High Steel_ The Daring Men Who Built The World's Greatest Skyline Part 5

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 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. 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 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. 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 ac.u.men 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 sh.o.r.e, changed his clothes, and promptly reported back to work.

In 1884, Cooper published General Specifications for Iron Railroad Bridges and Viaducts 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body," 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 Inst.i.tute, Was.h.i.+ngton 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 (18791900) 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e. The cantilever is anch.o.r.ed and balanced by a truss on the sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.sively 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 repet.i.tion 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 ma.s.sive 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e, erection of the anchor arm of the truss was just getting underway. On the south sh.o.r.e, 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 562 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 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 bridgemen and local girls were celebrated that July. 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 bridgemen 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 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." 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 Sh.o.r.e Nine" dominating the "South Sh.o.r.e 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 gra.s.s. 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.

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Caughnawaga Lacrosse Team, August 1907.

(Courtesy of Kanien'kehaka Raot.i.tiohkwa Cultural Center) Strikes and occasional deaths were to be expected on a bridge. More uncommon and disturbing was the condition of the structure itself. The first indication of a problem had arisen as far back as June, when a few of the chord pieces on the anchor arm failed to line up as they were meant to. This had not alarmed anyone much-even now, it's a rare bridge or building in which all the pieces fit perfectly-and the problem was fixed and work continued. But now, in August, it was becoming clear that the problems on the bridge went well beyond the usual fabrication errors. The bridgemen and on-site engineers began to notice ominous bends in the metal, particularly in two sections of the bottom chords of the anchor arm-the steel pieces that were meant to transfer most of the bridge's compressive weight to the stone pier. The bends were severe enough to require jacks to straighten them out before the steel could be riveted. When field engineers reported these bends to Cooper in New York, he was more quizzical than alarmed. "It is a mystery to me," Cooper wrote to Phoenix Bridge on August 9, "how both of these webs happened to be bent at one point and why it was not discovered sooner." A few days later, inspectors on the bridge discovered more bending, and the mystery deepened. Still, no one seemed unduly concerned.

The obvious explanation to the men in charge, including Cooper and John Deans, chief engineer of Phoenix Bridge, was that the steel had received some sort of blow. Deans thought it must have been damaged at the bridge shop or dropped in the steelyard. Cooper wondered if it had been hit by another piece of steel during erection. He asked his inspector, a young Princeton graduate named John McClure, to investigate.

Only McClure, performing more or less the same function on the Quebec Bridge that Cooper had performed years earlier on the Eads Bridge, seemed clear-eyed enough to recognize what was happening, even if he didn't quite grasp its significance. On August 12, he wrote to Cooper: "One thing I am reasonably sure of, and that is that the bend has occurred since the chord has been under stress, and was not present when the chords were placed." To accept McClure's premise was to accept the inconceivable: that the great bridge was buckling before their eyes; that seven years of work and millions of dollars had gone into building a bridge that could not hold itself up; that Theodore Cooper himself had overseen and approved a design that was profoundly flawed; and that this bridge, which was meant to be the greatest in the world, was doomed.

Part of the grim fascination that comes in reading the letters and telegrams sent between the princ.i.p.als in these last days of August is in watching otherwise intelligent and accomplished people try to explain away the obvious. The chief engineer of the Phoenix Bridge Company, John Deans, continued to insist that the bends had occurred before the steel was erected, and maintained this position even as McClure's measurement on the bridge proved conclusively the steel was bending after after erection. erection.

The Sunday before the collapse, a cold front moved into Quebec, pus.h.i.+ng the hot summer air away and pulling in rain and wind and cool autumnal temperatures behind it. Monday and Tuesday the rain continued and only a few men worked on the bridge. McClure visited the bridge Tuesday and discovered alarming new evidence that steel in the bridge was failing: a piece in the anchor arm had bent an inch and a half since his last measurement less than a week earlier. McClure and several other engineers huddled over the chord and discussed what to do about it. The 38-year-old erection foreman, Ben Yenser, was sufficiently concerned to announce his intention to call his men off the bridge.

On Wednesday, August 28, the wind continued to blow but the sun came out and the men reported for work as usual. Mysteriously, Yenser had changed his mind overnight and decided to keep the men on the bridge after all. It was an odd decision, given Yenser's reputation for caution, and because of it Yenser is often given the rap for putting his men at risk. But Yenser was no engineer. He certainly would not have resumed work without tacit approval, if not outright pressure, from his own bosses. In fact, such pressure seems to have been applied by E. A. h.o.a.re, chief engineer of the Quebec Bridge Company, who admitted as much in a letter he sent to Cooper that same afternoon. "I requested him to continue," wrote h.o.a.re, "as the moral effect of holding up the work would be very bad on all concerned and might also stop the work for this season on account of losing men." The bridge was already undermanned. h.o.a.re and others worried that halting work now, and thereby admitting concerns about the bridge, would send more men packing. With cold weather approaching, and the rush to complete the south arm before winter, this was a costly prospect. In a second letter, sent immediately after the disaster, h.o.a.re would revise his account, suggesting that Yenser had made the decision to continue work entirely on his own. Blaming Yenser would be convenient, since the foreman would no longer be alive to defend himself.

In the end, whether it was Yenser or h.o.a.re or anybody else who made the decision, the only person whose opinion really mattered was Theodore Cooper's, and he was 440 miles away in New York City. "It was clear that on that day," an inquiry into the bridge collapse later concluded, "the greatest bridge in the world was being built without there being a single man within reach who by experience, knowledge and ability was competent to deal with the crisis."

On Wednesday afternoon, 29 hours before the fall, McClure boarded a train from Quebec City to New York to consult with Cooper in person. By now, every man on the bridge knew that something was wrong. That evening after work, a number of the bridgemen paid a visit to the lower chord. The group included a Detroit native named D. B. Haley who was serving as president of the local bridgemen's union in Quebec. Haley was no engineer, either, but it was obvious to him, and to every other bridgeman gathered around, what was happening. "The inside web was bending toward Montreal and the outside was bending toward Quebec," he told investigators later, "showing that there was too much compression put on and it would not stand the strain and it was giving."

That night half a dozen of the Indians talked about the bridge at the house where they boarded. A white bridgeman named John Splicer was present and later recalled the conversation. "They said there was a place in that chord, I do not know whereabouts, where it was bent, and they were trying to jack it together, and they could not jack the plates together and riveted up the way it was...." Splicer was so shaken by the conversation he decided not to report to work the following morning.

Thursday, August 29, was a bl.u.s.tery day, fair skies, in the mid-60s. Before work began, a few men gathered again around the bent chord to have another look. They were thoroughly apprehensive by now. "By G.o.d," Delphis Lajeunesse told himself, "I am going home before some accident." But he stayed, as did most of the men. Apparently, for all their fears, they still trusted the bridge, and the engineers, with their lives.

A bridgeman named Theodore Lachapelle decided to quit for the day around nine that morning, just two hours after starting time. He quit not for reasons of apprehension or prophecy, but simply because, as he later explained, "a man feels like work one day, and he does not another day." At 2 P.M. P.M., a 26-year-old riveter named Dominick McComber, one of the Mohawk lacrosse players, got into an argument with his foreman and stalked off the bridge.

John McClure, in the meantime, had reached New York. He was there to greet Theodore Cooper as the engineer arrived at his office on lower Broadway that morning. McClure's report caused Cooper concern, though apparently not enough for him to demand an immediate cessation of work. Instead, Cooper sent a telegram to John Deans at Phoenix Bridge Company in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. "Add no more load to bridge until due consideration of facts." Later, Cooper and the press would make much of this telegram, as if its prompt delivery to the bridge might have prevented the tragedy. Cooper told the New York Times New York Times that the telegram ordered "the man in charge of the work there to get off the bridge at once and stay off it until it could be examined." In fact, the telegram said nothing of the sort. that the telegram ordered "the man in charge of the work there to get off the bridge at once and stay off it until it could be examined." In fact, the telegram said nothing of the sort.

After leaving Cooper, McClure boarded a train and followed the telegram to Phoenixville, where the bridge company had its headquarters. He went to consult in person with Deans and Peter Szlapka, the chief design engineer. Back in Quebec, around the same time that McClure was arriving at the Phoenixville depot, a Mohawk riveting foreman named Alex Beauvais noticed that rivets were starting to shear on the lower chord. Ingwall Hall, working atop the traveler, noticed that the cantilever had become "springy," bouncing slightly whenever a load of steel landed on it. "It would jar enough so you would notice it good and plain and you would feel afraid."

McClure reached Deans' office at Phoenix Bridge Company around 5:15. Deans had gotten Cooper's telegram but had not acted on it, apparently considering it less than urgent. McClure sat down with Deans and Szlapka and they briefly discussed the situation. At 5:30, they decided the best course of action was to await new information from the bridge site and resume their discussion in the morning. As they were standing to leave the meeting-at 5:31 P.M. P.M., just half an hour before quitting time in Quebec-the bridge, 500 miles to the north, finally did what it had been threatening to do for weeks.

Eighty-six men were on the south arm when a loud "grinding sound" shot out from the bridge. The 19,000 tons of structural steel toppled slowly at first, then the cantilever tower kicked out from the stone pier and it fell fast. A few of the men near sh.o.r.e had enough time to make a mad dash and save themselves. Men farther out over the river had no such option. Eugene Lajeunesse, who always worked side by side with his brother, Delphis, was standing on the south arm above the pier, waiting for his brother to lower a bucket of bolts, when the collapse began. "I made a jump and I went down and I do not know anything about it.... I said, 'I am finished'; that is all. I did not see anything."

Ingwall Hall, another survivor, rode the big traveler crane 300 feet to the water. "Well, I could feel it start to go down and it was going down so fast you got tears in your eyes and you could hardly realize anything beside you."

"It left me, sir," Oscar Lebarge later testified. "I was in s.p.a.ce, in the air. It traveled a great deal quicker than I did."

D. B. Haley, the local union president, had a similar experience: "I was at the extreme end of it and the first I knew I caught myself going through the air. I realized that the iron fell very much faster than I did and left me falling through the air. The next thing I remember I was in deep water."

The bridge hit the river with a "clap of thunder," as one witness put it. The New York Times New York Times described the sound as "a terrible crash which was plainly heard in Quebec, and which shook the whole countryside so that the inhabitants rushed out of their houses, thinking that an earthquake had occurred." When D. B. Haley and Ingwall Hall came back up to the surface, injured but alive, the water was turbulent and filled with debris. "Everything was out of sight except timbers," said Hall, "and I do not know how many voices were hollering for help." described the sound as "a terrible crash which was plainly heard in Quebec, and which shook the whole countryside so that the inhabitants rushed out of their houses, thinking that an earthquake had occurred." When D. B. Haley and Ingwall Hall came back up to the surface, injured but alive, the water was turbulent and filled with debris. "Everything was out of sight except timbers," said Hall, "and I do not know how many voices were hollering for help."

Most of the men had been dragged deep into the river by the steel and killed outright. Nearer the sh.o.r.e, where the water was shallow, men were trapped but still alive. They remained so as night began to fall. "Their groans can be heard by the anxious crowds waiting at the water's edge, but nothing so far can be done to rescue them or relieve their sufferings," reported the New York Times New York Times. "There are no searchlights available, and by the feeble light of lanterns it is impossible to even locate some of the sufferers." A village priest lowered himself by rope down the face of the cliff on the south sh.o.r.e, then waded into the shallows to administer last rites to the trapped men. Then, as the horrified spectators watched and listened, the tide came in and washed over the men, and their voices went silent. Of 86 men who had been working on the south arm of the bridge that afternoon, 75 were dead.

The collapse reverberated around the world. Its shudders were felt with particular keenness south of the border. The bridge was in many ways more of an American enterprise than a Canadian one, built by an American bridge company and by American methods, and overseen by an esteemed American engineer. Many saw its collapse as an American failure. "The fall of the great Quebec cantilever bridge is the most disastrous calamity that could possibly have overtaken the profession of bridge engineering in this country," lamented Scientific American Scientific American two weeks after the collapse. "The tremendous significance of this disaster lies in the suspicion, which to-day is staring every engineer coldly in the face, that there is something wrong with our theories of bridge design, at least as applied to a structure of the size of the Quebec Bridge." It was almost too disturbing to contemplate. If Theodore Cooper had been wrong, how confident could other bridge builders be that they weren't wrong, too? two weeks after the collapse. "The tremendous significance of this disaster lies in the suspicion, which to-day is staring every engineer coldly in the face, that there is something wrong with our theories of bridge design, at least as applied to a structure of the size of the Quebec Bridge." It was almost too disturbing to contemplate. If Theodore Cooper had been wrong, how confident could other bridge builders be that they weren't wrong, too?

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The southern arm of the Quebec Bridge, August 28, 1907, one day before the collapse.

(Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, PA-029229) The press treated Cooper kindly in the days after the collapse, as if he were the victim of bad luck rather than bad design; or as if the very practice of bridge engineering were to blame, rather than Cooper himself. But an inquiry launched by the Canadian government in the aftermath of the disaster quickly determined otherwise. The Royal Commission found Cooper to have committed several blunders that were attributable not to a failure of engineers as a body as a body, but to his own poor judgment.

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After the collapse.

(Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, C-009766) The gravest error concerned the weight of the bridge. While the bridge was still in its design stage, Szlapka, with Cooper's blessing, had estimated a total weight for the bridge of 31,400 tons. Later, when it became clear that the weight of the bridge would be significantly higher, more like 38,000 tons, Cooper did nothing to change the specifications of the steel. He decided the new loadings fell within the margins of error figured into the bridge's design and p.r.o.nounced them safe. By doing this, he was allowing a unit stress unit stress on the steel-that is, the pounds per square inch the steel would be expected to bear-that was 20 percent higher than the standard practice of his day. Cutting so close to the bone might have been warranted in a smaller, more typical bridge, but in a bridge of this magnitude, where there was little precedent to rely on, it was foolhardy and arrogant. Cooper trusted the steel too well. And others trusted him too well. on the steel-that is, the pounds per square inch the steel would be expected to bear-that was 20 percent higher than the standard practice of his day. Cutting so close to the bone might have been warranted in a smaller, more typical bridge, but in a bridge of this magnitude, where there was little precedent to rely on, it was foolhardy and arrogant. Cooper trusted the steel too well. And others trusted him too well.

In Cooper's defense, he was underpaid and overworked. Lack of money tied his hands. He could not conduct tests that might have proved informative; he could hardly afford a secretary to help him with paperwork. The report took these facts into consideration and spread blame around. But most of the blame it placed squarely on the shoulders of Cooper and Peter Szlapka, the Phoenix Bridge engineer who drew the design. The language in the report by the Royal Commission was plain but devastating: "The failure cannot be attributed directly to any cause other than errors in judgement on the part of these two engineers.... The ability of the two engineers was tried in one of the most difficult professional problems of the day and proved to be insufficient to the task."

The words were a wakeup call to engineers around the world, who checked and rechecked their calculations. To Cooper, they were as good as an epitaph. Though he would not in fact die for another 12 years, his career as an engineer was over, his reputation destroyed. For all his accomplishments, only one fact really mattered about Theodore Cooper now: he was the man who built the Quebec Bridge.

Beyond its significance as a monumental engineering debacle, the fall of the Quebec Bridge was, of course, a human tragedy. The tragedy was especially staggering at Kahnawake. Of the 75 men who died, 33 were Mohawks. Many families on the small rustic reservation of 2,000 people had lost a relative. In the days after the collapse, the bereaved cl.u.s.tered in front of the post office, an old stone structure that possessed the single phone in the village. They waited for news and tallied the loss. Twenty-four women were widowed. Fifty-six children were fatherless. One family, the D'Aillebouts, lost four brothers, as well as an uncle and a cousin. Joseph D'Aillebout left 11 children behind.

A delegation from the reservation traveled downriver to gather the dead, but there were few bodies to bring home. Most were pinned underwater by the failed steel, where they remain today. A funeral for the eight men whose bodies were recovered took place the Monday after the collapse. The village was almost entirely Catholic in those days, and the ceremony was held in the St. Francis-Xavier Mission, a stone church near the river. Eight simple coffins lay on a platform in front of the altar. A local choir sang liturgical chants in Mohawk. The Archbishop of Montreal said ma.s.s to the overflowing church. "I am here to pray and share your grief," the Archbishop told the mourners, as a priest translated his sermon into Mohawk. "A father is above all in sympathy with his children in trial. Yours is a severe one. The remains of eight victims now lie before us; but how many more have found a watery grave, perhaps never to be recovered? Like Rachel's, your sorrow is one that will not be allayed."

BOOMING OUT.

The sorrow had a peculiar effect on the Mohawks. Rather than end or diminish their enthusiasm for high steel work, it seems to have done precisely the opposite. In 1915, just 8 years after the disaster, an investigator for the American Board of Indian Commissioners visited Kahnawake and reported that 587 out of 651 adult males belonged to the structural steel union, up from less than 100 in 1907. Even if this figure is inflated-it's difficult to believe it's not-there does seem to have been a real surge in interest. Apparently, the danger of the work only added to its appeal. "It made high steel much more interesting to them," a retired Mohawk riveter told Joseph Mitch.e.l.l in 1949. "It made them take pride in themselves that they could do such dangerous work."

According to reservation lore, the women of Kahnawake imposed a condition on the men: they would no longer travel to jobs in large groups. Rather, they would spread out in smaller groups, minimizing the chances for wholesale slaughter of the sort that had occurred on the Quebec Bridge. It was thus, according to the lore, that men began "booming-out," traveling in smaller groups to faraway places like Buffalo and Detroit and New York City.

Mohawk ironworkers had been working as far south as New York well before the Quebec Bridge disaster-as early as 1901, in fact-but over the decade that followed they came in greater numbers. By the early 1920s, Mohawks were regularly crossing the border to work on bridges and buildings up and down the Eastern Seaboard, traveling together in tight four-man gangs, communicating on the steel in Mohawk, boarding together wherever they could find inexpensive housing. The practice was nearly halted in 1925 when an ironworker named Paul Diabo (a common surname at Kahnawake) was arrested for illegal immigration while working on the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia. Diabo's case resulted in a landmark decision by a federal court in 1927. Citing the 150-year-old Jay Treaty, the judge ruled that Mohawks, whose land had once overlapped parts of both countries, were ent.i.tled to pa.s.s freely over the border from Canada into the United States.

The ruling removed legal hurdles for the Mohawk itinerants but it didn't make the commute any shorter. The drive between Kahnawake and New York still took nearly 12 hours, making frequent visits home impractical. In lieu of returning home to their families, many of the men moved their families down from the reservation to live with them near the job site. Communities of Mohawk ironworkers quickly grew up in sections of Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and, most significantly, in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn families lived close to each other in the neighborhood of North Gowa.n.u.s (now Boerum Hill), around the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. Over the next several decades, the Mohawks' presence there grew into a full-fledged ethnic enclave. By 1950, at least 400 Mohawks lived in Brooklyn; as many as 800 were there by the end of the decade. Apartment buildings filled up with Mohawk families. Bernie's Grocery on Atlantic Avenue sold a special cornmeal called "o-nen-sto" that the Indian housewives needed to make their boiled cornbread. The tiny Nevins Bar and Grill became known as "the Wigwam," the center of the community where men could meet, learn of jobs, and keep in touch with home. Drawings of Iroquois warriors and photos of the Native American athlete Jim Thorpe decorated the walls, and the hard hats of Indian ironworkers who had died on the job were displayed as memorials. "The Greatest Iron Workers in the World Pa.s.s Thru These Doors," read a sign posted at the entrance.

The children attended the local public school or one of several parochial schools in the neighborhood. Most Mohawks still practiced Catholicism, but there were enough Protestant converts among them to inspire the local Presbyterian minister, Reverend David Cory, to learn Mohawk and offer a service every week to the Indians in their language. Cory's church, the Cuyler Presbyterian on Pacific Street, became a gathering place for Presbyterians and Catholics alike.

Ironically, even as Reverend Cory was learning Mohawk, the Indians were forgetting it. Their children were growing up on English-Brooklyn English, no less-and American television. Many of the young ironworkers married non-natives, Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican women who lived in the neighborhood. Some even moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. They were partaking of that all-American rite of pa.s.sage: a.s.similation. English, no less-and American television. Many of the young ironworkers married non-natives, Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican women who lived in the neighborhood. Some even moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. They were partaking of that all-American rite of pa.s.sage: a.s.similation.

The Mohawks lived quietly in Brooklyn for a decade or two without much remark from others. They simply formed one of the many ethnic enclaves in the demographic stew that was New York. But in the middle of the century, white people-white journalists, more precisely-began to take notice. The city-dwelling "redmen" who performed death-defying stunts on steel proved irresistibly exotic.

Joseph Mitch.e.l.l deserves much of the credit, and blame, for sparking interest in the subject. His 1949 article for the The New Yorker The New Yorker, "Mohawks in High Steel," described the settlement in Brooklyn and included a history of the itinerant Mohawks from Kahnawake, "the most footloose Indians in North America," as Mitch.e.l.l referred to them. While Mitch.e.l.l's article was clear-eyed and well grounded, it contained the seeds of a misconception that many white people, and some Indians, have held about Mohawk ironworkers ever since: that in addition to being footloose, they are preternaturally sure-footed; that they are innately endowed for life in high places and immune to fear of falling. It was Mitch.e.l.l who first quoted a Dominion Bridge official's opinion that the Indians were "agile as goats" and gladly would "walk a narrow beam high in the air with nothing below them but the river...and it wouldn't mean any more to them than walking on the ground."

Several years after Mitch.e.l.l's article, National Geographic National Geographic ran a profile of the Brooklyn Mohawks that gave this notion greater credence and wider circulation. "Why did the Caughnawaga Mohawks take so eagerly to this spine-chilling high-iron work?" the magazine wondered rhetorically. "The answer seems to lie in a puzzling characteristic found in many North American Indian tribes, and outstandingly in the Iroquois: they are almost completely lacking in fear of heights." The magazine quoted an early eighteenth-century English surveyor named John Lawson, who wrote of the Tuscaroras, another Iroquois nation: "They will walk over deep Brooks and Creeks, on the smallest Poles, and that without any Fear or Concern. Nay, an Indian will walk on the Ridge of a Barn or House and look down the Gable-end and spit upon the Ground, as unconcerned as if he was walking on Terra firma." Scientists, according to ran a profile of the Brooklyn Mohawks that gave this notion greater credence and wider circulation. "Why did the Caughnawaga Mohawks take so eagerly to this spine-chilling high-iron work?" the magazine wondered rhetorically. "The answer seems to lie in a puzzling characteristic found in many North American Indian tribes, and outstandingly in the Iroquois: they are almost completely lacking in fear of heights." The magazine quoted an early eighteenth-century English surveyor named John Lawson, who wrote of the Tuscaroras, another Iroquois nation: "They will walk over deep Brooks and Creeks, on the smallest Poles, and that without any Fear or Concern. Nay, an Indian will walk on the Ridge of a Barn or House and look down the Gable-end and spit upon the Ground, as unconcerned as if he was walking on Terra firma." Scientists, according to National Geographic National Geographic, could not explain this peculiar behavior.

In his Apologies to the Iroquois Apologies to the Iroquois, published in 1959 (in a volume that included Mitch.e.l.l's article), the writer Edmund Wilson suggested that the Mohawks' fearlessness derived from their earlier life in the forest, from scaling mountain peaks and canoeing in rapids. He also noted their habit of walking by "putting one foot in front of the other, instead of straddling as, when they see our tracks, we seem to them to do." Presumably, this peculiar stride (which sounds more like that of a fas.h.i.+on model on a catwalk than an ironworker on steel) equipped them for traversing narrow surfaces.

The claim for Mohawk fearlessness and sure-footedness has been repeated, with greater or lesser degrees of credulity, in countless newspaper and magazine articles. Alongside it has grown another popular idea: that only only Indians have the capacity to walk high steel. "Virtually all of New York City's skyline has been built by American Indians; Mohawk Indians," began a brief article in Indians have the capacity to walk high steel. "Virtually all of New York City's skyline has been built by American Indians; Mohawk Indians," began a brief article in Parade Parade in 1982. The first misconception-that Mohawks are genetically equipped for life in high places-naturally gives rise to the second. in 1982. The first misconception-that Mohawks are genetically equipped for life in high places-naturally gives rise to the second.

In fact, Mohawks have never made up more than 15 percent of the ironworking force of the city. As for fear and agility, they exhibit no more or less of these than any of the other 85 percent of the men who walk steel for a living. Nor do they get injured or die less frequently than their Caucasian counterparts.

Around the same time that journalists were discovering Mohawk ironworkers, a young Columbia Universitytrained anthropologist named Morris Frielich undertook a more scholarly study of the subject. He began hanging out as un.o.btrusively as possible at the Wigwam (he feared getting beaten up, he admitted), observing the behavior of the Mohawks. He published his findings in 1958.

The Mohawks' affinity for ironwork, both for its itinerancy and its danger, was best explained not by genetics, thought Frielich, but by cultural atavism. For hundreds of years, the role of the male in Iroquois society had been to leave his family for long periods of time to hunt and wage war. Working on high steel, a Mohawk man reprised his warrior role, traveling to perform acts of daring and either getting killed or returning home with booty (U.S. dollars, in this case). "Here in the world of men, one could fight, boast, talk men's talk and be a warrior," wrote Frielich. "Colloquially speaking the warrior returned to the tune of 'Home the Conquering Hero Comes,' and to hear it again and again, he necessarily had to keep leaving for war." In short, "that the formula 'to be a man = to be a warrior' 'to be a man = to be a warrior' changed in a relatively short time period to changed in a relatively short time period to 'to be a man = to be a steel worker' 'to be a man = to be a steel worker' was due to similarities in the essence of the two ways of life." was due to similarities in the essence of the two ways of life."

Frielich's cultural explanation, while intriguing, is in some ways as problematic as the genetic explanation. The very existence of the place where he did much of his research-the Mohawk community in Brooklyn-seems to contradict his premise that Mohawk ironworkers were intent on getting away away from their wives and families. Wouldn't their role as warriors have played more convincingly if they'd kept the wife and kids up on the reservation while they whooped and plundered afar? Apparently, they felt the tug of other roles Frielich doesn't consider: father and husband. from their wives and families. Wouldn't their role as warriors have played more convincingly if they'd kept the wife and kids up on the reservation while they whooped and plundered afar? Apparently, they felt the tug of other roles Frielich doesn't consider: father and husband.

What, then, does explain the persistence of Mohawks in high steel ironwork for 120 years? If you ask a Mohawk ironworker this question, he is likely to shrug and blame it on luck. "I'm just glad we didn't go into plumbing," is how a young ironworker named J. R. Phillips put it. "n.o.body would be interested in us if we were plumbers."

Ironwork happened to become available to the Mohawks at a time when few occupations were open to them, and they were happy for it. They stuck with it because it paid well and they'd learned it well; it offered a lucrative, if perilous, niche. Were they good at it? Yes. Was it exciting work? Yes. Did it provide its pract.i.tioners with pride? Certainly. But in all likelihood, these were secondary considerations, and fortuity, not genetic or cultural destiny, best explains the Mohawks' predilection for high steel; and practicality, not anthropology, best explains their footloose ways. In the end, the most remarkable aspect of the Mohawks' itinerancy is not how far they went away from home but how much effort they always made to come back.

In 1949, Joseph Mitch.e.l.l wrote that the Mohawks showed signs of "permanence" in Brooklyn. Ten years later, their population there peaked at around 800. Ten years after that, they were all but gone. The Mohawks' exit from Brooklyn was triggered, in part, by the soaring crime rates that hit New York City in the 1960s. At the same time, many native communities in the United States and Canada were undergoing cultural retrenchment, embracing their Indian heritage and rejecting a.s.similation into mainstream white culture. At Kahnawake, this new sentiment found expression in the growing popularity of the Longhouse religion, a traditionalist faith based on the teachings of an eighteenth-century Iroquois prophet named Handsome Lake. It found expression, as well, in the determination of many Mohawks to return and live on the reservation, on the land of their ancestors.

The simplest explanation for why the Mohawks left Brooklyn, though, was neither crime nor culture. It was a highway. In the 1960s, Interstate 87 was extended north beyond Albany to the Canadian border. The new road, the Adirondack Northway, halved the driving time to Kahnawake, making weekly commutes plausible if not quite pleasurable. Now the ironworkers could board in Brooklyn during the week and return home to their families on the weekends. Which is what they have been doing, in greater or lesser numbers, ever since.

HOME.

On a steamy Sunday afternoon in late July, Bunny drove to the outskirts of the reservation to visit his cousin's grave. Kenneth McComber had been laid to rest in the wide yard between the Longhouse and the quiet two-lane highway leading out to the golf courses. A knee-high mound of dead flowers and bright ribbons marked the grave. Clumps of upturned dirt lay scattered in the gra.s.s. A holly bush and wildflowers grew nearby. Bunny stood at the grave for a few minutes, his hands tucked into the pockets of his cut-offs, then turned and walked across the yard to the Longhouse. His flip-flops skimmed through the gra.s.s.

The front door of the Longhouse was unlocked. Bunny pulled it open and stepped inside. The air was cool and smelled of cut pine. Everything was wood-floor, ceiling, walls, benches-except the iron stoves at each end and the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Afternoon sun slanted through the windows. A month earlier, the Longhouse had been filled with the grief and tears of mourners. Now it was empty and tranquil. According to Handsome Lake, the Iroquois founder of the Longhouse religion, the spirits of the dead rise into the sky and travel the Sky Road (the Milky Way) to heaven. That is where Kenneth McComber had gone now. The light in heaven was forever dazzling, promised Handsome Lake, and the air was fragrant with the sweetness of wild raspberries that grew there in abundance.

Back outside, Bunny ducked into his car. He turned out of the parking lot onto Route 207. The windows were open and the radio was set to K103, Kahnawake's local radio station. Bunny smoked and piloted the big sedan toward the center of the reservation. He was subdued, maybe pensive after the visit to his cousin's grave or maybe just listening to the music. It was a Sunday afternoon. Earlier in the day he'd taken one of his daughters into Montreal to go shopping. Soon he'd go home and eat dinner with his family, then lie down for an hour or two before setting out for New York.

Bunny cruised down Old Malone's Highway, a sort of main street for the reservation, lined with gas stations and shops and restaurants. He waved to a guy pa.s.sing the other way in a pickup, then turned off Old Malone's into the welter of side streets.

It is one of the oddities of modern Kahnawake that most of its streets still follow the maze of the dirt trails scuffed out by ancestors who lived on the reservation hundreds of years ago. As a result, it is entirely possible for an outsider to believe he is driving east for ten minutes and end up, somehow, west of where he started. To make navigating somewhat more challenging to the outsider-and this must be partly the point-none of the streets off Old Malone's Highway are named. Street names are unnecessary in a community where everybody already knows where everybody else lives.

Other than the streets, which have always been loopy and nameless, life has changed considerably on the reservation over the last century. No longer does Kahnawake resemble the small rustic village with outlying farms that it was at the time of the Quebec Bridge disaster. The population has quadrupled to 8,000. The Catholic Church now shares its formerly exclusive metaphysical turf with Pentecostals and Presbyterians and the followers of the Longhouse. The town's infrastructure is thoroughly modern. Plumbing did not arrive here until the late 1950s, but you'd never know it from the countless swimming pools s.h.i.+mmering in backyards.

Altogether, Kahnawake is a prosperous, even idyllic place where you can feel, at moments, as if you've stepped back in time-not to 1907 but to 1957, to a suburban tableau of kids in bathing suits sprinting across lawns from house to house, pool to pool, and young moms calling to each other over back fences, while friendly local police officers (they're called Peacekeepers here) glide by in cherry tops, waving through open windows. Crime is low. Families usually live in close proximity to each other, brother by brother, adult children near elderly parents. On summer weekends, the reservation gives itself over to recreation, to the bustling community pool and the canoe club, to speedboating on the river, and, most of all, to golf. No less than four golf courses accommodate the residents of the reservation. This is one of the other oddities of Kahnawake: there must be as many acres of links per capita here as anywhere in the world.

Bunny drove by the canoe club and the community pool, then turned at the old stone church, the Mission of St. Francis Xavier. Beyond the church, the St. Lawrence glinted and boats plied the Seaway. Farther along the river, children played lacrosse on the wide green lawn next to the Cultural Center. An odd dark structure rose from the gra.s.s there: two steel columns, about 10 yards apart, joined at the top by a steel crossbeam. It looked like the sort of modern sculpture you might expect to find on the campus of a well-endowed liberal arts college, but in fact its purpose was sport, not art. The steel had been erected some years ago for field day compet.i.tions. Ironworkers would take turns racing up and down the columns (sometimes greased to make the sport a little more interesting). Bunny remembered the compet.i.tion from his childhood as a thrilling event, but it had been stopped years ago. "Too many guys were getting their pride hurt, I think is what happened."

As Bunny continued along the river, he pa.s.sed a tall steel cross erected in 1907 to commemorate the dead of the Quebec Bridge-a reminder that the pleasures of life at Kahnawake have not come cheaply-then drove through a tunnel under the railroad tracks. He turned sharply into a small gravel lot and parked. He got out and walked to the steps that rose to the bluff where the tracks ran. A uniformed sentry came out of a small shack near the tracks. "Where are you going?" she asked Bunny.

"Out onto the bridge. Any trains coming?"

She gave him a once-over, enough to satisfy herself that he was a Kahnawake Mohawk and therefore ent.i.tled to trespa.s.s. "You've got some time," she responded casually, then stepped back into the shack.

On the sentry's vague a.s.surance-some time, whatever that meant-Bunny climbed the stairs to the railroad tracks, then started walking across the short drawbridge that spanned the Seaway. He continued out onto the dark steel of the Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge. whatever that meant-Bunny climbed the stairs to the railroad tracks, then started walking across the short drawbridge that spanned the Seaway. He continued out onto the dark steel of the Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge.

This latter bridge is the rebuilt version of the Canadian Pacific Railroad span where Mohawk ironworkers got their start in 1886: the same Black Bridge where Bunny, and so many other young Mohawks, first pitted their skill and courage against high steel. A great many stories regarding the Black Bridge circulate around Kahnawake. Some of these stories involve daredevil stunts, like the one about the boys who rode their bikes over the bridge-not on the rail bed, which would have been challenging enough, but on the 16-inch-wide top chord of the bridge. One ironworker dismissed this account as extremely unlikely-The top chord? Ridiculous!-then proceeded to tell a story of a fire-breathing white horse that haunted the bridge, which he swore was absolutely absolutely true. true.

Bunny had his own story about the bridge. A few years back, a German journalist had come to town to write an article on Mohawk ironworkers. He asked Bunny to take him to the bridge. They walked out, as Bunny was now doing, to where the top chord curved sharply up from the track bed. When they got to the chord, the German started to climb it, as so many boys had done over the years. He apparently felt a need to experience the Mohawk gestalt. He was almost near the top when he suddenly froze. He could not go up, he could not come down. He was locked in a full-blown attack of acrophobia. Bunny spoke to him quietly for a while, then climbed behind him and walked him down, step by step. The German promised to send the article when it was done, but Bunny never heard from him after that.

Looking down now beyond the wooden ties, Bunny could see one of the endless barges pus.h.i.+ng down the Seaway toward Quebec. He could see the river, too, of course-the river in which so many Indians had drowned and died, the river of wealth and grief. Still wearing flip-flops, Bunny walked over to the edge of the ties and leaped up onto a box girder running along the edge of the bridge. He stood there for a few moments, looking across the river toward Lachine and down toward Montreal. Then he stepped down onto the track bed and strolled back to land. It was time to go home and get ready for the week ahead.

MEMORY.

A few days later, a retired ironworker named Alec McComber sat in the air-conditioned bar of Kahnawake's Knights of Columbus Hall, sipping Bud Light from a bottle. The bar was nearly empty, just Alec and few younger men who had some time to kill on a Tuesday. Bunny and the other ironworkers were gone, off to New York and elsewhere, and the reservation was quiet. Outside, in the heat of the late afternoon, kids were doing bike tricks on the melting parking lot. Alec's dog, an old black mongrel named Jimbo, snoozed in the shade of a pickup truck.

Alec McComber was 84 years old, which made him one of the oldest ex-ironworkers alive in Kahnawake. Neither the work nor the itinerant lifestyle-the heavy drinking, the fatty diet, the all-night travel-were conducive to longevity, but he had managed to defeat the risk factors. He appeared fit and in robust health.

Alec believed he might be related to Bunny, and to Kenneth McComber, the boy who'd recently died, but he wasn't sure precisely how. Like Diabos and Beauvais and Kirbys and Skyes and Horns and Snows and Deers, McCombers were plentiful at Kahnawake and hard to sort. A great many of these McCombers were, like Alec, ironworkers.

Alec had been in the trade for 50 years. Thirty-four of those years he was a foreman, mainly for Bethlehem Steel. He'd worked all over America, Alaska to Florida to New York. He'd had a reputation as a hard-driving, demanding pusher. He was known by his men as "One-More-Piece Alec," because there was always time to set one more piece before quitting. It was difficult to see the hard boss now beneath the bleary green eyes and the sweet, nearly toothless smile, but some of the old authority was still there. When Alec spoke about the old days, the younger men at the bar listened attentively, occasionally helping him out with a detail or two.

Not that Alec needed much help. His memory was uncannily sharp. He recalled the gauge of chokers and the precise weight of girders he'd handled half a century ago. He remembered how toggle bents were used to hold up the cantilevered arms of the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls while it was under construction in 1940, and he remembered the weight of the heaviest sections of steel on that bridge (75 tons) and the size of the gap between the two arms of the cantilever when they were complete (18 inches). He remembered details of tricking up columns for the Chase Manhattan Building in New York (54 tons each, using a 75-ton derrick supported by one-and-a-half-inch guy wires). He remembered the name of the boat that ferried him and three other men from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port Au Basque, Newfoundland, on their way to Gander to help build an airplane hangar for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 (the SS Caribou Caribou), and he remembered the name of the policeman they met in St. John's after riding a narrow-gauge train 600 miles across Newfoundland-and overshooting their stop by a couple hundred miles (Sergeant Mahoney).

"This was wartime, understand? So he looks at us Indians and he wants to know who the h.e.l.l are we. Well, we explained the situation, and he made a call to Montreal and got it all straightened out. 'You boys, you're all right,' he said. 'Sleep here overnight. And in the morning, get back on the train. You only pa.s.sed your job about two hundred miles back.'"

Alec cackled merrily at the 60-year-old memory, and the young men in the Knights of Columbus bar smiled. One of the men asked Alec if it was true his father worked on the Quebec Bridge in 1907. "Yes, he did. He didn't like the way things were going so he walked off right before it went down." And what was his name? "Dominic," said Alec. "Dominic McComber."

Dominic McComber: The young lacrosse player who got into a fight with his boss and quit the job three and a half hours before the collapse.

Alec took a last sip of beer and stood. It was time to go home. He waved farewell to the others and shuffled slowly to the door, his legs bowed and stiff. Outside in the heat, his dog rose, panting with joy, and Alec leaned over and patted him on the head. Then he straddled an old black three-speed bike that had been leaning against the side of the building and pedaled off, slowly but steadily, as Jimbo trotted along beside him. Fifty years on steel had ruined Alec's legs, but his ironworker's balance remained intact.

The following afternoon, Alec sat at the table in the dining room of his rambling white house, paging through an old book of photographs. He'd golfed that morning, and his face, already deeply tanned, was flushed by a fresh dose of sun. The windows of the house were open. The white lace curtains billowed in a strong breeze and wind chimes jangled on the porch. Alec's wife, an ironworker's daughter he'd met in Brooklyn 67 years earlier, was in Montreal at a baseball game with the grandkids. Alec had brought the book out to show to a guest.

"This," said Alec. "This is it."

The book lay on the table, along with several other books and folders containing yellowed newspaper clippings. Bound in worn red cloth, it had been bequeathed to Alec by his father years ago. It was a record of the construction of the Quebec Bridge-not the first Quebec Bridge, but the second second Quebec Bridge, begun in 1914 to replace Theodore Cooper's fallen 1907 structure. Dominic McComber had returned to the site to work on the second bridge, which must have been disconcerting given how close he came to death on the first. More disconcerting, the second bridge fell, too, in September of 1916, and Dominic nearly lost his life all over again. This time, the collapse occurred as the ironworkers were raising a 640-foot-long center span that was to stretch between the two cantilevers. Thousands of spectators had turned out to witness the event and crowded the cliffs on both sides of the river. A steel casting that held the span on the south side suddenly ruptured. The span plunged into the river, another 5,000 tons of steel lost, another 13 bridgemen dead. The span was quickly re-fabricated and the luckless bridge was finally completed a year later, September 20, 1917, when Alec was three months old. Quebec Bridge, begun in 1914 to replace Theodore Cooper's fallen 1907 structure. Dominic McComber had returned to the site to work on the second bridge, which must have been disconcerting given how close he came to death on the first. More disconcerting, the second bridge fell, too, in September of 1916, and Dominic nearly lost his life all over again. This time, the collapse occurred as the ironworkers were raising a 640-foot-long center span that was to stretch between the two cantilevers. Thousands of spectators had turned out to witness the event and crowded the cliffs on both sides of the river. A steel casting that held the span on the south side suddenly ruptured. The span plunged into the river, another 5,000 tons of steel lost, another 13 bridgemen dead. The span was quickly re-fabricated and the luckless bridge was finally completed a year later, September 20, 1917, when Alec was three months old.

Closing the book, Alec turned to the small stack of photographs and clippings. The guest asked Alec if he'd ever gotten hurt on a job. He shook his head. "I was always pretty lucky." Did he know many men who had gotten killed? Alec shook his head again. "Naw. Not too many."