![]() ![]() The best path lay straight through the mountain, so the C&O invested 1,000 men and three years into digging a tunnel through its rocky mass. In 1870, construction crews for the C&O Railroad came to a halt at the base of Big Bend Mountain near Talcott, West Virginia. For many, the most important clue is the reference in some renditions to "Big Ben" Tunnel. ![]() One version of the story has Henry working on the "Georgia Line," while another has him driving steel on the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railroad. Some sources provide tantalizing but imprecise clues.įor example, his birth-state is identified separately as Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. In some renditions, the color of his skin isn't mentioned in others, he's Black, and his race is an important aspect of the battle.īut was John Henry real? Did this larger than life steel-driving man exist, and did he fight a battle to the death with a machine? Fact from Fiction In some versions, Henry's boss or "captain" makes a bet that his best steel driving man can outperform the machine, while in other versions, John Henry initiates the contest in order to demonstrate his superiority over the drill. From here, the details vary from rendition to rendition. Unfortunately, the contest took a deadly toll on his body, and he died immediately after. The contest between man and machine raged for hours, but in the end, John Henry won. Once the explosives ripped a chunk out of the mountain, the driver and shaker would go back to work.Īccording to the legend and the songs that record it, John Henry agreed to race a new piece of technology, a steam-powered drill, to prove that he was better, faster, and stronger than new-fangled piece of machinery. The "blaster" would come next to insert explosives into the hole. The driver would pound a steel spike into the mountain's rocky surface while his partner, a "shaker," would hold the spike in place and turn it between strikes until they produced a sizable hole. The main ingredient required for any story or song about John Henry is the fact that he worked on a railroad as a "steel-driving man." Steel drivers worked in teams to carve railroad tunnels through mountains. The good news, however, is that they all tell the same basic story. Stories and songs about John Henry have been in circulation since the last decades of the 19th century (the first published version was released in 1900), and the details within these multiple renditions vary. Sorting out the real from the unreal, however, is no simple task. Yet unlike Paul Bunyan, John Henry may have been a real person, and many historians believe that his epic battle against a machine really did take place. John Henry is one of America's legends, a larger-than-life figure like Paul Bunyan whose superhuman strength has been celebrated in stories and songs. ![]()
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