Deadly Dallas

With dynamite on grocery shelves and livestock rampaging through the streets, Dallas was a dangerous place in its formative years.

Spring 1904. An inexperienced automobile driver jumps the curb and drives into the lobby of the St. George Hotel. The mayor orders a roundup of unlicensed dogs due to a city-wide outbreak of rabies. An elevator crushes the head of a young man as he retrieves a half-dollar he had dropped down the shaft. Embers from a wood burning stove transform a sleeping house into a funeral pyre. A ten-year-old boy in City Park has a spike driven into his temple by a playmate with a fence picket. All this in just a few days.From airships falling from the sky to pestilence floating in on the Trinity, Rusty Williams catalogues the heartbreaking and bizarre forms in which death stalked Dallas at the turn of the twentieth century.