Pikes Creek drains the hills between Bayfield and Washburn along the south shore of Lake Superior. In ordinary weather, it is a modest stream, the kind of waterway that railroad engineers would have crossed without much thought when they laid the Bayfield branch in 1883. But October 1884 was not ordinary weather. Days of sustained rainfall had saturated the soil and filled every drainage in the region beyond capacity. The creek did not just rise -- it undermined the very ground the railroad sat on. Somewhere between the two towns, the train met the gap. The locomotive and its three flatcars plunged into the swollen creek. The weight of the logs, the force of the water, the sudden collapse of the railbed -- it all happened in moments. Men who had been sitting in the open were thrown into churning water and wreckage.

Ten men died. The engineer who was running the train. The conductor overseeing the crew. The brakeman. Seven members of the track gang. Some were killed instantly in the derailment. Others lingered for a day or more, their injuries beyond what the small hospitals in nearby Ashland could properly treat. Those hospitals were overwhelmed -- two small facilities suddenly tasked with the aftermath of a major disaster. The community mobilized in the way small communities do when catastrophe strikes close to home. A local dentist organized a house-to-house collection, going door to door gathering bedding, bandages, and supplies for the injured. Women in the area formed sewing bees, stitching quilts and bedding to replace what the hospitals lacked. In a region where everyone knew everyone, each of the ten dead men had a name that meant something to the people sewing those quilts.

News of the wreck traveled fast. The accident was quickly dubbed the Pikes Creek Tragedy, and newspapers from coast to coast carried the story -- though, as one later account noted, the coverage varied considerably in sensationalism and accuracy. The remoteness of the Bayfield Peninsula, the drama of a train swallowed by floodwaters, the round number of ten dead -- it was the kind of story that lent itself to embellishment. A local history published in 1929 by Weber and Sons described the event in careful detail, quoting a writer who declared, 'It is doubtful if a worse tragedy ever occurred in this vicinity than that of October 2, 1884.' But memory is fragile, especially in places where the landscape itself changes. Highway construction eventually obscured the exact location of the wreck. By 2023, according to one local historian, the Pikes Creek Tragedy had become all but forgotten.

In 2023, nearly 140 years after ten men died on a rain-soaked afternoon along the Lake Superior shore, an ad hoc citizens group raised funds to place a marker near the site of the derailment. It was a small act of recovery -- pulling a name and a date back from the edge of erasure. The Bayfield branch of the Omaha Railway is itself long gone, its right-of-way absorbed into roads and overgrowth. Pikes Creek still flows between Bayfield and Washburn, still rises when the rains come heavy in autumn. The marker stands as a reminder that the infrastructure we take for granted -- the railroads, the bridges, the drainage culverts -- was built by specific men who sometimes died in the building. Ten of them, on one October afternoon, riding a work train toward a washout they never reached.