B e n c h m a r k e d u c a t i o n c o m p a n y Themes • Supply and Demand • Transportation • Compromise The Transcontinental Railroad Level S/44 Social Studies Skills & Strategies Anchor Comprehension Strategies • Make inferences Comprehension • Think about it • Summarize information • Use graphic features to interpret information Word Study/Vocabulary • Use context clues to determine word meaning Social Studies Big Idea • Technological advances in transportation had important economic, political, and cultural effects on the developing nation. TEACHER’S GUIDE
Transcript
B e n c h m a r k e d u c a t i o n c o m p a n y
Themes• Supply and Demand• Transportation• Compromise
The Transcontinental RailroadLevel S/44
Social Studies
Skills & Strategies
Anchor Comprehension Strategies
• Make inferences
Comprehension • Thinkaboutit
• Summarizeinformation
• Usegraphicfeaturestointerpretinformation
Word Study/Vocabulary • Usecontextcluestodetermine
wordmeaning
Social Studies Big Idea • Technologicaladvancesintransportation
Think About It • Set a Purpose for Reading• Discuss the Reading• Apply Comprehension Strategy:
Make Inferences• Use Graphic Features to Interpret
Information: Primary Source Documents
After Reading (page 11)• Administer Posttest• Synthesize Information: Skimming/
Summarizing Information
Writing Workshop (pages 12–13)• Model the Writing Process: Write a
Clues and Evidence Paragraph
Make Inferences as You Read (page 14)
Use Context Clues to Determine Word Meaning: Descriptions (page 15)
Inferences (page 16)
Build background: visualize previous experiences of railroads
Introduce/preview the book: read back cover, table of contents, skim chapters
Navigators Lesson Guides provide flexible options to meet a variety of instructional needs. Here is one way to structure this lesson.
Before ReadingBuild Background • Say: Close your eyes and picture a railroad. The railroad may be
one you have seen or a picture of one from a book. Now open your eyes and draw what you saw. Share drawings with group members.
• Ask: What do you think the railroad is made from? How do you think it was built? How do you think people traveled before the railroad was built? Explain that this book provides a history of how the transcontinental railroad was built and how it benefited American society.
• Draw a T-chart like the one shown. Create additional columns as needed when students pose other questions with possible multiple answers. Work with the group to list various answers. Students could also include their visualization of types of railroads, such as model railroads and cartoon railroads.
• Have students analyze each others’ answers. Ask: Where did your ideas come from? Why do you think these materials were used in the building of the railroad? What do you think travel-ing a long distance was like before railroads? (Possible answers: Students will describe visual images they have gotten from a variety of sources. Their knowledge of railroads and travel before railroads will be based on books and movies they have read or seen, or stories told to them by relatives. Many may have traveled modern railroads as well.)
Introduce the Book • Give students a copy of the book. Have them read the back
cover blurb. Ask: What do you think this book is about? (Possible answer: It’s about the first railroad that was built across the North American continent a long time ago.)
• Have students turn to the table of contents. Say: Which two chapters would you like to look over as a group? Allow students to offer suggestions and have them tell why these chapters interest them. There aren’t any right or wrong choices here, but students should make a choice as a group and state reasons why.
• Have students skim the chapter, looking at pictures and captions, diagrams, illustrations, and sidebars. Encourage students to ask questions about anything they see in the chapters they have cho-sen.
• Allow students to name any railroads they know or any railroad history with which they are familiar.
Administer Preassessment• Have students take Ongoing Assessment #23 on page 82 in the
• Use a real-life example of thinking about it. Say: Have you ever read a book and come to the end of a page and wondered what you just read? Whether you knew it or not, you were thinking about what you read. And often when you pause in your reading, or are interrupted, you find yourself thinking about the story or something amazing you just read. You’re revisiting some of the ideas in your reading. You’re asking what they mean.
When I get to the end of a page, or even the end of a paragraph that was filled with ideas, I pause and consider what I’ve just read. Putting the author’s ideas in my own words or my own thoughts helps to fix them in my head. I am then ready to absorb more ideas because I understand these first ones. Jotting these ideas down on self-stick notes helps me to remember them later.
• Read pages 2–3 aloud while students follow along. Try to antici-pate ideas and words in the text that might cause them to need to stop and think about what they’ve read. Stop and think as you read. Write the idea encountered on self-stick notes and place them in the book where the ideas occurred. Some ideas that readers might discover follow.
Gold and free land were available out west.
Half of the United States was unsettled except by Native Americans.
Railroads were the easiest way to travel back then.
The ways to get to the West Coast were difficult.
Set a Purpose for Reading • Ask students to read pages 4–7 silently to see what they can
find out about how the transcontinental railroad got started. At the end of each page, they should jot down in their reading journals or notebooks any ideas that they encounter or ques-tions they have about descriptive words. Tell them they will share their notes after reading the chapter. They should be try-ing to understand how the author is presenting ideas that prove a transcontinental railroad was needed and why it was built.
Good readers think about what they are reading. Thinking
about what is read helps readers stay engaged with the text
and enhances understanding. To use this strategy, readers
stop every so often and think about the text. They may ask
themselves, “What did I just read?” If they can’t remember big
ideas, details, cause-and-effect relationships, etc., they know
they need to reread the text.
Content InformationShare these interesting facts with your students.
• Most wagon trains contained 100 wagons. They used teams of oxen, not horses, because oxen were much stronger, ate local plants, and didn’t run away.
• Food and water became very expensive along the land routes to California. Flour that sold for $4 a barrel in the East could command $1 a pint half way there.
• Henderson Luelling drove a million-dollar wagon to Oregon in 1846. He loaded up with fruit trees and pampered them the whole way. Those trees produced over a million dollars’ worth of fruit in later years.
Minds-On/ Hands-On Activity
1. Allow students to use the board to draw a simple map of the local area between their homes and school. Obviously, these may vary greatly depending on the setting, urban or rural. The idea is for students to see the route that takes them to school via car, bus, or foot.
2. Now ask them to draw another route, an unexplored or nonexisting route to school from home. This could be an “as-the-crow-flies” direct route through the woods, over a river, or through a subdivision. (Students may need maps of their area to complete this activity.) Ask them to explain what would be involved in building a road that was level and straight through terrain that isn’t already leveled and cleared. This will help them envision what the transcontinen-tal railroad builders faced.
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Discuss the Reading • Ask students to share their ideas that they jotted down at the
end of each page. Discuss why these ideas were important to them as they read.
• Explain that later you will come back to these ideas after reading the whole book.
• Ask: How do the reasons for building the transcontinental railroad show what America was like at the time? (Answers will vary but could include many political issues, such as slavery, Native American wars, gold rushes, and the government’s role in development of land.)
Model Comprehension Strategy: Make Inferences • Tell students that the ability to make inferences in their reading
helps them to increase their understanding of the author’s ideas. Say: As I read the first chapter, I wondered how all these things happening in our country at that time led to the railroad. Even a simple statement makes me “read between the lines.” This means trying to interpret and understand other things that might be happening. The author can’t say everything. Good readers take what an author says and go one step further. They also write their inferences in a journal or on self-stick notes.
• Pass out the graphic organizer Make Inferences As You Read (blackline master, page 14 of this guide).
• Explain that as students read, they will complete the first seven rows together. The last four rows will be completed independently.
• Have students look at the book and follow along while you locate possible inferences they could make in chapter 1. Write the information on the graphic organizer as you find it. (You may want to make a chart-size copy of the graphic organizer or use a transparency.) Read page 2 aloud and say: We can make inferences about many statements the author made on page 2. Even the first sentence says people wanted to try to find gold. I will write this in the Statement column of the chart. Now you may think about what you just read and ask yourself why do people want gold? The author is implying that they wanted to be rich and were willing to risk their lives to go west for gold. I will write that in the Inferences column of the chart.
Informal Assessment Tips1. Watch students as they think
about what they read and write down their ideas.
2. In a folder or notebook, jot down what you see each student doing.
3. Students should be thinking about what they read as they read. Document students who are and are not using this metacognitive strategy.
4. If students are not thinking about what they read, remind them that they may fail to remember concepts from earlier in a chapter or book that are needed to understand later passages.
• Read page 3. Say: What is the author saying here? Why does he mention these four forms of transportation? (He’s describing the types of transportation available at the time. The railroad that will soon be available is the fourth choice.) I’ll put that in the Statement column. Notice that although he’s telling you about these forms of transportation, he’s implying that people chose them for different reasons. Different people preferred different risks or conveniences. Each type of available transportation had problems. This is why people wanted a railroad to the west. I’ll write that in the Inference column.
• Say: Now I can see what the author was implying. Ask: How does the author show the need for the railroad as a type of transportation to the West? (He shows there were dangers and time considerations in all other forms available and the railroad was the preferred method for traveling long distances.)
Use Context Clues to Determine Word Meaning: Descriptions• Have students find the word transcontinental on page 4. Point
out that this is a descriptive word that the author has used for effect. Say: When I read the word transcontinental, I see the author defines it in the next paragraph by describing it. I also look at the different parts of the word that each tell me some-thing about the meaning of the word. I can see the word conti-nent inside the larger word. I know this refers to America and the author mentions a railroad built across the country, which is the width of the North American continent. I can also see the prefix trans-, which means across. This describes the path of the railroad across the continent.
• Have students find the word surveyors on page 6. Point out that here again the author has used a descriptive word to give the reader a clear image of what the word means. Say: The word surveyors is used to give the reader an exact idea of the type of work these people did. They weren’t just explorers or soldiers or even railroad employees; they had a title. Their job was to sur-vey. You probably know this word from common use, which means to look out over an area. But surveyors do more than that. As you can see from how the author describes their job, they drew up a route on a map showing exactly where the rail-road had to go.
• Tell students that they will examine descriptive words again later in their reading.
2 (paragraph 1)
3
8 (paragraph 2)
9 (paragraph 2 &
3)
11
14 (paragraph 2)
17
20 (paragraph 1)
23 (paragraph 2)
28
Page # Statement Inference
People go west to find gold.
Each kind of trans-portation has prob-lems for travelers.
Make Inferences
People risk their lives to be rich.
Travelers preferred railroads but had to take risks on other forms.
Chapters 2–3
Apply Metacognitive Strategy: Think About It • Have students look at their journals to review the ideas they
recorded yesterday. Ask them if they have any other ideas they have thought about since they read chapter 1. Discuss these additional considerations. Remind students that thinking about what they’ve read helps them to be better readers.
• Say: Today we are going to think about what we read in two new chapters. Read pages 8–9 aloud while students follow along. Pause and think about what you have read as you move through the text. Write ideas on self-stick notes and place them in the book where the idea was found. Some possible ideas follow.
The Central Pacific had to lay track through huge mountains.
Railroads can’t climb steep slopes.
The Union Pacific had to deal with hostile Native Americans.
The transcontinental railroad forever changed the buffalo herds.
• Tell students that stopping to think about what they’re reading helps them to make inferences. When readers pause to consider the ideas they have encountered, they often realize expanded meanings in the text.
Set a Purpose for Reading Have students finish reading chapters 2 and 3 to learn about the
difficulties the workers faced in building the transcontinental rail-road. Remind them to look for descriptive words the author uses. Tell them they are to write down on self-stick notes or in their jour-nals or notebooks the ideas they discover. Help them to make infer-ences by asking: What else does the author mean by this state-ment?
Discuss the Reading • Have students go over some of the ideas that they noted when
they thought about what they read. Let them begin making inferences by probing the author’s secondary meaning. Have students share their level of understanding of these ideas.
• Have students help each other to analyze statements the author has made and they wrote down in their journals or self-stick notes. Remind students that the chapters that follow will probably help them to understand their inferences in greater detail.
• Ask students to think back to chapter 1 to consider any ideas they wrote down. Students should decide if these ideas have been echoed in these chapters. The need for the transcontinen-tal railroad when considered against the hardships required to build it is an example.
Content Information• Fifteen months before the Union
Pacific work crew got anywhere near the supply depot, there were already railroad engine repair shops, a telegraph office, a hat store, a newspaper, and two hotels built there.
• Native Americans ate or used every bit of the buffalo they hunted. Certain parts were eaten raw on the spot. Other meat was cooked on a stick over a fire or boiled in water. A type of sausage was also made. What couldn’t be eaten right away was cut into strips and dried in the sun. This way it would keep until later without spoiling.
• Work crews labored 500 miles ahead of the spot where the tracks were laid. Some crews cut the thousands of trees needed for a single mile of track. Other crews dug coal for loco-motives that hadn’t arrived yet. Track-layers were called “rust eat-ers.”
• Chinese workers were responsible for laying ten miles of track in one day with the help of eight Irish rail handlers. They drove spikes into 3,520 rail lengths and 25,800 wood-en ties. Chinese workers were paid $1 a day, half of what other workers were paid, and they had to pay for their board.
Minds-On/ Hands-On Activity
1. Have students experience what it would’ve been like to create a sup-ply depot in the middle of nowhere. Volunteers can suggest the basic provisions needed for a large crew of workers, including water, food, medical supplies, and tents or some other kind of shelter. Because of the threat of attack from hostile Native Americans, some kind of protection was also needed.
2. Have students lay out a sample depot by sketching it on the board. Encourage student responses by ask-ing about the needs of the workers and how they would be met.
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Chapters 2–3 (continued)
Guide Comprehension Strategy: Make Inferences• Review making inferences by reviewing the graphic organizer.
Explain that as a group you are going to revisit chapters 2 and 3 in order to make inferences.
• Ask students to skim page 8 to locate a cause-and-effect relation-ship. Say: The author says only fifty miles of track were laid in the first two years. Write the statement on the chart. Remind students that the author’s statement implies something. They, as readers, need to infer or interpret his idea. Now ask: What does the author mean by this statement? (Working in the mountains was so hard that there was little progress). Let’s write that in the Inference col-umn for page 8.
• Follow the same procedure for pages 9, 11, 14, and 17. Use the completed graphic organizer on this page for suggested answers.
Use Context Clues to Determine Word Meaning: Descriptions• Have students find the word immigrants on page 14. Point out
that the author used this word for a specific purpose. Say: When I read the word immigrants I have a very specific description of the type of people the author is talking about. These aren’t just workers, they are people who have come from another country. This matters because as the author notes, they “had left their native homes in search of a better life.” This tells me as a reader both the definition of the word and that they would work hard and put up with the difficulties of this job. This is like an inference contained in the word itself. A descriptive word gives the reader more information than a general term.
• Have students find the word discriminated on page 18. Point out that the author used this word to indicate exactly how the Chinese immigrants were treated. Say: When I read the word discriminated, the author is telling me all sorts of things about the treatment of these people. The word describes how the laws singled them out in a way others were not. This tells me that the Chinese immigrants took on the hard work of the Central Pacific Railroad because these laws prevented them from earning money as prospectors.
• For more practice, have students complete the blackline master Use Context Clues to Determine Word Meaning: Descriptions on page 15 of this guide.
Informal Assessment Tips1. Watch students as they help
complete the statement and inference chart.
2. In your folder, jot down what you see the students doing as they complete the activity with you.
3. Ask yourself: Are students having problems with this strategy? if so, what are the problems? Are students mastering this strategy? If so, how do I know?
4. For struggling students, review the strategy using the compre-hension strategy poster. Use both sides of the poster if needed.
1. curiosities
2. guy wires
3. marvel
4. relentless
a. natural wonders
b. things that look strange
a. support cables
b. telegraph connections
a. something amazing
b. something that doesn’t work
a. lacking any real power
b. never ending
2 (paragraph 1)
3
8 (paragraph 2)
9 (paragraphs 2 &
3)
11
14 (paragraph 2)
17
20 (paragraph 1)
23 (paragraph 2)
28
Page # Statement Inference
People go west to find gold.
Each kind of trans-portation has prob-lems for travelers.
Only fifty miles of track were laid in the first two years.
Railroad disrupts Native American way of life.
Supplies had to sail around South America to California from the East.
The owners of the company were care-less about paying their workers.
Workers called the sound of hammers the Anvil Chorus.
Make Inferences
People risk their lives to be rich.
Travelers preferred railroads but had to take risks on other forms.
Working in the mountains was so hard that there was little progress.
Native American tried to stop railroad by attacking workers.
These supplies were not already available in California.
The owners were greedy because they made fortunes and still didn’t pay workers.
It sounded like a song sung by a choir of hammers hitting metal anvils.
Apply Metacognitive Strategy: Think About It • Have students look at their journals to review ideas they jotted
down during the last lesson. Ask them if they’ve had any addi-tional ideas since thinking about chapters 2 and 3. Discuss responses. Remind them that thinking about what they’ve read is what good readers do to be actively involved in their reading.
• Say: Today we are going to make inferences about statements in the text.
• Read pages 20–21 aloud while students follow along. Pause to think about what you have read as you read. Some ideas follow.
Congress changing the rules benefited the Central Pacific.
People enjoyed the race between companies.
Two tracks ran side by side even after they met.
Congress decided where the two railroads would meet.
• Ask: What are you going to do as we read the next two chap-ters? (Students should remember to think about what they are reading and write the ideas they encounter on self-stick notes or in their journal or notebook.)
• Remind students that thinking about what they’ve read will help them to make inferences. Thinking about the ideas in the text helps them understand the author’s meaning.
Set a Purpose for Reading • Have students read the rest of the book silently. Ask them to
write at least one major idea on self-stick notes or in their journals. Explain that pages 26–30 consider the results of the transcontinental railroad. Ask them to write at least one idea from the information on these pages. Ideas can be an inference or a statement that contains an inference. Remind them to use context clues to figure out difficult words.
Discuss the Reading • Ask students to share their questions from the reading and
encourage other students to come up with ideas about the answers.
• Have students highlight the questions that they were unable to answer when reading the chapter.
• Ask: How did the transcontinental railroad change the way Americans thought about their young country? (They considered the western territories and states to be part of the country for the first time.) Why are railroads not as popular for transportation today as airplanes or cars? (Airplanes are faster and cars are more convenient now that we have good roads leading almost everywhere.)
Content Information• The last spike driven in the transcon-
tinental railroad was the work of unnamed Chinese workers. They did the job after Leland Sanford missed. There were also two golden spikes and two silver spikes. All were ceremonial, as they would have been smashed by a heavy hammer blow.
• The “Big Four” were all Sacramento, California businessmen who knew almost nothing about building railroads. The chief engineer and sur-veyor Theodore Judah had a dream of a transcontinental railroad and turned to the only men he knew who had any money.
• Leland Stanford opened up a store that sold mining supplies. Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins opened a grocery business together. Charles Crocker also had a business. Huntington was perhaps the best businessman of them all and ran the Central Pacific with an iron hand.
Minds-On/ Hands-On Activity
1. Line up 6, 8, 10, or more individual chairs, as space allows, in rows of two. Have students sit in each chair with little room between rows and chairs. Do one of the exercises or some of the reading while they are cramped together like this. The idea is for them to experience what a long train ride would be like over a hundred years ago when railway cars were uncomfortable and crowded.
2. Complete the activity by having the students in the chairs follow a clapped cadence that you or another student lead. Clap with a pause between each beat but the students only clap with the leader on the third clap, raising their hands on the second clap. With each clap, the last two students in chairs stand up and carry their chairs to the front of the column. Repeat this with clapping to simulate a rail-road work gang laying track.
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Chapters 4–5 (continued)
Informal Assessment Tips 1. Watch students as they ask
questions. Ask yourself: How have the students progressed with thinking about what they’ve read? What problems are they still having? What questions pop into my mind when I read ideas I don’t quite understand?
2. Watch students as they com-plete the graphic organizer independently. Ask yourself: Who is still struggling with this strategy? What are they doing or not doing that makes me think they are struggling? How can I help them?
3. Jot down your thoughts in your folder or notebook.
• Have students look at all the ideas they wrote down in their journals. Discuss how they might make inferences from these statements. You might want to assign pairs of students to research possible inferences and report back to the class to see if they were accurate. Make sure students understand where they need to go to find the answers. Discuss the importance of consulting primary reference sources to get accurate information that will help them make inferences from statements.
Apply Comprehension Strategy: Make Inferences• Review the graphic organizer with students and explain that you
want them to identify cause-and-effect relationships in chapters 4 and 5, pages 20, 23, 28, and 30, independently.
• Ask if they have any questions about making inferences before they begin.
• Monitor their work and intervene if they are having difficulty completing the graphic organizer.
• Discuss student responses together.
• For more practice, have students complete the blackline master Inferences on page 16 of this guide.
Use Graphic Features to Interpret Information: Primary Source Documents • Have students find the newspaper clipping on page 25 and the
map and poster on page 26–27. Explain that these sources of information are primary sources because they date from the time of the transcontinental railroad. Note that the reader can learn how events were presented in the 1800s. These types of documents often contain more accurate information because they have not been confused by retelling over a long period of time. Good readers are good researchers who find out the truth of an historical event by consulting a variety of accurate versions prepared by those who were there at the time.
• Ask students to locate primary source documents from chapters 2 or 3. These include photos, maps, or captions.
Paragraph
1
2
3
Statement
Dr. Johnson could never find any record of the man.
Synthesize Information: Skimming/Summarizing Information• Have students skim through any chapter to determine information
that is important versus information that is interesting but not critical. Point out that sometimes information can be both important and interesting. Create a T-chart like the one below. Have student summarize the information they locate and help you complete the chart with their findings.
• Help students determine the difference between types of information by asking the following questions. They will also help students to decide what is information in the first place:
Can this statement be summed up as a fact?
Does this fact relate to the entire story of the transcontinental railroad?
Is this fact merely a curious detail that entertains the reader?
• Have students document their answers as they fill in the chart. If time allows, share charts within the small group.
• Use the information from the summarizing charts to have students compare and contrast the types of information they have collected. Say: To skim well and make a good summary, we compare and contrast the types of information we have collected.
• Ask: What comparisons and contrasts can we make about the treatment of the Irish and Chinese immigrants as laborers on the transcontinental railroad in chapter 3? (Chinese immigrants were kept from making as much money as miners. Irish immi-grants weren’t paid promptly by the owners. Both groups of immigrants needed to work badly and they suffered hardships.) Say: We can show this comparison and contrast in a Venn diagram.
• Score assessments and determine if more instruction is needed for this strategy.
• Keep group assessments in a small-group reading folder.
• Look closely at students’ responses. Ask yourself: Why might this student have answered the question in this manner? For in-depth analysis, discuss responses with individu-al students.
• Use posttests to document growth over time, for parent/teacher conferences, or for your own records.
Interesting Information Important Information
Irishno pay
Both hard work
Chinese laws against
mining
Model the Writing Process: Write a Clues and Evidence Paragraph • Remind students that throughout the book The Transcontinental
Railroad, they made inferences from the author’s statements.
• On chart paper or the board, create a visual map like the one below showing the inferences that can be made from a basic statement.
• Use the writing model to show how the information from the visual map can be used to write a paragraph that uses clues and evidence in the text to support inferences you made.
• Have students work together to find clues and evidence in the text that supports these inferences, or have them skim and summarize for information as they did in the Synthesize Information activity. Encourage them to organize information they find in a chart similar to the one shown.
• Allow class time for students to research some of the related historical information, like the material on clipper ships, found in the text. Group students who want to research certain topics together to increase input. Remind students to look for evidence or clues that back up any inferences they make.
Informal Assessment Tips
1. Observe students as they participate in the group writing project. Identify those who might need additional assistance during the various stages of the writing process. Jot down notes in your journal.
2. During conferences, keep notes on each student’s writing behaviors. Ask yourself: What evidence do I have to support the conclusion that this student is writing well or poorly? What can I do about it?
3. For struggling students, practice writing sentences containing cause-and-effect relationships; then move to short paragraphs.
In the rush to build the transcontinental railroad, crude bridges were built spanning deep river gorges. One of the scariest curiosities was the Dale Creek Bridge. It was over 600 feet long and was taller than a twelve-story building. Yet its supports looked like little more than toothpicks. If it weren’t for the guy wires stretched tightly, the wind would’ve blown it down in a second. And how that wind could blow! The open Laramie plains of Wyoming allowed the gales to whip the railroad cars at the end of the train. They threatened to knock the whole locomotive off the tracks. Yet the bridge was an engineering marvel that made jaws drop. An iron bridge replaced it in 1876 but it, too, still had to have guy wires to keep its shape in the relentless wind.
Name ________________________________________ Date __________________
Use Context Clues to Determine Word Meaning: Descriptions
Directions: Read the following passage. Complete the exercise at the bottom of the page.
For each underlined word, circle the letter of the correct definition. Explain how descriptions helped you choose that definition.
1. curiosities
2. guy wires
3. marvel
4. relentless
a. natural wonders
b. things that look strange
a. support cables
b. telegraph connections
a. something amazing
b. something that doesn’t work
a. lacking any real power
b. never ending
Name ________________________________________ Date __________________
InferencesDirections: Identify the statements and inferences in the paragraphs. Complete the graphic organizer using information from the passage.
Many people believe that the real John Henry was born in 1839 in Tennessee. Some say he was from Alabama. But John Henry’s story became a song sung across America. In 1929, Guy B. Johnson, a university professor went to find the real John Henry. He had heard many different versions of the song. But Dr. Johnson could never find the man.
The story goes that John Henry was the biggest, strongest steel driver on any railroad work gang. He could swing a hammer ten hours a day, six days a week blasting tunnels hundreds of feet long though solid rock. When the first steam engines came along, John set out to prove a human being could beat a machine. In doing so, he would save thousands of jobs. Of course, he won, yet there is no record of this match.
In time, the steam engine replaced most of the workers anyway. The song says at the end of the race John Henry died. His heart was broken. That isn’t true. John Henry lives on every day, in legend and in song.
