Thursday, August 29, 2013

A STUNT GONE HORRIBLY AND TERRIBLY AWRY


Over 30,000 people stood on the Texas prairie near Waco in late afternoon sunshine on September 15th in 1896.  They all had come to witness the disaster that none believed would occur because they had been assured by the wise and educated men of the day that it could not happen.  A few moments after the clock snuck past 5 PM, two 35-ton locomotives, both hauling seven boxcars and each moving at roughly 60 miles per hour, intentionally slammed into each other…

The spectacle was a publicity stunt at the town of Crush, built expressly for the purpose of allowing folks to watch a train crash and a metropolis abandoned immediately after its gruesome purpose had been served.  Two mighty locomotives would meet head on at a terrific speed and suffer only minor damage… 

 
The burg was named for William George Crush, a passenger agent for the Katy aka the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway.  He’d been tasked with promoting and staging this display of engineering prowess.  [Readers who live in the Houston, Texas, area may suspect correctly that one of the suburbs of the nation’s fourth largest city took its name from the MKT nickname.] To gin up crowds, the Katy’s officials charged no admission to witness the collision which would prove the durability of their equipment even in the face of horrific disaster…

The only cost imposed upon witnesses was the train fare required to visit the briefly lived metropolis of Crush-- and that was offered at rock bottom rates.  One could travel from El Paso to the site for only $5, from Waco for pennies on the dollar.  Upon arrival, the thirsty could “wet their whistles” with all the absolutely free “fresh Waco water” they could drink and find shade in tents on loan from the Ringling Brothers circus…

But something went wrong a few moments after the clock snuck past 5 PM in the late afternoon sunshine…

All the technocrats who assured Mr Crush the stunt would be perfectly safe hadn’t told the boilers in the engines of Old Number 999 (painted bright green) and Old Number 1001 (painted bright red) that their meeting would be perfectly safe.  One indestructible boiler decided to prove the 19th Century’s exuberant faith in Man’s Progress dead wrong by exploding, hurling jagged metal fragments into the crowd at the moment of impact.  At least two people died, many more suffered grievous injury…

One of the witnesses to the disaster (which resulted in Mr Crush’s immediate firing in public and quiet rehiring in private the next day) may have been a young black man, about thirty years of age, born and raised in northeast Texas, then touring the area as a musician.  Historians can’t verify that Scott Joplin-- America’s most famous ragtime composer, best known for The Maple Leaf Rag-- actually witnessed the publicity stunt gone horribly and terribly awry but they can say he did pen a lively little tune about the most famous event in Crush’s brief history, submitting it for a copyright about a month after The Crash…
 
The Great Crush Collision March, performed by Benjamin Loeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KFmZdBvPYQ

 

 

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CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  information about the Crush Crash also taken from the Lone Star Junction website at .http://www.lsjunction.com/facts/crush.htm All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: None.

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