1. Austin C. Rogers, “A Pre-Arranged Head End Collision,” in The Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine November 1896–April 1897, vol. 22 (Irvington, NY: Cosmopolitan Press, 1897), 125, 129; “They Are All Ready,” Dallas Morning News, September 14, 1896; “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, September 13, 1896; “Stand at Crush Station,” Democrat (McKinney, TX), September 10, 1896; “Scene of the Collision,” Dallas Morning News, September 16, 1896; “Taking Care of the Crowds,” Dallas Morning News, September 16, 1896; “Railroad Matters. The Katy’s Grand Scientific Show of a Collision Between Two Trains,” Dallas Morning News, August 13, 1896; “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, September 12, 1896; “Dallas Well Represented,” Dallas Morning News, September 16, 1896; “Is Over at Last,” Dallas Morning News, September 16, 1896; John Banta, “Railroad Publicity Stunt Ended in Tragic Explosion,” January 23, 1983, box 9, folder 5, Thomas E. Turner Sr. Papers, accession #2200, Texas Collection, Baylor University (hereafter cited as Texas Collection).
2. “They Are All Ready”; Letter, Maggie Dunn to W. H. Clift, September 16, 1896, box 246, folder 20, Crush Collision Collection, accession #1253, Texas Collection. Crush remains remarkably understudied. Extant literature ranges between reading Crush as economic escapism and a physical manifestation of high and low culture wars. See Mike Cox, Train Crash at Crush, Texas: America’s Deadliest Publicity Stunt (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2019), 27; and Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 1–4. Despite varying interpretations, all project modern astonishment onto the Crush collision and treat it as an anomalous event. By “kinetic spectacular,” I mean events that captured the attention of masses and traded on movement.
3. Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 7, 54, 92–93, 121–132, 162–163. Regarding pellagra, see Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 203–210. For hookworm, see John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). On poverty and the wealth gap in the New South, see Gaston, New South Creed, 45–47; and Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22. For how the South got its public image as backward and antimodern, see Scott L. Matthews, Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
4. C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 140–141; James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind & Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 2. Prominent texts on the late economic development of the South include Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); and Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). On southern modernity, see Benjamin S. Child, The Whole Machinery: The Rural Modern in Cultures of the U.S. South, 1890–1946 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: First Vintage Books, 1999); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
5. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 288; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 1–9; William A. Link, Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 33–34, 55–58; Woodward, Origins of the New South, ix. On the influence of technology on perceptions, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). On speed, power, and the modern state, see Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotex(e), 1986). On the impact of speed on American and European aesthetics, see Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the 20th Century,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992). For examinations of the texture of everyday life in the New South, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, vii–ix. On the relation between Civil War destruction and New South development, see Link, Atlanta, 3.
6. Waco occupied a unique regional position as both South and West. Given its historical ancestry, wartime experience, segregation, and cotton culture ranging from plantation to sharecropping, Waco was predominantly southern until at least the 1920s, when the demographics and scale of agriculture shifted toward a western model of ranches and Mexican labor. See Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2–5.
7. In 1860, McLennan County contained 6,206 white and enslaved people. While deaths and later enlistments make the actual number unknowable, the most reliable estimate was that 1,200 white men were of eligible age for service (16–45) and that 1,300 served. Harold B. Simpson, Gaines’ Mill to Appomattox: Waco & McLennan County in Hood’s Texas Brigade (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1963), 30. Waco’s disinterest in Confederate memorialization is all the more shocking considering Texas had the highest per capita and whole numbers of surviving Confederate veterans in 1890. Of the 432,020 Confederate veterans living in the United States, 66,791 lived in Texas. These comprised 2.99 percent of the state’s population. Virginia—the crucible of Confederate memory—was its closest rival, with veterans comprising 2.94 percent of the population. Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 804–806. While there is a Confederate monument in Waco’s Oakwood Cemetery, this structure served a different purpose than the Confederate monuments placed in central public spaces. See Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 66–67. After its founding in 1887, Waco’s Pat Cleburne Camp of the United Confederate Veterans rarely drew more than 150 members. Morrison & Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Waco, 1888–89(Galveston, TX: Morrison & Fourmy, 1889), 47. The UDC had only twenty-five members when organized in 1894. Morrison & Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Waco, 1894–95 (Galveston, TX: Morrison & Fourmy, 1895), 59.
8. Letter, R. N. Goode to Mary Virginia Thompson, March 19, 1865, box 1, folder 3, Goode-Thompson Family Papers, 1837–1993, accession #2794, series II: Richard N. Goode, Texas Collection; Letter, Patience Crain Black to James Black, June 17, 1862, in A Copy of the Letters of Patience and James Black (1862–1865): Their Correspondence while Separated by the Civil War (1972), 39.
9. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution: 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 125, 119, 204, 352–354; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41–42, 171; Foley, White Scourge, 28; Charles William Ramsdell, “Reconstruction in Texas,” in History of Texas Democracy: A Centennial History of Politics and Personalities of the Democratic Party, 1836–1936, ed. Frank Carter Adams (Austin, TX: Democratic Historical Association), 1: 237; Patrick G. Williams, Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 15–16, 55–60; Carl H. Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 3. Economists Ransom and Sutch argued that the region’s straggling economy resulted from the loss of enslaved labor, not physical destruction. Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 50. Whether or not the Civil War’s desolation was to blame was irrelevant, for white southerners felt it was. It was this perception that triggered a massive demographic shift.
10. John Sleeper and J. C. Hutchins, Waco and McLennan County, Texas (Waco, TX: Examined Steam Job Establishment, 1876), 26; A Memorial and Biographical History of McLennan, Falls, Bell, and Coryell Counties, Texas (Chicago: 1893), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, 47–48, 121; “Reconstruction in McLennan County,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 221. For representative individual examples of Confederate veterans in Texas’s postwar economy, see “Forsgard, Samuel J.,” “Johnson, Charles L.,” and “Makeig, Stephen L.,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 104, 143, 178; and Memorial and Biographical History, 543, 725–726.
11. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 30–33; Eleventh Census, 400; Ralph A. Wooster, Civil War Texas: A History and a Guide (Austin, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 1999), 32, 45. Only Arkansas and Florida topped 100 percent growth between 1860 and 1890. Williams, Beyond Redemption, 4. After Texas, the ex-Confederate state with the most residents born out of state was Arkansas with 355,498 people. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 480. Texas was the most popular destination for emigrants from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas; the second most popular for Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia; and the third most for North Carolina and Florida. Tenth Census, 480–483.
12. In 1870, most migrants to McLennan County had come from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 372. By 1880, more expansive data added Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia to this list. Tenth Census, 530. Mrs. J. B. Powell, interview by Edward Townsend, July 7, 1938, box 4J132, folder 2, Works Progress Administration Records, 1933–1943, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as WP Records). For representative individual examples of white southerners relocating to Waco to become cotton planters, see Sleeper and Hutchins, Waco and McLennan County, 114–116; and “Brown, Henry W.” and “Gerald, George Bruce,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 38, 110. Similarly, Patrick G. Williams argued that although the “planter thesis” held for Texas, where antebellum and secessionist leaders regained political power after the war, this was not a simple continuity because they had to contend with different interests as a result of demographic shifts. Williams, Beyond Redemption, 5–9.
13. “Chisolm Trail,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 104; Memorial and Biographical History, 57; W. R. Poage, McLennan County before 1980 (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1981), 59; Sleeper and Hutchins, Waco and McLennan County, 62; C. D. Morrison, General Directory of the City of Waco, for 1878–79 (Waco, TX: Examiner, 1877), 8; “Telegraph—Waco a Cotton Market,” Semi-Weekly Register, September 29, 1869, box 4J132, folder 1, WP Records.
14. J. W. Riggins, “Big Thing for Texas,” Waco Evening News, October 10, 1893; promotional pamphlet, “The Texas Cotton Palace,” 1894, box 2, folder 8, Texas Cotton Palace Records, accession #792, Texas Collection; J. W. Riggins, “Texas State Cotton Palace,” Waco Evening News, October 14, 1893.
15. Charles Cutter, Cutter’s Guide to the City of Waco, Texas (Waco, TX: 1894), 53.
16. Cutter, Cutter’s Guide, 55; “Texas Cotton Palace,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 9, 1894; “Social and Current Events,” Artesia, November 11, 1894; “Where Cotton Reigns,” Marion Daily Star, December 5, 1894; promotional pamphlet, 1894; “Cowboy Day at Waco,” Galveston Daily News, December 1, 1894; “The Cotton Palace,” Galveston Daily News, November 12, 1894.
17. “Negro Day,” Austin Daily Statesman, November 25, 1894; R. Scott Huffard Jr., Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 101–102; Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, “Introduction,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1–2, 92.
18. “St. Louis Day,” Galveston Daily News, November 18, 1894; James Morton, “The Cotton Palace,” Daily Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle, December 1, 1894.
19. Cutter, Cutter’s Guide, 55; “Pertinent Paragraphs from the Palace,” Artesia, November 25, 1894; Morton, “Cotton Palace.”
20. “Artesian Wells” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 10–11; Cutter, Cutter’s Guide, 7; Morrison & Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Waco, 1892–93 (Galveston, TX: Morrison & Fourmy, 1893), 3–4.
21. Cutter, Cutter’s Guide, 11–15; Morrison & Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Waco, 1894–95, 4.
22. “Artesia, The,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 25–26; Cutter, Cutter’s Guide, 10; “Artesia,” Artesia, February 19, 1893; William C. Brann, “The Iconoclast Told to Leave Town,” in The Complete Works of Brann: The Iconoclast (New York: Brann, 1919), 9:204.
23. Brann, “Editorial Etchings,” in Complete Works of Brann, 7:79; “Social and Current Events,” Artesia, August 23, 1896; “At the Rink Last Night,” Waco Daily Examiner, February 28, 1885; “Prince Won the Race,” Waco Evening News, June 15, 1893; “The Week in Society,” Waco Evening News, October 28, 1893.
24. Sarah Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 31–32, 132–134; Richard Harmond, “Progress and Flight: An Interpretation of the American Cycle Craze of the 1890s,” Journal of Social History 5, no. 2 (Winter 1971/1972): 244; “Tea Table Gossip,” Waco Evening News, May 16, 1893.
25. Brann, “The Bike Bacillus,” in Complete Works of Brann, 1:253–256; Brann, “Salmagundi,” in Complete Works of Brann, 11:42; Brann, “Editorial Etchings,” Complete Works of Brann, 7:80–81; Brann, “Salmagundi,” in Complete Works of Brann, 5:48.
26. Davis v. The State, in Central Law Journal 5 (1877): 288; “Untitled,” Waco Daily Examiner, October 31, 1875, box 4J134, folder 1, WP Records; “Untitled,” Waco Daily Examiner, January 21, 1876, box 4J135, folder 1, WP Records; Margaret H. Davis, “Harlots and Hymnals: A Historic Confrontation of Vice and Virtue in Waco,” Mid-South Folklore 4, no. 3 (January 1976): 88; J. T. Upchurch, Traps for Girls and Those Who Set Them: An Address to Men Only (Arlington: Purity, 1908), 11, 23; Orville Wilkes, Diary, September 30, 1933, Waco, Texas: The Reservation (Vertical File), Texas Collection. The conventional view treats vice as an abstraction rather than deeply embedded in place. See Davis, “Harlots and Hymnals,” 92; and Amy S. Balderach, “A Different Kind of Reservation: Waco’s Red-Light District Revisited, 1880–1920” (master’s thesis, Baylor University, 2005), 4, 35.
27. “Mayor’s Court,” Waco Evening News, May 21, 1892; “An Interesting Decision: In the Police Court Relating to Female Residents of the Reservation,” Waco Evening News, January 12, 1892; “Police Court,” Waco Evening News, March 7, 1889. Because social codes conducting prostitutes’ behavior were informal, sources are limited to Wacoans recalling the Reservation decades later. See William H. Curry, A History of Early Waco (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1968), 129–130; Davis, “Harlots and Hymnals,” 90; and Bob Darden, “Best Legal Whorehouse in Texas,” Dallas Times Herald Westward, March 27, 1984, Waco, Texas: Prostitution Clippings (Vertical File), Texas Collection.
28. Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway Company, The Opening of the Great Southwest 1870–1945: A Brief History of the Origin and Development of the Missouri Kansas and Texas Rail Way (M. K. T. Lines, 1945), 2, 6–7; V. V. Masterson, The Katy Railroad and the Last Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 223; Morrison & Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Waco, 1896–97 (Galveston, TX: Morrison & Fourmy, 1897), 63–66.
29. Cox, Train Crash at Crush, 39–48; Frank Barnes, “Train Wreck,” True West, box 9, folder 5, Thomas E. Turner, Sr. Papers, accession #2200, Texas Collection; Huffard, Engines of Redemption, 2, 234–236, 138–139; Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 6–8; Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 129–131. On railroads and modernity, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
30. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 60–64.
31. “Head-End Collision,” Dallas Morning News, August 5, 1896; “The Katy’s Grand Scientific Show of a Collision”; “Scene of the Collision.”
32. “The Collision at Crush,” Houston Post, September 16, 1896.
33. “They Are All Ready.”
34. “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, September 11, 1896; “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, September 6, 1896; “Is Over at Last”; “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, September 12, 1896; Barnes, “Train Wreck,” WP Records, 16.
35. “Home Notes and Personals,” Dallas Morning News, August 14, 1896; “The Crush Collision,” Houston Post, September 17, 1896; “Is Over at Last.”
36. “The Katy Collision Was Entirely Too Realistic—Nine People Were Injured by It,” Austin Daily Statesman, September 16, 1896; “Collision at Crush”; “Is Over at Last”; “Mrs. Deane on the Crush Collision,” Dallas Morning News, October 1, 1896.
37. “Stories of Some Witnesses,” Dallas Morning News, September 17, 1896; Letter, Maggie Dunn to W. H. Clift, September 20, 1896, box 246, folder 20, Crush Collision Collection, accession #1253, Texas Collection.
38. “May Be Another Victim,” Dallas Morning News, September 17, 1896; “Collision at Crush”; “Katy Collision Was Entirely Too Realistic”; George W. Walling, “Accurate Estimates,” Austin Daily Statesman, September 20, 1896.
39. “Railroad Matters,” Dallas Morning News, August 16, 1896; “Deane, Jervis C.,” in The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, ed. Dayton Kelly (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1972), 84; Memorial and Biographical History, 553.
40. Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 28; Rudi Blesh, “Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist,” in The Complete Works of Scott Joplin, ed. Vera Brodsky Lawrence (New York: New York Public Library, 1981), 1:xiii–xviii. For criticism of the ending of Great Crush Collision March, see Berlin, King of Ragtime.
41. “Social and Current Events,” Artesia, October 4, 1896.
42. Brann, “Salmagundi,” in Complete Works of Brann, 6:238–239. The ways in which local photographer Fred Gildersleeve portrayed the lynching of Jesse Washington in progress suggests that it too should be understood as a thoroughly modern form of violence marked by the same fascination with speed. Lynching, which white southerners constantly defended as a form of “swift justice,” belongs in this conceptual framework of speed grounded in wartime experiences. This adds to a growing literature on lynching as a quintessential feature of modernity rather than southern backwardness. See Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1998); Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In this light, it may be no coincidence that spectacle lynchings and train crashes crested at the same time. See Huffard, Engines of Redemption, 138.