Montana.</p>
<p>The Forest Service began moving in its well-organized
rescue organization that morning, under the direction of
Harvey Robe. Eight of the FS’s elite smokejumpers, trained
in first aid, jumped in the canyon at 10:30 o’clock, with rescue
equipment under the leadership of Al Hammond.</p>
<p>“When we made our parachute landings,” Hammond remembers,
“The folks we came to rescue asked us, solicitously,
if we were OK.”</p>
<p>The rescue of the people trapped in the canyon—it turned
out that there were close to 300—proceeded smoothly. The
<span class="pb" id="Page_50">50</span>
Osts, Fredericks, and Smiths, all ambulatory, if shoeless were
helicoptered out to the highway on the Ennis side of the
slide, and taken in highway patrol cars to the hospital or to
the dormitory improvised in the high school gym. The injured
who’d been gathered at the Hebgen Dam end of the
canyon were helicoptered out to West, and flown to the hospital
in Bozeman.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig32"> <ANTIMG src="images/p26.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="748" /> <p class="pcap">The slide that blocked Madison Canyon, dammed the river, and brought terror and tragedy to those at Rock Creek Campground as viewed from the valley side.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p>
</div>
<p>Working continuously through the day, without provisions
for meals, etc., the road repair crews “barbered” a shoo-fly
substitute exit road along the steep mountainside parallel to
the shore where the road had collapsed into the lake. By
6:00 P. M. they’d completed a passable road. The State Highway
Patrol registered the cars as they exited from their entrapment
in the Madison Canyon. When all the unencumbered
cars had passed through, the bulldozers helped pull
<span class="pb" id="Page_51">51</span>
those with trailers over the most difficult portions of the
substitute road. That night the refugees were welcomed to
food and beds in the Montana State College gym in Bozeman.</p>
<p>Within eighteen hours after the initial shock, the last of
those trapped by the earthquake in the difficult-to-reach
Madison Canyon were on their way to safety. The wounded
had been rescued hours before. As George Sime, information
guy for the Highway Department and for CD, said,</p>
<p>“That day anyone would have been proud to be a member
of the Highway Department.”</p>
<p>The whole operation ran smoothly—it was a tremendous
example of government service in the finest tradition—a demonstration
of agencies working together to do an important
job.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig33"> <ANTIMG src="images/p26a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="783" /> <p class="pcap">Where the mountain fell—as viewed from helicopter approximately over the site of the buried area right next to Rock Creek Campground.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Power Company)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_52">52</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p27.jpg" alt="Overturned automobile." width-obs="600" height-obs="423" /></div>
<p>Nobody held back. They put in all the personnel, and
spent all the money needed to get it done.</p>
<p>“When we knew lives were at stake,” Forest Service
Region 1 Chief Charles Tebbe said, “We didn’t worry about
the cost or what appropriation it would come from. We just
went ahead and did the job.” Quinnell, head of the Montana
Highway Department, took the same attitude.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until three days after the quake that anyone
mentioned the fact that no one, including Potter, actually had
authority for much of the work they’d done. It belonged to
the sheriffs of the counties involved. By this time the emergency
job was practically done. All that remained was to
figure up the damage.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_53">53</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig34"> <ANTIMG src="images/p27a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="553" /> <p class="pcap">Two of the road drop-offs, and the shoo-fly, or improvised escape road built the day after the quake trapped 300 vacationers in Hebgen Canyon.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig35"> <ANTIMG src="images/p27b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="580" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="jri jr">(Bottom Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_54">54</div>
<h2 id="c9"><span class="small">UNTRAPPED</span></h2>
<p>All through the night, the Osts, the Fredericks, and the
others trapped above the slide shuddered with each new
quake, and then listened for the repeated thunderous crashings
of the avalanches which echoed loudly against the canyon
walls. Every 15 to 20 minutes all that morning there
would be another shock.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p28.jpg" alt="Flooded stream." width-obs="600" height-obs="154" /></div>
<p>They were thankful that their families were complete.
Fredericks, nearly exhausted from his work in helping rescue
those trapped by the rapidly advancing water above the slide,
tried to sleep, but the excitement and uncertainty kept the
whole group awake. At dawn, which came at about five, the
first of the many small planes flew over the canyon. The
light gave the group a clear view of the opposite side of the
canyon, and they could see how the mountain had turned
loose, crashing down onto the canyon floor, surging up the
other side of the canyon to a height two-thirds of the height
of its original location, and then shooting both up and down
the canyon. They could now see the mud, debris and the
accumulating water which had covered their cars and camp.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_55">55</div>
<p>In the early light they used
merthiolate and dressings
from a first-aid kit to treat the
worst of the previous night’s
injuries. The two dozen eggs,
somehow rescued intact in
their flight up the canyon side,
fried with canned potatoes and
served on bread, plus coffee
made a heartening breakfast.
The Smiths, who’d fled the
Beaver Creek Campground at
the time of the quake, joined
them, making a total of 21 in
the group.</p>
<p>A small, orange and silver
plane swooped low, circled,
and waving its wings, flew
east toward the dam. They
took heart in the fact that
they’d been discovered.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p28a.jpg" alt="Parachute drops from air rescue." width-obs="200" height-obs="599" /></div>
<p>Half an hour later, the plane
flew over again, very low,
dropping an orange streamer
fastened to an envelope. The
envelope was torn open by a
branch, and the message
floated down by itself. With
fresh horror they read it. It
said, “Fire down by river
bridge on ridge top. Get going.”</p>
<p>It was signed simply, “Ost.”</p>
<p>Hurriedly they looked
around for smoke. Seeing
none, frightened, trapped in a
strange, wild country, with all
nature seeming to turn against
them, they knew not where to
turn.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_56">56</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p29.jpg" alt="Helicopter evacuation." width-obs="595" height-obs="430" /></div>
<p>In an effort to find out about the fire, Ost borrowed the
hip boots a woman had given Fredericks and started off in
the direction of the slide. The plane circled over him and
wagged its wings, an action he interpreted to mean that he
was going in the right direction. He continued, climbing the
muddy lower end of the slide, the rubble, the great cube-shaped
boulders, big as cars, all mixed in with trees, some
stripped bare, others still complete with all their branches.</p>
<p>On the slide he met two men walking in from the outside.
They told Ost that the river bridge was 15 miles upstream,
past the dam, and advised him to keep the group
where it was until helicopter help came.</p>
<p>The plane message about the fire was still a mystery. It
remained so for several months, until Ost finally got it explained.
The message had been one of several dropped from
<span class="pb" id="Page_57">57</span>
a plane by a Forest Service guy, Otto H. Ost, in 1957 to instruct
a ground crew to proceed to a fire a couple of hundred
miles from the Madison Canyon. The streamer, Otto Ost
figured, had been found, returned, and sent out without removing
the two-year-old message. The note from Ost to Ost
was a powerful coincidence.</p>
<p>“Doesn’t it strike you as almost planned?” Rev. Ost said
when he got the explanation.</p>
<p>At 11:30 A. M. the two Forest Service smokejumpers,
part of a group of eight who’d jumped farther up the canyon,
hiked in. They had first aid equipment and food. They
reassured the group that a helicopter was on its way to rescue
them.</p>
<p>Shortly after noon, the Johnson Flying Service helicopter
arrived, landing precariously on the canyon-side slope. Mrs.
Ost and George Whitmore, the Fredericks nephew, both with
eye injuries, were the first two taken out. The helicopter ferried
them over the slide to a point on the highway where
Highway Patrol cars sped them—at 80 miles an hour where
rocks hadn’t made the road hazardous—to Ennis, to medical
care, comfort, and safety.</p>
<p>By the time the helicopter had taken seventeen of the
group over, the turbulence of an oncoming storm made the
air so treacherous that the four remaining men walked up
the canyon, were driven to a safer landing point at the upper
end of the canyon. They saw the cracks and damage at Hebgen
Dam. The helicopter picked them up, and they joined
their families in Ennis.</p>
<p>“We’d lost our money, our cars, our clothes,” Mrs. Fredericks
said. “The Red Cross didn’t ask us any questions about
whether we had any money or not. They just helped. They
sent us to stores and got us all two complete outfits. They
told us to make any calls home—to our relatives—that we
wanted to. And they’re flying us home.</p>
<p>“We’re certainly going to be ardent Red Cross workers
from now on!”</p>
<p>That night they stayed—dormitory style in the Ennis High
School Gym—as Mrs. Fredericks put it, “An anvil chorus,
each snoring in his own language.”</p>
<p>Conditioned by the quake of the night before, when the
town siren blasted off at 9:00 P. M. the quake victims jumped
<span class="pb" id="Page_58">58</span>
out of bed in alarm and hastily dressed. Even after the siren
was explained as the regular nightly curfew signal, Mrs.
Fredericks slept the rest of the night in her clothes.</p>
<p>“I’m damned if I’m going to be caught in my pajamas
again,” she said.</p>
<p>The Osts moved up to the Shermont Motel in Sheridan,
where Mrs. Ost recuperated from her face and eye injury.
Miraculously, though the whole side of her face was massively
bruised, no bones were broken. That Saturday they
were guests of the Madison County Fair at Twin Bridges.
On Sunday the Red Cross flew them from Butte back to their
homes in New York.</p>
<p>The Fredericks moved to the Finlen Hotel in Butte while
George Whitmore had treatment for his more serious eye
injury.</p>
<p>“Everyone was so wonderful. A bellhop drove us all
around, showing us this exciting town. The people at the
hotel took up a collection and gave us some money. You
couldn’t have better people.”</p>
<p>The Fredericks flew back to Elyria that same Sunday,
leaving George Whitmore in the hospital for further treatment.</p>
<p>“The irony of it all,” Mrs. Fredericks said, “is that we still
didn’t get to see Yellowstone Park.”</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p30.jpg" alt="Refugees by the lake." width-obs="600" height-obs="157" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_59">59</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig36"> <ANTIMG src="images/p30a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="554" /> <p class="pcap">The main, Red Canyon scarp runs for 7 miles along Kirkwood Ridge, parallel and about three miles above the north shore of Hebgen Lake.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p30b.jpg" alt="Red Canyon scarp, continued" width-obs="800" height-obs="558" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_60">60</div>
<h2 id="c10"><span class="small">MYSTERY—WHO GOT IT?</span></h2>
<p>With the primary emergency—rescuing the injured and
freeing the trapped—contained, there still remained the perplexing
problem of trying to figure out, just how many were
still buried under the 80-million-ton rock slide.</p>
<p>Early guesses put the figure in the hundreds.</p>
<p>The infeasibility of moving 43 million cubic yards of collapsed
mountain in quest of this gruesome total was almost
immediately apparent.</p>
<p>Aerial photos taken that next morning showed that the
slide hadn’t covered the improved portion of Rock Creek
Campground—the section with five formally-laid-out campsites,
each with parking spot, fireplace, picnic tables, etc. But
this didn’t help much toward an estimate of the total buried,
because of the informal fashion in which both trailer and
tent campers would set up for the night anywhere they could
find a level spot.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig37"> <ANTIMG src="images/p31.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="523" /> <p class="pcap">Water from normal flow of the Madison beginning to flood the canyon, and Rock Creek Campground, which was located under the water at the right. Note the streaks showing the flow patterns of the slide.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p>
</div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_61">61</div>
<p>Fred Brauer of the Forest Service Fire Control Division in
Region 1, HQ in Missoula spent quite a bit of time talking
to survivors and others who might help to establish a probable
total.</p>
<p>Rev. Ost, who’d been camped in Rock Creek Campground,
said that he had counted 21 trailers between the mouth of
the Madison Canyon and the spot he camped. The undertaker
in Ennis, Charles Raper, put his estimate at 100 to
160.</p>
<p>Brauer found that Marshal George Hibert of the town
of Ennis had been on a fishing trip in the vicinity of the
slide area on Monday, August 17, and for some inexplicable
reason decided to cut the trip short, leaving the area at
9:30 o’clock that night, about two hours before the quake. He
guessed, from his observations, that there could be 100 people
under the slide.</p>
<p>Guy Hanson, a West Yellowstone 5th and 6th grade school
teacher who was working that summer as a Fire Prevention
Guard for the Forest Service, had periodically checked the
Madison Valley campgrounds. In one survey, shortly before
the quake, he’d found five tents, eight trailers, and 42 people
in the Rock Creek Campground. In the adjacent, unimproved
area, he’d counted another 25 people. At noon the
Monday of the quake, he’d helped police the improved area
and found six trailers parked there at midday. He didn’t
check the unimproved area.</p>
<p>From his familiarity with the campground, Hanson felt
that 40 campers were probably trapped under the slide.
Brauer chilled as Hanson told him that the occupancy could
be higher if there were groups, such as Boy Scouts, camped
there. He described how often he’d found scout encampments
at Rock Creek, and how one scoutmaster had told him that
this was a favorite camping objective for many Utah scout
troops.</p>
<p>While Brauer was trying for an answer as to how many,
others were working on the question of just who was buried
under the slide. Mrs. T. Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah, was
considered a probable from the first. Her husband was
washed out from under the lower end of the slide, and it was
logical to deduce that she’d been caught under the rock
mass.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_62">62</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig38"> <ANTIMG src="images/p32.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="641" /> <p class="pcap">Whose gear? This collection of clothes and creel found below the slide, may be a clue to one of the victims still buried under huge pile of rock and debris.<span class="jri jr">(Lewis—Montana Standard)</span></p>
</div>
<p>Volunteers from Ennis, Butte, Virginia City and elsewhere
walked over the rugged slide for days searching for
any kind of clue which might help. They turned up everything
from fishing creels, camp equipment, and souvenir
pillows to kids’ shoes. One slide-walker found an exposed roll
of film which was immediately heralded as a hot lead. But
when developed, the film turned out to have been ruined by
the water. Their findings were kept in a county warehouse
in Ennis. Much of it was claimed by those who’d escaped.
The debris, so painstakingly gathered, helped little in the
search for identity.</p>
<p>The quest evolved into the painful job of waiting, keeping
lists, sifting names.</p>
<p>From the moment the quake occurred and the fact that
there were casualties became known, phone calls, telegrams,
and letters began surging in from all over the U. S. wanting
to know about friends and relatives who might be in the
area or among the victims.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_63">63</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig39"> <ANTIMG src="images/p32a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="689" /> <p class="pcap">Volunteer slide workers searched the huge 80-million-ton pile of rock for victims, and clues to identity of the buried.<span class="jri jr">(Lewis—Montana Standard)</span></p> </div>
<p>“The Disaster Service of the American Red Cross did a
tremendous job through their teletype and telephone by taking
over these inquiries and sending back information through
the Home Service chapters,” Don Skerritt, Sheriff of Gallatin
County, said.</p>
<p>One of the leads was a spaniel discovered wandering in
the slide area the day after the quake. The animal wore a
Salt Lake dog license tag. This seemed like a certain clue
to the identity of some of the victims.</p>
<p>In response to Skerritt’s teletype inquiry, Salt Lake police
found that the dog supposed to be wearing the tag had been
killed months before. Someone had hung the collar in a gas
station. Subsequently this collar was put on another dog.
Further probing developed that the dog in the quake area
belonged to the Ray Painters of Ogden, Utah. Mrs. Painter,
one of the casualties, died in the Bozeman hospital a couple
of days after the quake.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_64">64</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig40"> <ANTIMG src="images/p33.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="608" /> <p class="pcap">In Ennis County Warehouse, Red Cross Area Disaster Director Ralph Carlson, who flew to the quake scene from San Francisco, looks puzzled as he surveys part of the truckload of material recovered by slidewalkers
searching for clues to identity of those buried under slide.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p>
</div>
<p>Skerritt, who’s like a quieter, shorter version of Kefauver,
worked all that week and for months afterwards on the
identity problem. During the first weeks, Red Cross volunteers
and personnel worked around the clock to answer the
flood of inquiries. There were some 3,000 of them. They felt
fortunate that no scout troops turned up missing.</p>
<p>These queries, they painstakingly sifted, sorted, and winnowed
down. With tireless persistence, they kept at it, writing
to the source of each of the thousands of inquiries to
find out if the missing had turned up. New inquiries kept
coming in—and still do, asking about people that just plain
haven’t been heard from, and their relatives, or friends have
thought of the slide as a possible explanation.</p>
<p>Through tangible tie-ins, like postcards, letters, the use
of credit cards in the area just before the quake, phone calls
from the area, they finally got down to a list of those highly
probable as slide victims whose bodies will never be uncovered.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_65">65</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig41"> <ANTIMG src="images/p33a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="733" /> <p class="pcap">Gruesome reminder? Days after the quake, these children’s shoes and clothing still lay in the dried-up streambed below the massive slide.<span class="jri jr">(Christopherson)</span></p> </div>
<p>Take the case of Roger Provost, an official at the California
State Prison at Soledad, California. He had been in
touch with his office up to the date of the quake. He was
a methodical type. Upon leaving California, he left a planned
vacation itinerary stating that the family was to proceed
from Yellowstone down the Madison River (August 18, 19,
20 and 21) and to Bozeman, etc. Several cards to friends and
relatives postmarked Aug. 16 at West Yellowstone, Montana,
stated that the family was at a trailer campsite “on the Madison
River, about 30 miles from Yellowstone.”</p>
<p>Another family, Robert J. Williams and wife, Coy, children
Michael, 7; Steven, 11; and Christy, 3, of Idaho Falls,
had told relatives they planned on fishing the Madison River.
They registered as visitors at the Museum in Virginia City
on August 17, 1959, and weren’t heard of again.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_66">66</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p34.jpg" alt="Stranded boat." width-obs="600" height-obs="146" /></div>
<p>Dr. Merle Edgerton and his wife, Edna, in their car and
trailer, were travelling with Harmon Woods and his wife,
Edna, who also brought their car and trailer. Dr. Edgerton
kept in daily contact with his hospital in Coalinga, California,
up to the time of the slide. He was last heard from
on August 15, giving the families’ location as “on the Madison
River, outside Ennis, 35 miles from Yellowstone.”</p>
<p>The complete list of those who on such evidence are considered
buried under the monumental Madison Canyon slide
totalled 19. They are:</p>
<p>Sidney D. Ballard, wife, and son of Nelson, B. C.</p>
<p>Bernie L. Boynton and wife, Inez, of Billings, Montana.</p>
<p>Dr. Merle Edgerton and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, California.</p>
<p>Roger Provost, and wife, Elizabeth, and sons, Richard 16,
and David, 1½, of Soledad, California.</p>
<p>Mrs. Thomas Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah.</p>
<p>Robert J. Williams, and wife, Coy, and children, Steven,
11; Michael, 7, and Christy, 3 of Idaho Falls, Idaho.</p>
<p>Harmon Woods and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, Calif.</p>
<p>The other quake casualties include Mr. Purley Bennett
and children, Tommy, Carole and Susan of Coeur d’Alene,
Idaho, who, along with Thomas Stowe of Sandy, Utah, were
found below the slide. Mr. and Mrs. E. H. Stryker of San
Mateo, California, were killed by the boulders at the Cliff
Lake Campground. Mrs. Myrtle Painter of Ogden, Utah, and
Mrs. Margaret Holmes of Billings, Montana, died of quake injuries
in the Bozeman Hospital.</p>
<p>The final Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake death toll
stands at 28.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_67">67</div>
<h2 id="c11"><span class="small">CD AND NATURAL DISASTERS</span></h2>
<p>Natural disasters, like the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake,
are perhaps the best test of our Civil Defense readiness.
Until the quake, CD Director Hugh Potter wasn’t at all
sure that he had an outfit at all. Operating on a short budget
of $21,000 a year, with all of the third biggest, sprawled-out
state to organize, he’d set up, at least on paper, state-wide
and county CD groups. He’d compiled an exhaustive inventory
of state facilities, resources, etc., complete to such
minutiae as the number of aspirins in the state (1,657,000 5-gr.
tablets), and the amount of meat Montana’s abundant wildlife
represented (58,517,725 lbs., including 1,000 bison, 415
grizzly bears).</p>
<p>The alerts he’d organized weren’t notable successes, and
he’d caught some hell from the higher-ups for not being current
on the state-wide alerts which are supposed to be held
at least once a year.</p>
<p>“Our people just aren’t too enthusiastic about practice
alerts,” Potter says. “Frankly, they feel it’s a waste of time.
They’re busy. They don’t want to play war. A guy will say,
‘I want to go fishing, or put up a hay crop, or something.’</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p34a.jpg" alt="Vertical fault line." width-obs="600" height-obs="291" /></div>
<p>“But let a real emergency happen and they’re right there.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_68">68</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig42"> <ANTIMG src="images/p35.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="634" /> <p class="pcap">Real shook—the interior at the colorful Virginia City Courthouse the morning after the quake.<span class="jri jr">(Lewis—Montana Standard)</span></p> </div>
<p>“During that first day Ed Cottingham and I were busy
pulling triggers. I realized then that the most important thing
I’d done during my seven years as CD director was getting
around and getting to know who to phone—the people you
can count on to get something done in an emergency. You
can get the heck of a lot done if you know the right guy to
call.</p>
<p>“There isn’t a CD department that didn’t check in right
away to find out if they were needed.</p>
<p>“We’re especially lucky to have the U. S. Forest Service
(the big slide happened in the Beaverhead National Forest)
in our area. Their experience and constantly organized readiness
to meet the threat of forest fires right now makes them
an ideal outfit for any emergency. Forest Service firefighting
squads, transport, equipment, and information about the area
are all set up to move in a matter of minutes. They’re most
adaptable to the kind of crisis the earthquake threw at us.</p>
<p>“You can tell the Forest Service your problem and quit
worrying.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_69">69</div>
<p>“Another important outfit is the Montana Forestry Department,
which is set up to administer and protect the
state’s forests. Its boss, Gareth Moon, is head of the CD’s
Rural Firefighting Section.</p>
<p>“We have a good, mobile law enforcement outfit in the
Montana Highway Patrol. The Montana Fish and Game
Dept. men, in emergency, serve as an excellent backwoods
force.</p>
<p>“Frank Wiley, Montana Dept. of Aeronautics director and
one of the real pioneer pilots who can still fly anything from
a jet to a Jenny, took over our flying problems.”</p>
<p>At 8:45 A. M., as part of a CD emergency plan called
“Operation Bulldozer,” set up by the Associated General
Contractors, Jack Marlowe, secretary of the Montana Contractors’
Assn., had completed a list and location of all heavy
construction equipment in the area and reported that all
contractors were on standby in case they were needed.</p>
<p>The State Dept. of Health was on the ball, too. They were
moving in personnel to test water in Ennis, West Yellowstone
and throughout the quake area by 9:00 the morning
after the quake.</p>
<p>At 9:15 word came in that the Red Cross was flying in
emergency personnel from the west coast.</p>
<p>Potter was thrilled by the offers of help that kept CD HQ
phones busy. General Keith R. Barney of the Army Corps
of Engineers called offering any help needed. The governors
of Idaho and Wyoming and three Canadian provinces asked
if there was anything they could do. Idaho’s highway patrol
actually came up and helped keep things under control in
the West Yellowstone area.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p35a.jpg" alt="CD garage and trucks." width-obs="600" height-obs="166" /></div>
<p>Several search and rescue outfits called, offering aid. A
combined Army, Navy and Marine Corps Reserve unit from
Butte gathered their medical equipment and ambulances and
sped to the Ennis side of the slide as a voluntary, unpaid
action.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_70">70</div>
<p>There were offers from the crack mine rescue teams from
the famous Anaconda Company mines in Butte. When a call
went out on the regular radio for housing for the Ennis
evacuees, several hundred accommodations were phoned in
to a local Butte station. Another abortive suggestion that
men on horseback might be needed to search some of the
impassable back country brought over a hundred volunteers
in less than an hour. A Bozeman station was overwhelmed
with offers in response to an announcement that station
wagons would be needed at the airport to ambulance the
wounded to the hospital.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p36.jpg" alt="Road blocked by boulders." width-obs="600" height-obs="126" /></div>
<p>Nurses, doctors, National Guardsmen, skindivers—they all
called in wanting to help.</p>
<p>At Great Falls, where the Montana Red Cross Blood Bank
was holding a regularly scheduled drawing, when word came
that they were flying blood to Bozeman to help the victims,
so many volunteers showed up that the total exceeded 450
pints, and at closing time 150 donors were still in line.</p>
<p>“We had special problems—distance from any sizeable
town was one. I’d hate to think of the casualties if the quake
hit in a really populated area,” Potter said.</p>
<p>“The mountains, which obstruct short-wave signals and set
up all sorts of radio blind spots, made it difficult to get any
sort of ground radio communication going. It was impossible
from the ground, to signal to Ennis or to Hebgen Dam from
West Yellowstone. The radio amateurs did a tremendous job
of helping those first few hours—they set up a standby network
and kept it clear for emergency messages. One ham,
Father Francis A. Peterson, (W7RKI), from St. Anthony,
Idaho, one of the first to report the quake, loaded up his
gear, drove to West Yellowstone, and by 7:45 A. M. the morning
after the quake had set up radio control at the otherwise
<span class="pb" id="Page_71">71</span>
radioless West Yellowstone Airport. Another ham,
Harold L. Beddor, (W7JPD), of Dillon, Montana, handled
emergency communications from Dillon the day after the
quake, then flew his equipment to the West Yellowstone Airport
to help out too.</p>
<p>“The problem was complicated by the multiplicity of wave
lengths on which the various civilian and military agencies
were operating. We discovered that the high frequency bands
the Civil Defense uses (150 megacycles) are useless in mountain
country, especially in the day time. Lower frequencies,
34.82 and 46.86 megacycles did get through.</p>
<p>“All that first day or so, we relied on the Highway Department
plane, which was radio-equipped, to get messages
across the quake area. It stayed in the air all day.</p>
<p>“The mountain altitude (at the dam the elevation is 6,550
ft.), presented aviation difficulties, too. Smaller helicopters
couldn’t make it, and some of the bigger jobs were tricky to
fly in the less dense mountain air.</p>
<p>“We had difficulty with aerial sightseers. In spite of our
announcement that the fields at West Yellowstone and Ennis
were closed to all but emergency aircraft, planes flew in
from all over. Charter pilots flew in from as far away as
Arizona, and did a brisk business in flying the curious over
the quake area at $6 a head. Including the Air Force ships,
during the first few days the West Yellowstone Airport was
as busy as Chicago’s Midway Field, with planes taking off
and landing at the rate of one a minute. With all the traffic
over the slide area, it was a miracle that we got through
that first week without a crash.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p36a.jpg" alt="Fallen trees." width-obs="600" height-obs="110" /></div>
<p>“But as a result of the quake we know that any area
which has this kind of emergency will make out OK with
the wonderful spirit of people, helping and wanting to help.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_72">72</div>
<h2 id="c12"><span class="small">AFTERMATH</span></h2>
<p>Among the cataclysms of nature, none is more terrifying
than an earthquake, and huge slides, like the one triggered
by the Madison Canyon earthquake, are perhaps the most
dramatic type of geologic change. In one sudden, spectacular
moment, changes take place that make us think of the tremendous
energy released by atomic fission, the earth’s mass
moves in a volume that rocks the imagination, and its effect
on the people who are near, or in the path of nature’s huge,
impulsive-seeming change helps us to realize how infinitesimal
we are before the forces and laws of nature.</p>
<p>In 1903, a 40 million cubic yard rock slide crashed down
from the crest of Turtle Mountain onto the coal-mining town
of Frank, Alberta, killing 70 people.</p>
<p>But the consequences of such huge slides aren’t completed
when the cliff toppling ceases. Take the case of the
famous June 23, 1925, Gros Ventre slide in northwestern
Wyoming, 40 miles south of Yellowstone Park. An estimated
50 million cubic yards of rock and debris plunged down the
steep canyon wall, shot across the valley floor, and rushed
some 350 feet up the opposite wall of the canyon before it
settled back, like water sloshing in a huge bowl.</p>
<p>Nobody was killed when this slide choked the Gros Ventre
River. It covered parts of two ranches and buried six head
of cattle. But two years later, in May, 1927, the water dammed
by the slide pushed out a big section of the slide and
the sudden wave of water and debris washed away the town
of Kelly, Wyoming, killing seven people.</p>
<p>This kind of possibility was in the mind of Army Corps
of Engineers Missouri River Chief Keith R. Barney as he
and Lt. Col. Walter W. Holgrefe of the Corps district offices
at Garrison Dam in North Dakota, discussed the Montana
earthquake’s action. The slide represented a double threat
to people in the Madison Valley below.</p>
<p>As an immediate effect of the slide, the water flowing
over Hebgen Dam was stopped by the slide. The formation
of a lake behind the slide began the moment of the slide.
When it filled, this 240-foot deep impoundment, called
Earthquake or “Quake” Lake, would exert an enormous pressure
on the slide. If the slide was composed of unstable material,
its collapse could, in a repeat of the Gros Ventre tragedy,
bring death and destruction to the valley towns of Ennis,
Three Forks, and Trident below.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_73">73</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig43"> <ANTIMG src="images/p37.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="639" /> <p class="pcap">The Hebgen slide on September 10, when Quake Lake first began to flow through the 14-ft. deep channel cut by the Army Corps of Engineers. The immense erosion that followed prompted another 50-ft. channel cut on the
slide. The lower picture shows the completion of this project on October
17, 1959.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Army Corps of Engineers)</span></p>
</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p37a.jpg" alt="The completion of the channel." width-obs="800" height-obs="607" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_74">74</div>
<p>The second and greater threat was the discovery that
when Quake Lake filled, its impounded water would lap at
the foundations of Hebgen Dam, and quite possibly undermine
it, releasing a volume of water seven times that of the
earthquake-caused reservoirs, which could also sweep part
of the slide along in its mad rush.</p>
<p>Like the threat of a time bomb, the rising level of Quake
Lake, and the increasing pressure of the water against the
slide, augmented by rumor, kept the downstream towns in
constant anxiety.</p>
<p>The Army Corps of Engineers rushed into emergency
action. They flew in a 50-man-staff, and set up headquarters
in the Stagecoach Inn at West Yellowstone.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p38.jpg" alt="Bridge repair." width-obs="600" height-obs="147" /></div>
<p>The mines in Butte were on strike, and huge earth moving
equipment from the open pit operations, along with rigs
from other contractors, worked around the clock to cut a 250-foot
wide and 14-foot deep channel across the mile and a half
long slide and armor it with rock so the water couldn’t cause
sudden erosion of the rest of the slide before the water
topped the huge natural dam.</p>
<p>On September 10, water licked over the new spillway,
running into the river bed just below, which had been dry
since the quake. To the Corps’s great surprise, severe erosion
tore the downstream face of the slide. To remedy this, they
launched another crash program to cut a 50-foot deep channel
across the top of the slide. It was completed October 29.</p>
<p>The Corps’s operations on the slide took a total of close
to $1,700,000 of funds set up for such emergencies. As a result,
the towns below the slide are safe from the flood threat
the slide might represent.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_75">75</div>
<h2 id="c13"><span class="small">LIVING GEOLOGY</span></h2>
<p>Just how common are mass earth shakeups like the
Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, anyhow?</p>
<p>Geologists tell us they’re frequent, with a dozen or more
major quakes, and thousands of minor tremors happening
each year.</p>
<p>Earthquakes are the natural outcome of the fact that the
earth, while seeming substantial and changeless, is constantly,
if most gradually, in the process of change. Mountains
are thrust up. Glaciers carve them down. Volcanoes
pour out their molten rock. Rivers and floods
scour their erosive paths. Sediments slide and settle.</p>
<p>The enormous masses which great internal earth
forces have raised up to mountain height, create
counter stresses. These forces build up for years,
sometimes for centuries or longer.</p>
<p>Eventually something has to give. When this happens
on a grand, or spectacular scale, we call it an earthquake.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig44"> <ANTIMG src="images/p38a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="470" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap">Stress, caused by the quake, resulting from slump of surficial material caused the attractive curving of this fence along Highway
287 east of Hebgen Dam.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Geological Survey)</span></p>
</div>
<p>Whether you’re a connoisseur, expert, or not, the
spectacular 1959 Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake
<span class="pb" id="Page_76">76</span>
was a beaut. Geologists call
it a “textbook earthquake,”
because it included nearly
all of the classic actions, or
results which quakes are
likely to cause.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig45"> <ANTIMG src="images/p39.jpg" alt="" width-obs="458" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap">Damkeeper George Hungerford points out how much the tidal waves, or seiches, overtopped
Hebgen Dam at the time of the
quake. Hungerford is standing
on earthfill washed down from
dam-top level by the gigantic
waves. The quake also cracked
the dam’s concrete core as shown.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Power Co.)</span></p>
</div>
<p>It ranked right along with
San Francisco’s 1906 shakedown
as among the severest
earthquakes on the North
American continent.</p>
<p>In seismic measurements,
it rated 7.8 on the Richter
Scale, as compared with San
Francisco’s 8.2.</p>
<p>It set up so called tidal
waves, or seiches, on Hebgen
Lake. There were at
least three of these huge
waves—20-ft. high—which
overtopped the entire 721-ft.
length of the dam by four
feet. Eyewitness statements
relate that the velocity of
the tidal wave was so great
that it caused the water
literally to leap over the top
of the dam. It filled the
small generating plant with
a 2 to 4 ft. deep layer of
rocks.</p>
<p>Although the dam stood, the quake caused several fractures
in the core wall, one of which showed a 3- to 4-inch
separation, and shattered the dam’s concrete spillway.</p>
<p>The earthquake created three major faults, with displacement
on the Red Canyon Fault running as much as 20 ft.,
which stacks up impressively alongside the 26-ft. maximum
displacement resulting from San Francisco’s quake. (These
two earthquakes differed, however, in that the Montana displacement
was vertical, while San Francisco’s was horizontal.)</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_77">77</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig46"> <ANTIMG src="images/p39a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="258" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="ss"><i>BEFORE</i></span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig47"> <ANTIMG src="images/p39b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="600" height-obs="269" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="ss"><i>AFTER</i></span></p> </div>
<p>According to the Society of Military Engineers, surveys
from benchmarks outside the earthquake-affected areas show
that the earth in the Hebgen Dam Quake area near Hebgen
Dam has settled between eighteen and nineteen feet from
its level before the quake.</p>
<p>It wasn’t uniform, though. The quake caused tilting,
which showed up in the way the north side of Hebgen Lake
had sunk eight feet, while the south side of the lake, docks,
boats, etc., were sticking eight feet out of the water.</p>
<p>The quake also caused many sink, or more properly, blow
holes. These phenomena are also known as sandspouts.
Water, compressed and forced up and out by quake action
washes out layers of sand sub strata. The overhead surface
areas naturally drop into the hole, leaving a puzzling hunk
of slumped ground—separate from the normal scarps—as big
as 15 × 50 ft. in area.</p>
<p>The Montana-Yellowstone quake sent seismographs jiggling
as far away as New Zealand. It caused fluctuation of
water level in wells as much as ten feet in nearby Idaho, a
tenth of a foot in Hawaii, 3,200 miles away, and .01 ft. in
Puerto Rico.</p>
<p>The huge concrete Hungry Horse Dam, near Columbia
Falls, Montana, 250 miles NW of the quake area, showed
measurable displacement as a result of the quake. In remote
Seattle, the diminished tremors were still strong enough to
break loose the floating amphitheatre in Lake Washington.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_78">78</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p40.jpg" alt="Rock Cr. Camp" width-obs="660" height-obs="359" /></div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p40a.jpg" alt="Collapse of Dolomite Buttress" width-obs="656" height-obs="407" /></div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p40b.jpg" alt="Camp as buried by landslide" width-obs="666" height-obs="369" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_79">79</div>
<p>But by far the most spectacular effect of Montana’s Earthquake
was the huge landslide at the mouth of the Madison
Canyon.</p>
<p>At the site of the slide, a relatively strong and nearly
vertical layer of dolomite rock supported a huge bank, or
mountain, of comparatively unstable schist and kept it from
sliding into the valley in the same way that a retaining wall
keeps a hillside terrace from slipping downhill. The tremendous
shock waves of the earthquake fractured this dolomite
buttress, and some 43 million cubic yards, or 80 million
tons of rock, timber, and other mountainside debris cascaded
off the slope, hurtled into the canyon, and surged up the
opposite side, carrying huge trees and house-sized boulders
as if they were weightless, hollow toys.</p>
<p>When this huge mass whomped down onto the river bed,
it forced out the water and air trapped underneath at hurricane
velocity. The huge slide spurted mud, air, and water
with such force as to send two-ton cars sailing through the
air, and to grind others to suitcase thickness against the rocks.</p>
<p>All this happened in seconds.</p>
<p>It would take eight seconds for the mass at the top of the
mountain to fall to the valley floor 1,200 ft. below. At the
time it reached this point, the mass would be travelling 174
miles per hour. The time it took to zoom half-a-mile across
the valley, up the opposite canyon wall, then split and flow
three-quarters-of-a-mile up and down the valley (the slide
lies one-and-a-half-miles-long in the valley), was less than
thirty seconds!</p>
<p>The fact that timber from the face of the mountain is
spread in relatively uniform fashion over the entire surface
of the slide is interpreted to mean that there was little tumbling
action—that the slide moved as a single, if shattered,
mass.</p>
<p>One important scientific controversy has emerged from
the earthquake. It relates to the time relationship, or sequence
between the initial shock, the tidal waves, or seiches,
how fast the huge quantities of water which overtopped the
dam moved down the valley, and whether these slugs of
water had rushed through the canyon in time to reach the
site of the slide before the mountain fell.</p>
<p>The stretch of the Madison running through the canyon
is fresh, fast water, but normally it takes up to two hours
<span class="pb" id="Page_80">80</span>
for an object to run the sparkling, seven-mile, trout-rich
stretch from Hebgen Dam to the mouth of the canyon. The
big surges of water—the seiches overtopping the dam—would
make it a lot faster.</p>
<p>There are two big, related questions.</p>
<p>Could the big surges of water reach the point of the slide
soon enough?</p>
<p>And just how soon after the first shock did the mountain
fall?</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p41.jpg" alt="Ruined building on the fault line." width-obs="600" height-obs="296" /></div>
<p>For the first couple of days after the quake, the theory
persisted that the slide must have happened quite some
time after the first shock—as late as 5:00 A. M., according to
some theorists.</p>
<p>But, as the facts, and the testimony of folks trapped near
the slide—the Osts, Fredericks, Smiths, and Mrs. Bennett—became
available, it was apparent that the slide must have
closely followed the initial shock. Even if you discount the
disrupted time sense of people under stress—when a minute
can seem like an hour, and vice versa—it’s difficult to imagine
that more than 20 minutes elapsed between the first shock
and the slide.</p>
<p>According to one set of calculations, big waves could have
swept from the dam to the slide site in 18 minutes or so.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_81">81</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig48"> <ANTIMG src="images/p41a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="659" /> <p class="pcap">A man stands in the gap left by the earthquake-caused simple fault scarp.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Geological Survey)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig49"> <ANTIMG src="images/p41b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="557" /> <p class="pcap">Something slipped here! Before the quake caused the ground drop, creating this magnificent scarp, the ground surface shown here was continuous.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_82">82</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p42.jpg" alt="Surface elevation after quake." width-obs="600" height-obs="296" /></div>
<dl class="undent pcap"><br/>Hebgen Lake
<br/>Hebgen Fault
<br/>Red Canyon Fault
<p>Although the quake caused much settling of the earth
packed against the downstream side of Hebgen Dam’s concrete
core, the relatively slight displacement of the sod cover
is interpreted to mean that all three tidal waves passed over
the dam before this earth subsided and separated from the
core. Thus the water would have begun its race down the
valley before the heavy earth-settling shocks hit the dam
area.</p>
<p>Those who support the high-water-at-the-moment-of-the-slide
theory point to the great volume of water damage way
below the slide.</p>
<p>If the slide had come first, it would have dammed off the
tidal waves, and prevented such damage. They feel there
just wasn’t enough water in the river bed’s normal content
to cause the water damage done both upstream and downstream
by the slide. And they argue, the mud and dust in
the composition of the slide would have taken up most of
the water normally found in the reach of the river buried
under the slide.</p>
<p>There’s further evidence in the numerous fish found high
and dry on the flat along the river bank several feet higher
than the streambed. Most of them were small, catfish-like
chubs. There were numerous trout, and one 18-inch carp.
There is no place in the river below the pool at the toe of the
dam where carp would likely be found.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_83">83</div>
<p>Also, there was further confirmation in the fact that three
of the especially made 11-inch squared timbers, eight and a
half feet long, with notched ends and two U-bolts used as
stop-logs in the Hebgen Dam spillway were found below the
slide. Some shadow was cast on this as absolute confirmation
by the Montana Power Co.’s explanation that stop-logs have
been lost from time to time before the quake.</p>
<p>Those who, in spite of such evidence, oppose the theory
that the high water reached the slide area first just don’t
feel that the water could have made it all the way down the
canyon in so short a time. They feel that it would have taken
at least 40 minutes for the big waves to traverse the seven
miles. They have some support in L. D. Smith’s testimony
that in driving down from Beaver Creek to Rock Creek right
after the shocks, he saw no such waves.</p>
<p>At any rate, this is one argument that geologists and
hydrologists will be batting around for a long time.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig50"> <ANTIMG src="images/p42a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="613" /> <p class="pcap">This view of the Madison Canyon slide gives the feeling of the up-canyon and down-canyon flow of the 80-million-ton mass of rock and debris.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Highway Commission)</span></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_84">84</div>
<h2 id="c14"><span class="small">NOW YOU CAN SEE</span></h2>
<p>It’s unusual when an event so spectacular
as the Montana-Yellowstone
Earthquake doesn’t produce some exploitable
possibilities, and this one did.
The month after this August 17, 1959
series of quakes, the U. S. Forest Service,
which is proprietor of the vast and
tumultuous real estate on which the
major portion of the immediate quake
action happened, announced that is was
underway with plans to set up a Geological
Area to help visitors get to
earthquake interest points and to understand
the tremendous earth forces
which operated here.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p43.jpg" alt="Cliff and fallen rocks." width-obs="158" height-obs="599" /></div>
<p>They held the inaugural of the Madison
River Canyon Earthquake Area—the
first of its kind anywhere—on August
17, 1960, the first anniversary of
the quake. Relatives of the 28 quake
victims sat on the gigantic slide as they
unveiled the bronze memorial plaque
mounted on the huge dolomite boulder
which had floated across the valley
atop the surging debris.</p>
<p>This awesome and fascinating earthquake
area quickly became one of the
region’s top tourist attractions, with
close to half-a-million visitors in attendance
during each of the first two
post-quake summers, in spite of miserable
to nearly impassable access roads.
This popularity is especially fitting because
the quake that’s on display here
was essentially a “tourist earthquake”.
It happened in the scenic mountain
<span class="pb" id="Page_85">85</span>
area which draws a brisk vacation traffic from all over the
U. S. and Canada, during the height of the tourist season.
And those who went through the adventure, the thrills, the
terror, the heroes and the helped, the survivors, and the casualties,
could nearly all be classed as tourists.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig51"> <ANTIMG src="images/p43a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="434" /> <p class="pcap">On this huge boulder, atop the slide, the U. S. Forest Service erected a plaque in memorial to the victims of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake.<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Service)</span></p> </div>
<p>Superb trout fishing has always been one of the area’s
most important features, and, understandably, there was
much post-quake concern as to how this would be affected.
While Hebgen Lake was drained to repair the quake-damaged
Hebgen Dam, Montana’s Fish and Game Department poisoned
the trash fish and stocked the refilled lake with millions
of rainbow trout running in size from fingerlings to 9-inchers.
Today both Hebgen and Quake Lake—formed by the damming
action of the slide at the mouth of Madison Canyon,
afford top fishing, either from shore or from boat. Quake
Lake has a made-to-order launching ramp at Cabin Creek,
where the flooded-out road runs right into the lake.</p>
<p>In spite of the concern by fish biologists that silting from
the slide would take the edge off fishing on the Madison below
the slide area, it kept right on providing fishermen the
top-notch action that had long earned its reputation as a
blue-ribbon trout stream that compares with fishing anywhere
in the world.</p>
<p>Today there are excellent roads to and through the Earthquake
Area. Route 287, south from Ennis, leads directly to
the huge slide at the mouth of Madison Canyon. Here the
Forest Service has built a surfaced road up onto the slide.
On top is the best vantage point to view the whole panorama
<span class="pb" id="Page_86">86</span>
of the mountain fall—where it dropped from, how in a matter
of seconds 80-million tons of rock cut off the valley, the sparkling
blue lake it created, and the open stretch of the Madison
below the canyon. Besides, on the slide there are interpretive
exhibits, and the huge monolith bearing the plaque to the
quake dead, 21 of whom still lie somewhere beneath this
mammoth pile of rock.</p>
<p>The relocated route runs eastward down the slide, along
Quake Lake, and through Madison Canyon. Several Forest
Service people staff the formally designated Earthquake
Area during the summer season to help explain and interpret
what happened here. Definite plans for the area include a
formal visitor center, and at least one first-class campground
in the slide-lake-canyon area.</p>
<p>Hebgen Dam, the dam that held, straddles the upper end
of Madison Canyon. The road from here along Hebgen Lake
to the Duck Creek Y has been much improved over its pre-quake
status.</p>
<p>The Quake Area is just as easily approachable from West
Yellowstone by taking 191 north 10 miles to the Duck Creek
Y, and then driving west along Hebgen Lake. Near the Y,
the big fault runs close to the road, through the Culligan
ranch, etc.</p>
<p>The magnificent Raynolds Pass road, which runs south
from its junction with the Madison Canyon road three miles
west of the slide, has become an important new route to
the earthquake area. The morning after the slide, highway
crews were at work on this alternate route, which for two
years substituted for the blocked, flooded, and destroyed road
through the Madison Canyon and along the north shore of
Hebgen Lake while the regular route between Ennis and
West Yellowstone remained blocked. With its exciting mountain
backdrop, this new, improved road provides an enjoyable
alternative which should be included in any circle tour
of quake features.</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p44.jpg" alt="Highway crews at work." width-obs="500" height-obs="108" /></div>
<p>In the spring of 1959, as he tells it, Lemuel Garrison,
Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, looked at some
bids for new housing in the Park which included extra steel
as a protection against the possibility of earthquakes.</p>
<p>“Heck,” he said, “We’re not in an earthquake area.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_87">87</div>
<p>Today, Yellowstone’s famous earthquake has become an
important addition to its already fabulous attractions. The
Park took the quake in its stride. By June 1, 1960, in spite
of road damage of $2,600,000, and building damage of $1,700,000
resulting from the quake, Yellowstone Park, its roads,
and other facilities were ready for its normal summer rush.</p>
<p>In clearing a slide which blocked the road near Firehole
Falls, south of Madison Junction, the road crew discovered
one near casualty—a bear. The bruin had evidently sought
shelter in a hollow below the road shoulder, and became
trapped when the slide closed his exit. It was several days
after the quake when the crew heard the bear’s attempts to
crawl out of his artificial cave. They lowered a tree trunk,
still bearing branches, into the hole and retreated while the
bear scrambled out.</p>
<p>Word of the quake plus the initial belief that the epicenters
of seven of the eleven major shocks were located in
the famous Firehole Basin caused widespread anxiety as to
whether the tremendous forces loosed might have interfered
with nature’s intricate underground plumbing which keeps
the geysers, hot pools, and mud pots spouting, burbling and
burping.</p>
<p>Studies by a horde of seismologists, geologists and other
earth scientists who swarmed into the Firehole Basin in the
months after the quake show that during the night of August
17 the hot spring activity in this area changed more than
during the 87 years since a park was created out of the
mysterious, steaming country which had been known as
“Coulter’s Hell.” The scientists termed these changes as
“profound and far reaching.” These changes in thermal features
are, and will be, in years to come, tremendously interesting.</p>
<p>The majority of these changes came with, or just after,
the initial quakes. The earthquake acted as a trigger to start
eruption in hundreds of springs, nearly half of them erupting
for the first time in their known histories. The whole place
blew, then subsided.</p>
<p>There was considerable juggling of the intervals and playing
times of some of the better-known geysers. Great Fountain,
Riverside, Daisy, Castle, and Oblong shortened the
length of their eruption intervals, but they play nearly twice
<span class="pb" id="Page_88">88</span>
as frequently as they did prior to the quake. Sapphire, a
minor geyser, became a major geyser, but has subsided to a
status somewhere in between. Clepsydra Geyser went frantically
wild, and has erupted continuously since the quake.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig52"> <ANTIMG src="images/p45.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="494" /> <p class="pcap">The quake gave Yellowstone Park’s famous Morning Geyser in lower Geyser Basin a shot in the arm. Normally erupting once a day, after the quake it blasted off every four hours.<span class="jri jr">(National Park Service)</span></p>
</div>
<p>Steady Geyser just up and quit. So did Grand Geyser.
Giantess Geyser, located just across the river from Old
Faithful, habitually shook the ground in the vicinity every
time it erupted. Right after the quake it blasted off and
kept blowing for a continuous 100 hours, instead of its usual
30-hour run. The Fountain Paint Pots became so active, and
spread so, that they took over what used to be an asphalt-paved
parking area.</p>
<p>In the midst of these changing patterns, Old Faithful
goes on in much the same way, except for perhaps a slight
increased interval between blasts. Studies of 14,317 eruptions
were clocked, with an average interval of 63.8 minutes.
The shortest interval was 33 minutes, in 1948-51, the longest
is 93 minutes, measured in ’55.</p>
<p>But none of these changes are static. Just when Grand
Geyser, having been dormant for five months, was considered
dead, it moved into a sporadic blasting phase.</p>
<p>These quake-caused fluctuations in thermal features, plus
strong curiosity as to the earthquake’s effects in the surrounding
area, Sup’t. Lon Garrison feels, will make Yellowstone’s
post-quake years bigger than ever.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_89">89</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig53"> <ANTIMG src="images/p45a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="1000" height-obs="776" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="large"><span class="ss"><i><span class="rubric">MADISON CANYON EARTHQUAKE AREA</span></i></span></span></p> </div>
<dl class="undent pcap"><br/><span class="rubric">QUAKE LAKE</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Smokejumpers</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">SLIDE</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">destroyed road</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">5 bodies found</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">19 presumed buried under slide</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">helicopter took victims here</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Quake Exhibits</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Old Madison Valley Fault</span>
<br/>RAYNOLDS PASS
<br/><span class="rubric">Raynolds Pass Road (replacing Madison Canyon road knocked out by Quake)</span>
<br/>CLIFF LAKE
<br/><span class="rubric">2 fatalities</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">RED CANYON FAULT</span>
<br/>HEBGEN LAKE
<br/><span class="rubric">HEBGEN FAULT</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Road fell into Lake</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Improvised road</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">Sandspout</span>
<br/><span class="rubric">4 Air Force Helicopters</span>
<br/>WEST YELLOWSTONE
<br/><span class="rubric">Injured transferred from helicopter for flight to hospital</span>
<div class="pb" id="Page_90">90</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig54"> <ANTIMG src="images/p46.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="443" /> <p class="pcap"><span class="center"><span class="large">General Area</span></span> <span class="center">Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake</span> <span class="center">August 17, 1959</span></p>
</div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_91">91</div>
<h3 id="c15">MONTANA-YELLOWSTONE EARTHQUAKE</h3>
<div class="fig"> id="fig55"> <ANTIMG src="images/p47.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="470" /> <p class="pcap">The Slide<span class="jri jr">(U. S. Forest Svc.)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig56"> <ANTIMG src="images/p47a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="708" /> <p class="pcap">This was level ground before the quake made this 20-ft. scarp.<span class="jri jr">(Mont. Hwy. Comm.)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig57"> <ANTIMG src="images/p47b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="541" /> <p class="pcap">Road missing after quake.<span class="jri jr">(Montana Power)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig58"> <ANTIMG src="images/p47d.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="535" /> <p class="pcap">These massive rocks blocked the road at Yellowstone Park’s Golden Gate after the Earthquake.<span class="jri jr">(Natl. Park Svc.)</span></p> </div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig59"> <ANTIMG src="images/p47e.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="540" /> <p class="pcap">Shook-up road after quake.<span class="jri jr">(USFS)</span></p> </div>
<h2 id="c16"><span class="small"><span class="ss">ABOUT THE AUTHOR</span></span></h2>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p99.jpg" alt="Edmund Christopherson" width-obs="300" height-obs="365" /></div>
<p>Ed Christopherson was a professional author and magazine
writer whose articles about Montana, the Northwest, and
other subjects appear in The Saturday Evening Post, Holiday,
This Week Magazine, Mademoiselle, Reader’s Digest, The
New York Times, Congressional Record, etc.</p>
<p>Born in Ohio, he began his writing career in New York.
His introduction to the Mountain Northwest came through
a season as a Forest Service Smokejumper. After several years
in New York, he picked exciting and scenic Western
Montana as the center of his regional writing activities.</p>
<p>Christopherson went to West Yellowstone (they called
it “Shookville”) the day after the quake. He got first
hand accounts from survivors there, and in Ennis,
flew and walked over the slide and elsewhere in the quake
area, and since has spent months researching
and correlating what turned out to be “The
Night The Mountain Fell.”</p>
<h2>Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
<ul>
<li>Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.</li>
<li>Silently corrected a few typos.</li>
<li>Transcribed some text within images.</li>
<li>In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.</li>
</ul>
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