By Harold W. Fuson Jr.

This is a small story about a locomotive wiper, in steam railroading the bottom rung of the train crew whose task was to clean or wipe down the engine and generally do scut work for the top dogs, the engineers.

My great grandfather was an engineer, who may or may not have started as a wiper in the late 1890s. He survived to retire in 1944 and his death in 1958 was a natural one — there are stories in his life but his death was not the most interesting. My grandfather was also an engineer, but on a “clam shell,” a sort of steam shovel on rails, not on a locomotive. Grandpa did die rather dramatically, but more about him some other time.

This story is about Edwin Ellis, who in 1902 was not just a wiper, but a “boss wiper” in the Burlington & Missouri River yards at McCook, Nebraska. He was married at the time to the former Emma Yarnell, one of my wife’s great-great grandmothers. Emma’s first husband died sometime after the conception of their last known child together in 1873 and before the 1880 census when Emma was recorded as a widow.

We don’t know what killed Emma’s first husband, but we have no reason to believe any trains were involved. Might have been a hungry hog, but that was another relative’s end, probably not Richard Yarnell’s.

So, to Ed the boss wiper. He probably showed up in southern Iowa in the early 1880s when Emma’s eldest son Sam was supporting the family as a coal miner. The mines didn’t kill Sam, who lived long enough to be known as “Stinky Pants” by his great grandchildren, finally passing at 89 in 1950.

Ed the wiper was born in England in 1838 and according to his obituary came to the U.S. about 1872, but it seems possible he was the same Ed Ellis who arrived in Illinois by 1870 in time to be counted in the census as a Schuyler County coal miner. Ed’s obit says he was working “on the section” for the B&M railroad out of McCook by about 1880.

From a coal mine to a section gang probably seemed a step upward. He would have had an easy time with a railroad pass checking on a well decked out widow in Southern Iowa during breaks on the Nebraska section. Perhaps he had even spent some time coal mining with Emma’s son Sam on his way to joining the B&M and had stayed in touch.

The B&M had once been an independent railroad linking Burlington, Iowa and the Missouri River, but in 1872, though it retained its name, it merged with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy to complete the link from Chicago to the Missouri River and ultimately to Denver.

In 1885, Widow Emma and Ed got married in Centerville and thereafter Emma and at least one of her children, the youngest, Florence, about 13, decamped to Nebraska. Emma and Ed lived in McCook for the next seventeen years while Ed worked his way up at the B&M, admittedly not very far up, from section gang to wiper to boss wiper, probably earning at most a few dollars a day.

Then, as his obit puts it, “while assisting in running No. 76, for the Imperial run, going toward the turntable, his foot slipped, and he fell, the wheels of the tender passing over the left leg, crushing it, from which cause he died.”

First, though, he being a “faithful and trusted employee of that company” was carried off to the B & M Relief Hospital where “[h]e bore his suffering patiently, with Christian fortitude, waiting for his time to come.” No doubt his suffering was made easier by the “attention given and the courtesy shown to the family, by the head officials [of the B&M]… ample proof of their appreciation for his labors.”

Perhaps the B&M officials’ solicitude for Ed’s family had something to do with the 100 members of the A.O.U.W. lodge who were present in a body at Ed’s Episcopal services. A.O.U.W. stood for Ancient Order of United Workmen, a fraternal benefit company that provided insurance to Ed and many of his B&M coworkers as well as many other workers throughout the country.

The B&M, like all railroads, at the time was sensitive to the growing power of its workers and particularly to their safety concerns. In the 1890s, railroad workers were dying on the job at a rate of over 2000 a year, more than 200 by falling as Ed did under the wheels of a train. Today the total number of railroad worker job-related fatalities annually averages less than 50.

In 1902, the number of auto deaths was, well, not very many. In 1966, another grandfather, who made his living driving, learned the hard way that it’s always something. At least his transportation death didn’t involve a train.