High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (15 page)

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 Cornwall. 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 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
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.

Caughnawaga Lacrosse Team, August 1907.
(Courtesy of Kanien’kehaka Raotitiohkwa 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.