The next day a larger crowd rolled a wagon containing a small building on to the tracks. The crew of the southbound freight never even slowed, blasting pieces of the wagon and building in all directions as they roared on.

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Cries of “tear up the tracks” rose from the frustrated crowd, and several men began rounding up sledgehammers and crowbars. It took only a few minutes for the crowd of about 200 to pull spikes from the rails and disjoint more than 900 feet of track. Men were then sent running in both directions to flag any oncoming traffic, and a short time later a stock train with 30 loaded cattle cars came swinging up the line from Texas.

When viewed at a distance by engineer Jim Sullivan, the tangled mess of track and ties appeared to be of no threat. Having seen buggies, wagons and other obstacles on the rails, he only smiled as he cruised past the man running down the tracks waving a red flag. Sullivan pulled the whistle cord and called to his fireman, “This time they’re trying a windmill.”

They forged ahead, and by the time Sullivan realized the track was in shambles, it was too late. He and his fireman jumped clear of the cab as the engine plunged into the tangle of ties and rails. The locomotive plowed through nearly 100 yards of trackless roadbed before finally sliding to a stop. Like a collapsing accordion, the trailing cattle cars piled into a heap behind it, most bursting open. More than 100 cows were crippled or killed in the wreck, but miraculously the trainmen escaped serious injury. Local officers arrested and charged them with violating Pond Creek’s strict speed limit. At a hearing the next morning, railroad attorneys were dumbstruck to hear Pond Creek city officials defend the derailment as the only means available to enforce speed laws.

The Pond Creek wreck brought swift response from federal authorities, who realized the depot dispute had become an all-out war. Territorial Marshal E.D. Nix and some deputies arrived in town to investigate, and although Nix obtained arrest warrants for half a dozen Pond Creek citizens, the local court released each of them on bond.

On the night of June 22, the concussion of a massive explosion rocked the two towns of Pond Creek Station and Pond Creek. Railroad workers from the north town pumped their way toward the Salt Fork River bridge on a handcar to find an entire section “blown into splinters.” The Pond Creek Echo reported that the men on the handcar met County Sheriff R.H. Hagar at the far end of the bridge. The newspaper accusingly wondered “how the sheriff could walk twice as far as they [the railroad men] went by handcar, each starting at the time of the explosion?”

Appalled by the continued destruction, Rock Island President Ransom Cable sent a telegram to U.S. Attorney Richard Olney at the territorial capital in Guthrie to assert the gravity of “interference with interstate transportation.” The matter was handed to U.S. Commissioner W.A. Duncan, who promised his Washington bosses that he’d quickly capture the offenders, no matter who they happened to be.

He was a bit optimistic. The next night some Pond Creek men shot up a southbound train as it rambled through town. Train guards returned the fire, wounding the local news dealer as he innocently waited along the tracks for a bundle of newspapers to be tossed from the train.

Pond Creek’s Cherokee Sentinel blamed the latest violence on the railroad:

It is devoutly and sincerely to be hoped that the Rock Island will abandon its openly avowed purpose of crushing this town out of existence….The people here…are ruined unless the railroad is brought to subjection, hence they are growing desperate.

A three hundred dollar depot will put an end to all this trouble.

On the night of July 12, railroad haters in Enid took up the cause by sawing through several key timbers on the bridge over Boggy Creek. At dawn, Friday the 13th, a Rock Island freight thundered onto the bridge. The locomotive and tender barely made it across before the structure collapsed, sending oil tankers and lumber cars into the creek bottom. As the trailing cars went down, they pulled the engine and tender back into the wreckage. Crawling up from the rubble, the bruised and battered engineer told a gathering crowd of townspeople, “Yuh done a damn good job of sawing that trestle.”

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