STEEL
AND IRON WORKERS
Little
Indian kids on a bridge up in Canada They can
balance and they can climb Like their fathers before them
They'll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline...
—Joni
Mitchell, "Song for Sharon", Hejira
In
1886, the Dominion Bridge Company set out to build a cantilevered
bridge over the St. Lawrence for the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
The bridge would be set partly on the reservation of the Kahnawake
and Akwesasne Mohawks. In exchange, the Mohawks demanded jobs
on the project. Dominion Bridge agreed—assuming that the Mohawks
would unload box cars, and perform other menial tasks. Instead,
the Indians climbed all over the bridge, "as agile as goats,"
asking if they could try riveting. As one company official later
wrote, "It was quite impossible to keep them out." Indeed, "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."
Dominion
Bridge trained a dozen or so Mohawks as riveters—a difficult,
dangerous skill that entailed heating rivets until they were red-hot,
tossing them thirty to forty feet through the air, then catching
and forcing them through steel beams with a hammer, or a pneumatic
drill—all of this some 500 feet or more above the ground.
Soon
there were 70 iron and steel riveters in the Kahnawake band, working
projects throughout Canada. The "Caughnawagas"—as whites first
called them—had always proved adroit at adapting to the vagaries
of capitalist culture. They thrived as guides for French fur trappers,
raft riders for lumber companies, circus performers—even patent
medicine salesmen.
Then,
in 1907, came "the disaster"—the collapse of the Quebec Bridge,
killing 96 workers in all, 35 of them Indians. The tragedy might
have ended Mohawk participation in high steel right there; instead,
it made Mohawk boys determined to become steelworkers—and Mohawk
women determined that they would never work one job again in such
concentrated numbers.
The
Kahnawake riveting gangs continued to spread out—and by the 1910s
they had reached New York. There, they worked nearly all the monumental
structures of greater New York: the Empire State Building and
the George Washington Bridge; the Chrysler Building and the World
Trade Center; the Triborough Bridge, and the Verrazano Bridge,
and the Pulaski Skyway and the West Side Highway.
By
the 1930s, a community of 700 Mohawks was living in the old North
Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Local Italian groceries carried
the Mohawks' favorite brands of corn meal, and the riveters drank
Canadian beers at the Spar Bar and Grill, and the Wigwam, with
its picture of Jim Thorpe on the wall, and the sign "The Greatest
Iron Workers in the World Pass Thru These Doors." Rev. Dr. David
Munroe Cory, of the Cuyler Presbyterian Church, even translated
the Gospel of St. Luke into the Mohawk-Oneida language, and held
monthly services in that tongue.
The
community's center remained along the St. Lawrence. When they
were working on a job, Mohawk steel workers might make the twelve-hour
trip up there from the city on Friday nights, returning on Sunday
nights—often driving at breakneck speeds, fueled by alcohol. They
always received a joyous reception on the reservation, and the
gypsy-like nature of their work seemed to hold a great appeal.
They would drive on, all over the United States—even arriving
in time to help rivet together the Golden Gate Bridge.
What
made the Mohawks such superb high steel workers remains something
of a mystery. The legends assumed some kind of genetic advantage,
but there is little evidence of this. Joseph Mitchell, in his
scrupulous New Yorker article, "The Mohawks in High Steel," thought
Kahnawake children in Brooklyn "have unusual manual dexterity;
by the age of three, most of them are able to tie their shoelaces"—but
Kanatakta, Executive Director of the Kahnawake Community Cultural
Centre, suggests that it's more "a question of dealing with the
fear."
The
Mohawks were able to deal with the fear—but not the changes in
the construction industry. By the late 1960s, riveting had all
but disappeared. The Brooklyn community dissolved, too, as crime
rates rose.
The
lure of high steel work, though, would not so easily dissipate—not
in a community where the graves of men who died on the job are
marked with steel-girder crosses. By the 1990s, some 20-25 percent
of Mohawk men were in steel construction again—and dozens of them
were living in New York.
The
demand will always be there. As Mitchell quotes the Dominion Bridge
official: "Men who want to do it are rare and men who can do it
are even rarer..."
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
