April 30, 1900 —
John Luther “Casey” Jones was born on March 14, 1863, in southeast Missouri. While he was still a small child, his family moved to Cayce, Kentucky, which is how he got his nickname. As a boy, he liked trains – he really liked trains. In 1878, at the age of 15, he went to work for the Mobile and Ohio Railroad as an apprentice telegrapher. By 1890, “Casey” had reached the pinnacle of the railroad profession as a crack locomotive engineer on the Illinois Central Railroad.
In 1899, Jones was given a regular passenger run on the Cannonball route, which ran between Chicago and New Orleans. On April 29, 1900, Jones was in Memphis, Tennessee, having arrived from the northbound Cannonball, when he agreed to take the southbound Cannonball because the scheduled engineer had called in sick. He left Memphis at 12:50 a.m., 95 minutes behind schedule, but made up almost an hour between Memphis and Grenada, Mississippi, nearly 100 miles away. By Durant, 55 miles farther down the line, they were almost on time.
At Durant, Jones received orders to “saw by” two freights that had taken the siding in Vaughan. The two freights were too large to fit entirely into the siding, leaving one end on the main line. If the “sawing” maneuver had been done correctly, the freights would have allowed the approaching train to pass the first switch, and then the trains on the siding would move past the other switch. However, an air hose on one of the freight trains burst, applying the brakes on the freight cars behind the break and leaving them immobile on the main line. Meanwhile, Jones was traveling at excessive speed, possibly up to 70 miles per hour, and did not have enough time to brake. When a collision seemed imminent, Casey told his fireman, Sim Webb, to jump for it, but Jones rode the engine into the cars and was killed. It is believed that, because Jones stayed to slow the train, he saved the passengers from injury and possible death (Casey himself was the only fatality of the collision).
Popular legend holds that when Jones’s body was pulled from the wreckage of his train, his hands were still firmly latched onto the whistle cord and the brake.
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