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Oral History |
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By Pappy Clay - February 3rd, 1969 This is a true story of the "Great Tea Wreck" of probably 1889 on East Promontory Hill and of the thwarted enterprise of one "Big Wun Lung" who was a rather tall chinaman who belonged to the Kolmar section-gang in the Golden Spike Era of the old "C.P." between 1887 and 1890. The story involves one of several mysterious wrecks which occurred on eastbound trains going down Promontory Hill between Promontory Station and Kolmar within that same period of time. This particular wreck known as the "Tea Wreck" involved just a few cars near the middle of the train which jumped the track on the "hill fill" and rolled a long ways down the south side of the embankment causing boxcars full of big boxes of bulk tea from China to burst open scattering boxed and loose tea all over the side hill. The usual length of a freight-train in those days was about 30 cars but west bound traffic being heavier at the time than east-bound traffic, therefore eastbound trains usually included a few "empties" and were sometimes 40 cars long on that account. Such trains were too long for the Westinghouse automatic airbrakes of that period to properly functioning long steep down grades like East Promontory Hill so sometimes "the air would be cut" near the middle of the train leaving the locomotive engineer to handle the air-brakes on the front half of the train while the two brakeman would apply the hand brakes on the rear half of the train. The aim would be to ease the train down the hill at not over 15 miles per hour with the cars near the locomotive and the cars near the caboose being efficiently braked but with some cars near the middle of the train being poorly braked or almost "free wheeling". If some of the middle cars happened to be "empties" then there was the possibility of a kind of a "jack-knife" effect of pressure form both ends of the train against the middle and on the slight curve to the left of the "hill fill" this might be enough to "squeeze" the trucks of an empty up over the outside rail so the wheels flanges might ride that rail for and instant then jump off the track and that empty car would break from the rest of the train and roll down the fill taking several following cars, either loads or empties, with it before the two ends of the train could be brought to a stop while still on the track since breaking the air-hose on the front half of the train would set the brakes up tight while the cars near the caboose would have been well hand-braked by the two brakemen working near the rear end. Such was the wreck and damaged track that Big Wun Lung was called out to work on and which soon gave him a grand idea of an enterprise that would make him rich. At each succeeding night he took his "tote-pole" and walked two miles from Kolmar to the scene of the wreck on the track, then down the embankment until he found two undamaged boxes of tea, one of which he tied to either end of his tote-pole, then on down to the wagon-road which crossed the track not far from the hill-fill then along that wagon-road toward Blue Creek Station. Each big box of tea was about two feet square on all sides. The tea had came from Hong Kong, China, and had Chinese writing all over the paper which was glued to a teakwood tight box with the loose tea inside a lead-foil bag inside the box and each box weighing around 80 pounds apiece, and undoubtedly this load was so heavy that poor Wun Lung would need to stop and rest every few hundred feet. The distance along the wagon-road between the "tea wreck'" and Blue Creek Station was at least 3 miles and poor Wun Lung would heave and carry and rest and lug and tote all night long just to get two boxes of tea to his cache behind the water tank at Blue Creek, then he would walk 2 and a half up the track from Blue Creek to Kolmar before daylight and either play sick of go out with his section-gang buddies to put in a long day shift. Big Wun Lung kept this up nightly for more than a week until he had a pile of around 16 boxes of tea at Blue Creek Station poorly hidden east of the water-tank and when my father, Cassius M. Clay, who was the telegraph operator and agent at Blue Creek at the time, discovered the tea cache and deemed it his duty to report the incident to the C.P. Special Agent by telegraph where upon Special Agents came out to Blue Creek and had the boxed tea shipped to Ogden as part of the railroad's obligation to salvage all the boxed tea from said "Great Tea Wreck" as was possible to have done. As the tea loaded boxcars had rolled down the hillside enough tea boxes had broken open so that most of the Ranchers on the East-side of the Promontory and most of the railroad employees in the Promontory, Kolmar, Blue Creek area salvaged enough tea to last them for a year or more. This was from the spilled tea, of course, which the railroad company could not efficiently salvage for the shipper so the Central Pacific Company paid for it while the folks of the area were happy with different amounts of free tea. What Big Wun Lung's shattered dream was, this writer can only guess. Maybe it was to quit the Kolmar section-gang, after shipping his hard earned tea back to San Francisco, and become a wealthy tea merchant in that city for the rest of his life. |
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