Fig. 01 · The bore, at the face · Big Bend Tunnel, 1870
John Henry drove steel for the C&O railroad in West Virginia in the early 1870s. In the song he races a steam drill through the mountain, beats it, and dies with his hammer in his hand. The song gets sung again whenever a new machine turns up, and lately it is being sung about AI.
Driving steel meant hammering a steel rod into rock to make the holes for the blasting powder. One man swung the hammer. Another, the shaker, crouched opposite him, holding the rod and turning it between blows. The song almost never mentions him and gives no reason for the race. A man who watched it, interviewed in 1927, said the drill company’s agent had brought the machine and the race was a test of whether it was practical. It went all day and into the next. The steam drills of that decade jammed and broke often enough that a good crew could beat one.
In the 1920s the railroad’s chief engineer told a sociologist that no steam drill had ever been used in that tunnel and that the papers had burned. In 2006 the historian Scott Reynolds Nelson found records in the files of the Virginia Penitentiary. They list a John William Henry, nineteen, arrested after the Civil War and rented out to the railroad with hundreds of other prisoners to dig its tunnels. His file stops in 1873. The prisoners worked beside steam drills night and day, and most of what killed them was the dust in their lungs, which the steam drills made as well as the hammers did.
The film just below is from 1965, made by the National Film Board of Canada, twenty-four minutes with no dialogue. Buster Keaton, who turned sixty-nine during the shoot, finds a rail maintenance speeder on the Nova Scotia shore, puts it in gear by accident, and rides it to the Pacific, sleeping on it and keeping it running. At the far coast a man who has just walked out of the ocean takes it for his own tour, and Keaton starts back along the track on foot.
The Railrodder · Gerald Potterton · National Film Board of Canada · 1965 · twenty-four minutes, not a word spoken
The men who kept driving steel had their own songs for the work, slower than the ballad and sung by the whole gang at once, with a beat the hammers could follow. A man who drove faster than the song was shunned, because a faster pace, once seen, would be asked of everyone. John Henry is in those songs too, as the man who worked too fast.
The steam drill in that tunnel ran at the company’s pace. The gang’s was their own, and it was the one that had kept them alive. It would have done for the drill too.