John Henry as told by "Billie Harold Jones" as told by Mike Jensen Part 1

On May 10, 1869 the Golden Spike was driven, completing the Transcontinental Railroad and joining once and for all the East to the West.

About the same time, there were other railroads being built. The war between the states had just concluded and President Lincoln had called for a healing. This healing would include the rejoining of the North and the South and again it was to be done by the railroads.

Somewheres around 1870, the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad was cutting a path through West Virginia and they were moving along quite fine, quite fine that was until they ran into the Big Bend Mountain. Big Bend Mountain was a mile and a quarter thick and it sat right in the middle of Green Brier River. Even the river had enough sense to go around and not try to cut through it. The men that ran the railroad were not like other men. They just set their mind to it and they just did it. To around the mountain would be an extra 7 miles of track, so they decided to go through it.

Saying you're going to go through a mountain and going through the mountain are two different things. The C&O railroad would soon find out that lesson as they would spend the next three years and 1000 men to build that tunnel. Hundreds of those thousand men died in the process as well. It was the making of a true tragedy, and it was, but it is also the thing Legends are born from. In in this case, that Legend is John Henry.

John Henry was a hammersmon. He drove steel spikes, called drills, in the rock by means of a hammer. A hammersmon had work with him another man called a "shaker". The shaker would shake and twist the drill following each hammer strike. This shake and twist kicked out the excess dust and kept the drill from wedging itself into the rock. The two would work the drill until they had drilled a hole deep enough to load with explosives and blasted out.

John Henry was, by the way, the best hammersmon around!