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Saturday, April 1, 2006 No one survived crash in rugged terrain(La Historia del Rio Abajo is a monthly column about Valencia County history written by members of the Valencia County Historical Society. This month's article, the last in a two-part series, is based on information gathered from contemporary newspaper articles and from the Fray Angélico Chávez Historical Library at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.
Opinions expressed in this and all columns of La Historia del Rio Abajo are the author's alone and not necessarily those of the Valencia County Historical Society or any other group or individual.) Commercial airline travel in the United States was relatively new when a Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) plane disappeared en route from Albuquerque to Winslow with three crew members and five passengers on board in early September 1929. A.B. McGaffey, a highly respected businessman from western Valencia County, was among the five missing passengers. Searchers combed the area on land and from the air. Even Charles Lindbergh joined the search, accompanied by his bride, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Although every rumor of a sighting was pursued, nothing had been found of the plane (with wing number 9649) or its passengers and crew for three long days. But then the searchers' luck suddenly seemed to have changed. On Friday, Sept. 6, search plane pilot D.W. Tomlinson delivered promising news after returning from a flight to an area about a hundred miles north of Winslow. Tomlinson reported that he had spotted four men on a high, isolated mesa. Seeing Tomlinson's plane, the men had rushed to a nearby Navajo hogan, had grabbed white shirts and had waved the garments in what appeared to be a distress signal. Tomlinson optimistically concluded that the men he had seen were survivors from the T.A.T. flight. If there were four survivors, maybe there were others in the hogan, including some in need of immediate medical attention. With his fuel running low and no place to land safely, Tomlinson hurried back to Winslow to report his discovery and dispatch rescuers on horseback to aid the stranded party. But Tomlinson's optimism was premature. Closer inspection showed that the men he had seen were not flight survivors, but simply enthusiastic rural residents who had probably never seen a plane before or at least not one in the vicinity of their isolated home. Finding nothing in the region near Gallup and Winslow, pilots broadened their search area toward more eastern parts of Valencia County. And that's where searchers finally met success, of a kind, about 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 7. Asked to be on the lookout around Mount Taylor on his regular flight east from California to Albuquerque, pilot George K. Rice of the Western Air Express Company searched the southern slopes of the largest volcanic mountain in New Mexico, located about 30 miles northeast of Grants. Flying as low as he dared, Rice spotted the remains of an airplane wing near Mount Taylor's peak, over 11,000 feet above sea level. Resting upside down, the number on the plane's wing was clearly visible: 9649. The City of San Francisco had been found at last. Several hundred yards further on, the aviator found what everyone had been looking for but all had dreaded they might ultimately find: a crash scene with the cabin and remainder of the plane in shambles. Worse yet, there was no sign of life. All on board had apparently perished during or shortly after the terrible crash. Rice took aerial photos to confirm his gruesome discovery. The pilot rushed to Albuquerque to relay his news to a waiting world. Hearing of Rice's report, A.M. McGaffey's friends in Gallup were now as determined to get to the crash site as they had been to find the previously missing plane. The group drove through Saturday afternoon and began their accent of Mount Taylor at 4:45 p.m. But, as Rice had reported, "no trail or road led to the immediate vicinity of the wrecked plane." Anyone venturing to the crash site would have to travel most of the way by foot over incredibly rugged terrain. The Gallup party finally suspended its search about 10:30 p.m., making camp at 9,000 feet altitude. Many in the group could not sleep in the bitterly low overnight temperatures. Eager to move on, the men continued their trek early the next morning. Shouldering stretchers to remove all eight bodies, they proceeded 10 miles through deep canyons and dense woods. Their search for the downed plane was futile until two planes circled the crash site to reveal the targeted destination. Charles Lindbergh, piloting the high-speed craft he had flown from New York, swooped particularly low over the crash site to aid those on the ground. The men from Gallup claimed that they were the first to arrive at the crash site by land, although local ranchers and a Valencia County deputy sheriff were not far behind. One pack team included Tom Palmer, the most famous Mount Taylor guide and mountain lion hunter of his generation. By 9 a.m., no fewer than 75 men had arrived on the mountain. The scene they found "resembled nothing so much as a city dump," according to one newspaper report. "Metal was strung in hundreds of places over a wide territory." As feared, all eight on board were dead. Suffering severe burns from the fire that had engulfed the plane on impact, few of the passengers or crew members were easily recognizable. Corina Raymond's body was the first to be identified, thanks to the rings and other jewelry she wore. A.B. McGaffey was also identified by a piece of jewelry: a Masonic ring recognized by O.L. Gray, the Santa Fe Railroad trainmaster at Gallup and one of McGaffey's closest friends. The bodies of T.A.T. officers Stowe, Dietel and Canfield were identified by the gold buttons on their uniforms, although the buttons were blackened with soot from the fire. Stowe and Dietel were found in the ship's cockpit "with their left hands up before their faces as if warding off a blow," in the words of a reporter who had arrived at the crash scene. The badly burned bodies of passengers M.M. Campbell, William Henry Beers and Harris Livermore were the last to be identified, by process of elimination. Valencia County lawmen insisted that the bodies of A.M. McGaffey and his fellow crash victims could not be removed until an official inquest was held. All present had to wait another two hours before District Attorney Fred Nicholas arrived, held an inquest and finally released the bodies for removal off the mountain. According to one story, the first searchers on the scene waited for the district attorney and others to arrive by sitting on some steel boxes found among the plane's scattered cargo. They later learned that the boxes contained $50,000 that was being transported by air to the federal mint in San Francisco. Led by undertaker Dominic Rollie, the Gallup party struggled to carry the victims' remains on horseback to the Canyon Lobo ranger station where ambulances waited to transport them either to Gallup or to Albuquerque. Reporters used a portable telephone, set up at an isolated surveyor's camp and connected to a switchboard in Grants, to relay news of the dramatic developments. Marcel Marsalis, the lone telephone operator in Grants, connected reporters on the remote phone to their newspaper offices across the country. Rescue workers and reporters praised Marcel for her untiring, efficient work from Saturday, when the crash site was identified, to late Sunday, when the victims' bodies were successfully removed from Mount Taylor. Although she had refused to stop to eat or rest for over 36 hours, Marcel was as calm, courteous and helpful on Sunday night as she had been at Saturday noon. Identifying Marcel as the hero of the day, newspapermen offered her gifts of money for her exceptional work. Like all true heroes, she humbly refused the reporters' generous offers. (Search pilot Rice also refused to accept any of the $10,000 offered as reward money for the person who first discovered the missing plane. He did, however, accept an Associated Press check for exclusive use of his aerial photos of the plane wreckage.) The T.A.T. crash, search and discovery made a powerful impact on people and places, far and wide. Friends and relatives mourned their losses. Captain Stowe's young wife, who had bravely insisted throughout the ordeal that her husband would eventually be found alive, sadly returned to the small house that the couple had just recently purchased in Clovis. The community of McGaffey was never the same after its founding father perished. McGaffey's sawmill soon closed and most families moved away. T.A.T. had changed as well. In the days and weeks following the crash, T.A.T. canceled its east-west flights more readily when inclement weather threatened western New Mexico or eastern Arizona. But the Mount Taylor crash, plus another tragic T.A.T. crash in January 1930 that cost 16 lives near Pleasanton, Calif., left the young company close to bankruptcy at the start of a far different crash: the Great Depression of the 1930s. To its credit, T.A.T. weathered the economic storm, changed its name to Trans World Airlines, or T.W.A., and flew not one, but two transcontinental flights through Albuquerque en route to Los Angeles each day by mid 1934. An investigation into the causes of the plane crash on Mount Taylor followed in 1929. Most investigators agreed with search pilot Rice's assessment that that the tragic crash "appeared to have been an unavoidable accident," caused by poor visibility in terrible weather conditions. Rice told reporters that it was "almost impossible to predict weather conditions in that section, they develop so suddenly." Rice and other observers believed that Captain Stowe had encountered an ominous storm and had crashed into Mount Taylor while attempting to turn back to Albuquerque, rather than continue on. There seemed to be no other plausible explanation for the City of San Francisco to have been anywhere near Mount Taylor, a rough area that experienced pilots avoided whenever possible. Investigators concluded that the crash had occurred on Tuesday, Sept. 3 at 11:01 a.m.; the wrist watches of four crash victims had stopped at that exact time. In Anne Lindbergh's, and undoubtedly her husband's, opinion, it was "just one of those un-understandable, hideous accidents." Privately, Anne confided, "It seems to me the most terrible accident in all of aviation." Despite this tragedy in Valencia County, most aviators were not about to abandon their exciting new pursuits. Ironically, on Sept. 7, just as the search for the City of San Francisco had ended, the press announced that England's H.R.D. Waghorn had broken the world speed record, racing his plane at 329 miles per hour during a flying competition in Europe. Despite the tragic events on Mount Taylor in 1929, the world continued its fascination with flying. Other heart-wrenching disasters would follow, but far greater advances were yet to come.
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