When The Turtle Shed Its Skin
(The Night The Mountain Walked)
Deep on the floor of a glacier valley
where the Old Man River flows
there once was a tiny town called Frank
where they mined the mountain for coal.
And there in the Alberta Rockies
in the shadows of Crowsnest Pass
is the scene of destruction so grand
that nature has yet to surpass.
Nearby there loomed Turtle Mountain
of which the local Indians talked,
in their legends, that caused them fear,
they called it the 'mountain that walked'
In the still morning hours, in 1903
ten after four, April’s twenty-ninth day
The mountain walked in the dark,
and took with it all that it found in its way.
The mountain shivered, creaked and groaned
the night was split by cracks like thunder
while miners ran as the ground shook
and the mine was torn asunder.
A massive wedge of rolling rock
was ripped from Turtle Mountain
as ninety million tons of limestone
came down upon the town like rain
An enormous wall of freezing air
was pushed across the valley
as tons of limestone boulders
rolled in behind for the finale
The mine completely disappeared;
a coal car was pushed two miles away;
three quarters of the town of Frank
was crushed like brittle twigs that day.
The slide pushed forward, raging on,
leaving nothing standing in its path
after just one hundred seconds
of Turtle Mountain’s wrath!
And in North America’s history
it reigns as the greatest slide;
still buried in their limestone tomb,
all but twelve of the seventy-six who died.
But the threat of death had not yet ended
for in twenty minutes on the clock
the ‘Spokane Flyer’, if not stopped,
would plough into that wall of rock!
Over the mass of tumbled limestone,
to flag that train coming down the line,
raced CP brakeman, Sid Choquette,
arriving in the nick of time.
And then, a miracle happened
when seventeen miners, buried deep,
after fourteen hours of digging
amazingly broke free!
So goes the tale, though few have heard,
of those one-hundred seconds of shock,
when Old Man River became a lake,
-- the night the Mountain walked.
june 2003
Frank Slide Images
