Chapter CD: Wrapup

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.

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.

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.

"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 1/2 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."

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.

"How many do you need?" he was asked.

"All you can get," he answered.

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.

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.

"When we made our parachute landings," Hammond remembers, "The folks we came to rescue asked us, solicitously, if we were OK."

The rescue of the people trapped in the canyon--it turned out that there were close to 300--proceeded smoothly. The 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.

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 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.

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,

"That day anyone would have been proud to be a member of the Highway Department."

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.

Nobody held back. They put in all the personnel, and spent all the money needed to get it done.

"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.

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.

UNTRAPPED

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

It was signed simply, "Ost."

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"Doesn't it strike you as almost planned?" Rev. Ost said when he got the explanation.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"We're certainly going to be ardent Red Cross workers from now on!"

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."

Conditioned by the quake of the night before, when the town siren blasted off at 9:00 P. M. the quake victims jumped 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.

"I'm damned if I'm going to be caught in my pajamas again," she said.

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.

The Fredericks moved to the Finlen Hotel in Butte while George Whitmore had treatment for his more serious eye injury.

"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."

The Fredericks flew back to Elyria that same Sunday, leaving George Whitmore in the hospital for further treatment.

"The irony of it all," Mrs. Fredericks said, "is that we still didn't get to see Yellowstone Park."

MYSTERY--WHO GOT IT?

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.

Early guesses put the figure in the hundreds.

The infeasibility of moving 43 million cubic yards of collapsed mountain in quest of this gruesome total was almost immediately apparent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The quest evolved into the painful job of waiting, keeping lists, sifting names.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

The complete list of those who on such evidence are considered buried under the monumental Madison Canyon slide totalled 19. They are:

Sidney D. Ballard, wife, and son of Nelson, B. C.

Bernie L. Boynton and wife, Inez, of Billings, Montana.

Dr. Merle Edgerton and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, California.

Roger Provost, and wife, Elizabeth, and sons, Richard 16, and David, 1-1/2, of Soledad, California.

Mrs. Thomas Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah.

Robert J. Williams, and wife, Coy, and children, Steven, 11; Michael, 7, and Christy, 3 of Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Harmon Woods and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, Calif.

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.

The final Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake death toll stands at 28.