King Phillips War--When Tribes Almost Drove Out Settler Colonists

 

Attacking a homestead during King Philip's War.

On June 24, 1675 King Philip’s War erupted in New England with the sudden attack on isolated farmsteads in the Town of Swansea in Plymouth Colony by a band of Pokanoket.  The raiders lay siege to the town for five days before capturing and burning it with several settlers killed, including some from other towns who had attempted to raise the siege.

Alarm spread across the colonies.  Forces of Plymouth and Boston responded by raiding and burning a Wampanoag town at Mt. Hope (modern Bristol, Rhode Island).  The war quickly spread across the region with the Wampanoag, Pokanoket, Nipmunk, Podunk, Narragansett, and Nashaway peoples rising up against the colonists and their native allies the Mohegan and Pequoit.

It was the bloodiest conflict between settlers and natives in the early colonial period and per-capita on both sides the bloodiest war ever fought in North America.  Out of a total English population of about 56,000 more than 800 were killed, about 1.5% of the total.  Nearly half of all New England towns were attacked and more remote areas were swept of settlers.

Losses were even worse for native tribes.  Out of about 20,000 people in the various tribes, 3,000 or so were killed outright—about 15% of the population—and many more were injured.  Smaller tribes were nearly destroyed, and many fled their homes to an uncertain fate in the territory of hostile tribes further inland.

What stunned the settlers was that the war erupted after 50 years of general peace and was led by the Wampanoag, long-time allies and trading partners.  The original peace had been made by Massasoit, Sachem of the tribe and Plymouth leaders shortly after their 1620 landing.  It was Massasoit and his band that had helped the struggling colony survive the first brutal winter, taught them how to grow corn, and were the guests at the semi-mythical First Thanksgiving.  The Wampanoag prospered trading pelts, meat, and crafts with the colonists for knives, pots, and other desired iron goods.  And the alliance protected them from their enemies including the Iroquoian Mohegans.

But tensions had gradually been rising as Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colony centered at Boston spread inland, north and south along the coast, and up the Connecticut River stabbing deep into tribal hunting grounds.  The rapid population growth of Colonists put pressure on game populations.  And an economic crisis of sorts arose as the friendly tribes began running out of trade goods and turned to bartering for land—often land that they shared with other tribes.

Attempts to Christianize the tribes was also resented by most, although a few hundred did convert and moved to Praying Towns where they studied the Gospel and learned English crafts and trades.  These Praying Indians were resented by traditionalists, and, when push came to shove, distrusted by their White protectors.

After the elderly Massasoit, who crafted the alliance died in 1661, relations rapidly deteriorated.  His eldest son Wamsutta became Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy.  Wamsutta himself died suddenly, and somewhat mysteriously, while visiting Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow’s home for negotiations.  He was succeeded as Sachem by his younger brother Metacom, who would become known among the colonists as King Philip. 

                                                Paul Revere imagined this is what Metacom looked like in  this engraving for the book The Entertaining History of King Philip's War.

In council Metacom had long advocated resistance to the English.  Now he circulated among the tribes, both members of the Wampanoag Confederacy and ancient tribal enemies urging them to unite and rise up.  An advisor to Metacom, Praying Indian John Sassamon and the first native educated at Harvard, became alarmed and warned Plymouth officials of a possible uprising.  His mutilated body was soon found frozen in a pond, likely assassinated by Metacom’s supporters.

Plymouth authorities, acting on tips from other Praying Indians, arrested three warriors, tried them before a jury that included some natives, and hanged them on June 8.  Two weeks later war broke out. 

 

Early in the war the natives were triumphant. During the summer the towns of Middleborough, Dartmouth, Mendon, Brookfield, and Lancaster were attacked, and survivors fled. In early September they attacked Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield. 

100 Militia and unarmed farmers sent to reap harvests abandoned by panicked settlers were ambushed and nearly massacred at Battle of Bloody Bank.

The New England Confederation consisting of the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven, declared war on September 9 and began organizing a common defense.  Their first action was a disaster.  A column of about 100 militia and farmers was dispatched to the burned over areas to try to reap abandoned harvests and retrieve other supplies for the coming winter.  They were ambushed near Hadley and nearly massacred at the Battle of Bloody Bank.  More raids against the frontier towns of Springfield and Hatfield continued in the early Fall. 

Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow was the main New England leader in King Philip's War.  The death of Wampanoag Grand Sachem Wamsutta at his home while visiting for negotiations may have been an assassination or an accident, but it set of the war.  He would order the attack on the neutral Narragansett Praying Indians was not only an atrocity, it spread the war.

Led by Plymouth Governor Winslow the Colonists elected not to strike west into the Wamponoag heartland, but south against the Narragansett, who tried to remain neutral in the war.  Winslow suspected them of harboring Wamponoag women and children and feared that they might join the general uprising.  With friendly Indians for guides the force moved into Rhode Island, not a member of the New England Confederacy and generally friendly to the tribe.  In December they found and destroyed several villages then located the Narragansett stronghold palisade fort near modern South Kingston.  Winslow attacked with about a thousand men across a frozen bog.  The Great Swamp Fight ended with the fort and most of the tribe’s winter provisions burned.  The Narragansett lost at least 300 and the remnants of the tribe were forced away from their homes where many died of exposure or starvation and the surviving warriors joined the general uprising.

The colonists also lost heavily in the fight with 70 killed, including many of their most experienced officers, and 150 wounded. 

 The Great Swamp Fight.

Over the Winter the tribal offensive intensified.  Twenty-three towns and villages were attacked.  And in reprisal for the Narragansett raid the Jireh Bull Garrison House near the site of the Great Swamp Fight was attacked, burned to the ground, and its 15-man garrison massacred.  It was a rare instance of a well-fortified colonial post being taken by assault.

Things got even worse that Spring.  Plymouth Plantation itself, deep in the most settled and well defended area, was attacked on March 12.  Although the attack was repulsed it demoralized the colonists.  Three more towns were attacked within two weeks.  A sizable company of Massachusetts Militia under a Captain Pierce was ambushed between Pawtucket and Blackstone’s settlement.  Most were killed outright and those taken captive were tortured and killed.

The Rhode Island capitol of Providence had to be abandoned and was later burned.  Across the region colonists were forced back on their most populous towns which were fortified to withstand repeated attacks.  Rhode Islanders were forced into a small defensive perimeter around Newport.

But despite battlefield victories, the Indian offensive began to grind to a halt for lack of provisions.  The war had left their own crops neglected and a hunting season was lost to battle.  Hoped for aid from the English enemy the French in Canada did not materialize except for some arms and ammunition used in the northernmost battleground—Massachusetts’s colonies in what is now Maine.

The Wampanoag’s traditional enemies the Pequot and Mohegans joined the colonists in greater numbers and began raiding Wamponoag villages and burning crops.  They played a big role in defending Connecticut from the kind of destruction faced elsewhere.

Desperately Metacom traveled to the lands of his traditional enemies the Mohawks to secure an alliance but instead they launched attacks on his exposed villages and fields.  Hungry bands began leaving the area for safety in Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and even Canada.

In April 1676 the remnants of the Narragansett under Canonchet were defeated and the chief killed.  The next month Massachusetts Militia under Captain William Turner fell upon a large group of natives in a fishing camp at Peskeopscut on the Falls of the Connecticut River killing nearly 200 and forcing many survivors to jump into the river where they likely drown.  It was an expensive victory.  Turner and 40 of his men were also killed.

Battles near Hadley and Marlborough scattered native survivors.  Colonial authorities offered an amnesty to those who would come in to surrender and who could show that they had not been combatants.  Hungry bands began to straggle in.  By early July over 400 had surrendered.

Metacom went into hiding in the Assowamset Swamp near Providence and near where the war started.  He was hunted by mixed teams of settlers and native allies.  He was found and killed by Praying Indian John Alderman.  He was beheaded, drawn and quartered. 

                                            Victorious militia troops march into Plymouth with Metacom's head on a pike.

The severed head of “King Philip” was on display at Plymouth for the next twenty years.  Fighting in northern Maine dragged on another year, but the New England heartland was secure.

Many of the tribes were essentially eliminated as organized bands or pushed beyond the frontier.  Hundreds of native captives were tried and executed or sold as slaves in Bermuda, where many residents today trace their lineage to exiled Indians.

Although Plymouth and other colonies had gone deeply in debt and much capital was destroyed, the amazing population growth of the colonies recouped losses within a few years.  Western settlement was delayed by lingering fears of Indian attacks and by the growing threat of the French but that allowed the core settlements to grow into real cities and encouraged a move away from subsistence farming to trade and manufacture.  By the end of the century the per capita income and standard of living in New England exceeded that of Mother England.

It Was an Equal Opportunity Mississippi Lynching—Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner

                      

 Norman Rockwell, the beloved painter and illustrator of a pleasant America, was deeply moved by the Civil Rights movement and shocked the nation with his depiction of the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.  

June 21 was the anniversary of an important and tragic event in the struggle for social justice in America—the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.  Their story reminds us that before young white people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and in protest to the police killings of George Floyd and other African-Americans and People of Color, an earlier generation put their lives on the line in the segregationist South where the Ku Klux Klan still terrorized with near impunity. 

They were fewer in number than the young BLM activists who took to the streets in every corner of the country including small towns and white suburbs where they were totally unexpected.  The Freedom Riders and voting rights activists of the ‘60s came mostly from Northern university enclaves and were often red blanket babies and frequently Jewish.   My own best friend from high school, Jon Gordon, went down in the summer of 1967 and thankfully returned safely.  I wished then that I had gone with him instead of spending the summer washing dishes at a Skokie Howard Johnson’s.

Many of us of a certain age still have vivid snowy black and white TV images stuck in our heads keeping alive the memory of the murders of those three young civil rights activists in the Freedom Summer of 1964.  

 

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. 

It still made news 52 years later in 2016 when Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced an end to the active Federal and State investigations into the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi.  The announcement came just days after the death of Judge Marcus D. Gordon, who oversaw the 2005 murder trial at which Edgar Ray Killen, a Ku Klux Klansman and Baptist preacher who was believed to be the prime mastermind of the crime was finally convicted.  Hood told reporters: 

The FBI, my office and other law enforcement agencies have spent decades chasing leads, searching for evidence and fighting for justice for the three young men who were senselessly murdered...It has been a thorough and complete investigation. I am convinced that during the last 52 years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those responsible and hold them accountable; however, We have determined that there is no likelihood of any additional convictions. Absent any new information presented to the FBI or my office, this case will be closed.

The news came as no surprise to any of the victims’ families.  After so many years most, if not all of the others involved in the crime are likely dead—Killen turned 91 in prison—as are almost any witnesses.  The likelihood that new physical evidence may show up has diminished to the vanishing point.

The case was kept alive in the press and public awareness due to the diligent work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation which encourages young people of all religious backgrounds to be engaged in social justice work and continues to campaign for the preservation and extension of voting rights which are under pressure from a wave of suppression laws enacted across the Old South and states with Republican governors and Legislatures.  Andrew Goodman’s brother, David is the effective public face of the foundation.

Then there was the troubling role of FBI informants within the Klan.  Although J. Edgar Hoover planted spies in both the civil rights camp and in various Klan groups and White Citizen’s Councils, he was clearly more fixated on discrediting the Civil Rights Movement, particularly its charismatic leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., than he was with White terrorists.  He was also loath to disclose how deeply his informants were involved in several high-profile cases, including the murders of the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during the Selma Campaign—so deeply they may have been directly complicit in brutal crimes.

 

The film Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Willem DaFoe as the lead FBI investigators on the case started a trend in films about the Civil Rights movement that put white heroes at the center of Black stories. 

1988’s award winning Mississippi Burning told the brutal tale of entrenched Southern racism.  It starred Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as a pair of FBI agents who diligently and doggedly investigated the crime.  Widely praised at the time of its release, the film set a pattern for other movies about the Civil Rights era which always centered on white heroes relegating Black victims and civil rights workers alike to secondary roles in their own stories.  And the irony of the FBI as heroes was not lost on many who lived through those times.

By the summer of 1964 the Civil Rights movement had matured.  The non-violent civil disobedience campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other groups had won some local victories and the near passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had cleared a 57 day long Senate Filibuster just two days before the murders.  But progress was painfully slow and everywhere bitterly resisted, often with violence.  The Movement was experiencing internal stresses due to tactical differences, jealousies, and rivalries between groups and leaders, and the early stages of restiveness among younger militants over the limitations of non-violence in the face of increasingly brutal attacks.

CORE was gaining a reputation for both a more confrontational approach than Dr. King’s SCLC and for going into the heart of the Black Belt to work in small towns and rural communities with long-term organizing projects.  It declared that summer to be Freedom Summer and publicly vowed to bring up to 30,000 volunteers into Mississippi to set up Freedom Schools and conduct voter registration drives.  Although that number was wildly exaggerated, it got the attention of Whites, many of whom flocked to join the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a splinter group founded and led by Samuel Bowers which had a reputation of being much more aggressive than older Klan organizations.  It was also very active in recruiting among local law enforcement officers.

Andrew Goodman was a 20 year old New York student and activist from a Red Blanket secular Jewish background.  Michael Schwerner was a 24-year-old from a comfortable suburban background who graduated from Cornel University and was in graduate school at Columbia University.  Like Goodman he came from a Jewish family.  His classmate and friend at Columbia, the diminutive Robert Reich, later a Secretary of Labor and now a progressive social media star, remembered him as a “Gentle giant” who protected him from campus bullies.  Both Goodman and Schwerner became involved with CORE while in school and eagerly signed up to join the volunteers heading to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer.

 

 Student volunteers for COREs Freedom Summer voter registration project in Mississippi join hands and sing as the prepare to head south.

Once in state they were teamed with James Chaney, a 21 year old working class Black man from Meridian, Mississippi who was already a Civil Rights veteran.  Two years earlier in 1962 he had and endured the attacks on the Freedom Riders on interstate busses.  He had joined CORE and was already experienced in organizing voter registration drives in his hometown.  Of the three young men Chaney was the only one remotely aware of how dangerous their work would be.

Chaney and Schwerner were assigned to organize Freedom School in Neshoba County to prepare local Blacks to pass the tough comprehension and literacy tests required by the state.  These tests were a huge hurdle to voting and even answering every question correctly did not guarantee that it would be correctly marked.   Many would-be voters had to take the test repeatedly.  Part of the training at the school was in how to behave when turned down to prevent immediate arrest for causing a disturbance.  

 

The ruins of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi where  James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner spoke on Memorial Day.  

The pair kicked off their organizing attempt with speeches at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi.  Local members of the White Knights of the Klan immediately got word of the effort and began monitoring the pair’s travels and activities.  They also wanted to attract more CORE volunteers to the area with the intent of targeting them.   They burned the Mount Zion Church knowing that CORE would respond.  It did and Goodman soon joined the other two.

Early on June 21the trio met in the Meridian offices of CORE’s ally in the Freedom Summer project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to investigate the Mount Zion arson.  Schwerner told the staff to start searching for them if they were not back by 4 p.m.   After visiting Longdale they began the return to Meridian on State Rt. 16 to the county seat at Philadelphia where they planned to pick up Rt. 19 back to their base. 

Just inside the Philadelphia city limits they experienced a flat tire, probably the result of sabotage to the vehicle or sharp objects strewn it its path.  As the car limped down the road they were almost immediately pulled over by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price who apparently had been following them.   Price radioed Harry Wiggs and E. R. Poe of the Mississippi Highway Patrol for assistance.  Chaney, the driver was arrested on the impossible charge of speeding over 65 MPH.  The other two were held for investigation.  All were taken to the Neshoba County Jail on Myrtle Street and held incommunicado. 

By 4:45 alarmed staffers began calling authorities, including the Highway Patrol, in search of information on their whereabouts.  They were given no information.

Still prevented from making a phone call, all three were released at 10 that night.   They were followed by Deputy Price as they headed south on Rt. 19.  A Highway Patrol car sitting conspicuously outside Pilgrim’s Store dissuaded them from trying to stop and use the phone.  Meanwhile a mob of White Knights gathered in two cars drinking and arguing who would have the privilege of killing the men who were now literally fleeing for their lives. Philadelphia Police Officer Burkes told the men in the cars where to find the trio with instruction to “go get them.”

One of the two cars broke down and six of the men jammed into Horace D. Barnette’s ’57 Ford Fairlane for the pursuit.  Meanwhile Deputy Price stopped the CORE station wagon which had turned west on State Rt. 492 in an attempt to elude any pursuers.  He turned the men around and moved them back on Rt. 19 to Philadelphia, strait into path of the oncoming lynchers.  The police cruiser and Fairlane boxed in the station wagon and steered it onto nearly deserted Rock Cut Road where they stopped at a secluded intersection with another County Highway.  The three Civil Rights workers were dragged from their car.

Alton W. Roberts, 26, a dishonorably discharged U.S. Marine who worked as a salesman in Meridian shot both Goodman and Schwerner at point blank range after asking Schwerner, “Are you that Nigger lover.”  Chaney was singled out for a beating and then shot in the stomach by James Jordan and then finished off with another shot to the head by Roberts.

After the murders the bodies were loaded into their station wagon which was driven by prior arrangement to Old Jolly Farm owned by Olen L. Burrage southwest of Philadelphia and placed on a red clay dam on the property.  Herman Tucker, a heavy machinery operator, was at the dam waiting for the lynch mob’s arrival with his bulldozer, which he used to cover the bodies. 

Goodman was apparently not yet dead when he was covered.  When his body was finally recovered red clay was found in his lungs and clenched hands.

After the job was done Deputy Price told the men:

Well, boys, you’ve done a good job. You’ve struck a blow for the white man. Mississippi can be proud of you. You’ve let those agitating outsiders know where this state stands. Go home now and forget it. But before you go, I’m looking each one of you in the eye and telling you this: “The first man who talks is dead! If anybody who knows anything about this ever opens his mouth to any outsider about it, then the rest of us are going to kill him just as dead as we killed those three sonofbitches tonight. Does everybody understand what I’m saying. The man who talks is dead, dead, dead!

 

 The burnt out station wagon used by the Civil Rights Workers was quickly discovered confirming the worst fears for their fate.

Tucker was assigned to dispose of the CORE station wagon by driving it to Alabama.  Instead. he ditched it near a river along Highway 21 in northeast Neshoba County and set it ablaze.  That proved to be a fatal mistake.  After the Meridian COFO office, the initial target of an FBI surveillance team already stationed in town, reported its three volunteers missing, J. Edgar Hoover reluctantly moved to begin a search.  He was acting under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy who also ordered 150 additional agents from New Orleans to the scene.  The burnt-out station wagon was accidently discovered the next day by two Native Americans who reported it to the Meridian Agent in charge, John Proctor.  Kennedy then ordered hundreds of sailors from the Naval Air Station Meridian to search the swamps of Bogue Chitto for the bodies.  Top Special Agent Joseph Sullivan was brought in from Memphis to lead the investigation.  Proctor and Sullivan were the models for the fictional FBI agents in Mississippi Burning.

That search turned up unexpected results.  The bodies of college student Charles Eddie Moore and a sawmill worker from Franklin County, Mississippi were found badly decomposed in a river chained to a Jeep motor.  Although neither 19-year-old Black men was known to be involved in Civil Rights work, they were picked up while hitch hiking in May on suspicion, beaten, tortured, and interrogated before being dropped into the river alive.  The bodies of five other recently murdered young black men from rural towns in the area who were never reported missing were also turned up.  It was grizzly evidence of a well-oiled and active night riding operation.

Acting on a tip from a mysterious Mr. X the FBI dispatched searchers to Burrage’s farm where the bodies were discovered 44 days after their abduction and murder.  The case unraveled from there.

 

Outrage over the murders help secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Lyndon Johnson presents Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr with a ceremonial pen following a signing ceremony at the White House. 

National outrage about the murder of the idealistic young Northern volunteers was used by President Lyndon Johnson to leverage final passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on July 2.  As many noted even at the time, the death of their Black comrade Chaney alone would hardly have caused a ripple in Congress.  The case along with the deaths of White volunteers Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during the Selma Campaign the next year was also credited with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

You may have noted the great and specific detail known about exactly how the murders were committed and by whom.  Exactly how do we know so much?  Good question.  Although the FBI may not have had informants within the inner circle of those who plotted and planned the murder as well as the lynch mob that carried it out—although some historians believe that at least one of the men may have been a deep cover informant never revealed by the Feds because he was actively involved in the killings—there were informants in the wider White Knights of the Klan organization.  Take Mr. X.  Forty years after the fact he was identified as Mississippi State Trooper and Klan member Maynard King who was enlisted as an informant by Agent Sullivan.

Other informants were on hand on for instance on June 7 when White Knights Imperial Wizard Bowers told a secret rally:

This summer the enemy [CORE] will launch his final push for victory in Mississippi…there must be a secondary group of our members, standing back from the main area of conflict, armed and ready to move. It must be an extremely swift, extremely violent, hit-and-run group.

So, the FBI was aware that a serious and violent plot against Freedom Summer volunteers was afoot weeks before the murders.  After the fact other informants associated with the Klan but never identified by Federal agents passed bits and pieces of information they picked up from the loose lips of participants or second hand from others.

In late November 1964 the FBI accused 21 men of conspiracy to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.  Most of the suspects were arrested by the FBI on December 4, 1964.  Mississippi officials declined to prosecute any of the men for murder so Assistant Attorney General John Doar led a star-crossed Federal prosecution for conspiring to deprive the three activists of their civil rights.  18 men including Sherriff Rainey and Deputy Price were originally indicted.  Travis M. Barnette, owner of a Meridian garage where much of the planning was done, and James Jordan who was the first to shoot Chaney both confessed and testified at upcoming trials.  Jordan’s testimony was particularly damming.

 

The faces of evil--members of the lynch mob who carried out the murders: Top Row, L-R: Deputy Cecil R. Price, Travis M. Barnette, Alton W. Roberts, Jimmy K. Arledge, Jimmy Snowden. Bottom Row, L-R: Jerry M. Sharpe, Billy W. Posey, Jimmy L. Townsend, Horace D. Barnette, and James Jordan who confessed and testified against the others. 

Despite strong evidence, the case hit snag after snag.  After several false starts and bringing the case back to a Grand Jury once, the U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al. came to trial on October 7, 1967 in the Meridian with Federal Judge William Cox, an ardent segregationist, presiding.  An all-White jury included one admitted former Ku Klux Klan member.  When the jury deadlocked despite overwhelming evidence, Cox admonished them with an Allen charge for the minority to reconsider its judgement. 

On October 20 Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, Horace Barnett, and Jimmy Arledge were convicted and sentenced to between 3 to 10 years.  After losing their appeal they all went to prison, but no one served more than six years.  They were the first White men convicted of a fatal crime against civil rights workers.  The cases of E. G. Barnett, a candidate for Sheriff, and preacher Edgar Ray Killen, believed to be the principal mastermind of the plot ended in a hung jury.  Prosecutors declined to re-try them.  No charges were brought against several other men known to be involved in the wide-spread plot.

 

Edgar Ray Killen, mastermind of the plot was finally convicted of the three murder in a Mississippi court in 2005. 

After years of investigation by intrepid journalist Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarian-Ledger and the work of high school teacher Barry Bradford at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel who produced a documentary film on the case and helped uncover new evidence, Mississippi prosecutors were finally pressed into bring murder charges against Killen.  At age 80 he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive 20-year terms in 2005.  He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.

 

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.