The Sioux attack on the Pacific Railroad train

The Sioux attack on the Pacific Railroad train breaks into the journey at the moment Phileas Fogg and Colonel Stamp Proctor are about to settle their quarrel by duel. The raid shifts the immediate stakes from personal honor to the safety of the passengers and the control of a speeding train; the interruption will give Passepartout the chance to act with the agility he acquired as an acrobat.

From a Duel to an Attack

The confrontation had been arranged in the train’s rearmost car, about fifty feet long and cleared of its dozen passengers at the conductor’s request. Fogg and Colonel Stamp Proctor entered with two six-barrelled revolvers apiece. Their seconds shut them inside, and the signal to begin firing was to be the locomotive’s first whistle. The arrangement was starkly practical: after two minutes, the survivors were to be removed from the car.

Before the agreed signal, however, cries and gunshots broke out along the train. Fogg and Colonel Stamp Proctor left the car with revolvers in hand and hurried toward the disturbance. There they discovered that the train had been attacked by Sioux raiders. The duel had not reached its first shot; the violence around it was already spreading through the cars, and the immediate danger now came from an assault on the whole train.

The Raid and Its Escalation

The Sioux raiders came aboard without stopping the train: about a hundred sprang onto its steps, moving with the ease of a rider mounting a horse at full gallop. Armed with guns, they exchanged fire with passengers, nearly all of whom also carried weapons. The attackers first seized the engine, striking the engineer and stoker with their muskets and leaving both partly stunned. A chief tried to halt the train but, unable to operate the regulator, opened the steam valve instead of closing it. The locomotive surged forward at terrifying speed, turning the raiders’ attempt to stop their escape into an added danger for everyone aboard.

The assault spread from the engine through the cars. The Sioux scrambled over the roofs, forced open doors, and fought passengers at close quarters; in the baggage car they threw trunks from the train as they plundered it. Some passengers barricaded themselves in cars that became moving forts, carried along at a hundred miles an hour while the fighting continued. Aouda defended herself with a revolver, firing through broken windows whenever an attacker appeared. Twenty Sioux were mortally wounded, and those who fell onto the rails were crushed beneath the wheels; several passengers, meanwhile, lay shot or stunned on their seats.

After ten minutes of fighting, the balance of danger made stopping the train urgent. Fort Kearney station, with its garrison, was only two miles away, but if the train passed it, the raiders would control the stretch between Fort Kearney and the next station. The conductor, fighting beside Phileas Fogg, was shot and fell, warning that the passengers would be lost unless the train stopped within five minutes. Fogg prepared to go out himself, but Passepartout volunteered and slipped beneath a car through a door the raiders had not noticed.

The Separation of the Cars

Under fire, Passepartout worked his way forward beneath the cars, gripping the chains and using the brakes and edges of the sashes to move from one carriage to the next. At the front, he hung by one hand between the baggage car and the tender and loosened the safety chains. The train’s traction kept him from unscrewing the coupling bar, but a violent jolt knocked it free. The passenger cars were left behind as the locomotive rushed ahead, severing the raiders’ hold on the moving train and bringing Passepartout’s acrobatic skill to bear on the emergency.

Narrative Function and Stakes

The attack also overturns the detached rhythm that had marked Phileas Fogg’s passage aboard the Mongolia. In the rough Red Sea crossing, he showed no outward anxiety about delays and spent his time at meals and whist; on the train, faced with a conductor shot beside him and a five-minute warning, he prepared to intervene. The contrast is not a change in his measured manner so much as a change in what that manner must meet: a timetable can absorb weather, but a train seized by attackers demands immediate action.

The episode turns mechanical speed into both peril and the means of escape. The Sioux chief’s mistake with the steam valve sends the locomotive rushing onward, while Passepartout’s release of the safety chains and the jolt that breaks the coupling separate the passenger cars from it. The duel is left unresolved as the immediate contest becomes collective survival; the train’s division is the scene’s decisive reversal, and Passepartout’s acrobatic skill supplies the action that makes it possible.