High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 14

  This time the bridge was closer to home. In fact, one end of it was to be set on land at the northeast corner of the reservation. As part of the contract to obtain land rights, the bridge company agreed to hire Indians to work on the project. Originally, the Indians were meant simply to assist the bridgemen as day laborers, but they were not content with this supporting role. They began to climb up on the trestles at every opportunity.

  “It was quite impossible to keep them off,” an official of the Dominion Bridge Company later told the writer Joseph Mitchell. “As the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters…. We decided it would be mutually advantageous to see what these Indians could do, so we picked out some and gave them a little training.” Dominion Bridge trained three riveting gangs. The men of these gangs, in turn, trained other Indians. “It turned out,” said the man from Dominion Bridge, “that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs.”

  A hundred and twenty years later, an ironworker returning home from New York who enters the reservation from the east will pass through an old stone tunnel that runs under the railroad tracks. If he glances over his right shoulder as he exits the tunnel, he will see the old bridge, two dark humps against the sky. People here call it the Black Bridge. It’s a rebuilt double-tracked version of that first bridge, the original bridge where it all began: all the wealth and pride and death and grief.

  THE RIVER

  The night Bunny’s cousin died was hot and windy. Kenneth “Weedy” McComber was working the graveyard shift on the deck of the Champlain Bridge, just a few miles downriver from the reservation. Around 3:15 A.M., he was walking between the crane and the low concrete barrier that ran along the edge of the bridge when one of the outriggers supporting the crane snapped. The crane heaved over the side of the bridge, plunging about a hundred feet into the river. The crane operator managed to scramble out of the cabin moments after it hit the water. The current was so strong he was halfway to the Victoria Bridge by the time the rescue boat got to him.

  Vea Kateri Cemetery, Kahnawake. Many of the graves of fallen ironworkers are marked by steel crosses.

  (Photo by the author)

  There was no sign of Kenneth McComber.

  Through dawn and into morning, the Sûreté du Quebec—the provincial police, known as the SQ—searched the 20-foot-deep water with boats and divers, then later with a helicopter. At 10:15 A.M. they called off the search. For many people at Kahnawake, this was evidence of the SQ’s contempt for the Indians; had the boy been white, some suggested, the search would have gone on far longer. “The SQ performs searches like this during the winter, even under the ice, for days,” an angry Kahnawake woman complained to the local newspaper. “Here it isn’t even twelve hours and now it’s over. That’s unforgivable.”

  Bunny, his father, and several cousins arrived at Kahnawake that evening, after driving straight home from New York. The men briefly stopped off to pay their respects to the young ironworker’s family, then went directly out onto the water in boats that a few of the men kept at the marina. All night, by flashlight, they searched the river downstream of the bridge, looking for signs of Kenneth. Shortly after dawn, another shift of men arrived to take over the search, and Bunny went home to get some sleep. He was back on the water that afternoon. Several boatloads of relatives and friends had joined in the search, including divers from the reservation’s scuba club. One of the divers found a key and a shoe belonging to Kenneth. Both were about 250 feet downriver of the bridge. This seemed to confirm the working assumption that the fast current had swept Kenneth downstream, meaning his body could be just about anywhere between Montreal and Quebec.

  On Friday evening, Bunny visited a medicine man on the reservation. The medicine man burned Indian tobacco, a means of communicating with the Creator, and afterward told Bunny to look for the number 3—this was the number he’d seen in his vision during the tobacco ceremony. The following day, Saturday, Bunny and the other men returned to the water to continue the search. That morning, the divers discovered a white barrel on the riverbed under the bridge. On the side of the barrel was a number: 3.

  “I looked and I said, ‘Holy shit, it’s gotta be around this area somewhere,’” Bunny recalled later. “Of all the millions of digits, how can anybody come up with that? The hair stood up behind my neck.”

  But there were no other finds that day, and by the end of Saturday, the search party was frustrated and the family of the young ironworker was despondent. That evening, Bunny went to visit a different medicine man, an ex-ironworker he’d known for years. The second medicine man gave Bunny a new set of clues. “He told me a concrete pillar with some of the concrete broken, I guess by the current. You could see some of the rebar, it was rusty. And he said—he’s there. That’s where you’ll find him.”

  The broken pillars sounded like the reinforced concrete piers of the bridge. If the medicine man was right, it meant Kenneth’s body had not been swept downstream after all, but remained near the spot where he fell. The news excited Bunny. “That night, after that information, I went to everybody’s house that was searching. I got in touch with a couple of the divers. I told them what my friend had seen. We had to get everybody out there—everybody together one last time. We had to try one more time.”

  At six o’clock the next morning, the search party reconvened. The men narrowed their search to the area under the bridge, around the submerged crane. They found nothing. At noon, Bunny came off the water and paid another visit to his friend. The medicine man was fairly confident that Kenneth McComber’s body had remained near the bridge but allowed that it might have drifted overnight. “The water is so strong,” he told Bunny. “It does what it wants. If you don’t find him, go look in the bay. Look for uprooted trees lying in water. Look for a stone fence that was built by humans in the background. If he’s not under the bridge, he’d be in that bay, floating. If you go in with a boat, and you get close enough, you can see him. He’s facing up.”

  Bunny returned to the river in the afternoon. Before turning downstream to search the bay, the party continued to look under the crane. “I was hoping he’d still be there,” said Bunny, “hoping we didn’t have to go downriver. We searched the whole area. We searched on the side of the rig, underneath the platform. But he wasn’t there. The divers decided, let’s check around the crane one more time. They snagged a rope on the crane, then pulled themselves down toward the crane. They both searched. They looked at each other.” Nothing. One of the divers emerged on the surface and climbed into the boat next to Bunny. The other diver emerged from the water a moment later. “Let me check one more time,” he told the men in the boats.

  “So he went down,” said Bunny. “He went underneath the crane, and he went around a little further than he’d gone before. And then he saw him. He was sitting right there, right by the crane. The diver got hold of his hair and pulled him up…. I was more relieved than grieving. That the body had been found. And proving the SQ wrong.” Bunny shook his head. “What a hell of an experience. Something I don’t want to do again. But eventually, it’s gonna happen.”

  Indeed, as Bunny knew, it had happened before, many times. The river had given the Mohawks a great deal in the way of opportunity and prosperity, but it had exacted, in return, a terrible price.

  THE GREATEST BRIDGE

  In the spring of 1907, about 40 Kahnawake bridgemen traveled 140 miles down the St. Lawrence to a deep narrow channel 6 miles west of Quebec City. The Indians had been in the bridge-building business for 20 years. They had worked on bridges along the length of the St. Lawrence, and had recently returned from work on an enormous bridge at Cornwall, Ontario, where they probably shared their knowledge of high-steel riveting with another band of Mohawk Indians, the Akwesasnes, who lived on a reservation near Cor
nwall. Now the men of Kahnawake came east to build an even greater bridge. It was going to be, in fact, the greatest bridge in the world.

  The Quebec Bridge had been under construction for seven years by the summer of 1907. When complete, it would extend 3,220 feet, end to end. It was not its full length, however, that was going to make this bridge great. Virtually any competent engineer can design a long bridge, provided he has the means to support it from below at regular intervals. What makes a bridge truly great is the length of its center span, or clear span. This is the part of the bridge that stretches between supports; the unearthly part that stays aloft in defiance of gravity and common sense.

  The Quebec Bridge was to be erected over a deep, fast-moving channel, so the supports that held it up would have to be very far apart, at least 1,600 feet. To make matters more challenging, this bridge, like many great bridges before it, would rise over an important commercial waterway. Even if the depth and current of the river had allowed for falsework, river traffic ruled it out. So the 1,600-foot center span would have to be built in the air, without temporary support from below. And to make matters somewhat more challenging, the bridge would have to be built on a tight budget, as the Quebec Bridge Company, its underwriter, was perpetually and notoriously short of cash. Such a bridge would require an engineer of untold ingenuity and experience. An engineer, that is, like Theodore Cooper.

  Theodore Cooper was one of the most widely respected structural engineers in the United States in 1900. Early in his career, he had earned a reputation not only for engineering acumen but also for physical courage. He’d served valorously in the navy during the Civil War, then gone to work as a bridge inspector on the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, the first indisputably great American bridge. Cooper did not hesitate to crawl out on the girders with the bridgemen and inspect the metal close-up. One December day, he stumbled and fell 90 feet into the murky water of the Mississippi, plunging all the way to the river bottom. Still grasping his drafting pencil, he swam to shore, changed his clothes, and promptly reported back to work.

  In 1884, Cooper published General Specifications for Iron Railroad Bridges and Viaducts, a book, later expanded to include steel specifications, that became a sort of bible for engineers trying to gauge the stress tolerances of metal. Nobody in America, perhaps in the world, understood the capacities and tolerances of structural metal better than Theodore Cooper. Certainly Cooper himself believed this to be true. “There is nobody,” he once told a colleague, “competent to criticize us.”

  For all his knowledge, Cooper lacked the singular achievement that would put him in the ranks of his old boss, James Eads, or his fellow alumnus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Washington Roebling. Now advancing in age and failing in health, Cooper looked to the Quebec Bridge as the capstone of his career, the job that would place him squarely in the pantheon. This ambition might explain his willingness to work for extremely low pay, a total of $32,225 for eight years of work for Phoenix Bridge, the company contracted to fabricate and erect the bridge. As consulting engineer, Cooper would not draw the designs for the bridge—that task fell to Peter Szlapka, an in-house engineer at Phoenix Bridge—nor would he have on-site responsibility for the details of erection. But every important question of design and erection would be referred to him. He would be the ultimate authority. The Quebec Bridge was to be Cooper’s bridge.

  The first major decision confronting Cooper was the type of bridge it would be. The length of the span put a normal truss bridge out of contention. One option was a suspension bridge like Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge. But there were problems with suspension bridges for rail lines. They tended to move a lot and were deemed untrustworthy under very heavy loads. Cooper favored, instead, a cantilevered truss bridge, or “flying” cantilever. Cantilever bridges had been built sporadically for many years—the Eads Bridge was a form of cantilever—but had recently gained in popularity among bridge engineers after the erection (1879–1900) of an enormous cantilever over the Firth of Forth in Scotland. That bridge, 5,666 feet long with two 1,700-foot clear spans—the longest clear spans in the world—was the undisputed King of Bridges.

  A cantilever is a structure or object that projects into space, supported at one end, unsupported at the other. Applied to bridges, the advantage of a cantilever is that it allows engineers to build inward over the river from each shore, meeting in the middle to form the span, and to do this without any support from below. Generally, each cantilever is centered on a pier that has been set in the riverbed near the shore. The cantilever is anchored and balanced by a truss on the shore side of the pier, then extended, panel by panel, over the water. Obviously, a cantilever requires enormous material strength simply to hold itself up. One reason cantilevers had become so popular at the turn of the century is that steel’s enormous bearing capacity made them possible. Steel could support loads inconceivable just 20 years earlier.

  The Firth of Forth bridge was commonly acknowledged to be massively overbuilt and exorbitantly expensive. Theodore Cooper had strong feelings about overbuilt bridges; he considered them sins of engineering. In an essay published in 1898, two years before signing on to the Quebec Bridge job, Cooper approvingly quoted another engineer, named Unwin, on the subject of overbuilding: “If an engineer builds a structure which breaks, that is mischief, but one of a limited and isolated kind, and the accident itself forces him to avoid a repetition of the blunder. But an engineer who from deficiency of scientific knowledge builds structures which don’t break down, but which stand, and in which material is clumsily wasted, commits blunders of a most insidious kind.” These words would come back to haunt Cooper and everyone involved with the Quebec Bridge. In the meantime, the engineer’s prejudice against wasted material suited his financially squeezed employers just fine. Where the Scottish bridge was massive and thick, the Canadian bridge would be slender and lacy, almost delicate in appearance. It would be an extraordinary demonstration of engineering prowess and steel capacity dominating gravity.

  And there was one other thing: in May of 1900, Cooper recommended increasing the length of the center span from 1,600 feet—which already qualified it as one of the longest spans in the world—to 1,800 feet. Cooper determined that building the piers closer to shore, in shallower water, would shave a year off construction. Coincidentally, it also would make the center span of the Quebec Bridge 100 feet longer than the Firth of Forth’s. It would now become the longest clear span in the world.

  The bridge was still half a bridge in the summer of 1907. On the north shore, erection of the anchor arm of the truss was just getting underway. On the south shore, it was nearly complete. The tapered arm of the cantilever reached hundreds of feet over the St. Lawrence. Each complete cantilever would eventually reach out 562½ feet and would support a central 675-foot “suspended span” between them.

  About 120 men worked on the bridge that summer, 80 or 90 of them stationed on the south arm. A few of the bridgemen were French Canadians who lived nearby, but most came from elsewhere. They came from New York City and Buffalo, from Columbus, Ohio, and from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Wheeling, West Virginia. The greatest number came from Kahnawake, 140 miles upriver. Since entering the trade two decades earlier, the Mohawks had flourished as bridgemen. Seventy of the 600 adult males on the reservation worked in high steel in 1907. That summer, over half of these men were employed on the Quebec Bridge, mainly as riveters.

  The bridgemen, Americans and Indians alike, boarded at rooming houses in New Liverpool or St. Romuald, small towns near the bridge site. They seemed to find the accommodations hospitable. Indeed, several American floaters were so taken with the surroundings they’d remained in Canada after work shut down the previous winter, ostensibly to hunt deer. “But we think there were other reasons,” the secretary of the local union speculated in The Bridgemen’s Magazine in June of 1907, “judging by the rapid progress some of these pretty French Canadian girls have made in learning to speak English.” At least two weddings between br
idgemen and local girls were celebrated that July.

  As for those American floaters already married, several had brought their wives and families. One of the wives wrote a letter to The Bridgemen’s Magazine that summer expressing her delight with the surroundings. “We have quite a nice place on the banks of the St. Lawrence river, and the job is quite good, so we manage to get along well…. I must say for a positive fact, we never met such a crowd of gentlemanly bridgemen—some of the best men anybody could find.”

  They worked six days a week, 11 hours a day. Sundays were for sport. The Americans played baseball, the “North Shore Nine” dominating the “South Shore Nine.” The Mohawks preferred lacrosse. One Sunday in mid-August, the Caughnawaga Lacrosse Team, with its roster of Indian riveters, scrimmaged on a field near the river. Afterward, the men posed for a photograph in the grass. They wore uniforms of black turtlenecks and white shorts and cradled their hand-made sticks. They were perhaps still a little breathless from the practice, but as they peered into the camera, they appeared relaxed and fit and understandably proud, for the lacrosse players of Caughnawaga (the common spelling of the reservation’s name until the 1980s) were the finest and most famous in the world. It was they, after all, who introduced lacrosse to white Frenchmen in the middle of the nineteenth century, and who later traveled to England to demonstrate the sport to the Queen.

  In 1907, the fame of Caughnawaga Indians still derived largely from their prowess on a lacrosse field. That was about to change. In the distance, looming over the trees behind the lacrosse players like a fin, was the slightly blurred outline of the bridge where 8 of the 13 men, among many others, would die before the month was out.

  The bridge had progressed without incident through most of the summer, but with August came trouble. Early in the month, the bridgemen went on strike to protest Phoenix Bridge Company’s practice of docking pay for traveling expenses whenever a man quit the job. The strike only lasted three days, but a number of rankled floaters never returned to work, leaving the bridge shorthanded. The bridge lost another man on the morning of August 20th, when a popular American, Joseph Ward, lost his balance at the extreme end of the cantilever and vanished beneath the water 180 feet below. His was the first death on the bridge.