John Luther “Casey” Jones was a locomotive engineer who went on to become an American folk hero. He was a highly skilled driver and was well known for keeping to schedule, even if it meant speeding. He was killed in a train wreck on April 30, 1900. He was celebrated as a hero for remaining at the throttle, blowing the whistle to warn people to clear the area. In the accident, Jones was the only casualty. His heroic sacrifice was immortalized in “The Ballad of Casey Jones.”
Jones was born on March 14, 1863, in rural southeastern Missouri, to Frank and Ann Nolan Jones. He was the eldest of five children, four boys and a girl. Jones’s father was employed as a country schoolteacher. His parents were determined to provide their children with better opportunities, so in September 1876 the family left Missouri and traveled by wagon for two days to reach Kentucky, where they settled in the town of Cayce.
The young Jones became interested in trains and spent his free time hanging around the train depot. In 1878, at the age of fifteen, he moved to Columbus, Kentucky, and took a job as a telegraph operator with the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Later, Jones became a brakeman and a fireman for the M&O, but his ambition was to become an engineer. Jones moved to Jackson, Tennessee, and settled into a boardinghouse. Here he met Joanna “Janie” Brady (1866–1958) and fell in love. The couple was married on November 25, 1886, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and settled into a house on West Chester Street. It was during his time at the boarding house that Jones got the nickname “Casey.”
In March 1888 Jones took a job with the Illinois Central Railroad as fireman, hoping that his seniority would open the doors to advancement. His decision proved astute, and on February 23, 1891, Jones was promoted to engineer. In 1893, Jones spent the summer ferrying visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Illinois Central Railroad had a new engine on display at the fair, the 638. When the fair closed Jones was allowed the privilege of driving the locomotive back to Water Valley. For the rest of the decade Jones ran freight on the 638 in the Jackson district.
But Jones was ambitious. Passenger runs offered better pay and were more prestigious than freight, and the working hours were shorter. In January 1900, the Illinois Central transferred Jones to Memphis, Tennessee, and assigned him to the passenger run between Memphis and Canton, Mississippi. The route was one part of a four-train service that ran between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Chicago, Illinois. This service was colloquially known as the “cannonball” run because of the fast train service along the route. As railroads shortened the running times of trains, engineers’ abilities were tested as they strove to keep their trains on schedule. For Jones, who was said to be so punctual that people set their watches by him, this run was a challenge he eagerly accepted. Jones also had a peculiar talent for using the train whistle. He developed his own signature call, which some people likened to the sound of a whippoorwill. In those days, engineers owned their own whistles and transferred them to whichever locomotive they were driving.
On April 29, 1900, Jones and his fireman, Simeon “Sim” T. Webb (1874–1957), arrived in Canton, where they had a scheduled layover. There is some controversy about the time of arrival: some biographers maintain it was early morning, while others peg Jones’s arrival time at 9 p.m. Regardless of this discrepancy, the circumstances of Jones’s departure are well attested. Jones was reassigned to the Memphis run after Sam Tate, the regular engineer for No. 382, had called in sick.
No. 382 was scheduled to leave Memphis around 11:00 p.m., but another train on the track delayed Jones’s departure and he did not pull away from the station until nearly 12:50 a.m., an hour and a half behind schedule. Jones’s reputation for making up time was well known, and despite rainy weather he was determined to get No. 382 to Canton on schedule.
The first leg of his journey was a 102-mile stretch of track between Memphis and Grenada, Mississippi. Jones opened the throttle, while Webb shoveled coal for all he was worth. The cannonball roared down the track at nearly eighty miles an hour, and by the time Jones stopped for water in Grenada, he had made up nearly an hour of lost time. On the next 23-mile stretch of the route, from Grenada to Winona, Mississippi, Jones continued to push the engine and managed to make up another fifteen minutes of lost time. It was only 30 miles to the next station at Durant, Mississippi, and by the time Jones reached the station the train was almost back on schedule.
At Durant, Jones received instructions to pull off onto the siding at Goodman, Mississippi, and wait for a passenger train to pass before proceeding to his destination of Vaughan, Mississippi. He pulled out of Goodman only five minutes behind schedule and made up another three minutes on the way to the next stop. What Jones did not know was that three trains were already at the station in Vaughan: the freight trains No. 83 and No. 72, and the passenger train No. 26. The passenger train was moved onto a side track west of the platform, while the two freight trains were shunted off the main track onto a siding. But their combined length was so long that four of No. 83’s cars remained on the main track. Station workers tried to clear the main track for Jones, but an air hose broke on No. 72 and caused its brakes to lock.
Meanwhile, No. 382 was steaming toward Vaughan at speed, with Jones still trying to make up the last few minutes of time. As the locomotive rounded a blind curve, Webb spotted the red lights on No. 83’s caboose. It was directly in their path. The fireman told Jones that something was on the main track. Jones’s last words were “Jump, Sim, jump!” Webb jumped from the engine as Jones blew the whistle to warn the other trains. Webb was lucky; he was knocked unconscious and sustained bruises, but was otherwise uninjured.
Jones remained on No. 382 and applied the emergency brakes, but there was not enough open track for the train to come to a halt. Jones did manage to slow to thirty-five miles an hour before No. 382 tore through the caboose and three other cars. Jones was killed in the collision and his body was later found underneath the cab, his hands still on the whistle and brake. His watch had stopped at the moment of impact: 3:52 a.m.
Several passengers were slightly injured, but Jones was the only fatality. His willingness to stay aboard and continue to man the brakes and whistle gave other train passengers time to clear the area. Jones’s body was taken back to Jackson for a memorial service and he was buried in Mt. Calvary Cemetery. Jones was survived by his wife and three children, Charles, age twelve; Helen, age ten; and John Lloyd, age four.
The official accident report issued by the Illinois Central claimed that Jones failed to acknowledge a flagman and was thus solely responsible for the accident. At the time of the report, Webb claimed to have seen the flagman and heard railroad torpedoes, small explosive charges placed on rails to warn engineers to reduce speed. But controversy continued to surround the accident, and in later years Webb denied ever seeing a flagman or hearing torpedoes, a position that he maintained until his death in 1957.
Jones was well liked by his fellow railroad men. Wallace Saunders, one of Jones’s friends and a roundhouse worker in Canton, enjoyed singing and created a ballad about Jones soon after the accident. The song’s melody was based on a popular song, but Saunders never recorded his words and the song was soon picked up by fellow railroad workers, including engineer William Leighton, whose brothers Frank and Bert worked in vaudeville.
Railroad Folklore
In the common American imagination, the wide open spaces of the American West were in large measure tamed by the railroads, and thus it is no surprise that the adventures, heroes, villains, and challenges represented by the conquest of the Wild West by the iron, coal, and steam of the Golden Age of Rail gave birth to its own branch of American folklore. Moreover, from the advent of the Transcontinental Railroad in the mid- to late nineteenth century through the end of the Great Depression, the railroads represented the “freedom of the open road,” as it were, giving birth to several generations of migratory workers as well as to travelers and adventurers who refused to be penned in; thus the American icon of the hobo derives from this period, as do heroic rail workers such as John Henry and legendary engineers such as Casey Jones.
C. Fee
For several years after Jones’s death, the Leighton brothers performed the ballad as they traveled the country, helping to spread Jones’s legend across America. Two other vaudeville performers, T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton, picked up the song as they were passing through New Orleans and wrote their own version.
“Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer,” was copyrighted in April 1909 by Seibert and Newton and printed as sheet music by the Southern California Music Company. Ironically, the cover advertised the song as “the only comedy railroad song.” Other versions of the ballad circulated through oral tradition, immortalizing Jones as an American folk hero. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jones’s legendary ride was made into a radio series, a book, and even a movie.
Jones’s legend continued to grow. In 1956, his home was filled with railroad memorabilia and opened to the public. In 1980 the building was moved to Casey Jones Village in Jackson, Tennessee, which continues to operate a museum. Another museum dedicated to Jones is the Water Valley Casey Jones Railroad Museum in Water Valley, Mississippi.
Karen S. Garvin
See also Express Train to Hell; Folklore and Folktales; John Henry; Kate Shelley Saves the Train; Legends
Further Reading
Casey Jones Museum. 1956. “The Man at the Throttle”: The Story of Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer. Jackson, TN: Casey Jones Museum.
Cohen, Norm. 1973. “‘Casey Jones’: At the Crossroads of Two Ballad Traditions.” Western Folklore 32 (2): 77–103.
Downey, Clifford J. 2007. Chicago and the Illinois Central Railroad. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
Downey, Clifford J. 2010. Kentucky and the Illinois Central Railroad. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
Lee, Fred J. 1993. Casey Jones: The True Story of John Luther “Casey” Jones. Germantown, TN: Guild Bindery Press.