PmWiki - UnknownUSA.JohnHenry

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Legendary steel-driving man. In our campaign, John Henry slew a Nephilim (in a battle misremembered as a race against a steam drill) to become America's reigning avatar of Strength.

Excerpted from http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/index.html :

: There are two John Henrys, the actual man and the legend surrounding him. Defining the first is a matter of assembling facts. He was born a slave, worked as a laborer for the railroads after the Civil War, and died in his 30s, leaving behind a young pretty wife and a baby. Pinning down the second, the legend, is not so easy. It's as varied as the thousands of people - menial workers, scholars, professional musicians - who have studied, sung and recorded it over the years.
: The story of John Henry, told mostly through ballads and work songs, traveled from coast to coast as the railroads drove west during the 19th Century. From what we know, John Henry was born a slave in the 1840s or 1850s in North Carolina or Virginia. He grew to stand 6 feet tall, 200 pounds - a giant in that day. As far as anyone can determine, John Henry was hired as a steel-driver for the C&O Railroad, a wealthy company that was extending its line from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio Valley. Steel drivers, also known as a hammer man, would spend their workdays driving holes into rock by hitting thick steel drills or spikes.
: It took 1,000 men three years to finish the C&O’s Big Bend tunnel. Hundreds of men would lose their lives to Big Bend before it was over, their bodies piled into makeshift, sandy graves just steps outside the mountain. John Henry was one of them. As the story goes, John Henry was the strongest, fastest, most powerful man working on the rails. He used a 14-pound hammer to drill, some historians believe, 10 to 20 feet in a 12-hour day - the best of any man on the rails.
: One day, a salesman came to camp, boasting that his steam-powered machine could outdrill any man. A race was set: man against machine. John Henry won, the legend says, driving 14 feet to the drill's nine. He died shortly after, some say from exhaustion, some say from a stroke.
: John Henry's life was about power - the individual, raw strength that no system could take from a man - and about weakness - the societal position in which he was thrust. To the thousands of railroad hands, he was an inspiration and an example, a man just like they who worked in a deplorable, unforgiving atmosphere but managed to make his mark.

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