So many ways to die
Much of my time is spent doing research in old newspapers, and I am amazed at the number of stories reporting on deadly accidents. Our ancestors lived perilous lives, facing death or injury every day as they went about their lives.
Until relatively recent times, most Arkansans lived and worked on farms. And farms were dangerous places. A surprising number of people, including children, were killed by farm animals. For example, in 1833 a “young son” was killed in Pope County when trampled by oxen pulling a cart. In 1888, a hog running at large in Kingsland (Cleveland County) killed a child. Black businessman Scott Bond of St. Francis County, known as the “black Rockefeller” due to his great wealth, was killed in 1933 when one of his highly prized registered bulls gored the 80-year-old.
An appalling number of Arkansans throughout the 1800s died in accidents associated with water wells and cisterns. In August 1885, an Arkansas Gazette headline reported: “Damps [?] kills man in water well in Hot Spring County.” Children regularly fell into wells, and on one occasion a Little Rock mother and her daughter were killed when a cistern collapsed.
Just as today, many of our ancestors were killed in travel accidents. Runaway horses were often the causes of many injuries and deaths. A runaway team in downtown Pine Bluff in March 1888 left a trail of destruction and two men were seriously injured. Only a few months later, runaway horses killed two people in Little Rock and another in Clarksville.
Travel accidents increased dramatically with the coming of motorized vehicles. Newspaper reports often told of accidents involving streetcars. Little Rock built its first trolley system in 1876 featuring small coaches that were pulled by mules. The first electric streetcars began operation in Little Rock in 1891, only four years after New York City got its electric trolleys.
News reports frequently told of trolley passengers being injured when entering or leaving the cars, but sometimes a car would leave the tracks, and that could be deadly. Pedestrians were often injured by streetcars, and in a few instances children were run over and killed. In November 1887, “little Katie Shannon” was run over, dying the following day despite the efforts of three physicians.
Accidents killed many children and not a few of their mothers. This was especially true of females of all ages who lived, worked, and played around open fires. Before 1900 many rural Arkansans heated their houses with open fireplaces, and perhaps more dangerously, the family meals were cooked over these open hearths. The long dresses worn by both women and children were highly flammable death traps.
On one day in October 1894 the Gazette reported that a woman in Lamar (Johnson County) had burned to death while a child in Camden had suffered the same fate. Two more people died in fires later that month, including a child at Mount Ida (Montgomery County).
Equally horrifying to read are the numerous news articles on “scaldings”—usually of children but sometimes adults. More than one youngster fell into backyard wash pots or pulled skillets of hot grease off the table. However, the worst scalding report I have read involved an adult man who was “horribly scalded” when he fell into a molasses vat. Many adult men were scalded, often fatally, when steam engines exploded on steamboats and at cotton gins.
Many accidents defy easy explanation, some are bizarre, and some involved incredibly poor judgment. As Abby Burnett wrote in her recent book on death and burial in the Ozarks before 1950, “there are so many ways to die.”
During the summer of 1838, a Little Rock child was killed when playing with gunpowder. The use of gunpowder as a medical agent figured in the 1876 injury of a Carroll County woman who had bound her sore finger with a cloth containing gunpowder—which exploded when she struck a match.
Young men caught up in the patriotic fervor of the 1825 Independence Day Celebration in Little Rock learned a valuable lesson about the volatility of gunpowder. According to one observer, at noon on July 4, just as the celebration was beginning, volunteers attempted to fire a cannon salute: “An accidental explosion took place while the gunner was ramming down the charge in one of the cannon, which thrust the rammer through his hands and mutilated them both in a shocking manner.” Two other young men were “badly burnt.”
Another shocking accident occurred in January 1935 when the former acting governor of Arkansas, X.O. Pindall, died after he fell from a bluff above the Arkansas River. After striking his head on rocks, the venerable politician from Desha County landed in a pool of hot water from a utility company’s steam exhaust drain.
Perhaps the most unusual death report I encountered occurred in 1875 when five members of a Conway County family died after drinking coffee in which “a centipede had been boiled.”