The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly get it. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, which was shot in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Athens and Sparta... Georgia

The Temple of Hephaestus and the Athenian acropolis c. 1870

Maybe it’s my background in British history, or just growing up in northeast Georgia, but I love placenames and the layers and layers of history you can discern as you dig through them.

The Georgia connection is important. Long ago, I noticed that not only did my homestate have an Athens, the city where I was born and where my family has deep roots, but a Sparta, too. And a Rome. And a Smyrna. And a Cairo.

When I began teaching US History almost ten years ago and regularly explaining the Founding generation’s love, admiration, and emulation of the classical world to students, I remembered these observations and connected them to things I had learned about other states since then—that Cincinnati, Ohio is named after a heroic dictator from the early days of the Roman Republic (and, implicitly, George Washington), that New York has even more Greek and Roman placenames, and so forth. And I developed a pet theory I would occasionally expound to students.

Give someone a lot of spare time and grant money, I thought, and the ability to map the locations and dates of founding of American cities with classical placenames, and I bet they’d cluster noticeably along the frontier of the Early Republic, roughly from the Washington to the Jackson administrations.

And, lo and behold, this week I came across a piece from Antigone, an online classical journal, entitled “Classical Place-names and the American Frontier.” This essay concerns upstate New York specifically, where the author notes 130 classical placenames in use by 1860:

An upstate New York itinerary could take you on a drive from Troy to Ithaca via Utica and Syracuse, with stop-offs off in Camillus, Manlius, Cicero, and Pompey. One could be buried under four feet of snow in Rome. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, lived in a log cabin in Palmyra. You can read the works of Homer or study the military tactics of Marcellus in places that bear their names.

And the author confirms precisely the guess I made about Georgia’s classical cities: “Classical place names were given to frontier settlements there in the years immediately following the War of Independence. As the frontier moved west, so too did the practice.” He goes on to explain the shady buyout of the Iroquois Confederacy’s land in the upstate and the influx of settlers coming northward and inland from the coast.

Looking at Georgia’s considerably fewer such names, you can still note the same pattern: an early city like Sylvania, founded in 1790, lies in well-established territory between Savannah and Augusta, itself a classical name by way of the Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother. Sparta, founded in 1795, is farther north and west. Athens, founded in 1806 as a college town with a name intentionally meant to evoke Plato’s Academy, is yet farther north and west of that.

The displacement of Indians plays a role here, too, albeit a generation later than in New York. Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 you get Smyrna (1832) and Rome (1834) in former Cherokee territory in the northwestern corner of the state, beyond the Chattahoochee, and Cairo (1835) in the far southwest.

Look at these cities on a map and mark them in the order they were founded and you see a clear march upcountry from General Oglethorpe’s original enclave on the coast and the Savannah River.

Even Atlanta (1847), with its complicated history, fits this pattern, given its cod classical name (part feminine tweak of Atlantic, which is itself derived from Atlas, and part nod, probably coincidentally or indirectly, to Atalanta). Before taking the name Atlanta, the city was Marthasville (1843), and before that it was Terminus (1837). As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Terminus “literally means ‘end of the line,’” an appropriate name since Terminus was established as mile marker zero on a new railroad built to connect the western interior of the state to the coast (there’s that westward, inland movement again). But it only means that because Terminus was originally a Roman deity who protected boundaries and property lines, a god of ends.

I’ve already started recommending this essay to students, not only because it gratifyingly confirms a pet theory but because it makes abundantly clear the pride of place the classical world had in the imagination of the Early Republic. And not only for obviously learned showoffs like Jefferson and Adams.

“It was part of a wider cultural movement to align the new Republic with Classical ideals,” the author notes, “but it was neither as organized nor as calculated as one might think.” Such naming conventions were not part of a top-down agenda but grassroots:

What is interesting about the Classical place names of upstate New York—and what previous historians who have addressed the subject have overlooked—is that many of them were chosen by the pioneers themselves. Except for the town names of the Military Tract, there was no government initiative or evident persuasion that lay behind their selection. The pioneers in their rough-hewn settlements—far from the centres of education in the coastal cities—were choosing to align themselves with the Classical past.

Even the hardbitten types moving to edge of civilization were well-versed in the classical past and its republican ideals and made those cultural priorities clear in the names they gave their settlements.

And their children. Georgia has both a Homer (1859) and a Homerville (1869). These were founded later than the other examples I’ve given and were named for prominent local men, and so only indirectly for the great blind bard, but consider when these men were born.

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the change since then—given the option of naming things, Western civilization has gone from Utica and Troy and Ithaca and Rome to Boaty McBoatface and friends in two centuries.

I’ve marked a few cities on a Google Map and embedded it above. If you click through to the full map you can see the dates of each city’s establishment arranged in chronological order. Mouse over the list and the pins will light up in exactly the pattern described. I don’t have the time to do that with with all the New York and Ohio placenames mentioned in the Antigone piece but I hope someone will someday. An animated map would be a stellar classroom resource.

In the meantime, definitely read the entire essay. It’s a concise and insightful look at ordinary the relation Americans from an earlier era had to the classical past and should give us cause to reflect on our own relation to them.

Another Dark Full of Enemies sighting

A few paperback copies of Dark Full of Enemies have been sighted at Re/Max of Rabun in my hometown of Clayton, Georgia. They're available at the front desk for just $10, three dollars off the list price of $12.99. Stop by and pick one up while they're still available!

If Clayton is too far a drive, you can always find it and my other books at Amazon. Enjoy!