A Real Circus Train Wreck Inspired DeMille's Screen Extravaganza

Cecil B. DeMille's 1953 The Greatest Show on Earth was a huge hit and helped save Hollywood as television was keeping people home.  In gratitude the film won the Oscar for Best picture over such certified classics as High Noon, Moulon Rouge, and The Quiet Man.

Old time movie buffs like me are sure to remember the glitzy, gaudy, gauche 1952 Cecil B. DeMille flick The Greatest Show on Earth.  The veteran director put aside his sandal and sand Biblical epics to use the Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus as the backdrop for a somewhat turgid melodrama.  The film was a box office sensation at the time the movies were losing a battle for viewers to the infant medium of television.  Impressed, Motion Picture Academy voters picked it as Best Picture over far better films including High Noon, Moulon Rouge, and The Quiet Man, each of which is a certified classic.

The climatic scenes from the movie are a spectacular and gut-wrenching circus train wreck and its grizzly aftermath.  In the film a jealous animal trainer and a sideshow operator fired for running crooked games with ties to a shady character with a financial interest in seeing the circus fail, throw a switch leading the circus train to ram a stopped freight.  

In the melodramatic climax of the film beloved clown Buttons--James Stewart--exposes his true identity as a doctor on the lam for the mercy killing of his wife to save circus boss Brad--Charlton Heston--who is being cradled by trapeze artist Holly--Betty Hutton--after a gut-wrenching train wreck.

The film’s plot threads are all neatly tied up in the wreckage as the beloved never-seen-without-his-make-up Buttons the Clown (James Stewart) reveals his true identity as doctor on the lam wanted for the mercy killing of his wife when he saves the life of the rugged and driven circus boss Brad (DeMille favorite Charlton Heston).  Brad’s rival for trapeze artist Holly (Betty Hutton) The Great Sebastian (Cornell Wilde) bitterly nursing an injury that threatens to end his career in the center ring, nobly contributes his blood to help save Brad.  Holly realizes that it was always Brad she loved, not her erstwhile rival Sebastian, and steps into his role as hardnosed boss to save the circus.  She leads the battered and bloodied troupe into the nearest town at the head of the circus parade while singing the title song and sets up the show for an outside performance.

The movie was the first film that Steven Spielberg saw in a theater and triggered his lifelong passion for the movies.  The train wreck scene in particular inspired his first teen age film efforts and helped inspire his 2011 film Super 8.

What people don’t necessarily know is that DeMille’s circus train wreck was inspired by a true incident, one of the deadliest rail disasters in American history.

The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus promoted its shows with posters celebrating its show train.  Unloading the train and a parade to the grounds where the Big Top would be erected were big opportunities to promote the show.

Shortly before dawn on June 22, 1918 a Michigan Central Railroad troop train pulling 20 empty Pullman cars was closely following a slower moving train carrying the cast, crew, animals, and equipment of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, then the second largest traveling show in the country.  Alonzo Sargent, a veteran engineer with sixteen years at the throttle and a spotless record, was at the controls of the deadheading train.

Sargent had been called in for this run at the last minute and had hardly slept in 21 hours.  He knew he was following the slow circus train and had taken care to note signals at several crossings and switch points.  He figured he was two miles or more behind the other train.  But up ahead at the Ivanhoe Interlocking crossing 5½ miles east of Hammond, Indiana the circus train had come to a stop to attend a hot box on a flat car.  The exhausted Sargent momentarily nodded out at the controls of his locomotive.  When he jerked himself awake, he could see the red lights of the circus train’s caboose just ahead.  While snoozing he had blown through three signals and the warning flares put out by the proceeding train.

According to his own testimony before an investigating commission:

I awoke suddenly and saw the tail or marker lights showing red on a train directly ahead of me. Not realizing that the rear end of this train was so close. I started to make a service application, but before completing it placed brake-valve handle into emergency position. We struck almost instantly after making the brake application. Don't know whether I closed the throttle or not, but think I did.

Rescuers and survivors pick through the smoldering rubble of the circus train accident.

Still moving at an estimated 35 miles an hour the engine plowed through the caboose and the four ancient wooden passenger cars at the rear.  The cars were jammed with sleeping roustabouts and performers.  Most of the 86 dead were killed instantly, but some were trapped in the wreckage which immediately caught fire from the smashed oil lamps used to illuminate the old cars.  The were 126 severely injured, many of them badly burned, among the estimated 400 circus people and train crew in the four cars and caboose.  To his credit, Sargent, who survived the wreck with minor injuries, leapt from his cab and immediately began trying to pull survivors from the wreckage, working frantically for the next two hours.

Arthur, Joe and Max Dierickx during their heyday with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus before the train wreck that killed Arthur and Max.

Although most of the circus stars were resting in Pullman cars forward, the dead were known to include  Arthur Dierckx and Max Nietzborn of the Great Dierckx Brothers strongman act and Jennie Ward Todd of The Flying Wards.  Most of the victims were burned beyond recognition.

Just months before the wreck the wreck the Showmen’s League of America, a fraternal benefits society formed by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1913, purchased a large plot in Woodlawn Cemetery at the intersection of Cermak Road and Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park, Illinois for its members.  Five days after the accident the remains of 59 to 61 of the victims were buried in a mass grave.  Markers note unidentified male or female. As was typical of circus folks even when the dead were identified by survivors their real names were often unknown.  So, there are markers for Smiley, Baldy, 4 Horse Driver, and others.  

Most of the victims of the train wreck were buried in mass grave at Showmen's Rest at Woodlawn Cemetery near Chicago.  Individual markers were erected--most noting unknown male or female since bodies were burned beyond recognition.

Today the area known as Showmen’s Rest is guarded by five large elephant statues.  There is a gathering every Memorial Day to remember the dead of the train wreck and the many circus and carnival people who continue to be buried there.  

                                            The Showmen's Rest memorial elephant statue surrounded by markers of the train wreck victims.

Meanwhile the shattered Hagenbeck-Wallace show struggled in the spirit of the show must go on later celebrated in DeMille’s film, to resume operations.  In a show of solidarity rivals, including the biggest of them all, the Ringling show, lent equipment, animals and performers to the company.  The circus only missed two dates in Hammond and Monroe, Wisconsin and was able to finish out the season’s tour.

The circus was bought and sold several time after that consolidating with other shows.  It finally succumbed to the Great Depression, folding its tents for the last time in 1938 as the Hagenbeck-Wallace & Forepaugh-Sells Bros. Circus. 

The former home base of the show in Peru, Indiana is now the International Circus Hall of Fame.

The Federal investigation of the accident put the blame a squarely on the shoulders of engineer Sargent.  But the report noted that the flimsy, obsolete wooden passenger cars and their oil lamps contributed significantly to the death toll.  After that the old cars were rapidly taken out of service across the country and replaced by modern steel safety cars illuminated and heated by electricity.

Father's Day/Summer Solstice Congruence with Murfin Verse

 

The Green Man, pagan ruler of Midsummer.

It's Father’s Day, a minor American demi-holiday and Summer Solstice, an astronomical phenomenon with mythic trappings. Such calendar coincidences move me to the commission of poetry like a prune juice and X-Lax smoothie facilitates an explosive bowl movement.  Depending on your outlook the results may be equally as messy and disgusting. 

Some ancient peoples marked the Solstice with such astonishing precision involving monoliths, mounds, and monuments that it has enabled a basic cable cottage industry of pseudo-science documentaries speculating about aliens.  But for many others, the precise date was hard to pin down.  Changes to the length of day were too subtle to be measured precisely.  Instead, they spread out the celebration over a cluster of days under various names.  Modern Pagans, who have made up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps of what is known call those days Litha after and old Anglo-Saxon name for a summer month.  Taken together the various pre-Christian celebrations are often lumped together as Midsummer, as good a name as any.

                                        The Old Man as Greenman ready to sprout oakleaves and acorns with minion.

Was Father’s day, at least subconsciously set in spitting distance of Midsummer if not on the precise day?  No, but there are those who say that there is no such thing as pure coincidence.  Call it kismet or serendipity, it was enough to set my head spinning and impel my fingers on the keyboard.

My father, W. M. Murfin in Cheyenne, 1959.

 

Summer Solstice/Father’s Day

June 21, 2015

Perhaps, after all, I am the Green Man,

            and my Father before me

                        who took to the woods with rod and rifle

            and his father before him

                        who grew strawberries by the porch

            and the fathers before  him

                        who were orchard men in Ohio

            and back to those earlier yet

                        who pulled stones from Cornish fields

                        for their masters.

Save the complexion, I look the part enough

            With shaggy goatee, wild eyebrows,

                        and neglected hair which could sprout

                        oak and ivy.

But my wild forest years are well behind me,

            I plant nothing but my feet on the sidewalk

                        and my butt in a desk chair,

            I raise nothing but questions, concerns,

                        and indignation,

            my fertility was snipped away

                        long decades past

            my virility—don’t make me laugh,

                        no Goddess  awaits in a glade

                        under the triumphant Sun.

Perhaps I am not the Green Man after all

            just an old fool and fraud,

            but, hey, isn’t that all that is needed

            to be just Dad instead.

—Patrick Murfin

When the Old Man Picked 7 Books in 7 Days That Changed His Life

Note:  Eight years ago, on the suggestion of old Shimer College pal Sammie Moshenberg I undertook the Facebook challenge of Seven Books in Seven Days.  It took me more than seven days, but I got it done.  Because my half-assed literary tastes may be of some limited wider interest or the subject of bemused bewilderment, I am including lightly edited versions of all seven posts here.

I was not exactly sure what the rules are for Seven Books in Seven Days—favorite books? Most influential? Fiction only? Anyway, I decided yes to all of those questions. 

The book covers shown are from the paperback editions in which I first read them.

Day 1—Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel bit me while I was in high school. I was gobsmacked by the sheer power of the language: 

. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I decided then and there to be a writer. This is the big, fat Bantam Books paperback edition that put a real strain on the back pocket of my pants.

 

Day 2:  Ernest Hemmingway is deeply unfashionable these days among progressives and especially feminists. Mostly based on the macho image he cultivated later in life, he is filed under chauvinist pig and if you admit to liking him your cultural stock drops like shares in Trump University. But for me, the power of the simple declarative sentence I found in The Sun Also Rises was a much-needed antidote to the florid temptations of my first pick, Look Homeward Angel.  Papa would go on to write better books, and books much more nuanced than his reputation, but this is the one that first hooked me, even though when I first read it I was too young and stupid to figure out just what the hell Jake’s problem was.

Day 3:  When I was fresh out of college and living in Chicago I was reading science fiction almost exclusively except radical stuff, mostly labor history and anarchist related. Both of those reading obsessions were rewarded in Ursula K. LeGuin’s masterwork of speculative fiction The Dispossessed about an almost utopia on a planet based on the ideas of nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. It was also a frankly feminist vision in stark contrast to the vigorously macho—and often authoritarian—SciFi offered by many of the top writers in the field. The society was built on the writings and ideas of the crone Odo—an Emma Goldman-like personage. LeGuin called it “an ambiguous utopia” because unlike other anarchist writers she did not believe that either human or societal perfection was possible. Not only was the book unusually thought provoking, but LeGuin was a literary stylist of the first order and prized complex characters over moving a plot line to a predictable conclusion.

Day 4:  Not sure of the original parameters of this exercise, I decided to limit my list to fiction. So how did Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology—notoriously a book of poetry—get included?  It’s my opinion that if it was newly published today that it could be hyped as a cutting edge novel in verse. The large cast of characters—the dead of all ages, both sexes, all social classes spanning generations each speaking from their graves in the Southern Illinois village cemetery. Their lives intersect in interesting and often startling ways and weave a narrative of the life of the town over decades. Masters was anything but sentimental for the backwater village he grew up in. He was clear eyed, sliding to cynical—the true son of the Village Free Thinker who was a scandal to the “good folks.” If you ever harbored delusions of fantasy small town America fostered by Disney and even by adept writers like Booth Tarkington or Thornton Wilder in Our Town, this is just the book to bury those. A great read every time I pick it up.

Day 5:  1919 is actually the second book of John Dos Passos’s massive USA Trilogy, one of the great achievements of 20th Century American Literature. It stands for the whole master work. Not only are these books historically significant, but they are also endlessly inventive and hugely influential on future writers like John Steinbeck, Jean Paul Sartre, and E. L. Doctorow. Dos Passos follows the disparate but sometimes intersecting lives of a dozen major and several minor characters of widely varying social class and prospects and both sexes through the first quarter of the 20th Century. Even these fragmented narratives are broken up by three separate intervening devices—the famous Newsreels which capture reporting of historical events contemporaneous to the stories, mini-biographies of major figures like Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford, and The Camera Eye which were stream of consciousness autobiographical riffs on the author’s own development and relationship to his times. These are big, thick, important books, but don’t be discouraged from tackling them. Dos Passos took a radical lurch to the far right evident in his post-World War II work including Midcentury and that has deeply tarnished his reputation and legacy. Whatever anti-Communist hysteria and libertarian delusions he adopted late in life, the power of these social narratives written and published in the early 1930’s can’t be denied.

 

Day Six:  If you have been following this exercise you probably have noted my predilections and will not be surprised to see something by John Steinbeck here. You may be surprised by the choice. The Moon is Down is one of his least well-known works. It is a slender novel based on his own wartime play which also became a 1943 film starring Cedric Hardwick, Henry Travers, Lee J. Cobb, and Clair Trevor. It tells the tale of a small Norwegian village and the quiet resistance that mystifies and thwarts its German occupiers. The German officer in charge is not the usual war-time caricature of a demonic, sadistic Nazi. He seems largely a-political, a just-doing-his-job professional who even seems to strive to be humane and reasonable. But like the nice young men who serve under him he is the agent of a vast evil and inexorably compelled to ruthlessly serve it. The book deeply moved and impressed me when I stumbled upon it by accident. Not long after that Steinbeck returned from a Defense Department-sponsored trip to Vietnam. On return, he announced, “I am a hawk, not a pigeon” and heartily endorsed the war. It was quite a propaganda coup for the Johnson administration which was being criticized by numerous writers, artists, and intellectuals. I somehow found Steinbeck’s home address and sent him a telegram—some of you may remember those—that simply quoted a line from the book—a “The flies have captured the fly paper.”

Day 7:  If you have been following this series, you can tell that my picks tend toward major and serious American novelists of the 20th Century. I could continue on that vein, but I also have always loved a great funny book.  And the funniest laugh-out-loud book I have ever read was The Mouse that Roared, the 1955 Cold War satire by Irish-American writer Leonard Wimberly.

The story was laid in the mythical micro-state of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick nestled in a forgotten corner between France and Switzerland that by an accident of history was established by English knights and remains English speaking. In fact, it astonishingly mirrors post-war British society with a tiny Parliament dominated by a stuffy Tory Prime Minister with a Labor opposition leader in heavy tweeds with a working class chip on his shoulder, all ruled benignly by a young Duchess. The agrarian economy depends on production of a coveted wine but is nearly destroyed when a California winery produces an inexpensive knock-off. To save the country from ruin, the Prime Minister decides to declare war on the United States, lose, and wait for scads of money that America gave to its former foes under the Marshal Plan. The State Department promptly loses or ignores the official declaration of war, and it is decided that the Duchy must actually launch an attack on the superpower. The befuddled Forester is made Field Marshall and dispatched on a rented tub with a force of three Men at Arms and a dozen Yeomen armed with English long bows all decked out in chain mail and tin hats to invade the USA. Tully, the commander, does not understand that he is supposed to lose the war. When they land in New York City, they find the streets deserted as the city undergoes a mass civil defense drill. After wandering around they stumble upon the laboratory of an absent-minded professor and his creation—the Q Bomb, a new super powerful doomsday weapon that makes the H-bomb look like a firecracker. They return home with the professor and the bomb as victors and suddenly Grand Fenwick is the most powerful nation on Earth.

The book was made into a popular film with Peter Sellers playing multiple parts including the Prime Minister, Opposition leader, the Duchess and Tully Bascom.  I picked the book up again by chance a couple of years ago and it is still both hilarious and has some pointed lessons about the Cold War and international Real Politic.

 

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for June 19 2026

 

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk  

This Friday, June 19, 7-10 pm on and around Woodstock Square support the Ride/Walk/Run to Leave a Light On and the community-based organizations serving those in need in McHenry County.

Walk, ride, run, grab some ice cream, and enjoy a summer evening supporting eight local organizations that make a difference in our community. As the sun sets, colorful light strings will illuminate the Square in a beautiful display of support and hope.

Learn more and purchase a light string

http://realwoodstock.com/.../ride-walk-run-to-leave.../1104/

The McHenry County Juneteenth Festival will be held on Saturday, June 20, from 3 to 5:30 pm on Woodstock Square Woodstock.  

Festival founder Gloria Van Hoff reports that Attendees will also have the pleasure of enjoying Stev Walker and the Artistas Da Capoeira Woodstock, the soulful songs and music of Darlene Benton, soloist, and the The Ken Davis Project. We’ll also hear from Arlene Lynes, proprietor of Read Between the Lynes Bookshop. Sandi Johnson will be the keynote speaker.

Compassion for Campers

Compassion for Campers has secured a new base of operations and resumed regular distributions on Friday, June 19 from 10 am to 2 pm. We will be joining the new McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) coordinated by many of the former Willow Creek organizers and volunteers. Debora Anderson reported, "The McHenry County Mental Health Board has generously given us a temporary place in their offices, 620 Dakota Street, Crystal Lake, to host the events going forward while we continue to look for a permanent space to continue to host the event.  The facility has a welcoming intake area, wonderful office spaces, a dining area, and a shower!  There are a couple of things that cannot be provided in the space.  There is no way to do laundry and food must be prepared in a commercial kitchen." 

Many of the agencies and services from the Willow Creek events have already signed on to participate.  C4C is fortunate that we will have on-site storage for our supplies. We will resume our regular schedule of distributions on the First and Third Fridays of each month.

On the downside, Sue Rekenthaler reports C4C has been turned down again for a grant, this time by the McHenry County Community Foundation.  We remain critically dependent on donations.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support to get us through this emergency.  Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .