17. Casey Jones and the train wreck
Jonathan Luther Jones was a former baseball player from Cayce, Kentucky, who worked as first a fireman, then a wiper, and finally an engineer for several railroads in the American Midwest and South. He was well known during his lifetime, recognized by the towns through which his trains passed from the distinctive blasts of his whistle. Most railroad engineers developed their own whistle calls, which were used to signal family and friends as they went about their work. Jones was a Missourian by birth, but the time he spent growing up in Cayce led to him being called Casey by all who knew him. He had several instances when he was cited by his employers, mostly for speeding, but his overall record was free of accidents involving injuries to passengers.
On the night of April 30, 1900, Jones was running behind schedule when the train he was driving crashed into the back of a freight train at Vaughan, Mississippi. Jones’s actions slowed his train sufficiently to save his passengers, but at the expense of his own life in the ensuing crash. Starting with the local headlines announcing his death he began to acquire heroic status, which was soon amplified when the song The Ballad of Casey Jones was released. In later years, other musicians including Pete Seeger and the band the Grateful Dead released songs about Jones. The engineer has been lauded in art, books, theater, film, and television and became an inseparable part of the folklore of the American railroads, the symbol of the locomotive engineer.