Dreadful Loss of Life
Sixty-four Rebel and Union Soldiers Killed
One Hundred and Twenty Wounded.
Sadly familiar as the last three years have rendered the country and the public with tales of blood, scenes of slaughter, and the accumulated horrors of the battle-field, we are not yet so used to them as to feel unmoved when, on a smaller scale, some fearful railroad catastrophe brings them to us, face to face, amid the quiet of civil life. One of these terrible catastrophes, the most terrible that has happened in this country for some years, took place on Friday morning last, when the grave was again opened to receive a hecatomb of human life, offered at the shrine of managerial inefficiency and subordinate recklessness. It appears that on the 13th inst., a batch of 833 Rebel prisoners left Point Lookout (MD) under the charge of 135 Union soldiers. They safely arrived at New York on the 14th, and left Jers(e)y City at 5 a.m. on the morning of the 15th, en route for Elmira, N.Y., whither they had been ordered to proceed. All went well, and the convoy reached Port Jervis in the best of spirits. At Port Jervis the double track of the Erie Railroad ends, and for the next 24 or 25 miles the road is but a single track to Lackawaxen Ju(n)ction, with occasional lengths of double track where the nature of the road permits.
Throughout the whole of this distance, and for some miles further on, the railroad runs up the valley of the Delaware, and is full of sharp curves and awkward turns, along which it is often impossible for the engine driver to see more than fifty or sixty yards in advance. It was along this piece of the road, about two miles from Shohola, and when turning a point of one of the abutting hills, that a train of eighteen emigrant cars, with its freight of nine hundred and fifty-eight souls, running at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, met a coal train of fifty cars, with each a load of twelve tons, that came thundering down the incline from Lackawaxen. When the trains came in sight of each other, they could not have been much more than one hundred yards apart, the drivers not having time even to reverse their engines and jump off, before death was upon them; the driver of the passenger train, named Wm. Ingram, and his fireman, named Tuttle, being both taken off the engine dead, as was the fireman of the coal engine, named Philo. Prentiss.
The shock was tremendous, and the results awful, though fortunately neither of the engines left the line. The tender of the passenger engine was turned up on end, the wood for fuel being thrown in front, and burying the driver and fireman before named. The first car of course was utterly destroyed, being jammed as a spectator described it to us, into a space less than six feet, while to complete its demolition, the tender that had been tipped on end fell back on its roof. It contained 37 men, some of whom were on the platform at the time of the collision, and from its wreck 36 were taken out dead, only one man escaping with his life by falling between the platforms to the earth. Three of the cars in all were totally destroyed, and seven or eight of them so much broken as to be entirely useless, and it was in these cars that the greatest loss occurred; for when the collision took place, two Union soldiers were placed as sentinels at each door on the platforms of each car which were also occupied by some of the Rebels, beguiling the way by conversation with the sentry. Of the men thus standing, all were immediately killed, save one or two.
As soon as possible, the survivors set to work under the guidance of the Captain in charge of the body to extricate the dying and wounded from their fearful position, and, in the meantime, word was sent to Shohola apprizing the authorities there of the state of things, who immediately telegraphed for assistance to Port Jervis, whence, in a short time, Hugh Riddle, esq., District Superintendent, arrived on the scene of disaster in a relief train, with three surgeons to attend to the injured. The scene is described by those who escaped as most appalling, the road blocked up with the debris, car piled upon car in the most indescribable confusion, the bodies of those thrown from them covering the road at every step, the flying dust and blinding smoke from the quenching fires, the noise of the escaping steam, and, above all, the fearful groan and heart rending cries of the injured and expiring will never be forgotten. Some of the corpses were shockingly mutilated, heads completely crushed, bodies transfixed, impaled on timbers or iron rods, or smashed between the colliding beams, while one man was discovered dead, sitting on the top of the upturned tender, in grotesque and ghastly mockery of the scene around him.
When the cries of the last wounded had directed the searchers to his place of imprisonment, and the last corpse removed from its temporary tomb, it was found that the victims number 16 union men and 44 Rebels, dead; while the wounded numbered about 120, some of the wounded mortally – indeed four have since died, and a number of others cannot be expected to recover. T.J. Ridgway, esq., Associate Judge of Pike County (PA), was soon on the spot, and, after a consultation with Mr. Riddle and the officer in command of the men, a jury was impanneled and an inquest held; after which a large trench was dug by the soldiers and the railway employees, 75 feet long, 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep, in which the bodies were at once interred in boxes, hastily constructed – one being allotted for four Rebels and one to each Union soldier. The wounded were conveyed as soon as possible to Shohola, where they met with every attention and aid that surgical skill could suggest, and the limited accommodation permit, from Drs. Appley, Hardenburg, Cooper, Deborn, Lawrence and Walsh assisted by a number of volunteers from the inhabitants of the neighborhood.
The ladies of the vicinity also were unwearied in rendering those kind offices which womanly tenderness alone knows how to bestow, besides bringing soups, jellies, and other delicacies so grateful to the parched and fevered patient. The names of these good Samaritans, so far as we could ascertain, though if we do injustice, by omitting any that should be mentioned, we sincerely regret it – are Mesdames Loftus, Deborn, Halbut, Kelsall, Johnson, Bross, Harwood, Garderner, Spring, and Misses Skinner, Bross and Hamilton.
The line was cleared on Friday night, and on Saturday morning early the officer in command proceeded with the rest of the men to Elmira, taking with him most of the wounded, seven or eight of the cases requiring amputation, which could not be performed at Shohola, and the others more or less injured leaving only twenty two of the worst cases at Shohola, of which, as before stated, four died on Saturday and were buried with the rest in the trench in the woods between the road and the river.
The conductor of the coal train, John Martin, states that it started as usual from the depot on the Hawley branch, and that, coming on the main line at Lackawaxen, he inquired, as required by the regulations of the Company, of the telegraph operator, Duff Kent, if the line (the single track portion of it) was clear, and received for answer that all trains then due had passed, the fact being that the passenger train of which he had information was late, and had not yet arrived. On receiving the intelligence, the conductor of the coal train naturally ordered the driver to go forward, and the train proceeded at its usual speed along the single-track, until, when doubling the point, the passenger train dashed into it. Each train, as it passes a station, is telegraphed to the next, and the telegraph operator is required to keep, in a book set apart for that purpose, an account of the times at which each train passes his depot. Thus he can, at any moment, by reference to his book, ascertain what trains are due and what have passed, but whether Kent had done so or not we cannot state. One thing is certain – that he has since absconded.
On visiting the scene of the accident, on Saturday, we rode down the line with the courteous Superintendent, Mr. Riddle, on a hand-car, and could not but feel that shameful and criminal as was the carelessness which led to the present collision it is no small tribute to the officials that they have hitherto kept so free from accident on such a road. The road, in fact, is one of the worst that could be used, the striking beauty of the landscape and the many windings of the stream whose course it follows, that so delight the traveler, only rendering necessary such twisting and curving of the line that that portion must be the terror of all the drivers of the Company. The distance from Shohola to Lackawaxen is about five miles, and yet there are certainly not more than three points in that distance from which a spectator can see more than 100 yards of the line at once – about 50 yards each way.
At this spot on which the collision took place, the line makes a sudden bend, like the convex curve of the letter S, and it was at the apex of this that the collison took place. As we passed along, some distance before we arrived at the spot, the coal strewing the line in all directions, broken couplings and fragments, gave notice that we were approaching the scene of some disaster. At length two upturned tenders, with sides battered and crumpled, the massive timbers of their floors snapped across like a wand, wheels and axles broken, a piston rod bent as though it had been a wire, angle irons twisted out of all shape, massive bars crumpled like paper, wheels filling the ditch, planks torn into shreds, timbers splintered like touchwood, cars smashed and overturned, bore such witness to the fearful nature of the shock that one wondered how, when such rigid things as iron and wood were as straws before it, flesh and blood should ever survive. And as one passes on a little further, and looks down sheer eighty feet of perpendicular rock to the stream below, it is impossible to repress a shudder at the thought of how awful would have been the loss of life had the collision taken place in any of those narrow ridges, about fifteen feet wide, which the road forms at these places.
It is difficult to look up at those shaggy hills, clad with primeval forest, or down on the sunny stream sparkling below, or across the valley at the waving harvest, ready for the reaper, and realize the fact that only two days ago that pleasant, peaceful spot was to so many a scene of untold horror and anguish, yielding its first harvest to death, the reaper whose sickle had at last secured the sheaf of human life that had so often evaded and braved him on the battle-field. Yet there wee the remains strewing the road, and down at Shohola were more ghastly witnesses still. The appearance of some of the wounded men was frightful; the only object to give it relief being the presence of the ministering angels who so tenderly tended each sufferer – Union and Rebel alike – only requiring that aid should be needed to give it, and seeing only a fellow-creature appealing, and not in vain, to their sympathies.
Some little disapprobation was expressed at the hasty burial of the men, and it has been objected that opportunities should have been offered for their identification, but to this it may be answered that the mutilation of many of the corpses rendered this impossible, and the weather, on sanitary grounds, rendered it indispensable they should be removed, while there is no doubt the Government have all the names of the missing men and will give them such publicity as may meet the eyes of their friends. It is certainly, however, desirable that something more than the sham investigation by the jury, and which we are informed terminated in a verdict that all the company’s servants were free from blame and the accident unavoidable, should take place. The telegraph operator is said to have been intoxicated the night before, but until he can be met with, and the public will demand of the State authorities to see that he is, and can be confronted with the conductor of the coal train, it will not do to place too much reliance on the statement of the latter.
It is the duty of each telegraph clerk to telegraph to the clerk at the next depot immediately the train has passed his station, and this book seems to have been regularly kept, so far as our inspection went, at Shohola. At Lackawaxen we were unable to see the book kept by the absconding operator. Under any circumstances if the statement about the character of the telegraph operator is true, it is most discreditable to the company to have kept such a man in so critical a situation, and they are by no means free from complicity in the murder which has just been committed.
Source: Binghamton Daily Democrat. July 19, 1864. Provided by Richard Palmer.