[On October 7, 1826, America’s first commercial railroad, the Massachusetts Granite Railway, began operations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that line and other important moments in the history of American commercial rail and its contexts, leading up to a weekend post on pop culture representations!]
On three takeaways from one of the most brutal commercial train accidents in our history.
It’s far from the most telling and nowhere near the most tragic thing about that October 1901 crash in North Carolina between one of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show’s trains and a Southern Railway freight train carrying a load of fertilizer (more on both of them in a moment), but for me, and I imagine for most of us, it’s still striking to think that the Wild West Show was still going in 1901. And indeed, going strong—the show had just entertained audiences of more than 30,000 in Charlotte before this tragic accident that historians have identified as the beginning of the end for Bill’s troupe (although it would continue for more than a decade before its 1913 closure). I’ve written in this space previously about Owen Wister’s best-selling novel The Virginian (1903) and its role in creating the modern Western, but it’s important to add that Western legends like Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley (who was on the train involved in the crash, and badly injured as a result), and their many fellow performers were still actively shaping such cultural representations into the early 20th century.
None of those human performers were killed in the crash (from what I can tell, only Oakley was even seriously injured, as the other of the show’s two trains was carrying most of the human passengers), but it was still a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, as more than 100 horses (110 total, all but two of the show’s horses) and a number of other exotic animals were killed. I hope I don’t have to say any more about why that was a tragedy that rivals any other destructive train accident in our history; however we see animal lives in relationship to human ones (I don’t equate them fully, but I’m with Midnight Oil that “Every creature drinks from the same cup”), the needless and horrific loss of so many animal lives is a terribly sad thing. And that specific tragedy does likewise force us to remember and confront the overarching subject of the use and abuse of animals as part of the Wild West Shows—I wouldn’t say that they were identical to circuses in that regard (certainly someone like Bill had to have taken better care of his horses than many circuses did and still do of their wild animals), but I would nonetheless add that these were far from the ideal circumstances and conditions for any animals.
If that’s both a tragic and a telling takeaway from this train accident, I would add another telling detail, one captured evocatively by a quote from Oscar Sisk, a retired railroad worker who lived nearby and assisted in the accident’s aftermath: “Two engines seemed to have tried to devour each other. One had run halfway inside the other, and then they reared up on the tracks like two giant beasts in deadly combat. All the cars on both trains were made of wood and were shattered into thousands of pieces upon impact.” It’s easy (at least for this lifelong train aficionado) to think of trains as these giant, sturdy, largely indestructible behemoths, much more a danger to other vehicles (and obviously pedestrians) than facing dangers themselves. That might be more the case for the metal versions of the vehicles in the 21st century, although I’m sure it’d still be an exaggeration; but at the turn of the 20th, trains remained mostly made of wood, as Sisk rightly reminds us, and so were unfortunately tragic accidents just waiting to happen.
Last train! tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rail histories or contexts you’d share?
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