Encounters in Avalanche Country: A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820–1920, by Diana L. Di Stefano

Abstract

Encounters in Avalanche Country: A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820-1920, by Diana L. Di Stefano, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2013. x, 171 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). When avalanches (or snowslides) make history, the results are usually rather grim. This is certainly the case in Diana L. Di Stefano's Encounters in Avalanche Country, but there is also more here than thundering avalanches wiping out towns and trains and creating deadly disasters. Focusing on the North American West between 1820 and 1920, Di Stefano contends that mountain people developed increasingly complex understandings of their mountainous environments that helped them negotiate the often perilous environmental realities--particularly avalanches--that framed life in the high country for everyone. Over time, those understandings shaped ideas about environmental risk and responsibility, which in turn influenced social and economic developments, cultural and legal traditions, and even the way people thought about their relationship to the natural world more generally in the emerging industrial age. These are interesting ideas and Di Stefano pursues them in eight relatively brief chapters. The first three chapters move quickly across vast historiographical terrain, leaping from the fur trade to industrial mining in forty-three pages. The main ideas developed here focus on the challenges and dangers of mountain life--such as extreme cold, deep snows, steep slopes, and avalanches--and the way trappers, mailmen, miners, and others learned to negotiate and understand these challenges, weigh their risks, and stitch together a more cooperative social fabric in response. The following five chapters narrow the focus of the book to railways and the mountain towns they served. After a short synthetic overview of the problems snowslides posed for high country railroads, Di Stefano digs deeply into two events that animate much of the rest of the book: the 1910 Rogers Pass slide that struck the Canadian Pacific Railway in the Selkirk Mountains near the town of Revelstoke, and the 1910 Wellington slide that hit the Great Northern Railway east of Seattle in the Cascade Range. The Rogers Pass slide killed fifty-seven railroad workers, while the Wellington slide carried away ninety-six passengers and crew. These tragedies generated numerous liability claims, which Di Stefano analyzes in great detail to both reinforce and parse her ideas about local environmental knowledge, the social solidarity and identity of mountain people and their communities, and the nature and limits of liability law. Throughout Encounters in Avalanche Country, Di Stefano's most effective historiographical intervention touches on the way we think about the relationship of environment and culture in the settlement of the North American West. …