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75 75 fivE who’stoBlAmE? It was . . . alleged that the section house was built near the base of a high and steep mountain, and in a place subject to snowslides, and dangerous on that account; that the company was aware of said danger; that the plaintiff and her children had never before resided in a region of country subject to snowslides , and had no knowledge of snowslides . . . and that the company did not at any time notify or apprise the plaintiff or her children of the danger. —The Supreme Court Reporter, 1893 I n 1893, chriStophEr a. pilgrim SuEd hiS EmployEr, thE dEnver & Rio Grande Railway Company (D&RG), asking that the company take monetary responsibility for the injuries he received when a snowslide hit the train he worked on as a porter. He filed his case in district court in Arapahoe County, Colorado, and won. But in an appeal by the company, the Colorado Supreme Court overturned his case, ruling that the railway could not have predicted the slide. The court deemed the incident an act of God and absolved the railway of any responsibility for Pilgrim’s medical issues.1 Unlike the court, Pilgrim believed slides probable enough in Avalanche Country that the D&RG should have protected him better or taken responsibility for his injuries. Like other trainmen in Colorado and their counterparts in Washington and British Columbia, he was convinced that slides held predictable characteristics, believed his employer had acted in disregard of these characteristics, and so sought compensation for his injuries based on this conviction. He believed that his employers had a responsibility to either protect him or compensate him if hurt by a slide at work—a danger that they should have expected. The same slide led to another suit, this time by passenger Jennie A. Andrews. She claimed the D&RG should compensate her for injuries incurred. Like Pilgrim, she won her case in a lower court from a jury of her peers. But the D&RG appealed to the state court, and again the judges over- 76 § Who’S to BlamE? turned the jurors’ decision, delivering an act-of-God ruling. As recorded in the court report: “An inevitable accident or act of God, does not give rise to a cause of action.”2 Andrews, like Pilgrim, wanted the railway company held accountable for her injuries but found out that her conceptions of responsibility and blame did not match the company’s or the court’s. The question of whether people could predict slides or whether they were acts of God complicated cases that dealt with the relationships between workers and owners in industrial settings, as did incidents on mass transportation that affected passengers. Around the turn of the last century, the creation of state railroad commissions that investigated railway accidents signaled an acceptance of the inadequacy of older methods of determining the causes of accidents and assigning blame, but case law still favored corporations over individuals. Although more juries were finding in favor of plaintiffs against companies and had begun awarding larger damages for those injured on the job—a “small revolution” in terms of pointing “the finger of blame at employers”—appeals courts’ rulings often overturned jurors’ decisions. Higher courts’ resistance to changing common-law doctrine was especially obvious in cases in which acts of God came into play.3 Pressure also came from companies that sought to escape responsibility from damages ; they depended on act-of-God rulings to eliminate criminal prosecution for negligence and relied on plaintiffs’ difficulty in providing sufficient burden of proof in civil suits to escape moral and financial repercussions.4 The courtrooms, where victims sought justice, served as a public forum where employees, employers, passengers, and other stakeholders aired their opinions about the predictability of slides. Testimony highlighted the importance of local knowledge to those who lived as everyday participants in Avalanche Country, as well as how that knowledge affected those who passed through the mountains. Reactions to catastrophes became increasingly complex because of the growing number of those affected who all had their own notions of acceptable risk and ideas about who or what to blame when tragedy struck; snowslides, as noted, could be seen as unknowable acts of God or as predictable and avoidable tragedies. Disasters in Avalanche Country accentuated the continued importance of expertise for safety; disasters also thrust the shortcomings of liability law in the Progressive Era into the spotlight. Moreover, disasters brought people and nature together in unsettling ways that undermined confidence in industrial-age technology and man...

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