She Crawled a Flooded Railroad Bridge to Save 200 Lives

On the night of July 6, 1881, a violent thunderstorm tore through Boone County, Iowa, and washed out a small railroad trestle over Honey Creek. A pusher locomotive carrying four crewmen plunged into the flooded creek when the trestle gave way beneath it. Teenage Kate Shelley heard the crash from her family's farmhouse nearby.

Sources disagree on exactly how old she was that night. Her gravestone gives a birth date of September 1865, which would make her 15; other biographical accounts place her birth in December 1863, making her 17. Either way, she was a teenager.

A Wreck in the Dark

Shelley ran out into the storm and found two of the crewmen, Edgar Wood and Adam Agar, clinging to trees in the rising water. She could not reach them herself.

Two other crewmen, Pat Donahue and A.P. Olmsted, did not survive the wreck.

Shelley knew something the men in the water did not. A passenger train, the eastbound express, was due to cross the same stretch of track within the hour, carrying roughly 200 passengers toward the washed-out bridge.

Across the Bridge on Her Hands and Knees

To reach the nearest depot and stop the train, Shelley had to cross the railroad bridge over the Des Moines River on foot, in the dark, in the same storm that had just destroyed the Honey Creek trestle.

There was no walkway. She crawled the length of the bridge on her hands and knees, feeling for each railroad tie beneath her before trusting her weight to it.

Partway across, her lantern blew out in the wind. She finished the crossing in total darkness, with the flooded river running beneath the ties.

Once she reached the far side, she still had close to two miles to walk to the Moingona depot.

She Reached the Depot in Time

Shelley made it to Moingona and raised the alarm before the express train reached the damaged crossing. Railroad workers stopped the train at Scranton, Iowa, with all 200 passengers safe.

A rescue crew later went out and recovered Wood and Agar from the creek, alive.

A Lifetime of Honors

News of Shelley's crossing spread quickly, and the honors followed. The "little girls" of Dubuque sent her a medal. The state of Iowa gave her a medal made by Tiffany & Co., along with $200.

The Chicago and North Western Railway gave her $100, a half barrel of flour, half a load of coal, and a lifetime railway pass. The Order of Railway Conductors gave her a gold watch and chain.

In 1903, after fire destroyed the original Moingona depot, the railroad gave Shelley a job as its station agent there. She held the post until her death in 1912.

The Bridge That Bears Her Name

In 1901, the railroad replaced the old bridges near Boone with a new steel viaduct across the Des Moines River valley: 2,685 feet long and 185 feet above the water. It was named the Kate Shelley High Bridge.

A new double-track bridge opened alongside it in August 2009: 2,813 feet long and 190 feet above the valley floor, built to carry two trains at once at 70 miles per hour. Union Pacific officially named it the Kate Shelley Bridge.

Freight and passenger trains still cross it today, more than a century after a teenage girl crawled across the old bridge in the dark to save 200 strangers she would never meet.