The Hammond Circus Train Disaster of 1918 | Episode 82

Do you know the difference between your guts and balloon animals, Well, your guts are ever so slightly less flammable. Hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from their out human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn how to squeeze every penny out of a beloved animal corpse. I'll accidentally teach you why fire is the best way to get rid of leaves or bubble tax records or the body. And you'll learn the surprisingly simple thing that you should do if you ever found yourself full body or a go meat into debris. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would also learn about two warm up disasters that led directly to this one. You learn how close medicine cabinets used to be, two narcotic liquor cabinets. You would learn the incredible fallout of trying to kill people on twinkies, and you would learn the story of high falutin Wild West rodeo war hero Buffalo Bill Cody. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. I make no secret to the fact that I don't like episodes where animals or children get hurt or killed, and thankfully none of that is going to happen on today's episode. Will with a few rare exceptions. Case in point, let me begin today's story by telling you about an elephant that was run over by a train and the self promoting a moral industrial strength garbage bag who was there to sell souvenirs. In eighteen eighty five, Jumbo the elephant was billed as the biggest elephant in the world. He stood about fourteen feet tall and clocked in around six and a half tons that's about two Dodge caravans worth of elephant. They called him the largest animal in the world. He wasn't actually the biggest elephant ever, but he was reportedly the largest in captivity at the time, and that's where he spent his life. In captivity after being captured at a very young age, presumably from Ethiopia, and from there he moved to Paris before eventually settling into a nice, quiet life giving children free rides at the London Zoological Gardens in England, and he became a bit of a celebrity. He did even royalty and impresarios like Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria rode on his back. Of course, that was before he was eventually sold to the P. T. Barnum Circus, where instead of interacting playfully with his loving public, he was regularly filled with hard liquor to keep him quiet. P. T. Barnum was a guy who loved exploiting and exhibiting animals and even human beings with disabilities and deformities. He was also one who preached fear and pain as the best ways to control animals and lesser beings than he'd go on and make up some elaborate backstories, you know, anything to get the public to part with their nichols. This was a man who thought so little of people that he used to taxidermy fish and monkeys into diy mermaids. He once owned a black slave who he billed as George Washington's one hundred and sixty one year old nurse. He also had a black man who he named Zip the Pinhead, with which sounds undignified until you find out that he also called him the missing link between humans and apes. And I don't care how much you love the Greatest Showman movie. P. T. Barnum had the integrity of a diaper and all of the compassion of a vending machine, and Jumbo received the full P. T. Barnum experience, which I would not wish on anyone. That was until the fateful day on September the fifteenth, eighteen eighty five, at a circus stop in Saint Thomas, Ontario, that's about two hours southwest of Toronto. And let me assure you, Jumbo did not explode like a bag of super nothing. He simply could not suffer the internal injuries of stopping a train with your face. And he passed quite peacefully looking and surrounded by well wishers, while they weren't so much well wishers as ass hats who wanted souvenir photos or prints or a lock of hair or a patch of skin from the big dead guy. A big dead guy surrounded by mystery see, his death was not so clear cut. Barnum maintained in his version that Jumbo saw the train coming and sacrificed himself to save another elephant, a dwarf elephant by the name of Tom Thumb, who was with him at the time, and he saved his friend by picking him up with his trunk and throwing him to safety before turning to charge the train head on, knocking it off the tracks. Now, others had thought that Jumbo had been suffering from tuberculosis for some time, and the rumors were that an arrangement had been made to have him quote meet the train so to speak, you know, for the sake of public publicity. And back in January of nineteen seventy three, National Lampoon magazine featured a cover with a dog with a gun to its head and the headline, if you do not buy this magazine, we will kill this dog. And I tell you that because this was done to honor P. T. Barnum. And if you're still not convinced he was capable of such consciousless behavior, let me inform you that following Jumbo's death, Barnum had his skeleton mounted and his body separately Taxidermede so that the two could tour separately at the same time. He generated two revenue streams from one corpse. Well fast forward and Jumbo's body was destroyed in a fire almost one hundred years later in nineteen seventy five, and his skeleton remains off display at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Thankfully for US P. T. Barnum died in eighteen ninety one, strangled to death in his home by a bearded lady at eighty one years of age. And he can't hurt anyone any more. And thankfully not all circuses were run like an open face pit mine, extracting every penny of value. Some just like to pay their bills while entertaining the public, and they have been doing this for thousands of years. They used to hold circuses all the way back in ancient Roman times, where animals and acrobats and chariot races thrilled city wide massive crowds. It was all done to distract the public from the fact that Rome had become a politically corruptill with an over extended economy because of some fairly unusual trade wars going on against all of their strongest allies and it worked, not the tariffs, I mean the entertainment. The public ate it up and they generally didn't notice that everything was going to hell until Roman society finally collapsed all together. And this was about twenty five hundred years ago. So good thing for all of us that we don't do this kind of thing anymore. Today we are going to be spending our time with the Hagenback Wallace Traveling Circus. You might not know the name, but in the early nineteen hundreds it was one of the most prominent traveling shows on the road. At its peak it was only second to the Wringling Brothers and Barnaby and Bailey Circus. By nineteen eighteen, the company employed over two hundred and fifty performers, acrobats, clowns, equestrians, animal tamers, I mean, you name it. And the origin of this circus all began when Benjamin Wallace purchased the Carl Hagenbach Circus back in nineteen oh seven, And that was a circus that began as the Carl Hagenbach Trained Animal Show all the way back in eighteen forty four. For reference, the first telegraph message was sent in eighteen forty four, and quite awesomely, I've always loved this fact. The message was what hath god wrought. Hagenbach had started out as an animal trainer who is best remembered for pioneering the art of restrained animal training. You know how you train your dog by rewarding good behavior instead of breaking a chair over its head for bad behavior, Well, he came up with that. It was all the brainchild of Benjamin Wallace, a former Civil War vet and horse stable magnate from Indiana. By the time eighteen eighty two rolled around, he'd gotten a little tired of horse farts and post traumatic recollections of all of his friends being turned into bloody parts, so he made a change. When the WC. Coop circus went bankrupt, he scraped together every penny he had so he could repo their gear and create the Great Wallace Show in eighteen eighty four, which is a little like when your cell phone repair kiosk looks like it maybe used to be a pizza hut. But it worked, and Wallace did all right for himself. By nineteen oh seven, he was looking to hungry, hungry hippo up some new assets. When he bought the Carl Hagenbach Menagerie and Circus, which he merged with his own to create the Hagenbach Wallace Circus. Hagabac was all, well, enjoy your circus, but Wallace was all, yeah about that, I'm keeping your name for the recognition value. Hagabac was a little pissed and sued to keep his name out of this episode, but they kept his name anyways, and Wallace grew that show into a million dollar extravaganza that thrilled and amazed visitors from coast to coast with all those people, not even counting the animals and costumes and stands and tents and poles and everything else that you can imagine goes into putting on a circus show, and all of it had to come with them from city to city, which took two entire trains, each with twenty eight cars. So yeah, very long trains were needed just to transport it all. Back at the time, traveling entertainment would not have survived very long trudging slowly across the land in caravans of trucks and cars. Railways were a thousand times more efficient than road travel, and by the early twentieth century, nearly a hundred circuses were regularly crisscrossing the United States by rail. It was a different time. And when the circus came to town, man, make sure you're near your fainting coach when you get that flyer, because this would have been something to see. It would have been like imagine a jumbo jet landing on the main street of your little town, and outdoors celebrities and elephants and jugglers and fire breathers, and you've never seen anything like it. And yes, this is the kind of thing that you are going to want to have mentioned in your obituary one day. Businesses and schools would sometimes close just so people could watch. However, traveling by rail did come with some risks. So today, about ten thousand people are injured by trains in a year. I'll point out less than a thousand of those are actually killed, and the wild majority of these are trespassers. At track level. You always see people stalling out cars and trucks on train tracks. And how this ever happens, is completely beyond me. Now, back in nineteen nineteen, more than ten thousand people were killed every year by trains, and over two hundred thousand were injured. Of course, most of those were railroad workers, but like I said, it wasn't entirely safe. Story takes place July the twenty second, nineteen eighteen. Our story begins in Michigan City, Indiana, pretty much on the shore of Lake Michigan. The circus had just completed two sold out performances and were now on their way, headed west about forty miles or sixty five kilometers to Hammond, Illinois, just southeast of Chicago. Yeah, the life of a circus performer was a busy one. At the end of a stretch, it's all hands on deck to repack everything and get it all on the train cars to send to the next town. And there were two trains, like we said, And these trains were made up of Pullman carriages m Pullman carriages if you do not know about them. They were designed by a man named George Mortimer Pullman to offer a more luxurious and comfortable experience than the loud, dirty discomfort of typical railcars with their cramp seats and hardwooden benches. Pullman had a better vision. He wanted plush, cushioned seating that coned into beds at night and privacy curtains and gas lighting. These cars were designed with ornate wooden paneling and brass fittings and carpeting, which made them feel more like hotel rooms than the esthetic of normal railcars, which I will describe as being closer to the manger that Jesus was born in. These cars became so synonymous with luxury that people just called them pullman cars, the same way that you would say Kleenex instead of tissue, or xerox instead of photocopy. These were largely older cars that had been retrofitted for the unique needs of a traveling circus. But let's just say that they had been starting from a fairly luxurious place. The first of the two trains had already arrived in Hammond. These are ones that carried workers and animals and gear. The second train carried most of the performers and the crew. However, it had been forced to stop it was having a mechanical issue. There was an overheated axle bearing, which doesn't sound like a big deal. Well, I mean, this is the kind of thing that can lead to a derailmentt but for the purposes of our story, it just means that the axle bearing probably wasn't lubricated enough, which led to friction that created a dangerous amount of heat. So yeah, at worst it could lead to a fire which consumed the entire train. And then I end up telling you about Patreon and Global medic and then give you a hint about our next episode. But no, let me assure you everything is going to be okay. This was all happening around four in the morning. The second train car had pulled off onto a sidetrack so the engineers on board could work on the issue without having to wake everybody up. The thing is, well, they didn't quite fit onto the sidetrack, Like I said, very long cars, and while the performer slept, the last five cars, four of which were wooden sleeper cars, were still poking out onto the main track. Now, of course, you don't really worry about that kind of thing. You don't get a lot of train traffic at four in the morning. And as the men toiled under and around the axle, they began to feel a vibration in the track, and then they noticed a light growing in the distance. This was something that they could feel and sense before they could hear. It was at this point in our story when they realized without warning that they appeared to be sharing track with a train that was barreling down on them at full speed. The estimates were that it was traveling at speeds as high as sixty miles or almost eight hundred kilometers an hour, and it was a big one, a Michigan Central Railroad train used to transport soldiers to the East Coast to ship them off to the trenches of Europe, and now it had come barreling down the main track. The circus engineers frantically waved their lamps and screamed as loud as they could to try to get the driver's attention, which their hope for was dwindling as they desperately watched the oncoming train blow through several stops signs, scream and protest as they like nothing was slowing it down. Now, imagine that you're asleep mining your own business and I don't know, maybe flying or pulling out your own teeth, or you're back at school in your underwear. I don't know what weird things you guys dream about. Imagine that's happening, and then suddenly and immediately you are jolted into consciousness. No buildup of noise, no distant rumble, just an instantaneous, deafening explosion, and let slow that down. So as soon as the sound breaks for an instant the gravity beneath you drops out as the train, well your part of it, is lifted up and away from the tracks. Thousands of pounds of steel framed troop trains slam into your train with katastrophic force, and everything not tied down, that is to say, everything flies in every direction and the space is filled with splintering wood and twisted metal. This would have felt like somebody had set off a cannon blasting through the car, and the train itself would have felt like it was folding in on itself, and you would struggle to hear the groans of fellow passengers and the shifting wreckage through ringing ears filled with blood there becomes thick with a kind of a woody, greasy, metallic, bloody aroma. But don't worry, it's not all yours. There is plenty of people's blood to be had, And you and most everyone you know look like demo models out of the contortionist handbook. But at least you are still with us. So you're taking the train from point A to point B. But somewhere in between you find your shoes blown off and now you're covering your eyes with your feet. Would you know what to do? Well? If you have the chance to revisit our last episode, we offered up some pretty sound advice around increasing your piece by calming yourself down. But if you suffer an atlanto occipital dislocation and now your skull is facing the wrong way, maybe your feelings can take a minute. Now. For the most part, you really wouldn't need a dog to tell you that something was going wrong with your head, or your neck or your spine. That said, there are a lot more internal injuries that you can achieve than you could count on two severed hands. You ever hear of hyper extension or portional or hyperflexion injuries, All that basically describes extreme bending of the body, and that bending can do so much. Your vertebrae can fracture or dislocate, and severe twisting of the torso can cause the pelvis to fracture in multiple places. Think of it like the flail ribs we described in a previous episode, where most of your ribs become detached and just sort of float in your chest. It's like that, but for your spine, and the ligaments in your spine can sever, but you'd never know because the skin and the muscles look so deceptively intact. I don't have to tell you that a limb could be caught on a fixed object while you continue moving, and of course that thing is going to tear off at the joint. But you might not have known that if your leg was trapped while your upper body he continued moving, the bones can actually break in a spiral pattern. Obviously, heavy debris like oh, I don't know, train parts could easily crush your chest and results in all kinds of organ rupture or suffocation. But did you know that in a shearing injury like this, your organs can actually rip free. And I'm including your heart and your brain in that list. Now, most of you are still listening, so I'm going ahead and guessing that you don't have anything like that going on. But for those few of you who are, all, well, what about me? If you found yourself trapped but you can still move your arms or your legs, I'm gonna go ahead and ask you to gently try to free yourself, as long as you know you're not putting too much strain on your body. There are times when even a slight shift in position can relieve enormous pressure and pain. Of course, in a slightly different situation, it could lead to paralysis. So here's what I'm gonna say. If you can reach your phone, call a mergence services immediately and just explain your situation so that you know. I literally dialed nine one one using my tongue on a cell phone, so now you know that you can too. Of course, if you can't reach it, I'm going to ask you to make noise. Yell, bang, make some noise. Just do whatever it is that you feel comfortable doing to try to bring attention to yourself. If you still have the use of your arms in your hands, obviously using those to create a little pocket to make breathing easier, Yeah, definitely do that. But if you are stuck in a position where you simply can't move, conserve your energy and focus on remaining as still and comfortable as possible. See this is one of those weird safety segments where I'm largely going to tell you if you're holding your phone with your remaining teeth and dialing it with your toes, just stop doing anything because remember all those internal injuries I told you about, Well that was only a few. There are so many things that can go wrong beneath the surface. So if you found yourself pinned by debris, your tetrist into an impossible situation. This is one of those hunger down and weight kind of situations. Because sometimes the best course of action is no course of action. If you have a piece of debris sticking out of your chest, don't even touch it. Leave it. You are not qualified to diagnose what's going on around you, so leave this one to the professionals. But since you're going to be waiting a while again see our last episode. And secondly, let me quickly tell you about your natural painkillers. You've obviously all heard of adrenaline and endorphins kicking in, and those help you ignore the otherwise stellar pain of your situation. Ankavalins and dinorphans can also get secreted in terrible situations, and those help reduce the pain signals that your body makes before they reach your brain. You might not know this, but you also naturally produce and dough cannabinoids. It's the same stuff that you find in THHC. And I will tell you Cannabis does not eliminate pain. It just has the potential to change the way that you process or think of it pain. And even though there is a very old saying about smoking them, if you've got them, this is not the situation where I'm going to be telling you to light up a spliff. Just rely on your natural painkillers. Sometimes they can lead to you feeling little or no pain at all immediately following your injury, even in extreme cases like an amputation. However, once all that wears off, that pain is going to return twofold. So just try to stay comfortable and warm until rescue personnel can pull you free and shoot you up with something a little less natural. Somewhere nearby, someone groans in pain while others appear oddly still. You're probably already scared out of your mind. And if not, allow me to quickly remedy. That the wooden train cars of the time were lit with oil lamps. Maybe you first realize it when you notice a muffled, crackling sound rising up from behind you. Kerosene had splashed everywhere inside the wooden cars, which had been reduced to the consistency of kindling which fire certainly appreciates, Yes, that is fire. It spread quickly throughout the wooden debris, and the breathable air was quickly replaced with billowing smoke, which makes every breath a struggle. The sound of the impact had woken people for miles, who by now had rushed to the scene. You might be able to see them through the gaps in the wreckage, but for all the good that did see, they couldn't actually help. The fire had been growing along with the ambient temperature. It was too hot for people to approach the train, let alone board it. And detetrius you out of your situation. Henry Miller, not the controversial author. He had been sleeping in the last coach next to the caboose. He heard the splintering wood and crashing noises growing as the train buckled in on itself, and the next thing he knew he had been thrown from the train. He said, it looked like it had parted in the center, as though it had been sliced clean through with a giant knife. Those not thrown from the train were forced to claw their way out of the debris. Imagine kneading out of a place so bad that you willingly leave your finger nails behind. Survivors risked their lives to pull friends and family free, in spite of the fact that they would burn for their effort. Eugeniinos found himself pinned beneath some wooden beams. And you know those stories of an adrenalized coffee field mom lifting a car off a baby, Well that's what his wife Mary did. Some nearby clowns tried to help her, but she was all very smash and she did it all by herself. They pulled them clear just as the flames were licking his clothes, and he only received thermal burns. But not everyone was so lucky. They were held against their will, pinned and twisted into the debris, and unable to pull themselves free. Many called for help before, only to be overwhelmed as the fire spread and took them each one by one. The flames moved quickly, passing from car a car with surprising speed. It must have been at least a twenty alarm fire, because fire departments from as far as Gary and Hammond arrived quickly. Of course, the problem with trains compared to say, buildings, is their mobile so when they crash or break down, they don't always do it near life saving amenities like fire hydrants. I don't know what your experience with firefighters is, but they have a great enthusiasm for water. In this case, the only freely available water came from a shallow nearby marsh, not even deep enough to draw up for the hoses, certainly not enough to roll the train around in. A lot of people and equipment were brought in to try to help, and a crane was brought in to lift debris and help dig people out, but the heat from the fire was so intense that no one could operate it. By the time the roar of the fire had been reduced to the heavy tinkle of cooling metal, eighty six people were dead and twenty seven and others were injured. Sadly, the task of identifying the dead was almost hopeless. Practically everyone who remained on the train had been reduced to little more than charred remnants earned beyond recognition from the fire. In my very first episode, before I describe the injuries, I took a moment to say, Hey, if you are not great with gory detail, maybe you might want to skip a few minutes, and I would like to re extend that courtesy Now, okay, still here, good, Here we go. When exposed to extreme heat, the human body undergoes a gruesome transformation. In the beginning, all the moisture in your body will evaporate, leaving the skin to blister and blacken and contract and split open, allowing the underlying muscle and tissue to play a little peekaboo. The fat beneath the skin liquefies and then ignites, which fuels the fire like a man sized candle. The intense heat causes tissues to shrink and muscles to tighten contract, which sometimes forces the body into a kind of an old timey boxer's pose, you know, like a gentleman pugilist with the arms and the legs all curled inward. And as the flames continue their awful work, the soft tissues, including the facial features, are burned away, erasing the defining characteristics like the nose and ears and lips and eyes. People have it in their heads that teeth always survive a fire, but it's not like they can absorb infinite heat. You cook them long enough, and with enough thermal expansion, they will crack or shatter, and in the right slash, wrong circumstances, a skull can fracture or even explode from the pressure of steam build up, and after enough time, with enough fire, the bones will calcify and become brittle before they eventually crumble into ash. Bodies have gone through fires where dental records are meaningless, where DNA itself becomes unreadable, where all you have left are fragments of bone and maybe an artificial implant if your investigators were so lucky. And in cases of extreme incineration, the human body is reduced to a delicate, powdery residue, leaving behind zero trace of the individual who it once was. The bodies here had become blackened and brittle and fused with the scorched wreckage, with their features having been fully erased. So what happened, Well, let's get right to it. Engineer Alonzo Sergeant was at the controls of the approaching train that night. He had been piloting a K eight R four six two Pacific type locomotive, which doesn't say much. Let me simply tell you this is an absolute beast of a train. If you can picture in your head the largest, old timiest steam spitting train engine of all time, this would be one of those, and that's not including any of the cars. Just the engine and the tender could weigh as much as one hundred and thirty ton. That is heavier than thirty Dodge caravans, just for reference. And you describe its appearances robust. It was a cylindrical monster that measured about eighty feet long and weighed in at over three hundred thousand pounds, and that again is without any of the cars in tow. This was locomotive number eighty four eighty five, a steam locomotive. Now, I don't know if it was the soothing hum that lulled his brain into a relaxed state, or maybe the gentle vibrations that soothed him like a baby, but this guy was out. Despite his years of experience, he had fallen asleep at the controls. This guy, he had a known history of doing this, and I mean, who could blame him? The soft sway of a train, it basically becomes a kind of a lullaby. The rhythmic click clacking of steel wheels on iron rails sets a very nice tempo for unconsciousness. And Alonzo sergeant snore through the stop signals. He snored past the men waving frantically as he passed, and he snoozed right into the back of the other train. The train would have and I am guessing here based on weight and pliability of the thing that it hit and extrapolating how the force would peter out over time and distance, this train would have impacted with about one point eight millaneutons of force. And okay, I tried to create analogies for that level of impact, and the best one that I could imagine is that it would be like playing catch with ninety Dodge caravans falling out of the sky. It is at this point I would also like to tell you Alonzo Sergeant survived. It's a real testament to how well built and powerful this vehicle was. The best explanation after the fact, because he did live, was that he had not slept in the previous twenty four hours. He was too busy mowing down on several heavily carved up meals. And I'm not making that up. He would later go on to admit that, yes, he had fallen asleep at the throttle, and he confessed that he had done it after taking kidney pills. I myself don't like kidney so I guess pills would be the best way to eat it, But I don't know how much you understand what pills were like. Back in the early nineteen hundreds, one of the most popular patent medicines was Warner's Safe Kidney and Liver Cure, which was basically a cocktail of alcohol, opiates, and sedative herbs. A lot of kidney and bladder tonics were made out of opium or morphine, or codeine or phenobarbitol, and just about anything you could knock your ass out. Back in the day, it wasn't that easy to tell the difference between your medicine cabinet and your liquor cabinet, and pharmacists were just like bartenders with diplomas, sort of. One of the eleven worst things about the tragedy was that the circus train was mostly wooden, while the troop train was made of much sterner stuff. The wooden circus cars shattered and collapsed, trapping passengers inside, and a massive fire around did almost immediately, the Interstate Commerce Commission released a statement to the Chicago Daily Tribune saying we do everything we can to discourage the use of wooden cars on passenger trains and urge the substitution of steel ones. But they then went on to say that making that suggestion was all that they could do, and that brings us into the blame game, and blame was widely debated, which is a problem with these disasters. Someone at Company X is held accountable, but then walks away with the lightest slap on the wrist possible. When blame gets spread around, it just prolongs all this was the railway company responsible for allowing two trains on the same track. Was the circus management liable for breaking down in the first place. The guy catching Z's behind the throttle of a million pound missile, damn well earned some scrutiny. Heads we're going to roll, and everyone even remotely connected to rail travel all competed to shout not it as quick as possible. Sergeant was arrested and charged with manslaughter by federal transportation officials. Not even the cops didn't even know they could do that, And to all appearances, it was a pretty slam down case. All the prosecution had to do was hold up a photo of the disaster and point to sergeant right. So what actually happened was Sergeant's defense attorney argued that Sergeant, a veteran engineer with sixteen years of experience under his belt, only fell asleep because, well, yes, he got gooned on opiates and booze. But they argued it happened because he was chronically exhausted, exactly as planned. They said, sergeant had no intention to cause harm. Fatigue was normal and common amongst engineers at the time. He just worked long hours, as did all conductors and train jockeys. From a legal point of view, it reminds me of a messed up story of a guy claiming diminished capacity in a murder because he had eaten too many twinkies. He was just depressed, and today we all know that eating twinkies is just a symptom of a deteriorating men state. The prevailing attitude at the time was whaw, you're all tired at work. What are you going to do? Crash about it? Well, yes, and then the jury felt bad about it. Long story short, they acquitted him. They didn't just buy him lunch and him and the keys to another train. He was acquitted because the jury had deadlocked. He was let go and the proceedings were declared a mistrial. This all happened in February nineteen nineteen, less than four months after the crash. In February, a month the shortest of all the month. That's fast. No, well no, it actually only took a few days for the jury to get from let's fry this guy to go get some sleep, you exhausted and misunderstood man. Prosecutors hummed and hawed over retrying the case, but they eventually decided against it, and there was no circus riot. If you were new to the show, we did a circus riot episode. I'm not kidding. All the charges against engineer sergeant were dropped by the following June, and so now on paper it appears that no one did anything wrong. Despite the tragedy, the show went on, which, as phrases go, was actually born in the circus Ringmasters would yell the show must go on, to assure audience that, even if they had just watched an elephant repeatedly stomping its trainer on the way in, the performance would continue. And it worked both ways. You broke a leg barfing up a rib, and now you're supposed to be up next, Well, no one cares. Show goes on out you go no matter what happened behind the curtains, the audience was never to know. And amazingly, in the wake of this immense and unbelievable tragedy, the Hogenbach Wallace Circus only missed two show dates. They were performing in Beloit, Wisconsin within days. And I tell people, it's a responsibility to tell these stories like this and an honor to share tales of the truly selfless. So it is now my honor to tell you they were only able to accomplish this remarkable feat of resilience because other circuses donated performers and equipment and crew and even animals to help. And I mean rivals like the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circuses. This is the kind of generosity that could bring a tear to the eye. I could not tell you another industry with that level of kinship. There had been a piece of legislation on the books since nineteen o seven called the Hours of Service Act. It regulated rest requirements for train crews, and this crash reminded people that legislation without any kind of enforcement is pointless. And on that note, the railroad industry accelerated the shift to steal passenger cars, which yes, can still oro agami you into a blood fountain, but were generally way more structurally sound and fire resistant. The wreck also highlighted the need for improved signaling systems and automated stopping systems to prevent rear end collisions. Five days after the disaster, fifty three of the deceased performers were interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. If you think a funeral for twins is beyond sad, imagine a funeral for fifty three people. More than fifteen hundred mourners gathered to pay their respects. Hoffins re lined row by row and laid to rest in a section of the cemetery reserved for performers known as the Showman's Rest. Sadly, many of the headstones simply read unknown male or unknown female. Amazingly, almost preciently, only months earlier, the cemetery had been purchased by the Showman's League of America. If you'd never heard of them, the Showman's League of America was less of a union than a fraternal order of traveling show people, workers, performers, sideshow acts, everybody. It really helped create a sense of community for those whose lives were spent on the road, And as you can see here, how effective and important it was and how much good it was able to accomplish having never been tasked this hard before. The Michigan Central Railroad, which owned and operated the Troop Train, was found at fault and took financial responsibility for the accident. But in the year before, in nineteen seventeen, there was this little thing called World War One going on, and you ever hear of the War Measures Act. Basically in America in times of war, they suspend habeas corpus, which, if you don't know, is the right to affair trial before they throw you in prison. They impose strict censorship laws. They heavily restrict newspapers, They banned strikes. They in turn or jail thousands of quote enemy aliens or anyone who poses the draft. And that's all just a beginning. One of the thousands of other things was that the United States Railroad Administration took over railroads to ensure wartime efficiency, and as part of this, they imposed some pretty strict caps on railroad profits. Wait for me here, this is going somewhere. They controlled everything from scheduling to profits to apparently how much victims families could receive after an accident. This also meant the circus could not sue the government to recoup their losses, and the law was iron clad, which basically forced them to go kick rocks. And I am unable to find any record of how much victims families were paid, which says to me it was handled very quietly because it was not very much. As time went on, many circuses did start to rely more on trucks than trains, and they started insuring their performers. Because of the severity of the fire, only five of the victims had marked graves and the rest had been burned beyond recognition. Like we said today, those graves are marked by a stone elephant with a drooping trunk, which remains a somber memorial to all those who were lost. Now here's where it starts to get a little spooky. See. Over the years, myths and ghost stories have surrounded Showman's rest. Rumors about hearing the moaning and whales of dead circus performers and animals was a real thing. People claimed to hear the eerie moaning and whales of dead circus performers and the cries of circus animals at night, and they did. In fact, a documentary film crew investigated at once, and with all of their equipment and expertise in investigating the paranormal, they found that the noises were coming from a nearby zoo. The sound of animals carrying on the wind only served to remind people that they were surrounded by the spirits of so many who had dedicated their time in this world to entertaining people. The amazing thing is this was not the only disaster for this circus. I told my patreons about two separate train accidents in eighteen ninety two and nineteen oh three that led to death and fire and animals escaping and half of an entire town being eaten in a single evening. It wasn't just train wrecks, I know. We have briefly touched on the Great Flood of nineteen thirteen on the show before Well. The Hogabag Wallace Circus was wintering in Peru, Indiana, near the Wabash River in nineteen thirteen. When the river overflowed, the circus's headquarters and animal enclosures were submerged. They lost a lot of animals, including eight elephants, twenty one lions and tigers, and eight performing horses, wagons, costumes, equipment, all of it just destroyed by the floodwaters. And historian Stuart O'Nan believes that tragedies like this support the view that the circus is a dangerous and slap dash workplace, populated by shady transients and naturally prone to disaster. Wallace passed away on April seventh, nineteen twenty one, in Rochester, Minnesota, after a botch surgery, and today he is buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Peru, Indiana, where the Great flood of nineteen thirteen nearly tried to kill his dream. But Wills's legacy wasn't hey, kids, how many people will the circus kill on the way to your town? No. His legacy influenced the ongoing development and popularity of traveling shows across the United States. By the nineteen thirties, economic struggles and the rise of motion pictures and radio shrank the number of touring circuses, but for the first three decades of the twentieth century, it would be common for ten to twenty circuses to be crisscrossing the country by train on any given day. Due to the sheer volume of circus trains, accidents became unfortunately common. All those outdated breaking systems and heavy scheduling and human error really caught up. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen thirty, at least ten to fifteen major circus train wrecks occurred, with dozens of minor accidents also reported. Some were fatal, others just led to financial ruin, and today, over one hundred years later, the ham and Circus train disaster remains the deadliest circus related train accident in human history. When I was really young, my parents took me to the circus well once. At some point an elephant reared up, scaring the living hell out of everyone on that side of the arena, including my dad, who, if I knew him, was probably figuring out how to best hoist my mom and I under his arm as he sprint tackled his way out of the arena. The elephant stopped as preamble for his deadly swath across the stands, and instead uncorked a plug made of straw and feces, which flew like a cannon shot and was followed by a fart like a tuba blast from its bowels. On the way out, my dad bought me a super noisy ray gun, which even at that ginger age, I recognized was completely off brand for a circus, but I loved it anyways, and we never went to another circus again. And they never explained where my sister's name came from, but the elephant that day was named Diane. You have sibling experiences that act as cautionary tales in your adult life, why not celebrate our shared heritage by considering becoming a supporter of the show. It really helped fulfill my dream of doing this full time, and if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep the show and frankly me going. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but not looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation. And those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additionally ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoo, quick and heartfelt shoutout to Brent Mayfield, Jeff Mackee, Sarah Campbell and Chambers, Christine Dresler, Henley, David Brooks, Cynthia Engelbreck, Philippe Labatt, Ross Rodgers, Sarah Tafts, Quid and Grin Brenn, Liz Abbott, Alina Yakamenko, Christine Andrews Moreek. I think I got that wrong, Christine. I'm sorry. It's faster to drive Megan McDonald doctors, which I may also have already called out previously, and simply do not care because I appreciate you all for helping support me on Patreon. Again, there is no show without you, guys, so those who do pat yourself on the back. I also want to say, at the time of writing this, this was a good week for our listeners, at least most of them. I learned of a listener who lost a battle with mental illness, and I have said pretty much since the beginning of this show that we need to keep as many listeners alive and safe as we can, and a lot of times that just means talking. If you or someone you know is struggling, please don't hesitate to reach out. There are people ready to help. In Canada, you can call one eight three three four five six four five six six, available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, or you can text four five six four five or visit Crisis Servicecanada dot CAA. For youth and young adults, there's also Kids Help Phone at one eight hundred six eight eight six eight six eight, or just text connect to six eight six eight six eight. In the United States, you can call the nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Just dial nine eight eight. It's available all day, every day, or you can just text home to seven four one seven four one. Now. I actually don't know what the status of those lines are. This is not a political show. However, A certain leader of the free world has recently decided to discontinue the National Suicide Hotline, which also incorporates the Veterans Suicide Hotline. If you are currently going through it and you live in a country where you are not assured that you can actually receive the kind of help that you need. For I don't know, random budget cuts. I'm going to tell you to call nine one one, or just go directly into the nearest emergency room, and if that's not working, rewind us a few seconds. We don't care where you're calling from. This is not political. We just want to help. I have no idea what the next three years and ten months are going to be like. But if you are living in America and you can hear the sound of my voice and you trust me because I sound calm, or I have made you feel less alone at some point, to show how sincere I'm being about this, I am recording this part with a plane overhead, a car ami driveway, someone at my door, and three dogs barking downstairs and one bird. What I want to tell you is you can reach out to me Twitter, Instagram, on my phone goes off Facebook, they're all Doomsday Podcast. Or you can just fire me an email to doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. I am not a doctor. I cannot help you in this way, but I am not going to leave you alone and I will at least help you to get the help you need. Good Lord, where were we? Older episodes could be found wherever you found this one, And while you are there, please leave us a review and tell your friends, and I thank all my Patreon listeners new and old for their support encouragement. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a no donation to Global Medic. It is real quick, because these people are noisy. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises, and they are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical intervention to people in threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmetic dot ca. And actually, sorry, this is just I'm just letting the chaos fly here. I wanted to tell my listeners. In the UK, support lines can be found at one point one six one two three, or you can text eight five two five eight. All right, oh my lord, where were we? Okay? On the next episode. I don't normally point fingers before telling you what the next episode is about, but this one is all San Andrea's fault. By popular request. It is the Loma Prieta earthquake of nineteen eighty nine. We'll talk soon, say to goggles off, and thanks for listening.