Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 2017 episode covers a window from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, people in the United States were watching train wrecks for fun. These staged spectacles would draw thousands and thousands of paying onlookers, but why exactly were they so popular?
Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on Scott Joblin, we mentioned his Great Crush Collision March, written after the Crash at Crush, So we're bringing out our episode on the Crash at Crush as Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out September twenty fifth, twenty seventeen. We also played this as part of a playlist of offbeat History episodes back at the start of the COVID nineteen pandemic, so folks may have heard this episode a little bit more recently, but honestly it is one of my favorites, and since I talked in it about wanting to do a Scott Joplin episode, I really wanted to bring it back out today. Also, there are various points in this episode where we talk about how we're going to link to things in the show notes. That's something we used to say a lot on the show. Unfortunately we don't really have show notes like that anymore, but the things that we mentioned should be findable just of the quick Internet search.
So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray CV Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. So Holly, you know how sometimes when something terrible is happening that we just can't look away from, at least say it's like watching a train wreck. Yes, Yes, Although people do describe actual catastrophes as train wrecks, a lot of the times it's something a lot less tangible, with way less risk of injury or death, like bad speeches or product launches that go really terribly or like really cris cringe worthy TV shows, things that are not really ready, you know, I mean, things that are not really going to cause somebody to actually die, we describe as like watching a train wreck. But I always thought that was kind of weird that we would describe something like, you know, somebody's bad talent show entry that's just awful that you just can't stop staring at. Like why we would describe that as like watching a train wreck. It turns out that for a brief window from the late eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds, people in the United States we're watching train wrecks for fun. It's hard to come up with the exact tally of how many of them there were, because there were several different people who were arranging these things in different venues. Over the span of about forty years, there were definitely at least seventy five planned train wrecks to watch for fun, mostly playing out in the southwestern and midwestern United States, often at events like state fairs.
So that's weird. Here's what it reminds me of.
So when my husband and I got married and we merged our households, we found that we had multiples of things, uh huh, And somehow in that deal we had three microwaves, two which were pretty good.
In one which was really junkie.
So we gave the really good one away to somebody who needed one, and then the junkie one we took out on the back patio and we blew stuff up in it.
So I kind of understand this train wrecking. Well.
When I was a kid, my elementary school had a Halloween carnival every year, and one of the things that they would do for this Halloween carnival is that they would go buy a really junkie used car and you could pay a dollar to get to take a swing.
At it with a baseball bat.
Yes, so yeah, this is It still seems weird though, So it's what we're going to talk about today. I also it's felt like we needed a little bit of a lighter topic.
We've had some heavier things lately, some lighter stuff too.
I in particular, though, had researched some really heavy stuff, and so I was like, let's.
Just do something goofy. I will say this is mostly goofy.
It does have a little bit of tragedy, but is overall weird and fun. Yes, the concept of someone going, hey, let's stage some res so we can all gock at them. There is an inherent level of comedy there.
Yes.
So we are going to start though with the one that did actually have a few fatalities. This is the most famous and most deadly of the United States stage train wrecks, and it was known as the crash at Crush, which took place in September of eighteen ninety six, and this was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger agent at the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad Company also known as the KDI, which was shortened down from its initials MKT by eighteen ninety five. The year before this event took place, the KD had one hundred and thirty three locomotives and one hundred and sixty three cars. William George Crush came up with this idea to try to drum up some publicity for the railroad and to sell tickets on thelroad. The railroad wasn't really in financial danger in any way, but the nation was just starting to come out of the Panic of eighteen ninety three, so the Katie was definitely interested in protecting its bottom line. The railroad was also in the process of replacing its thirty five ton locomotives with sixty ton models, so Crush proposed they'd take two of those retired thirty five ton locomotives and smash them together. It really is just like my microwave. The venue that he proposed for this stage train wreck would be a pop up town named Crush, located about fifteen miles north of Waco, in about three miles south of the town of West, conveniently close to the existing Waco Dallas track. The designated spot was in a small valley with hills on three sides, making a natural amphitheater with plenty of viewing locations. They'd supplement this with things like a restaurant, a grandstand in carnival attractions selling two dollars round trip tickets on the KDI to get there and back. The KD had some concerns about the safety of this scheme, namely that the boilers of one or both of the locomotives might explode on impact, so they asked the opinions of several of the railroad's engineers, all but one of whom agreed that the risk of an explosion was low, so William Crush was given the go ahead to proceed. First, they laid track from the existing Waco Dallas line, terminating at a twenty one hundred foot that's six hundred and forty meters depot platform, complete with a sign telling passengers that they had arrived at Crush. There was also a stretch of track for the two trains to travel down and crash into each other, which followed the natural slopes of the land, and this gave the track a slight downward grade from each end toward the middle, which would help the locomotives pick up more speed. Locomotives nine ninety nine and one thousand and one were chosen for the crash, with one painted green with red trim and the other painted red with green trim for their pop up town. They drilled wells and installed spigots for fresh water along the spectator area. William Crush, which was apparently his fortuitous but actual real name, was friends with P. T. Barnum, so he borrowed a circus tent from Barnum to house a restaurant. They also constructed lemonade stands to telegraph offices, a stand for reporters, and a bandstand. They built a wooden jail, which I found one source saying that that was made out of a caboose. They hired two hundred constables to patrol on the day, and they also made plans for a huge carnival, complete with games and medicine shows and a variety of other diversions.
Clearly they were expecting this to be a party. Yeah.
William Crush and the Katie advertised this spectacle heavily all through the summer of eighteen ninety six, calling it the Monster Crash. The crash and the preparations for it became regular news items all throughout the Texas papers and outside the state as well. Organizers fielded queries from all over the country, and in the days leading up to the actual event, William Crush estimated that there would be fifteen thousand to twenty thousand spectators. William Crush had arranged for thirty three trains to provide passenger service to Crush and the Cadie started dropping passengers off around dawn on September fifteenth, eighteen ninety six. By ten am, there were at least ten thousand people already on the scene. They were picnicking and playing games and listening to political speeches while they waited. More trains kept arriving all through the morning and afternoon, some of them so crowded that people were riding on the roofs of the cars. The Monster Crash was supposed to start at four, but people were still arriving as that drew near, so they delayed the start until five pm, at which point there were about forty thousand people there, double what William Crush had estimated. First, the two locomotives came together very slowly on the track and touched their cowcatchers together. That's that little great looking thing on the front of a locomotive. They touched their cowcatchers together, kind of like boxers touching their gloves before a match. Then they were reversed apart again, and William Crush on horseback, raised a white hat into the air and whipped it down to give the signal for the wreck to officially begin. The two locomotives, pulling empty box cars that were festooned with advertisements and decorations, then began moving toward each other and picking up speed. Their engineers pulled their whistle cords and tied them down, then jumped clear and ran away from the track. They estimated that at the moment of impact, each locomotive was traveling at about fifty miles per hour when they crashed into each other. The collision was incredibly violent. The box cars unsurprisingly shattered into splinters, but the locomotives didn't behave as they expected.
Organizers had thought that.
They would basically push each other up into an inverted V and they would expend most of that energy in the upward trajectory doing that.
Instead, it was.
More like squeezing an accordion or collapsing a telescope, and the two giant locomotives just folded into each other and then, to the surprise of everyone except perhaps that one dissenting engineer, both their boilers exploded. Scalding water and flying debris from the locomotives, including pieces of iron and steel of all shapes and sizes, flew into the crowd, most of whom were along the hills at least two hundred yards away. At least two people were killed, although some accounts say there were three. Ernest Darnell, who had climbed up a mesquite tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound length of breakechain and was killed instantly. A young girl was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured her skull, and although she was reported to be resting comfortably afterwards, she died on the way home. There was a third man, John Morrison, who survived the wreck itself, but fell between train cars on the way home and was run over by the train and died. Haven't quite figured out if that is the third person some of the counts referred to as being killed, or if that was a separate incident. There were also a lot of injuries from the flying debris in boiling water then. At least six of those were serious, and some of them were sustained more than a mile away from the actual crash. J. C. Dean, a photographer, from Waco had been hired to take pictures of the event, and he lost an eye when a bolt from the wreck tore through it. His response was to get up and keep working, telling his brothers, who were also photographers, how to finish the shot that he had been framing. Even in the midst of all this chaos and the tragedy that was unfolding, souvenir seekers rushed in to try to claim pieces of the wreck. Wrecker trains hauled off the biggest remaining pieces. After the event was over, people began to leave the temporary town of Crush. As soon as the event had finished. Workers struck the tent and the other structures erected for the town, and the whole thing was essentially gone by nightfall. William Crush was fired immediately, but then officials at the KD realized they'd had an incredibly profitable day in spite of the tragedy, so they hired him back the next day, and he worked at the railroad until his retirement in nineteen forty. The KD began quickly and quietly settling lawsuits and paying compensation to the people who had been injured and the families of those who had been killed. Photographer J. C. Dean was paid ten thousand dollars and given a lifetime pass on the train.
Was Here's a.
Nearly as much public condemnation as he might expect from an event that killed at least two spectators and injured many others, But the news reporting at the time was actually relatively pragmatic about it. A few weeks after the crash, at Crush, composer and pianist Scott Joplin published his Great Crush Collision March. Joplin would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime, whose other most famous pieces include Maple Leaf Rag and The Entertainer, which would become the theme music for the nineteen seventy three film The Sting starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Robert Shaw. It's unclear whether Joplin was actually at the crash, but the Great Crush Collision March was one of his earliest published pieces of music and a relatively early example of ragtime, which is a distinctly African American form of music that was at the height of its popularity from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen teens. And we're going to link to that in the show notes so people can listen to it. Scott Joplin is the reason I took piano lessons as a child.
Really, yes, I love it, And the part of me.
That wants to do an episode about him is at odds with the part of me that does not like the sad aspect of the story, which is his death at a very early age from untreated syphilis. So the Katie went through waves of financial success and difficulty after this point until really starting to struggle along with the rest of the industry in the nineteen fifties. It was ultimately bought by the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company in nineteen eighty nine. There's a historic plaque commemorating the Crash at Crush in McLennan County, fifteen miles north of Waco. Although the Crash at Crush is the most famous of these stage wrecks, it wasn't actually the first one, and so we are going to talk about that first one and some others after a quick sponsor break.
Really frequently.
The Crash at Crush is described as the first staged train wreck in the United States. It was something that drew a big crowd, but which no other actual railroad company tried again afterward for obvious reasons, but that September fifteenth, eighteen ninety six event was actually predated by one staged by a man named Al Streeter. He was a railway equipment salesman from Illinois. Streeter first tried to stage a train wreck in Illinois, but wasn't able to generate enough attention, so he turned his attention to Ohio, where he got the ok to conduct a crash on July twentieth, eighteen ninety five, a couple of miles outside Canton. Here's how he described it in one of the ads that he ran to promote this event. Quote, two monster locomotives with full head of steam, starting a mile apart, will rush toward each other at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour, and allowed to come together with a crash that will result in the most horrible head on collision ever seen or heard of. Streeter made arrangements to buy a couple of retired locomotives and decorated them. One was emblazoned with free trade and the other with protection, symbolically pitting the two economic theories against one another. The two engines would pull flat cars loaded down with rocks like the crash. At Crush, part of Streeter's plan involved selling train tickets. A fifteen cent fare on the Cleveland, Canton and Southern Railroad would get people to the actual location for the crash, but once people got to that location, admission to the crash itself was not free. He hoped to sell twenty thousand tickets at seventy five cents apiece so that people could then watch the crash from a designated viewing area. However, the overwhelming majority of spectators had a different idea that was to climb trees and together outside the official viewing area and watch it for free, so he only sold about two hundred tickets.
In the end.
Though these two locomotives never the whole event was canceled at the last possible minute. Streeter claimed it was because spectators got too close and refused to move, ruining it for everyone else and forcing him to cancel for safety reasons, But the railroad claimed that Streeter owed them two four hundred dollars for the retired locomotives, which he had never paid, so the railroad exercised their right to take them back. Spectators, of course, were outraged, and the ones who had paid demanded a refund. People were also upset that they had spent that fifteen dollars train fare for something that didn't actually happen. Streeter was widely criticized in the press for wasting people's time and money, even as he claimed to have lost about eight hundred dollars of his personal funds in the venture. Streeter didn't give up though. On Memorial Day eighteen ninety six, he tried again, this time in Buckeye Park in Marietta, Ohio, about twenty five miles southeast of Columbus. The locomotives this time were the AL Streeter and the W. H.
Fisher.
Fisher worked for the Columbus Hawking and Toledo Railroad, and to add some more drama, Streeter put Mannikins aboard so it would actually look like there were people in there. This time, the wreck did indeed go as planned. Clarence Metters wrote about the event in National Magazine, saying, quote, twenty five thousand pairs of eyes were riveted upon one engine or another as they rushed together, And so critical was the moment that scarcely a word was spoken on and on sped the two iron monsters at the rate of over forty miles an hour, and when the crash came it was terrific, both trains being practically destroyed. Streeter continued to organize more of these spectacles around the country until the early twentieth century. But another man organized so many of them that it became part of his personal brand, and he was Joe Connolly, who was known by the nickname head On Connolly, who staged at least seven twenty three wrecks between eighteen ninety six and nineteen thirty two and became the most famous organizer of planned train wrecks. I found one account that said that he tried to sue someone for staging a train wreck and using the term head on when that was clearly his, but I couldn't find any evidence that he had actually tried to register that trademark, so not sure what the actual status of that was. Regardless though, head On Joe had worked in theater in Des Moines for decades before putting his hand to staging train wrecks, and he was scrupulous about safety. He had a very specific set of safety rules that had to be followed at any wreck he staged. He also told reporters that he had a quote lifelong desire to see such a disaster without danger to himself, and thought many other people harbored the same secret desire. He was also a showman, and as his res went on, he did things to make them more and more dramatic. He started laying small charges on the tray that would explode when the trains rolled over them, creating tiny explosions that, in normal circumstances were used to warn other trains of incoming traffic. He'd also douse the cars in fuel and filled them with flammable materials so that they would burn after impact. Connelly made a lot of money staging these crashes over the years, and his last one took place as the fad was really starting to wane. This one was at the Iowa State Fair in nineteen thirty two. He'd staged Rex at the Iowa State Fair previously to a lot of fanfare, but in nineteen thirty two the United States was facing the Great Depression. Even naming one of the locomotives that Roosevelt and the other the Hoover, wasn't enough to make the event sit right with the crowd. The explosion itself was reported to be a good one, but the response from the audience was really lackluster. That seemed like seeing two huge trains wrecked against each other for sport was needlessly wasteful in a time when so many people were hurting for money. This was doubly true when words started to spread that Connolly had charged the fair forty thousand dollars to stage the wreck, and that the fair had lost sixty five thousand dollars that year. People who were already angry at the idea that the crash had been wasteful, were furious that it had cost so much money. In addition to the wreckage of the locomotives themselves, al Streeter and head On Connolly weren't the only people organizing these staged wrecks. As another example, in September nineteen oh six, approximately six thousand people paid to see two engines that had been retired from the Salt Lake Railroad crashed together at an agricultural park near downtown Los Angeles. Organizers for this one were James Morley and former promoter football coach Walter Hemple. This particular wreck didn't go all that well. The engineers tried to extort extra pay from the organizers in the middle of the event. They were doing a prolonged run up to the actual crash, in which they'd run the trains at one another and then stop them before a collision. The engineers thought it would probably be impossible to find replacements in the literal middle of the event, so they asked for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars. Organizers managed to find replacements with no problem, though in general engineers were pretty eager to volunteer, so the original engineers were fired and then the event proceeded as planned. Yeah, the idea that you would get to just on purpose run a locomotive that was normally where you had to spend your working life into another locomotive and just smash it to pieces like that apparently was attractive to a number of engineers, and I really didn't find any indication that any of them were seriously injured while doing this, although I did find one that was an engineer who fell while trying to jump free of the locomotive and sprained his ankle. So in this event at the Agricultural Park near near downtown lie Los Angeles, the locomotives did run into each other whistles blaring, but the end result was pretty anti climactic because they just sort of whammed into each other with a thud and then stopped and nothing derailed and nothing caught on fire and nothing exploded, and so people were not particularly impressed. And these are just some examples. There were lots and lots of others, and there's actually footage of several of them on YouTube.
We're going to link to that footage in the show notes.
Next, we're going to talk about some ideas about why maybe this's caught on so well. So for roughly thirty or forty years, staged train wrecks were a really big deal in the midwestern and southwestern parts of the United States. The biggest crowd reported at one of these events was one hundred and sixty thousand people, and attendance was routinely in the tens of thousands. The town of Crush had about the same population as Dallas or San Antonio for the few hours that it existed. In nineteen twenty, a staged wreck on opening day of the Minnesota State Fair doubled the fair's first day attendance from the year before. All of this happened at a time when getting somewhere was a lot less comfortable and convenient than it can be today. This has led some people to speculate as to why this all caught on so well. One aspect was certainly the marketing organizers promoted their events heavily, getting lots of fanciful coverage and newspapers, and there was often a political theme to the decorations on the trains themselves. In addition to the ones that we talked about already earlier in this show, a staged wreck pitted locomotives dubbed evolution and fundamentalism after the Scopes trial in nineteen twenty five. There was also a showdown between the National Recovery Act, part of the New Deal versus Old Man Depression at the Minnesota State Fair in nineteen thirty three, And for some people the attraction was related more to the general politics of the day than any specific political issue. There was a general idea that locomotives were symbols of big businesses and industries that were taking advantage of people and ruining the landscape, and so it was really fun to think about their destroying one another, and then of course, there is this fact that humanity has kind of a morbid fascination with destruction. There's a complicated set of emotional and psychological responses that feed into the general human trait of morbid curiosity. In the decades after stage train wrecks, there were demolition derbies, monster truck rallies, a whole slew of disaster films, true crime shows, and on and on. These are all still money makers in many caseses yep, I mean, I think the thing that strikes me is so weird about the train part is that locomotives are just so big. Yeah, they like that's a lot of metal smashing together and then doing i don't know, sending as the scrap heap or whatever, which you know, made it seem a little odder to me than a demolition derby or a monster truck rally or whatever. But also, I mean, people did just do as we have shown in our some past episodes of the show, people go hom onto weird stuff sometimes, what I think was also a factor. This is the kind of episode that happens when you're looking for something a little less heavy to write about and you google weird fads.
Right, I've done similar things yeah, it is.
It's a I'm trying to think if there would ever be like an modern day equivalent attempted, Like would anybody ever go, let's try to crash planes together. I don't know how you would possibly orchestrate such a thing, but that sounds very scary. Yes, well, and suddenly I just remembered when when I was also a kid, in addition to having the elementary school Halloween carnivals where you could smash old cars with a baseball bat whenever the fire department would be conducting training by burning down a derelict building and extinguishing the fire. Oh yeah, like there would always be a crowd to watch that. Oh, anytime there's a building demolished, there's a crowd. We had one in Atlanta not long ago, and everyone who lived in Atlanta had it all over their social media because they got up at an ungodly hour to go look at it.
Were like blowing stuff up.
I mean, I then feel very tame for like being like what happens when you put a CD in a microwave. By the way, it's very pretty Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something so over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
