Not so, the passengers in the end car. Those who lived through its tumble into the gorge had, by this time, begun to burn.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The potbellied stoves had come loose during the plunge, shaking fire and red-hot coals all over the inside of the car. Kerosene from the gas lamps fed the flames, which consumed the car’s plush upholstery and dry wood like kindling. “I saw the coals of fire from the stove scattered all over the car,” recalled Angolan Josiah Southwick, a farmer and justice of the peace who witnessed the disaster from his home on a rise above the creek. He ran to help, but was stopped by the intense heat. “Inhaling the flames,” Southwick later said, “I was obliged to go back.”

He wasn’t alone. Many villagers who ran to the scene of the wreck would report the smell of flesh in the air, and the screams of the dying as the car burned. “The car was all in flames,” said John Martin, proprietor of a tin shop, who himself pulled five people from the inferno. “I could not see them,” Martin said, “I could hear them.” The Erie Observer reported the tragedy: “The hideous, remorseless flames crackled on; the shrieks died into moans, and moans into silence more terrible, as the pall of death drew over the scene.”

The screams of the dying lingered for close to five minutes, eyewitnesses said, before silence fell over the snow.

Betts, in a forward car, had hopped off the still-moving train and ran as hard as he could back toward the creek. Bracing himself in the snow, he made his way down to the two cars, which were lying some yards apart from one another on the icy creek bed.

Betts ran to the badly smashed end car. It was lying upside down, spun around so that one end pointed toward the bridge abutment, and the other tilted upward. Betts spotted a man hanging half out of the car, his arms waving wildly; he grabbed him and began to pull with all his strength, trying to pry the man loose.

The force of the fall had splintered the wooden car into bits, and the final impact of the descent had rammed everything in it—seats, belongings, men, women and children—into a dense mass of flesh and fabric and wood. “The bank was steep, and it was with great difficulty we could work around the car,” Betts would recall during the official inquest. “The lower end of the car was an indiscriminate mass of broken seats, passengers, timber.”

In the brief moment in which he stared into the interior of the car, Betts recognized a face looking back at him. With a sick feeling, Betts realized it was the same man he had dined with in Brocton that afternoon. The man was looking at him piteously and crying out for rescue.

Benjamin Betts looked down at the man he held in his own arms—a stranger, who hung suspended between life and death. He began to pull. The man came free of the wreckage and was passed along, hand to hand, down a line of rescuers to safety.

And then Betts saw that the fire had begun in earnest. He turned to see if he could save his friend from the Brocton station, trapped in the mass of flesh and wood. But it was too late. The man was being consumed by the fire; then he was gone.

Young John D. Rockefeller, in the letter he penned to his wife after the wreck, acknowledged that he had narrowly escaped death. He credited a favorable Providence with his survival, underlining thickly the words in the letter he sent her. “I do (and did when I learned that the first train left) regard the thing,” Rockefeller wrote, “as the Providence of God.”

It wasn’t hard to see why. Only three of the 50 or more people in the end car of the train had survived. Indeed, Rockefeller knew that he would have sat in this car, had he arrived at the Cleveland station on time.

He told Laura as much in his letter. “We certainly should have been in the burned car as it was the only one that went that we could have entered at the time we would have arrived at the station,” he wrote. “I am thankful, thankful, thankful.”

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to