John Henry, the Steel-Driving Man (Campfire Story)

The night JOHN HENRY was born, the sky lit up with lightning and the rivers ran backward. The baby came out kicking, reached right past his mama, and grabbed a hammer off the wall. 'This hammer,' he said, 'is gonna be the death of me.' Then he went to sleep.

JOHN HENRY grew up big. By the time he was ten he could carry a mule under each arm. By the time he was grown he stood taller than a doorframe, with shoulders as wide as a wagon and a laugh you could hear across three counties. And he never went anywhere without a hammer in his hand.

Back then, after the Civil War, the railroads were stretching across America. Wherever a mountain stood in the way, the railroad men had to cut a tunnel straight through solid rock. The way they did it was with steel drivers. One man held a long steel spike against the rock, and another swung a heavy HAMMER to drive it in, so they could pack the hole with blasting powder. HAMMER! HAMMER! All day long, deep in the mountain.

And the best steel driver on the whole Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was JOHN HENRY. He swung a twenty-pound HAMMER in each hand. He sang while he worked, and the other men sang with him, all of them keeping time to the ring of the steel. His partner, a little fellow named Li'l Bill, held the spikes and turned them after every blow. Li'l Bill was the bravest man on the line, because one miss from JOHN HENRY, and there'd be no more Li'l Bill.

One day a salesman rode into camp with a wagon. On the wagon was a big iron machine that hissed and huffed and puffed smoke. 'This is a STEAM DRILL,' he told the boss. 'It can drill more rock than any ten men, and it never gets tired, and it never needs paying. Buy one, and you can send your steel drivers home.'

The workers went quiet. Those men had families to feed. Then JOHN HENRY stepped forward. 'A man ain't nothing but a man,' he said. 'But before I let that STEAM DRILL beat me down, I'll die with this HAMMER in my hand.'

So the boss made a deal. JOHN HENRY against the STEAM DRILL, from sunup to sundown. If the machine drilled deeper, the boss would buy it. If JOHN HENRY won, the machine would go back where it came from, and the men would keep their jobs.

At sunup they started side by side, deep in the Big Bend Tunnel. The STEAM DRILL roared to life, chugging and shaking and spitting steam. And JOHN HENRY raised his HAMMER. HAMMER! HAMMER!

By noon the STEAM DRILL was ahead. Smoke filled the tunnel, and the men outside could hardly breathe. But JOHN HENRY just picked up his second HAMMER and swung both, one after the other, so fast the sparks flew like fireflies. HAMMER! HAMMER! HAMMER! Li'l Bill turned the spikes so fast his hands were a blur.

All afternoon they went at it. The STEAM DRILL rattled and clanked. JOHN HENRY sang, and his HAMMER rang like a church bell. Then, an hour before sundown, the STEAM DRILL coughed, and wheezed, and jammed in the hard rock, and stopped. The salesman kicked it. He banged on it. It wouldn't move.

And JOHN HENRY kept swinging.

When the sun went down, they measured the holes. The STEAM DRILL had drilled nine feet. JOHN HENRY had drilled fourteen. The men threw their hats in the air and cheered until the mountain echoed.

slow down and drop your voice for the ending

They buried him by the railroad tracks, with a HAMMER in his hand. And railroad workers say that when a train comes rolling through the Big Bend Tunnel at night, if you listen close, you can still hear it, deep in the mountain.

softly, slapping your knees slowly

Storyteller tips: the HAMMER cue is a rhythm, so keep the crowd slapping a steady beat through the race and speed it up when John Henry picks up his second hammer. Let the STEAM DRILL get louder and messier. For the ending, drop the volume and let the last hammer beats fade to nothing.

Some historians think John Henry was a real man, a Black railroad worker who drove steel in the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia or the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia in the early 1870s. The famous ballad about him is one of the most recorded songs in American history. After the story, talk about what it meant to be a worker when machines came along, and why people kept telling it.