From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Monte Davis"  wrote in message
news:259322d1f1bpjtfftcfutgrd14845ajood{at}4ax.com...
> Adam  wrote:
>
>>You seem to conveniently forget all the
>>chinese etc who built the railroads etc & established chinatowns all
>>over the place.
>
> I seem to recall there were some happy, hymn-singing darkies involved
> too.

John Henry said to his captain,


"A man ain't nothin' but a man,


And before I'd let your steam drill beat me down,


I'd die with the hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord!


I'd die with the hammer in my hand."

http://www.answers.com/topic/john-henry-folklore

The truth about John Henry is hidden from us, but legend has it that he was
a slave born in Alabama in the 1840s and fought his famous battle with the
steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West
Virginia. A statue and memorial plaque have been placed along a highway
south of Talcott as it crosses over the tunnel in which the competition may
have taken place.

The railroad historian Roy C. Long found that there were multiple Big Bend
Tunnels along the C&O rail line. Also, the C&O employed multiple
black men who went by the name "John Henry" at the time that
those tunnels were being built. Though he could not find any documentary
evidence, he believes on the basis of anecdotal evidence that the contest
between man and machine did indeed happen at the Talcott, West Virginia
site due to the presence of all three (a man named John Henry, a tunnel
named Big Bend, and a steam-powered drill) at the same time at that place.

The part-time folklorist John Garst has argued that the contest instead
happened at the Coosa Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and
Western railroad (now part of Norfolk Southern) in Alabama in 1887. He
conjectures that John Henry may have been a man named Henry born a slave to
P. A. L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in
1844.

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