Slater shot the officer, then fled, escaping either to the swamps or by hopping on a passing freight train. The request, according to some versions of the story, came because Slater had refused to pay taxes on the gun. He was approached by a policeman and asked to turn over his gun. As the story goes, one day he strolled into town with a rifle. Slater, as he was still known, was a turpentine still worker. The legend started somewhere, and for Railroad Bill it began in Alabama around 1893. As historian Burgin Mathews explains, Railroad Bill represented a “ powerful individual threat to white authority.”īut let’s go back. Railroad Bill differed from other outlaws because he was Black, and his race-and perceptions of it-intersected with a volatile time in US history. But his legacy as “an outlaw,” that infamous figure who ran up and down the American timeline, is a complex one. But he plausibly suggests that his body was buried, along with that of numerous other convict laborers, in an unmarked grave only recently discovered during the demolition of the old penitentiary buildings.His name was Morris Slater, but he was better known as “Railroad Bill.” That’s the kind of name about which they write ballads, the kind of name that starts incredible stories: “Did you hear about Railroad Bill?” That was true for Slater, too. Nelson doesn't learn how Henry actually died, for his subject disappeared from the prison's records. New steam drills and nitroglycerin blasted through sandstone, generating silica dust that took their lives, either immediately or gradually. That assignment proved to be a death sentence for 100 black prisoners, Henry likely among them. Bound out to the C&O Railroad as a convict laborer along with hundreds of other black men, Henry was put to work under the watchful eye of armed guards at Lewis Tunnel in Virginia. Accused, perhaps falsely, of theft from a grocery, the 19-year-old black Northerner found himself convicted and imprisoned in the hellhole that was the state penitentiary in 1866. Just over 5 feet tall, he was a freeborn man originally from New Jersey who was in rural Prince George County, Va., immediately after the Civil War. A flesh-and-blood John Henry, he discovered in previously unavailable documents, had been an inmate there. The records of the Virginia State Penitentiary provided the central clues to unraveling the mystery. John Henry, if he had indeed lived, died "somewhere else." Wandering about unsuccessfully in search of the remnants of work camps or other material culture clues, Nelson confirmed visually what engineering reports he had uncovered had already suggested: hand drills, not steam drills, cut through Big Bend Mountain. ![]() Like countless tourists, folklore fans and railroad buffs before him, Nelson paid homage to John Henry at the Big Bend (formerly Great Bend) Tunnel in West Virginia, where most accounts set the ballad. Nelson takes his readers on his journey of discovery as he retraces his drives through the Appalachian mountains, his meanderings through railroad tunnels, his patient archival visits and his online "Eureka!" moment when the pieces of his puzzle came together while staring at a century-old picture of a postcard. "I too started out looking for a legend, but in the end I found a real man." In his remarkable book, "Steel Drivin' Man," Nelson delves into American folklore to produce an original, compelling, sometimes speculative but always fascinating biography of the mythic figure. Most "historians and folklorists have assumed that John Henry was just a legend, a story designed to inspire pride," says Scott Reynolds Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary.
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