The Crash at Crush: Wild Entertainment in the Old West
The year was 1896. Hungry for entertainment, a crowd of 40,000 people showed up to an empty stretch of land in West Texas north of Waco. They came to watch two locomotives crash into each other head-on.
The Crash at Crush was a disaster — but it launched an entirely new form of entertainment in the Old West.
Inventing Train Wrecks
Crashing trains together for fun was a uniquely Western idea. William George Crush, an employee of a Texas railroad company, decided to stage the spectacle in 1896 to raise revenue for the company.
For the low price of two dollars, anyone in Texas could ride the rails to the site of the crash — which Crush named after himself.
Crush, Texas was a temporary town made from circus tents. It even featured a wooden jail in case outlaws crashed the party. But the main event in town was the crash.
Railroad employees laid a stretch of tracks through the town. They hauled in two steam locomotives, painting over their rust to make them look new. And they planned to drive the trains into each other for a massive audience.
Throughout the day on September 15, 1896, trains pulled into the temporary station. Six hours before the planned start time, 10,000 people had already flooded Crush.
“Men, women and children, lawyers, doctors, merchants, farmers, artisans, clerks, representing every class and every grade of society, were scattered around over the hillsides, or clustered around the lunch stands, discussing with eager anticipation the exciting event that they had come so far to see,” a Texas paper reported.
By 4 p.m., when the show was supposed to start, trains were still arriving. The pop-up town’s population had swelled to 40,000 people. For one day, the town of Crush became the second-largest city in Texas. And everyone wanted to see the spectacle of the Crash at Crush.
The main event started at 5:10 p.m. Crush hopped on a horse and rode out to the center of the tracks. He lifted his hat, signaling the engineers to start their locomotives. With a screech, the trains gained speed, until they were rushing toward each other at 50 miles an hour.
Just before the collision, the engineers leaped to safety. And then the trains hit.
“There was a swift instance of silence, and then, as if controlled by a single impulse, both boilers exploded simultaneously,” an eyewitness described. “The air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half a driving wheel.”
One Civil War veteran claimed the Crash at Crush was more bone-chilling than the Battle of Gettysburg.
A flying bolt took out a photographer’s eye. At least two died. And many others left with injuries. The railroad company fired Crush on the spot, declaring the spectacle a disaster. But the crowd surged forward, rushing for a piece of the wrecked locomotives to take home as a souvenir.
In spite of the danger, people loved the Crash at Crush. The next day, the railroad rehired Crush and asked him to stage another crash.
Train wrecks were just one of the wild forms of entertainment in the Old West. Gambling halls, circuses, rodeos, and even public hangings became popular ways to pass the time.
And Old West entertainment could easily turn deadly. Gambling halls saw fights break out, and more than one gambler lost his life at the table. At the gallows, the convicted criminal wasn’t always the only person who lost their life. Billy the Kid’s jailbreak left two deputies dead.
But nothing quite measured up with the literal train wrecks that brought in tens of thousands of eager viewers.
Staging Disasters
The Crash at Crush set off a wave of staged train wrecks. One entertainer, Joe Connolly, planned more than 70 train wrecks during his long career, earning him the nickname “Head-On Joe.”
Connolly watched trains pass his home in Iowa as a boy. He wondered what might happen if two trains smashed into each other. And as an adult, he turned that boyhood curiosity into a career.
“I believed that somewhere in the makeup of every normal person there lurks the suppressed desire to smash things up,” Connolly explained. “So I was convinced that thousands of others would be just as curious as I was to see what actually would take place when two speeding locomotives came together.”
Connolly got his start in Iowa, where he first worked in the theater. That entertainment experience served as a bridge into the exciting world of staged train wrecks.
Hoping to snag a spot at the state fair, Connolly offered to stage a crash for the low price of $5,000. The state fair board was interested, but skeptical. So they offered Connolly a different deal: $3,000 upfront, plus a cut of the ticket sales.
In the fall of 1896, Connolly staged his first train wreck. Over 5,000 people joined the crowd, paying a ticket price of 50 cents for a seat in the grandstands. Turns out Connolly struck the right deal with the state fair — he made a handy profit.
Soon, cities across the West wanted their own Head-On Joe collisions. Connolly staged crashes in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, along with some cities back East.
Raising The Stakes
While crowds had once been happy to see the trains barrel toward each other, flinging debris in the air, it didn’t take long before Connolly raised the stakes.
First, he strapped dynamite to the locomotives to increase the size of the explosion. Then he piled freight cars with gasoline to create massive flames during the derailment.
Connolly also knew that the crowds wanted to root for something more than explosions, so he painted the names of rival politicians on the sides of the locomotives.
Joe Connolly wasn’t the only person staging train crashes. State fairs across the country turned to the extreme form of entertainment. When the California State Fair hosted its first crash in 1913, a film crew captured the moment.
“Fairgoers likely held their breath as two smoke-belching locomotives barrelled toward each other at 25 mph and . . . kaboom!” reported a California newspaper. “Onlookers were then allowed to walk up and inspect the considerable damage.”
Crashing trains together wasn’t cheap. The same year Californians clamored to watch a train wreck, a Tennessee event flopped. Veterans of the Civil War meeting in Chattanooga that year were expected to fill the audience.
The local paper reported on the event: “With an estimated investment of $10,000, the promoters made final preparations. There would be a mile or more of new rail, a new grandstand that could seat at least 25,000 people, and a canvas wall to limit the view to the paying public.”
But heavy rains kept the crowds much lower, causing the promoters to go bust.
Other train crashes pulled in massive crowds. The largest recorded took place in New York, where 162,000 people showed up.
And when it came to entertainment, nothing beat the drama of locomotives smashing together. Audiences who bet on horse races were shocked at the size of the explosions.
As one clever reporter quipped, trains were different from horses. “Trained to the minute, the iron gladiators will each be fed a light breakfast of 21 tons of soft coal and 3,500 gallons of water this morning.” And in the afternoon, they would become twisted piles of metal, ready souvenirs for the crowd.
The End Of An Era
Eventually, the lure of train wrecks died out.
The metal shortages of World War I meant that state fairs no longer hosted train crashes. And by the era of the Great Depression, Americans began to think it was too wasteful to smash old locomotives into each other. Joe Connolly hung up his hat after a 1932 state fair.
Something else had changed by the 20th century. The wild feeling of the West had been partially tamed. In the new West, people would look to other extreme forms of entertainment and leave behind the train wrecks of the past.
High stakes made entertainment exciting in the Wild West. Would the next card bring victory, or break the bank? Would the cowboy wrestle the steer to the ground, or fail? And would the wreckage of crashing locomotives jumping from the tracks reach the audience, or would they be safe?
Staged disasters like the Crash at Crush reveal the wildness of the West — and the iron gladiators were just one of many wild forms of entertainment in the Old West.
For more true stories of the Old West, check out Wild Life, a book on the outlaws, gamblers, and cowboys who made the West wild.
Bruce Wilson Jr. is the author of nine books on history. Visit Bruce Wilson’s website to learn more.
