The afternoon was getting hot, and the crowd was growing restless. Two hundred men were hired to control the mob, but it was beginning to get out of hand. The two engineers were ready at the throttles, the boilers were redlined, and the steam relief valves had sprung open and were blowing mist. Crush rode out in front of the crowd on a borrowed white horse, raised his hat high, let it hang for a moment, then dropped it. The crowd went wild, and the engineers jerked their throttles full open. C. E. Stanton in the green engine and Charles Cain in the red one coolly waited for 12 puffs from the cylinders and bailed out, with the lightly loaded engines gaining speed. People pushed and shoved for an unobstructed view.
On they came, blowing dark clouds of smoke and setting off emergency signal torpedoes placed all along the track. Bang. Bang. Bang bang bang. Faster and faster, reaching a combined collision speed of 100 miles per hour. The official event photographer, J. C. Deane, tripped his high-speed shutter just as the two cowcatchers met. The two old engines, weighing about 35 tons each, suddenly occupied the same spot on the track. There was a terrific sound of crashing, bending metal as the two locomotives melted together, lifted their front trucks off the track, and seemed to hang for an instant. The wooden cars behind splintered and crushed as the two trains telescoped together.
Then, something bad happened. At least one of the boilers exploded with a heavy roar, sending a rain of jagged metal into the crowd. The first casualty was Deane, the photographer, stationed closest to the crash point. A piece of hot locomotive hit him in the face, cleaned out an eye-socket, and left a bolt and washer embedded in his forehead. He spun around to face the audience and went limp. Louis Bergstrom, also on the photography team, was cold-cocked by a flying plank. Ernest Darnall, a boy with a rare viewing opportunity sitting high in a tree, caught a heavy iron hook trailing a length of chain right between the eyes, splitting his skull down the middle. DeWitt Barnes, in a dignified standing position between his wife and another woman, was killed instantly by an unidentified fragment. People in the front row were scalded, screaming, and dripping blood. In all, three people were killed on the spot and six were very seriously injured. A Civil War veteran was visibly shaken, saying that it reminded him of seeing a line of men dropped by a Yankee rifle volley.
Instant tragedy, however, did not dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. They rushed the scene by the thousands in an incoming wave, poring over the wreckage to pick up or wrench loose the largest pieces they could carry. Many palms were singed as people pounced on bolts, rivets, bits of boiler tubes, and all manner of unidentifiable relics. To appease grieving families, Bill Crush was immediately and visibly fired from his job at the Katy. He was quietly re-hired the next day. From that day forward, the Katy Railroad flourished, and the many who had decided not to go to the event regretted the decision for the rest of their lives, as the stories of “The Crash at Crush” were told over and over in song, ragtime march, musical play, and Sports Illustrated.
Bill Crush wasn’t even the first to think of this. Incredibly, there were four independently staged engine head-butts in September 1896. None was as spectacular as Crush’s 100-mile-per-hour boiler bust, but the clustering indicates an unfulfilled need in the human psyche, peaking in 1896. Just outside Denver on September 30, two old narrow-gauge 2-6-0 Union Pacific and Denver & Gulf engines were smushed together for a crowd as a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party.[3] The crash made a lot of smoke and noise, but the engines were so feeble, the railroad was able to rebuild them and put them back into service.
On September 18 at the county fair in Sioux City, Iowa, two ancient Mason Bogey engines were smashed together to a cheering mob. In Des Moines at the State Fair on September 9, just six days before Crush’s spectacle, “Head-On Joe” Connolly arranged the collision of two really old 4-6-0 engines bought as junk from the Des Moines Northern & Western Railroad. The teeming masses numbered 70,000, and the gate receipts exceeded $10,000. That was a lot of money in 1896. Connolly was more adept at staging a crash than was Crush, and he knew to avoid a steam explosion. He had nothing to worry about. The elderly, arthritic engines were leaking steam at every joint. One was able to make 10 miles per hour, and the other 20. They hit at almost the right spot in front of the stands, there were the obligatory smoke and noise, and parts cartwheeled through the air, but the crowd was slightly disappointed. Still, they swarmed over the heap of steaming wreckage and carried off everything that was loose. Connolly returned home with $3,538.
Head-On Joe went on to make a career of locomotive crashing, eventually boasting that he had staged 73 wrecks, without killing a single spectator. He put together shows from Massachusetts to California, mostly at state fairs but anywhere people would gather and pay to see two trains smash together. The city with the most staged crashes was San Antonio, Texas, with four. New York City, Milwaukee, and Des Moines had three each. His biggest audience was at the Brighton Beach Racetrack, New York, on July 4, 1911, where 162,000 people paid at the gate to see two old 4-4-0 engines kill each other. There were imitators, of course, but Head-On Joe had it down to a science. He knew that he had to have at least 1,800 feet of track, or the engines could not make enough speed for a proper spectacle. A track length of 4,000 feet was optimal, as the engines could accelerate to a combined speed of 45 miles per hour. That was fast enough to tear up the machinery and make the tender ride up over the cab without a boiler explosion. It took a mile of track to make 65 miles per hour combined, but that was too fast. Boiler explosions were fine, but you had to have the onlookers so far away, they couldn’t see anything. They wanted to be close enough to feel the collision, to hear the iron screaming in agony, and smell the hot metal, without being maimed. The locomotives had to be inexpensive and junky, without being undersized or wheezy. To wreck two nice-looking passenger engines seemed extravagant and in bad taste. To bury two old freight haulers in a moment of glory seemed merciful. Sometimes the engines looked hesitant as they tried to accelerate toward oblivion. Sometimes they looked angry, like pit bulls, not really knowing why they had to kill the other engine, but up to the task and really getting into it. It was art, in a machine-age sort of way.
At 73 years old, Head-On Joe’s last staged train wreck was back in Des Moines, on August 27, 1932, at the State Fair. A matched pair of 4-6-0s, just retired from the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific, faced off on the field. Both were freshly painted, and they were named “Roosevelt” and “Hoover.” Roosevelt was aimed east, toward Washington, D.C. A respectable mob of 45,000 came to see them on their last trip. After a short but suspense-filled run, the engines met, with the drama intensified by a box of dynamite tied to the pilot on each participant and fire-starters in the trailing passenger coaches. Hoover’s boiler exploded, rudely injuring two spectators with hurled shrapnel. There would be no lawsuits. They were, after all, standing near where they knew there was going to be a train wreck. What did they expect? Connolly collected his $4,000 and quietly faded away to his home town in Colo, Iowa. When he died in 1948, a brass locomotive bell was found on the family estate, possibly the only souvenir he had kept from the destruction of 146 train engines.
The last staged train wreck in the United States was probably the one near Magnolia, Illinois, on June 30, 1935. Two 2-6-0s from the Mineral Point & Northern, the 50 and 51, were supposed to meet on a bridge going a combined 50 miles per hour, but they missed the point, impacting instead in an open field at a fraction of the required speed. Coal flew vertically out of the 51’s tender and a puff of smoke rose, but the damage was so slight and the spectacle was so pitiful, it didn’t make the morning paper. The age of the staged train wrecks ended with a whimper. A creative plan to replace them with airplanes crashing into each other in mid-air did not materialize.
3
For those who may wonder, “2-6-0” is the standard way of specifying a steam locomotive configuration. This particular engine has two wheels on the pilot truck, six steam-driven wheels, and no trailing truck behind the drivers.