![]() ![]() Many men lost their lives, but nothing could stop the railways. There was always the risk that a precariously balanced rock would fall and crush the labourer who disturbed it. John Henry just smiled to himself and went on working, drilling the deep holes for the explosives. “If I could get a mechanical drill, we’d get on twice as fast,” the captain grumbled. “You kin use explosives and all sorts of mechanical fangles,” he told the captain, “but there ain’t nothing a machine could do a man can’t do better himself.” John Henry’s muscles rippled as he cleared a great fall of rock. They hurried from the tunnel then there was a tremendous explosion and a cloud of choking dust.Īlmost before it had settled, the men were back, bringing down the loose stone with pickaxes and crowbars, anxious to finish what the explosion had begun. “All right,” shouted the captain as he lit the fuse. ![]() ![]() The gang worked on until the captain, a white man, went round the holes John Henry and the others had been drilling, and tamped them deep with gun-cotton. You just keep a prayin’ I don’ miss this piece of steel ‘cos if I do, they’ll be takin’ you out and buryin’ you tomorrow!”Īnd once more, tirelessly, the great hammer rose and fell. “Shaker,” he would say, “don’ you worry ’bout dat. “Don’t you niver git tired with all that hammerin’?”Īnd big John Henry smiled. “Lawd, John Henry,” his shaker would complain. Wherever there were railways being built, John Henry towered among the workers, his hammer coming down faster and harder than any other, and his thunderous bass voice chanting the rhythm as the rock chips flew in showers from the tip of the drill:Īnd with each BANG the great hammer came down hard, again and again. So the workmen put it around that he was born on the tracks and weaned on engine oil. The strange thing about the singer was that nobody knew where he had come from. Day by day the men worked farther into the mountain, their hammers swinging to the songs of a huge deep-chested black American. The men were tunnelling for the new railway, and they hammered holes into the rock to take the explosives which would blast out the heart of the mountain. Each swing ended in a loud crash as the hammer head smashed the point of the drill deeper and deeper into the rock. His mate, the “steel-driver”, swung a 4 kilos (9 lb) sledge-hammer in a 6 m (20 ft) arc. The “shaker” sat on the ground and held a 1.8 m (6 ft) steel drill between his legs. Visitors who penetrated this far would often faint from the heat – but the labourers stripped off their clothes and, with the sweat streaming down them, went on excavating the Big Bend Railway tunnel. Indistinct in the flickering light of a few sparse torches, huge black figures toiled deep under the West Virginia Mountains in America. A group of white American railroad workers by Angus McBride ![]()
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