Black Hills (47 page)

The working conditions down in the Brooklyn-side caisson—and later in the New York–side caisson, which went much deeper—were horrific. Stinking mud, constant high temperatures, pressurized air so thick that a man couldn’t whistle, literally couldn’t force the air out of his body against the pressure, while each man’s body and organs were daily assaulted by the constant descent into and climb up out of the high-pressure hole in the river.

Paha Sapa never did quite understand the math and science of the air pressure thing, but he believed Big Bill when the giant talked about the problems the men had with something they all called caisson disease and which others called “the bends.” No one could predict whom it would hit or how hard, only that it would affect everyone sooner or later and that a lot of men would die horribly from it.

Colonel Washington Roebling himself, the chief engineer and son of the bridge’s designer, John Roebling—who died of tetanus after getting his toes crushed on the site in the first days of work on the bridge—came down with caisson disease, and it ruined his health, turning him into an invalid for the rest of his long life. Big Bill said that the pressure-related disease wasn’t so bad during the work in the first caisson, on the Brooklyn side, since that foundation box reached its lowest point at about 44 feet, but the New York caisson had to be sunk to more than 78 feet. The external pressure on the caisson and
the corresponding air pressure on the workers inside were incredibly high. Men died of the caisson disease in both boxes, but the New York caisson, Bill said, was the real killer.

Slovak had been struck by the bends scores of times over his years working in the caissons and described the symptoms to Paha Sapa: blinding headaches, constant vomiting, overwhelming weakness, paralysis, tremendous shooting pains in various parts of the body, a feeling like one had been shot in the spine or stabbed in the lungs, and then, in many cases, blindness and death.

The worst cases, including Colonel Roebling when he was struck down after a day and night battling a slow fire in the Brooklyn caisson with all of his many rises and descents during that crisis, were treated with massive amounts of morphine just to relieve the agony until the worker either recovered or died.

Big Bill had had his own cure. However terrible the symptoms, he would drag himself down the stairs, into the air lock, and then plunge back into the darkness and pressure and smoke and sledgehammer crashes and plank-over-river-bottom-mud chaos of the caisson again. It always relieved his symptoms within minutes. Usually, he said, he’d work for an extra unpaid hour or two swinging sledges or priming charges while the caisson disease agony relented and then disappeared.

About twenty feet into the mud of the Brooklyn side of the East River, Big Bill told him, the caisson started encountering boulders too big to be broken up with sledgehammers and spikes and pry bars and sweat. Colonel Roebling conferred with Big Bill and two other new workers who, Bill thought, were also pretending to be experienced powdermen. Because the work of breaking up the boulders around the reinforced metal edge of the caisson—what they called the shoe—had moved from the almost impossible to the absolutely impossible no matter how hard the men labored down there in the heavy atmosphere in that box with the more than 27,000 tons of caisson roof and weights atop it, with tens of thousands of tons of weight of river and pressure above that, the workers were all for blasting.

Roebling had a few reservations. He explained to the three “powdermen” and the crew chiefs that in such a dense atmosphere inside the caisson, even a moderate explosion might blow out the eardrums of
every worker in every room of the sunken box. Also, he explained, the compressed air in the caisson, already so filled with noxious gases as well as smoke and steam from the calcium limelights blazing at the end of their long iron rods, each torch throwing bizarre shadows and glare from its blue-white luminous jets, might become totally unbreathable when the smoke from an explosion was added to the mix. And the vibration from the blast, explained Colonel Roebling, might damage the doors and valves of the air lock—eliminating their only escape from the pressurized compartments on the bottom of the river.

Big Bill used to describe to Paha Sapa how the powdermen would look at one another so soberly after these explanations. But Roebling had an even greater worry.

The way rubble and sand were removed from the working area in the caissons was via water shafts—two huge columns of water that were being held in suspension
above
the spaces where the men worked merely by the great pressure of the air inside the caisson. The bottom of each water shaft pipe was open and only two feet above the pool of water they kept beneath it; handy for shoveling debris into and easy to send down a bucket through the standing column of water, but what—asked the Chief Engineer—would happen if an explosion inside the caisson to break up the boulders (and it had to be
inside
the caisson, of course) depressed that pool and allowed the air to escape up the shafts?

Big Bill said that he and the other work chiefs and powdermen had stared blankly.

Bill Slovak imitated Colonel Roebling’s voice, distorted by the terrible air pressure there in the corner of the caisson where they had the discussion, and the effect was strange, with Big Bill’s vocabulary suddenly enlarged, his voice distorted, and his accent lessened:

—
It would be a total blowout, gentlemen. All the water suspended in that tall shaft above us, more than thirty-five feet today, perhaps all the water in both shafts, would erupt like a twin Vesuvius, and the compressed air that keeps us breathing and keeps the East River out would follow after it. I think that the eruption, seen from the outside, would rise at least five hundred feet. Parts of those workers nearest the water shafts would almost certainly be part of the extruded debris fountain. Then the full weight of the caisson, held up now only by the tremendous air pressure here,
would come crashing down, smashing and flattening all the blocks and braces and frames and the outer edges of the shoe itself. All of these interior bulkheads…

Big Bill said that at this point the cluster of work chiefs and workmen, including the three “powdermen” so eager to light a fuse, had looked around them in the caisson, their wide, white eyes looking even wider and whiter in the blazing blue-white glare from the calcium limelights.

—
… all of these interior bulkheads and supports would be crushed at once from the weight above. No one would have time to get to the air lock, or even to the narrow shafts serving the erupting geysers that were the water shafts until the blowout, and those fabrications of steel and iron—air shafts, air locks, water shafts, bracing, caisson shoe—would also be warped and crushed within seconds. And then the river would rush in, drowning any of us who might have survived the crushing force of the collapse.

The wide, white eyes, Big Bill told Paha Sapa (and sometimes five or six other listening miners) there in the black depths of the Holy Terror, then looked at one another a final time and turned back to Colonel Roebling.

—
So, gentlemen, this new crop of boulders here is extruding outside the shoe beyond our reach and doesn’t seem to want to surrender to our ministrations by sledge and spike. The caisson’s own weight will continue to drop it deeper, and the shoe and framing will be inevitably damaged unless those boulders are removed. Shall we risk using explosives? We should decide today. Now.

To a man, they voted to try it.

But first, Big Bill Slovak explained, Roebling brought down his revolver left over from his service in the Civil War and tried firing it with increasingly heavier powder charges.

No one was deafened. The reports, said Big Bill, sounded strangely muffled in the hyperdense atmosphere of the caisson.

Then the colonel had Big Bill and the other two “experts” set off small charges of actual blasting powder in a remote corner of the caisson while others sheltered in the farthest rooms, slowly increasing the charge with each test.

The water shafts did not blow out, even as the amount of powder approached that necessary to break up the seemingly impervious boulders. The air locks were not damaged. The vibrations destroyed neither the inner bracings nor the workmen.

Big Bill said in the Holy Terror—

—
The powder smoke, though, was a damned nuisance. We’d work for forty minutes or more in that thick, black cloud of smoke after each blast, not even being able to see the ends of our sledgehammers or pry bars, and I’d spit black phlegm the consistency of tar for weeks afterward.

But the results of a full charge were extraordinary. Boulders that would have held them up for days and damaged the settling caisson’s shoe were blown to bits in seconds, the bits then being pulverized and sent up the water shaft into the open world.

It was he himself, Big Bill told Paha Sapa, who suggested to Colonel Roebling that they adopt the miners’ technique of using a long steel drill hammered into the rock to create a hole for the blasting charge—the steam drill that they were all using at the Holy Terror in the Black Hills 1900 to 1903 hadn’t been invented yet in 1870 to ’71—and then the charge would be gently tamped in and set off. Big Bill, his hands twice the size of Paha Sapa’s, even at the decrepit old age of forty in the Holy Terror in 1902, had been in charge of the setting and tamping in the caissons.

In one eight-hour watch, said Big Bill, he and his two partners may have done twenty blasts. The other workers grew so used to the explosions that they—and the powdermen—would just calmly and slowly step into an adjacent chamber to escape all the flying rock and debris when an explosion was triggered.

Instead of descending six inches a week, as had been the case when they were breaking up boulders by hand, the Brooklyn caisson now dropped twelve to eighteen inches in six working days (everyone took Sundays off). Colonel Roebling raised Big Bill Slovak’s and the other powdermen’s pay twenty-five cents a week.

In March of 1871, when the Brooklyn caisson had reached its permanent home of solid rock 44 feet and 6 inches beneath the surface, Roebling had Big Bill and the men pump cement into it. The caisson had now become the foundation for the Brooklyn tower of the future bridge. Sunk that deep into the ancient Mesozoic bedrock of the East River, where no sea worms or other borers or normal agents of decay could get at them, Colonel Roebling had suggested that they—the caissons—might last a million years.

In May of 1871, when the New York caisson came sliding down the shipyard stays, 18-year-old Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak was riding on top of it like a sailor, helping guide it downriver to its final resting place in September. A year later, when the New York caisson had reached its own final depth of 78 feet and 6 inches—at a loss of many more lives to caisson disease due to the much greater pressure difference—Big Bill was the next to last man out as the cement pour to fill the interior was almost finished, offering his huge hand to help Colonel Roebling up as the air lock door swung shut a final time.

Many of the caisson workers took their low wages and went home after that, but Big Bill had then gone to work first on the Brooklyn Tower and, when that tower was completed in May of 1875, over to work on the New York Tower until its completion in July of 1875. He explained to Paha Sapa that he had swapped the blackness and pressure of the caissons seventy feet and more under the river for work dangling up to 270 feet
above
the East River. They used no safety harnesses. Their survival depended upon their sobriety and sense of balance and a simple bosun’s chair dangling from cable or scaffolds. When they worked atop the rising towers, they labored and lifted all day with their backs to a two-hundred-foot fall to the concrete-hard water below.

And then the dangerous spinning and spanning of the thousands upon thousands of miles of wire cable began. Big Bill Slovak learned that skill as well. He loved nothing as much as crossing the footbridge—a swaying, pitching four-foot-wide catwalk made of open slats swooping up to each tower at an angle of 35 degrees and more, all 200 feet and more above the river—and on the first day they’d begun spinning the strands of wire cable across, he and his boss, E. F. Farrington, had run back and forth across the entire river span of 1,595 feet and 6 inches of swaying footbridge at least fourteen times that one day alone.

Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak had loved every hour and day of his work on the Brooklyn Bridge, he’d told Paha Sapa a hundred times, and when the rest of New York and Brooklyn and America went crazy celebrating the official opening of the bridge on May 24, 1883, Big Bill had wept like a baby.

He was then thirty years old and had spent more than thirteen years of his life working for Colonel Roebling and the dream of the bridge. Suddenly… he didn’t know what his future held.

After six months of heavy drinking in New York, he’d finally headed west to the goldfields in Colorado and then the Black Hills. Every gold mine needed a good powderman. The pay was good in towns like Cripple Creek, he said, but the cost of whiskey and whores was correspondingly high.

The night Big Bill died in a cave-in—caused not by one of his own infinitely careful explosions but by sloppy work by some of the didn’t-give-a-fuck day supervisors on framing up the new support timbers on Horizontal Shaft Number 11—Paha Sapa was working a different shift. Instead of clocking in the next morning, he resigned, waited just long enough to be one of the few workers (and one Mexican woman) at Big Bill Slovak’s funeral in the windblown cemetery outside of Keystone, and then Paha Sapa used some of his money to buy a horse and took his young son and rode off north past Bear Butte onto the Great Plains.