Hinton
Daily News
December 24, 1969
John
Henry Story at Talcott is Revived
By
Hank Burchard
The Washington Post
Talcott
- The John Henry of whom Americans sing was no black Paul Bunyan but a real man
who drove steel here a century ago to build what was then the longest tunnel in
North America.
He
was one of a thousand men and boys who worked like dogs and died like dogs
driving the Big Bend Tunnel through more than a mile of treacherous red shale
as the Chesapeake of Ohio railroad pushed west through the mountains to link
the shipping lanes of the Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio-Mississippi.
All
the hundreds of his fellow workers who were killed by fever, falling rock and
bungled blasting died unsung, but John Henry was raised to immortality by the
balladeers who preserved the oral traditions of Appalachia.
In
the 50 years since the ballad made its way out of the mountains into the rest
of the country, ignorance of the story it tells and the hacks of Tin Pan Alley
have combined to distort John Henry into a tall tale and to unman him.
Get
this straight right off: Her name wasn't Polly and she didn't drive steel like
a man when John Henry took sick. Women didn't go into the tunnel, and if one
had she would have been too busy to drive steel.
The
women of the wilderness work camp stayed down the road a piece, resting up
during the day against the return of men who were super strong or couldn't make
it, sweated and bled and cursed and tore at the mountain from dawn to dark and
took their pleasure in women and whisky with the ferocity of those who are
likely to die tomorrow. There were some swinging broads who followed the
railroad through the mountains, but they weren't swinging hammers.
The
story of John Henry has become the Legend of John Henry, as much chaff as
wheat, as much nonsense as nostalgia. The search for the real John Henry
becomes in the end, like Albert Schweitzer's quest for the historical Jesus, an
act of faith. You believe what you want to believe, being as honest about it as
you can.
That
John Henry lived seems beyond doubt. That he drove steel in Big Bend Tunnel in
early 1870 seems certain. The drill and beat it seems likely. That he died from
overexertion in the contest seems somewhat less likely, if wonderfully poetic.
But
there is no double that John Henry is high among America's towering authentic
folk heroes, symbol of the proud working man who would not yield his human
strength and skill to the coming of the machine.
In
the current social context he is much more than that. He is the black man,
probably a Virginian only a few years out of slavery, who met on less than
equal terms but still mastered both his fellow white laboring men and the
clever technicians who were inventing machines to replace the skilled workman.
And,
as the many ribald variant verses of the ubiquitous ballad underscore, he is a
potent Freudian symbol, hammering away in the tunnel, making Mother Earth
yield. In early versions of the ballad, and according to local tradition, he
kept a blue-eyed woman. The later, scrubbed versions either tuned him white or
made her dress blue and skipped the eyes.
More
than one researcher has dealt somewhat nervously with this aspect of John
Henry, which blends so neatly with our cultural fixation about the black man's
sexual prowess. And it may be that this is the electric force that has kept him
so vibrantly alive.
The
story is classic and simple tragedy. The hero, as in the ancient Greek plays,
foretells his fate and then acts it out without flinching: a man must do what
he can do and must try what he knows he cannot.
The
setting was dramatic. This was wild county in 1870, the last wolf having been
killed only five years before on nearby Keeney's Knob. The first explorer known
to have traversed what is now Summers County was Selim, an Algerian, who
struggled through these Allegheney Mountain spurs in the mid-1700s, losing all
his equipment and most of his clothes in the process. He later became a
Christian and, in the end, went crazy.
A
century later it took surveying parties three years to map out the line of the
railroad which grew out of George Washington's James River Canal Co. It was the
heyday of the railroad barons who laced the country with steel track just as
fast as they could buy legislatures, manipulate stocks, and flim-flam widows
and orphans. Not for nothing did the expression "I was railroaded"
pass into the language.
By
The Time the surveyors reached the Big Bend of the Greenbrier River, where the
stream dashes against Big Bend Mountain and turns sharply aside to meander
around the ridge for 10 miles before returning to within a mile of the starting
point, they probably were willing to try anything to shorten the trackage, even
a tunnel project more than bold than any ever attempted by Americans, Nineteenth
century builders had boundless faith in the ability of science to overcome
obstacles.
Better
they should have gone around Big Bend Mountain is composed of hard, faulted
shale that resists drilling and blasting but then cracks and crumbles quickly
on exposure to air. The technology of 1870 wasn't able to deal with the deadly
rock, which from time to time thundered down on the workmen (one fall near the
east portal amounted to 22 million pounds' and killed at least one in five.
A
tunnel worker who escaped serious injury was lucky indeed, and the toil
included death by disease and from asphyxiation of men working by the orange
smoky light of lamps charged with heavy blackstrap oil.
Many
of those who died - including, some say, John Henry - were dumped into the huge
fill at the east portal, along with mules that succumbed from pulling heavy
cars loaded with the rubble mucked out after each round of black powder or
dualin, an early form of dynamite that was only a little less
"tetchy" than pure nitroglycerin.
John
Henry's job was to drill holes for the blasting, which required from one dozen
to four dozen holes sometimes as deep as 12 feet for each round. Since the
drills of the time would sink only a fraction of an inch into the rock with
each blow, it would take a half dozen steel-drivers as much as a full day to
drill the holes for one blasts, which would advance the tunnel heading perhaps
10 feet. After each "shot" the rock would be mucked out by hand and
loaded in small hopper cars to be hauled away.
The
steel-drivers were the princes of the working crews, and John Henry was king of
them all. Most accounts describe him as about six feet tall and 200 pounds, a
big man in those days. He is said variously to have been as black as coal,
copper-colored, red, light brown, or almost white, but all agree that he was
superbly muscled and an artist with his hammers. It is no mean feat to slam one
hammer at the end of a 1/2-2 inch diameter drill, hour after hour and day after
day, without missing. John Henry's ability to swing one in each hand is doubled
by many, yet was supported by men who worked with him on the project.
One
of these was Banks Terry, a lifelong resident of Talcott, who died some years
ago on his 100th birthday. Terry as a young boy was employed at many odd jobs
in the tunnel, and often told of watching John Henry. Terry said John Henry
could drive steel straight ahead or down into the "bench" or core of
the tunnel, or straight into the roof while standing on a powder keg, never
tiring, never missing a stroke, singing all the while and wearing out drills as
fast as they were brought to him for $1.75 a day.
After
five generations of power tools it is virtually impossible for a contemporary
American to conceive of such brutal, mankilling labor. If John Henry really did
work himself to death against the steam drill, it was a merciful release.
By
the accounts of those who knew him or knew of him, John Henry was a proud but
friendly man, fair and forebearing in his dealings with his fellows in the raw
and rough society of the labor camp. Usually in such camps a man's prestige was
measured as much by his fists as by his ability, but our hero seems to have
been no bully.
He
narrowly escaped going down in history as a murder, thief, highwayman and
general brigand. While John Henry was at work in the tunnel, one John Hardy,
who also grew up to be big and black and bold - but bad - was playing with
marbles in McDowell County.
As
soon as he was big enough to pack a gun, Hardy began a career of murder and
robbery which was finally cut off when he was hanged, at 28, on Jan. 19, 1894,
within sight of the county jail at Welch, for the murder of Thomas Drews
(because of a woman) at Shawnee Camp.
Of
course, there was a ballad about John Hardy, and the similarity of names and
general structure led the early musical historians of Appalachia to confuse the
two. Since nearly all the heroic ballads were more or less similar in form and
tune, verses about the steel driver became intermixed with those about the
rogue.
John
Henry's good name was rescued and his fame assured for all time by Louis W.
Chappell, the late West Virginia University folk historian, who early in this
century became fascinated by the legend and spent decades tracing it to the
source.
He
followed the reports of John Henry from New York to Jamaica and throughout the
South, eliminating one fiction or exaggeration after another until he had
dismissed the claims of all rivals and firmly established Big Bend as the site
of the showdown between sinew and stream.
Here
he found men still living who had worked in the tunnel and known John Henry and
who vouched for the essential details of the story. Distracted only by a fierce
rivalry with Dr. Guy B. Johnson of the University of North Carolina - who was
the only black historian ever to investigate John Henry and who could never
decide whether to honor or disparage him - Chappell built a case for John Henry
that is as convincing as it is little known.
But
try as he might, Chappell never was able to find the kind of documentary
evidence that would have provided an ironclad clincher. The C&O claims that
all records of the tunnel project, including the payroll vouchers and the
engineers's reports that could have absolutely established what happened, where
destroyed in a fire in Richmond at the turn of the century.
It
is indisputable that the Burleigh steam drill, runner of the pneumatic drills
that revolutionized mining and tunneling, was used successfully on other
tunnels, including at least one of the 26 that the C&O drove before 1878.
Since the speed with which blast holes could be drilled was the main factor
that determined how fast a tunnel could be driven, the undercapitolized and
overextended C&O could hardly have failed to try the Burleigh drill at Big
Bend, most massive of all its projects. The faster the line could be opened,
the faster the recovery of capital. Chappell interviewed a former tunnel
workman who described the distinctive Burleigh drill accurately after 50 years
of isolation in these hills.
If
the steam drill was tried at the tunnel, could flesh and bones have beaten it?
Could John Henry have driven 14 feet while the steam drill only drove nine?
Sandstrom says yes, but not with two 10-pound hammers, "which is beyond
mortal man."
At
this point Henry S. Drinker comes to John Henry's rescue (in tunnelling
published in 1878) by saying that one-hand hammers were "standard" on
the C&O projects. A good man then could swing two one-hand hammers
simultaneously, if he had a fast and trusting "shaker."
A
shaker also called a turner, was a nervy navvy who held the drill and turned it
slightly after each blow, giving it a little shake to flip the rock dust out of
the hole. The heat tempered steel available in those days dulled after a few
minutes at most, and the shaker had to snatch it out of the hole and insert
another between hammer strokes.
Consider
then how trusting was Phil Henderson, or Little Bill, as John Henry's shaker
has been variously called, who turned John Henry's steel while lying on his
back holding it between his legs, or by standing against the rock face holding
it crooked in his arm, or holding it close to his body (depending upon whether
the drill was being driven down or sideways or up), with the hammer flashing by
his groin or rib cage or his face.
As
the drills dulled, the shaker blindly held out his hand to the
"walker" (who walked the worn steels to a blacksmith at the portal
and returned with reforged one), like a busy surgeon taking a scalpel from a
nurse, to grasp the new drill. So fast were drills used up that most of the men
and boys employed in tunnels were walkers. On a big project the drillers could
use up thousands of steels a day. In some cases the drills were weighed, and
the driller was docked for the weight of steel that was worn off the points, a
weird work incentive.
But
could John Henry have beaten a steam drill? The most common version of the
story is that the contest lasted 35 minutes. Now the all time record for hand
drilling was set at Butte, Mont., in 1912, when the Tarr Brothers, a
double-pack (two-man) team, drove 59 « inches through gunnison graphite in 15
minutes. If they had kept the same pace for 20 more minutes they would have
driven 11 « feet.
John
Henry went a little farther than that - 14 feet - in rock that is much less
resistant to drilling than graphite. The rate at which a drill sinks into rock
is determined by how the point stands the punishment, how much force is applied
and how fast. A hatful of steam can deliver more power than the strongest man,
but the Burleigh drill had a particular problem in certain kids of rock. It
tended to clog on rock dust and to hang up in cracks. A Big Bend tunneler told
Chappell the steam drill hung in a crack, and the ballad says, "Your
hole's done choke and your drill done broke," both of which are consistent
with the drill's known weaknesses. This is not the kind of detail a balladeer
is likely to have pulled out of the sweet mountain air.
If
John Henry was there and he beat the steam drill, what became of him? The stanza
that says "he laid down his hammer and he died" seems to be the Tin
Pan Alley's revision of earlier verses that say he felt a "rolling"
or a "roaring" in his head, staggered home and died in bed. Either
word is a graphic description of the sensation of a stroke, according to a
noted West Virginia cardiologist. Still, John Henry, at 30 or 35, was a little
young and awful strong to have come to such an end. Testimony gathered by
Chappell indicates he more likely died later in a rock fall or other accident
or from a fever. The odds were one in five anyway, that he wouldn't come out of
Big Bend alive, and actually much higher because he worked in the most
dangerous section, the working face, or heading.
Chappell
was impressed by the virtually unanimous opinion of local Negroes that John
Henry's ghost remained in the tunnel, a belief said to have sprung up within
days of his death and to have caused a work stoppage. The laborers said they
could still hear John Henry's hammers ringing in the tunnel, but the captain
demonstrated that it was only water dripping from the roof. Sure, Boss.
The
superstition survived the explanation for at least half a century and even now
- if one is sufficiently hyped on John Henry - it is difficult to convince
oneself that one is alone in the Big Bend, even though there is no question of
it, as they say.
Big
Bend was a man-eater long after it was finished and lined with timber. Repeated
falls of rotten rock killed railroaders for a decade. In 1873 a major collapse
wiped out a train crew and led the Summers County prosecutor to take the
C&O to court for maintaining a deadly hazard.
The
railroad first tried to take over the county government and install its own
man, but finally gave in and arched the tunnel with more than six million
bricks, which took 10 years.
The
arching, or construction of ventilation works near the portals covered over
what are said to have been the holes drilled in the contest, which apparently
was held at or near the portal shortly after the driving of the tunnel began.
If so, it obliterated that last physical trace of John Henry except for a
roadside historical marker near the summit of Big Bend Mountain that refers
sceptically to the tradition.
http://www.wvculture.org/History/africanamericans/henryjohn05.html