President’s Note: This is the first of a new museum program to share the stories of railroaders buried in Utah cemeteries. While there is no schedule to their publication, we will put one up as often as the stories can be researched and written.
A fascinating headstone sits beneath a pine tree in the Provo City Cemetery. Bearing masonic symbols, it reads “William Young Jr. Was killed in R.R. wreck Fossil Wyo.”
William Young Jr. was born on 20 June 1873 in Overton, Tennessee, to William Young and Mary Vann. He had one older brother, Phillip, two years his senior.
As a young man William, known as “Little Bill,” caught wanderlust and headed west, ending up with railroad section (maintenance) jobs in Wyoming. He quickly worked his way up to become the section foreman for the Oregon Short Line Railroad at Waterfall Wyoming, a tiny railroad settlement on the Ham’s Fork River approximately 33 miles west of milepost zero at Granger and four miles east of Kemmerer.
In October 1897 he took a train west to purchase an engagement ring for the woman he was courting, then caught a ride in the caboose of an eastbound freight back to his post at Waterfall. Late in the night of October 31 his train stopped at Fossil, less than 15 miles from his home at Waterfall, to switch out some cars left on the spur there. The locomotive cut off the train to do the work leaving its cars and caboose fouling the mainline. Little Bill was sound asleep in a bunk inside the caboose when another eastbound freight train, without need or orders to stop at Fossil, plowed into the caboose with enough force to not only crush the wood car into splinters but severely damage the locomotive’s front end. Four freight cars immediately caught on fire and another 105 were destroyed in the subsequent derailment as the two trains accordioned into each other. The estimated cost of damages to the railroad equipment alone, not counting their contents, was $400 – but according to the modern value of the dollar, this was the equivalent to almost $13,000 in 2023.
By the grace of God nobody on the train crews were injured, so the newspapers reported that the accident was of “little consequence.” Little Bill, asleep as the caboose collapsed around him, was killed instantly in the accident. Apparently because he was not counted as part of the train crew this fact was not recorded until over a week later by the Cheyenne Sun-Leader.
Little Bill was a Freemason and his lodge provided some money for a headstone. Why he was transported to Provo and buried there remains a mystery – but it could be that whatever poor woman he intended to marry was a resident of Utah County.
Sources:
“Short Line Accident,” Salt Lake Tribune 1 November 1897.
“Railroad News,” Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader 2 November 1897.
“Mountains and Coast,” Salt Lake Tribune 9 November 1897.