Exploring This Part of Texas
by Joel Owens

On Monday, February 4th, 2008 I took a little jaunt with a few of our Cub Scouts, parents and Cubmaster in tow out just south of the town of Merkel, Texas. "Down the road a piece" as we say here.

Our target was a site south of town approximately 3 miles along the Santa Fe Railroad line in a pasture that runs near there. We were led to the location by the land owner, to whom we were very thankful for this adventure.

Back in either 1941 or 1942 there was a train derailment at this location. Most notable was one particular railway car that ran a good distance south of the track before crashing on its side, spilling a huge shipment of glass bead "marbles" which was being shipped to the smelter. Judging from the area and concentrations of the marbles, it was easy to see this must have looked like a tremendous explosion of the shiny freight when it happened.

Although most of the train car was removed from the site, it seems there was little attempt to remove the mountain of glass marbles that spilled onto the ground. The site is replete with them to this day, however having been on this slope some 65+ years, many of them are covered over by earth from the rains, wind and time. As we traveled there, we heard several stories of people who had come thru in the past and collected them by the buckets - Around Merkel there are a few flower beds here and there that are spotted with some of them.

We took 10 of our trusty Scouts, and each of them was able to gather enough marbles to make their plastic sacks start to split. Some were content just to gather a couple of hand-fulls, though. I picked up about 20 when my hunt turned to other buried treasure.


Cubs gather up loose marbles.
If you'll click on this picture to see a larger version, you'll see that there are shiny little points of light all over the place - glass beads.
I'm sure we would have seen thousands had there been direct sunlight,
but the sun was fast fading into the West Texas evening sky behind a dune of incoming clouds.


You get a good idea here of what these look like 'in the wild';
many of them are almost totally buried by the red dirt,
others are still standing loose on top of the soil.
Often they appear in clumps of 20-30 or 4-5. How many can you see?

Click on that last picture to enlarge it!
Did you find 24 marbles and one marble-hole in that last picture?
Click HERE to see where they are!


Here's a few of mine and my son's that we cleaned up in the bathroom sink.
Sorry, the picture does not do them justice.
Guess I'll get to remove and clean out the p-trap this weekend - ha!


Dacia is helping point these out for you; you can see what size they are.
Many have impact chips out of them and others have long scratch striations along the surface.

My son found one of the large springs of the old train car embedded in the earth
with only the tops of the coils and end plates still showing through.
He and I started to unearth it, but realized it was a big task and decided to leave it be.
My treasure find was somewhat better and much easier to get my hands around...!


Here's a shot of me with some of our Wolf Den and the railroad car sign that I discovered. This photo has a funny look to it, I look like I have a 5' long right arm, but in fact this is a photo-ism, that is my son's hand - It just so happened to line up with his that it looks pretty strange!

I wasn't quite sure if what I had found was part of the accident site at first or not - as the first words that I could make out were "Super Shock Control", and made me believe for a moment that it was just a typical piece of West Texas ranch fodder (e.g. - perhaps from an electric shock fence used for livestock).


You can see the sign is quite bent up, one edge is rolled back and the fasteners that once held it in place are long gone. I unbent the center fold some to unearth it.

However, after we poured a little bit of our drinking water onto it and let the red earth run off it, buffing it with professional buffing material (my blue jeans pants leg), we could see some of the rest of the stamped letters. Some of the stamped impressed letters were plainly visible, but those that had been buried were a good bit more difficult to make out. Only after I got this home, washed it thoroughly and used a blue LED laser-pointer lamp to refract off the sign could I see the entire text. This is what it says:

SUPER SHOCK CONTROL UNIT UNDER FRAME
IF HYDRAULIC UNIT FAILS COMPLETELY REMOVE LOCK BARS FROM STORED
POSITION AND APPLY TO SLIDING SILL IN FRONT OF CENTER PLATE USING
BOLTS THROUGH HOLES PROVIDED. LOCK EACH END OF CAR WITH TWO
BARS. WIRE OR PHONE SANTA FE ENGINEER OF CAR CONSTRUCTION.

Although this may not strike you as interesting at first, don't pass up the last line "Wire or phone Santa Fe...".
I think this pretty well establishes this as an actual piece of the train car in question and tells us something of the timeframe as well.
This means "wire" as in "Western Union Telegram". For those of you who are a little bit young, long before Western Union became a way to transfer money, it was a way to transfer messages that would get to the recepient same day back when most messages were sent by US Postal Service requiring days and sometimes weeks to reach their destination. Phones were rare, especially the farther westward one traveled.

A man wearing a Western Union hat and uniform would hand-deliver these and would often read them in the style which you can still catch in black-&-white movies with the sentences broken up by the word "STOP". The cost to send these was by-the-word or by-the-letter so messages often took on an abbrieviation not unlike "Texting" today.

"MOM AND POP...STOP...INJURED IN BATTLE...STOP...DONT WORRY DOING FINE...STOP...HOME IN TWO WEEKS...STOP...LOVE, JOHN...STOP...".

Sadly, in the years following this train accident, many families would live in dread to see the Western Union man coming up on their porch to deliver the telegram from Uncle Sam informing them that their son had been killed in the war or was missing in action. I am reminded of the Sullivan family, who lost all 5 of their sons in a single ship sinking mishap - There is a movie about this called "The Fighting Sullivans" whose ship was sunk in 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal, very near the timeframe of this train accident. ~sigh~ Once again, I digress...

Speaking of sad World War II telegrams, our next stop was to a pair of Historical Markers along the edge of Nolan County. The marker to the left speaks of a topic that I researched well a couple of years ago - the life story of one Cornelia Clark Fort.

Here I am talking with members of Pack 220 about Cornelia Clark Fort.

There are websites replete with information on Cornelia - I'd just like to point out a few highlights and let your curiosity do the rest of the research:

  • She was training a student pilot the Sunday morning of December 7th, 1941 and took controls away from her student when she found herself surrounded by aircraft with The Rising Sun painted on them.
  • She was one of the first women pilots to be 'hired' to ferry military aircraft when few women had been able to venture outside the home.
  • She was the first woman pilot on active duty to perish.
  • Her plane went down at a location almost exactly 3 miles due south of my home in Merkel, Texas.
  • My street neighbor's late father, Bob Riney, was the last person living who witnessed her crash first hand - He was a very young lad at the time and was present at the crash site.
  • Although nearby Avenger Field at Sweetwater, Tx was home to the WAFS of WWII, Cornelia actually preceeded this program and was trained as a private pilot prior to her enlistment.
  • There is an airfield named after her near Nashville, Tennessee.
  • There is a book (which I own a copy of) which biographs her in great detail.


Here we are, members of Pack 220 Cub Scouts.
The other adjacent Historical Marker regards the area behind it called "Mulberry Canyon" which was home to several small communities, schools and churches and how decendents of those settlers still reside today on ranches and farms located there.

The path of the famous Butterfield Stage passes from a point along Interstate 20 between Tye and Merkel right through the point where the Historical Markers are located today.