Death on the Madison

In the high Montana country west of Yellowstone Park, a full moon, shining on the pine-covered mountains, etched the thin, black notch of canyon where the trout-filled Madison River winds away from Hebgen Lake. Near the canyon mouth, seven miles below the Montana Power Co.'s 87-ft.-high dam, Purley R. Bennett, a Coeur d'Alene, Idaho truck driver, and his wife Irene had gone to sleep in their trailer. Outside, their three sons and daughter were rolled up in sleeping bags on the ground. At 11:30 p.m. an "indescribable" roar woke them all. What followed would never be forgotten--by those who lived through it.

From his sleeping bag Phillip Bennett, 16, looked up and saw the top of the mountain "cascading down on us." As his parents tumbled from the trailer, a great wind rushed through the canyon, lifting the children, sleeping bags and all, into the air. Irene Bennett saw her husband grab one of the children, hold on to a sapling with his other hand and straighten "like a flag on a flagpole." Then, as he let go, the mountain crashed down around them in an avalanche of rocks, shattered trees and earth. Next day only Irene Bennett and Phillip were found alive in the stream bed, their clothes blown off, their bodies bleeding and bruised after one of the U.S.'s strongest earthquakes.*

Forest rangers, highway patrolmen, Air Force and Yellowstone Park rescuers who poured into the area were appalled by what they found. Near where the Bennetts' camp had been, a huge slide of more than 7,500,000 tons of rock from the side of a 7,600-ft.-mountain had fallen into the canyon, sealing it from wall to wall for three-quarters of a mile and damming the Madison into a natural lake. Between the slide and Hebgen Dam, 260 other campers and fishermen were trapped in the Madison's canyon, dazed and shaken by a night of terror as the ground shook beneath them. Elsewhere, wide fissures scarred roads and ranches where the main fault, cause of the quake, had dropped parts of the land as much as 15 ft.

At week's end nine persons were known dead. It would be days or weeks before anyone knew how many others might lie buried beneath the 150-350 ft. of fallen rock. But the American Red Cross, compiling a list based on reports from relatives and friends, said at least 1,500 were known to have been in the area who have not reappeared.

*The Montana quake struck with a Richter scale magnitude of 7.8, compared with the 8.25 recorded during the disastrous 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

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