Two others fell. A fourth was struck by a falling timber.
Once, while we were watching the men scrambling about upon the steel
members of the uncompleted cantilever arm, one of them thought something
was about to fall, and ran swiftly in, over a steel beam, toward the
body of the structure; whereafter, as nothing did fall, he was
unmercifully twitted by his fellow workers for having shown timidity.
Many of the men working on this bridge had worked on the older structure
paralleling it. This was true not only of the laboring men, but of the
engineers. Ralph Modjeski, the consulting engineer at the head of the
work (he is, by the way, a son of Madame Modjeska), was chief
draughtsman when the earlier structure was designed; W.E. Angier,
assistant chief engineer in the present work, was a field engineer on
the first bridge, and it is interesting to know that, in constructing
the approach to the old bridge he unearthed a Spanish halbert which, it
is thought, may date from the time of De Soto. These bridge engineers
and bridgebuilders move in a large orbit. Their last job may have been
in Mexico, in the far West, or in India; their next may be in France.
Many of the men here, worked on the Blackwell's Island bridge, on the
Quebec bridge (which fell), on the Thebes bridge over the Mississippi,
twenty miles above Cairo, on the Vancouver and Portland bridges over the
Columbia and Willamette rivers, and on the great Oregon Trunk Railway
bridges.
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