Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-01-10
A WORK THAT KILLS.
HOW LIVES ARE SouANDERED iil
 THE LAKE TRAFFIC.

THE LAKE TRAFFIC. How Strong Men Work Hard, prink
 Heavily and Die Long Before They
 Should-Longshoreme Loading a ves-
 sel-The Fearfol Physical Results.
 Men are the cheapest animals on earth, and their lives are squandered in conducting the lake commerce as in battle; indeed, competi- tion is warfare, and men die in labor's ranks as they do on battlefelds where bullets thickly swarm. The longshoremen who toll | in the lake traffic work hard and drink heav- ! fly. saw the men who work on the coal | and iron docks at Buffalo and on the coal docks at Toledo. Almost without exception | they were broad shouldered, thick necked Irishmen. At Buffalo my steamer drew up to the iron dock just as another steamer moved away.
 "How many tons of rails do you want, captainr the foreman of the longshoremen | asked
 "Five hundred, and hundred tons of spikes and fishplates,m the captain replied
 eve have just finished loading 2CO0 tons in that steamer" nodding his head to indi- cate the departing vessel, 'and the men are | tired. It is supper time, captain" {" he added, | "and you will have to wait until the men | you"
 The sturdy Irishmen had been working
 continuously for twenty hours. Their flannel
 shirts were wringing wet with the sweat Of
 toil They were almost exhausted They
 walked slowly toward their boarding house,
 stopping on the way at a saloon to get a
 drink of whisky. At s o'clock they returned
 and began to run steel rails that weighed 54o
 pounds each into the hold of the ship. There l ic nf fo,,S of ilc pl1f
 docks. Two men laid rail on heavy hand
 truck, and one man wheeled it up an incline
 into the ship. All the men were bareheaded.
 All were clad in flannel. The work was ex-
 ceedingly heavy, and the truckmen strained
 painfully every time they wheeled their
 heavily laden trucks up the incline. sat on
 the rail of the ship watching the work and
 admiring the muscular development of the
 men who labored below me. Take them all
 in all, they were the most powerful men
 have ever seen. Presently it became dark
 A cold wave blew off the lake and over the
 wharf. Fires to give light to work by were
 built on the dock.
 After two hours passed in this excessively
 hard work, saw the overstrained muscles of
 the Irish truckmen twitch and jerk under
 their white skins as though turbulent creeks
 flowed there. They were almost exhausted
 But not a man flinched from his work. The
 foreman sent for a bucket of beer. When it
 was brought the tired men drank deeply.
 Sweat, laden with iron dust, rolled down
 their bodies in tiny rills. The beer did not
 seem to meet the imperious demands their
 systems made for stimulants. Presently a
 broad shouldered, bullet headed, black eyed i truckman slammed his truck down on the dock and said, loudly: "Curse the beer. There . is no strength in it at alb Then, turning to
 the foreman, he said: "Get a pailful of , whisky, or We will never get this iron loaded" A pailful of raw whisky was brought onto the dock. Man after man 7 raised the bucket to his lips, and drank freely
 of the fiery spirits. Then they worked with
 renewed energy. noticed that their muscles
 ccr,sed to twitch. They worked rapidly, and : trough they drank high proof spirits at short l intervals, the only apparent effect it had or r them was to cause their naturally fiery tenn i,ors to blaze little higher. Occasionally t men dropped the handles of their trucks pre- = paratory to fighting, but their foreman hae r them we'll in hand and controlled them witf ? few sharp spoken words of command, oI I hearing which they grasped the handles o s their trucks and resumed work, with many
 surly shakes of their head
 The mate of the vessel saw that was in 8 terested in the work, and that admired tho t physical perfection of the 1ongshoremen
 
 @ looking at the busy scene Finally he said 0 "I have seen hundreds, yes thousands of thes t men buried That gang" pointing to tn S busy workers over whom hickering bars O n light played, ''is prime gang. They ar 2 powerful young men. Not one of them vii g be on this dock in five years from tonight l. The work is too hard for men to do and live t These men work by the ton- They earn iron l. s4 to S7 per day. Night work is double pa.
 usually. Instead of quitting work when the s are tired they stimulate with whisky. Ihav 1t known them to work for thirty-six hours con 7, tinuously, and eight hours of that heavy labo a is sufficient to kill the devil. These men, s he continued, twill finish loading the steel a u about 1 o'clock tonight After they Qui e work every one of them will drink half l. pint of raw whisky before going to his board @ ing house. They will fling themselves o n their beds, clad in their wet clothing, and le d the heat of their bodies dry them while the IS lie in drunken slumber. At 5 years, if on 1t by chance lives to be so old, the longshorema e is broken down old man. They consum e themselves with hard work and hard liquor e Americans never do this work, and it is no e job that beer and cabbage stuffed Dutch s men banker after. Yes" he said carelessl n as he looked the gang over again, 'they ar Q powerful men, but they will all be dead i
 five years" He clambered down from tn
 rail and walked to his quarters whistlin
 gayly.
 IS At Toledo, Ohio, where we stopped to talk IT on 2,OOO tons of coal, there was another gan ?, of sturdy Irishmen who shoveled coal fror lr railroad cars into large iron buckets whic S. held a ton each. A wire rope which term 10 mated in a strong hook passed through put D. ley suspended from the arm of a derrick, an y the lower end passed around the drum of lr steam winch. When the buckets were file l. they were attached to the hook and elevate
 sufficiently high to clear the rail of the shiI is then the arm of the derrick was drawn owe 'r the deck of the vessel until the bucke 'e was directly over the open hatchway, int It which its contents were dumped. The cos le handlers who worked on this dock wer "a physcally almost the equals of the longshor' IS men who worked on the Buffalo iron docl IS Hour after hour these strong men bent owe 3, their scoop shovel, each man shoveling int y his own bucket. So oregular were their mov' It ments that timed them. They lifted an le cast a distance of four feet sixteen SCOOP n full of coal a minute. For twelve houI