Description
16
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THE BIG READ
National Endowment for the Arts
Construction of the Sandpoint Railroad Bridge
Sylvie and I walked the whole black night across
the railroad bridge at Fingerbone—a very long
bridge, as you know if you have seen it.
—from
Housekeeping
, p. 216
Author Marilynne Robinson grew up in Idaho
watching trains traverse the Sandpoint railroad
bridge, a long, dramatic span of track suspended
over the deep waters of Lake Pend Oreille. Forty
trains each day now pass through Sandpoint, but
imagine how vast and impenetrable the Idaho
wilderness must have seemed when surveyors for
the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in the 1850s.
Before the railroad arrived, travelers to the area
relied on Indian trails, and the town of Sandpoint
didn’t exist. The first railroad bridge was built in
1882, as part of a three-hundred-mile segment of
track constructed west from Heron, Montana, to
Wallula, Washington. The original bridge, updated
in 1905, was constructed with wooden pilings and
ties cut from virgin timber harvested from the
surrounding forests.
In Eugene Virgil Smalley’s extraordinary
History
of the Northern Pacific Railroad
, published in
1883, the building of the bridge itself is reported
as somewhat less arduous than the construction
of track leading up to the shores of Lake Pend
Oreille:
As the railroad approaches Lake Pend Oreille
from the west, the country becomes broken
with ridges and deep ravines, and much trestle
and piling is required.
Within three miles of
the lake there are three trestles—one 2,000
feet long, one 1,400 feet, and one 1,300 feet.
The work was performed by several thousand
men, Smalley noted, “in spite of heavy snow-falls.”
There were no settlements along the construction
path east of Spokane. All supplies were hauled in
on horse-drawn wagons. The coming of spring
put an end to the miseries of snow, but it brought
high water and terrible mud as work began on the
bridge. Still, the workers endured. The finished
bridge had a length of 8,400 feet (1.6 miles).
Smalley wrote that “six hundred feet of this
structure runs across such deep water that piles
from 90 to 100 feet in length are required.”
Within a few years, Sandpoint became a rowdy,
booming railroad town. In 1908, another long
bridge was built over the lake to carry wagons
and, eventually, cars. But the railroad bridge is
Robinson’s chosen image in the novel, perhaps
because it recalls a time when a train pulling into
town held any number of interesting possibilities in
a lonely place—including escape.