Sitting on Dynamite
I
I HAD just returned to Seattle from several weeks of bridge building and mountain climbing at Mount Rainier. My appetite and weight had expanded, but my pocketbook was rather flat. Since, however, I had landed in Seattle for the first time the previous year with a lone nickel in the pocket of a pair of torn overalls, and now I should be able to leave the city for California with two dollars in the pocket of a complete hiking outfit, I considered the year well spent.
A person willing to work at rough labor need have no fear of empty pockets while on the road. Lumber camps, construction outfits, and road gangs provide bed and board for their employees. The same is true of farmers and mine operators. I expected to land a ten-day job soon after leaving Seattle, and when the money earned at that had carried me as far as it could I would get another job. Several hundred thousand men are traveling about the country every year doing this.
I was well equipped. My trunks were stored in Seattle, and all I carried with me was a lumberjack’s ‘turkey’ containing blankets, a change of work clothes, toilet articles, and a clean shirt and trousers. I felt no need of a dinner jacket. I wore an O. D. shirt, breeches, and leggins that remained from my army outfit. I did without a cap. One motorist who gave me a lift said that since I wore no cap he could get a good look at my face and decide whether it was safe to pick me up. I never had to ask for rides; usually motorists picked me up of their own accord.
Rides are hardest to get where traffic is thick. I bought a ticket on the boat going down the Sound to Tacoma, whence the Pacific Highway led to California. My pile dropped to less than a dollar-fifty.
Tacoma is still a lumberman’s town. Extensive forests of giant spruce and Douglas fir surround it. The more easily logged-off lands were slashed a generation earlier, but many stands of virgin timber are still scattered over the near-by hills. The second-growth trees would make an Easterner think of the early forests of Wisconsin. Wherever one looks in either summer or winter he sees the green of tree-clad hills.
Beyond the city I had my first lift. A light truck covered with brown tarpaulin stopped beside me. On the canvas were the letters U. S. A. Two young soldiers on the driver’s seat made room for me, mistaking me for a national guardsman returning to camp. They were regulars from the 10th Field Artillery, at Camp Lewis, about twenty miles south of Tacoma. In return for this information I told them that I had been in the service at summer camps back East, and was now heading for California.
The concrete of the Pacific Highway extended mile after mile through second-growth timber. Most of the land was unfenced, and the trees stood about in beautiful park-like clusters. Puget Sound was near enough so that we could catch occasional glimpses of its island-dotted waters, with the snowcapped Olympic Mountains on the farther side. To the east were the jagged white ridges of the Cascades. The cone of lofty Mount Rainier stood out boldly above the lower summits. I tried to trace on it the contours that marked Paradise Valley.
During the war Camp Lewis had been one of the most important of the army encampments. Now it was half torn down. Row after row of brown frame barracks and supply depots stretched across a sandy flat. Roofs were caved in; windows were broken; torn screen doors sagged on rusty hinges. A small section of the camp was in good order. That was where the regulars and t he nat ional guards stayed.
The soldiers had a mess table to stick their legs under, but I was not so fortunate. It would be necessary for me to slaughter a few buffalo nickels before I could eat. Two men were repairing a side track on a railroad that paralleled the highway. Crossing to them, I inquired for the nearest roadside store or lunchroom.
‘Nisqually is about two miles on down the road,’ said one of the section men. ‘Or you might go back about a quarter of a mile to Green Park. Then there is Dupont a little ways down this side road. You can see the houses from here.’
Nisqually was on the road to California. This was the third attempt I had made to reach the land so much advertised; twice I had failed. No voice whispered in my ear that my immediate future would depend on my choice of a place to buy ‘hot dogs.’ Through the fir trees I could see a few of the houses of Dupont . Why was it so far off the main road?
The isolation of the settlement drew me toward it. A number of small bungalow houses all of the same general type lined the main street and two side streets. They were neat, but lacked the pretty individualisms that grace private homes. A few houses were larger than the others. These were set a little apart, with welltended lawns and flower beds.
An attractive general store stood on a corner lot near the upper end of the village. I entered it, hunted up the bakery counter, and ordered something to eat. A young clerk wrapped up cinnamon rolls and a length of sausage for me.
‘You are a new man, are n’t you?’ observed the clerk. ‘Are you going on the powder line?’
‘I’m new enough to this place,’ I answered. ‘I just came off the Pacific Highway. What powder line are you talking about?’
‘Oh, I thought you were working for the company,’ he said. ‘The Dupont Company makes dynamite here. They have a plant near t he Sound, and this is a company village. One of their mixing houses burned down this morning. They are putting on new men to clear up the wreckage and rebuild the house, and I thought you might be one of them.’
All that ‘listened good’ to me. A week’s work, plus a week’s pay, minus a week’s board bill, would suit me. When further questioning brought out information that the company ran a hotel for bachelors, I set off down the street looking for an employment office, which I found on the first floor of the hotel. It was closed. The landlady told me that the manager was in Tacoma taking care of men injured in the morning’s fire.
‘If it is work you want, better stick around until to-morrow morning,’ she said. ‘You are sure to get a job. Several men have quit; some always do after every accident on the powder line. Men will be needed on the labor gang to take the place of those who move up to make powder. The manager will be here again about eight tomorrow morning.’
Four-thirty was quitting time at the plant. By five o’clock the street was full of autos. Later, I found that there were more autos than families in the village. Wages were high, and the people had decided to live while they remained alive. Men streamed into the hotel, passed their lunch kits to the chef, and washed up for supper. The plant was too far away for the men to return for dinner, and all carried lunches.
About forty unmarried men lived at the hotel. I noticed they were older than the run of migratory workers; the average age was about thirty-five. Most of the men were former hoboes, soldiers, or lumberjacks about ready to settle down. Powder making is no work for a man anxious to have a secure job. Any day it is apt to move away from him; quite often with him. Most of the men took their continued existence as a matter of course. They married local girls, and rented a house from the company. Some bought houses just outside the company’s territory.
The supper I sat down to that night was the best I ever ate in a company hotel or camp. It surpassed most hotel cooking. The cook had been a chef on ocean liners. Now past middle age, he was willing to settle down near his family, who lived in Tacoma. The stability of labor among the unmarried men at Dupont, was due in no small measure to the table he set. I had intended to stay only a week, but many months passed before I left.
II
Next morning I met the employment manager. Six other migratory workers and I were examined superficially by the company doctor and pronounced serviceable. We signed a number of papers. One was an acknowledgment that we knew the work was dangerous to life and limb; another gave company officials the right to search us and our belongings at any time for matches or other material dangerous to powder manufacturing.
The manager made no bones about the nature of the work. Two men had been burned the day before, one so badly he would die. As maintenance men we should be in little danger. We were not to carry matches or lighters into the grounds, but we could use our ordinary work clothes and shoes. As it was late, he took us up to the plant in his car.
We rode for a mile or so through a beautiful forest of second-growth timber. The road emerged into a fire clearing, down the centre of which extended a high woven-wire fence topped with several barbed wires. The fencing stretched to the right and left out of sight. All the plant was protected by it. It was more a warning of danger than a barrier against trespassers.
A closed gate that guarded the entrance was operated by a gatekeeper from inside’ a house. Along the road outside the gate were boxes on posts, containing matches for the convenience of smokers leaving the plant at quitting time. While at work, most of the men chewed ‘snoose’ (snuff).
The grounds owned by the Dupont Company comprised several thousand acres. Most of it was second-growth woodland that lay between the Pacific Highway and Puget Sound. Ships owned by the company brought nitrate direct from Chile to the plant dock. As we drove farther into the grounds I could see little houses scattered about in the woods. Those housing dynamite powder, or machinery for manufacturing it, were protected by thick earthen embankments, called ‘bear cages.’ At the bottom these were more than a dozen feet thick. The tops were three feet wide, and as high as the secondstory roofs. The bear cages were pierced by several exits.
For safety’s sake the manufacturing process was greatly subdivided, each operation being carried on in separate houses by as few men as possible. The houses w ere spaced at intervals of more than a city block, and the powder in process of manufacture was carted from house to house on a narrow-gauge railroad. All the bulk powder was handled by man power. The small cars were pushed by men.
Manufactured goods, raw material, and supplies were moved by electric locomotives. A central heating plant distributed steam, water, electricity, and compressed air to all the buildings. The maintenance force comprised section men, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and many skilled mechanics, in addition to the labor gang.
My first job was to assist in clearing up the wreckage from the previous day’s fire. The house had been consumed. Wherever the bear cage’s retaining wall of plank had been partially destroyed, the earth had caved in, burying the timbers. Some which we dug out were still smouldering. The lumber was thrown in the centre of the clearing and burned. The scrap iron that remained from the burned building, and the machinery, were piled alongside the railway for later removal.
The bear-cage walls were leveled to make room for the new retaining walls of concrete.
Andy Christenson and his partner had been working together in the mixing house when it caught fire. Andy was a short, chunky Swede with a laughing quip for everybody. Nothing melancholy about him. I have forgotten the last name of his partner. It is on a tombstone now. Andy’s is n’t, but it deserves to be put where all may honor it.
Andy and John were alone in the house. They were engaged in mixing unused war powder into a composition for farm blasting purposes. They took dry, ground powder, filler, and liquid nitroglycerine and dumped them together in a circular trough. In the centre of this was a post supporting a pivoted cross beam like the front axle of a car. On either end of the beam was a huge wheel, which looked like an overgrown auto wheel. These wheels circled round and round in the trough, mixing the ingredients for the dynamite. Power was supplied by an electric motor placed outside the house for safety.
Tiny wheelbarrows stood about to receive the mixed powder. Two doors and two safety windows — French windows that open on impact — gave egress from the building to the space between the house and the bear cage. The bear cage was pierced by two openings for the trolley that brought the filler and by one for the narrow-gauge railway.
It is seldom that the cause of an explosion or fire can be found definitely. When the ‘big noise’ happens, everything goes, including men and evidence. A fire is usually as bad. Place a man in a room where everything is dusty with dry powder, including the air; add several hundred pounds of loose powder and a tankful of N. G. (nitroglycerine), introduce a spark anywhere, and a fire hotter than any burning oil well is the instantaneous result.
Andy lived to tell the tale of that fire. He and his partner had a batch in the trough with the mixing wheels revolving round and round in it. The wheels were pressing the powder down and then scraping it away from the sides of the trough. The men were joking. John was standing across the trough from Andy and near the wheelbarrows. Between them were the wheels, stirring up the powder. It was fascinating to watch them circle smoothly round and round. Andy was watching them that day — that is why he lived to tell the story.
A wheel circled past Andy in its endless track. He saw the smooth rim dip down into the trough, and rise from the powder. Then — a glow of fire on the rim as it rose. Some foreign substance had got into the powder and caused friction under the wheel. The spark multiplied on the rim and rained back into the powder-filled trough.
Andy yelled at his partner, whirled, and jumped through a safety window. Before he could rise to his feet everything inside the bear cage was flameswept. Then he was running through a tunnel in the bear cage with his clothes burning off him.
While clearing up the wreckage the next day, I found the imprint of a man’s shoe charred lightly into a tie a little distance from the mixing house. The footprint pointed back toward the mixing house. The men working with me crowded about; they looked at the footprint and then at the smouldering ruins. On the cinders beside the footprint was a bit of charred blue work shirt.
Yesterday Andy — young, cheerful, Scandinavian Andy — had stood momentarily on that tie with his shoes burning off his feet, with his clothes falling in charred fragments from his body. He had paused there in his flight to stand facing the fire. Loads of loose powder just mixed with N. G. were burning; the bear cage was a raging volcano spouting flames hundreds of feet into the air. Somewhere between the bear cage and the fiercely burning house was Andy’s partner. He had stumbled over the wheelbarrows and fallen twice before he could get out of the mixing house. He was staggering about in that hell, blinded, beating against the earthen embankments, unable to find the opening that led to life. Andy heard him calling.
The other powder men running toward the fire from their houses saw the stocky youngster rub his hand across his face as though to clear his eyes. His hair and eyebrows were burned off; his body was blackened, and great burns lay under the black, He had just escaped by an infinitely narrow margin from a blaze that was literally melting everything it touched. Yet his partner had not escaped. He was still in it and calling for Andy. In answer to that call Andy ran again into the terrific flames.
Then two smoking objects staggered out from the opening. The first was John, stumbling, falling, but ever shoved onward. Behind him came Andy, tearing off his friend’s burning clothes with one hand and what remained of his own with the other.
The fire sirens were sending out warnings all over the plant. Men rushed out from their houses, lest theirs should be the next to go. Meanwhile capable hands were beating out the fire in the burning clothes. John was unconscious from the pain. Forgetful of his own injuries, Andy kept begging those aiding him to devote themselves to his friend. First aid was applied. Soon a swift motor car took the injured men to Tacoma, where doctors waited.
Months later Andy returned to the plant. We worked together shortly before I left Dupont. His face was uninjured, but inch after inch of his body had been skin-grafted. John did not return. He had remained in the flames too long for mortal flesh to survive. The day following the fire, death ended his suffering.
The Dupont Company was not forgetful of Andy’s heroism. He was given five shares of Dupont common stock, and all his expenses at the hospital were paid. He also got his job back. He took it, and is still working there. He has joined the married men and has a home of his own. Perhaps he bosses it. He was a very brave man.
III
During the first, week at Dupont, I worked at odd jobs about the plant. As soon as the wreckage was cleared up I was put on the concrete gang rebuilding a nitrate house. Some of the time I spent at the docks loading supplies on the dinky cars. The mountain trip had put me in good trim and I enjoyed the rough work. I had been given a good room at the hotel; grub was the best ever. I began to think about staying on at the plant for a month. A good road stake would be useful in California during the winter months.
But the pay on the labor gang was only four dollars a day. I knew that the men working on the powder lines got much more. Their work was lighter and their hours were shorter. The thought of danger did not bother me. If I lived, I should have the money for California. If I went up with the ‘big noise,’ I should need no money. I asked the civil engineer in charge of our gang to put my name on the waiting list for powder work. Before the week was over I was transferred to the powder-drying line.
A special outfit is provided for powder workers. Before I was allowed on the line the foreman took me to the supply house. The storekeeper passed out a pair of leather shoes. The heels were wooden-pegged, the soles were sewed on, and the laces nearly made me throw up my job. They were untipped, and what things I said while trying to get them through the small eyelets in the shoes!
The overalls and jumper were sans pockets. All metal was taboo. I was allowed to keep my work shirt, underwear, and socks, but the pockets were slit so that no friction-producing material could lodge in them. Metal belt buckles were ruled out. The powder men were provided with small change houses where they could shift from home clothes to powder clothes. These contained showers and wash basins, and we also used them for lunchrooms.
After the World War, much of the unused ammunition was shipped back to the powder plants for transformation into peaceful forms. Most of it consisted of charges for the big guns. These charges were in the shape of short, rounded sticks about as big as a finger. They were dumped into a hopper, where knives cut them up. To neutralize fire hazards, a continuous stream of water flowed over the powder which was being reground. After the powder was ground fine the water was removed in centrifugal wringers. The damp powder was loaded on a car and pushed to the screening house. After screening, the powder was again loaded on trucks holding about a quarter of a ton. Three of these trucks were rolled on a car and pushed down the narrowgauge railway to the drying houses.
My new job was with the gang that loaded the drying houses with wet powder and emptied them again when the powder was dry. Four drying houses overlooked the Sound. We could stand on the platforms of our houses and watch the steamers ploughing down to Olympia. The Nisqually River flowed into the Sound below us; its flats were covered with thousands of geese and ducks during the fall and spring. Far across the waters we could see the beautiful Olympic Mountains.
Each drying house had one main room, with four doors opening on a covered platform that lay between the house and the bear cage. Our only light in the house came from covered electric globes on the platform. The floor, like those in all powder houses, was covered with battleship linoleum. Nails were of soft copper. At the back of the house was a separate room containing an electric fan that forced air over steam pipes and on through the house. When we had a house charged with wet powder, we turned on the heated air. The powder would dry usually in a day, or a day and a half. Then we would shut off the heat, and sift the dry powder into fibre drums, which were weighed up and sent to the mixing house via the railway.
To charge a house, a truckful of powder would be wheeled inside. One man would take his place before it w ith a wooden scoop. His job was to spread evenly a scoopful of wret powder on a cloth-bottomed tray. His partner supplied him with empty trays and stacked the filled ones, which were placed on top of each other as high as one could reach. When charged, a house contained many tons of powder. There was little danger in charging a house, but when the powder was dry we watched our step.
The dry powder was like dust. We rubbed it through a screen to break up any lumps. Boy, how dusty the house became! We were lucky if we could see the sieve we were using. The air was choking. Our skins and clothing were coated with layers of the powder. We carefully avoided any friction, for the powder lay everywhere. No tray could be slid along another; drums were rolled carefully; we were even supposed to lift our feet when we walked.
Dusty powder was bad, but ground cordite was worse. Cordite is used on battleships. It looks like long strings of macaroni, with a hole in the centre to aid the firing blast. None of the men on the drying line had made any cordite during the war. We were puzzled at first to discover how such a long hole was rammed down the cordite. But an old-timer told us that the hole had always been there — they had merely built the cordite around it.
Neither powder nor nitroglycerine ever gave me a headache, but what a ‘hangover’ cordite left! The fumes from it were terrible. When a houseful of it was drying out, a dense yellow mist rolled up from the ventilators. It was so slow drying that we rushed its preparation. Often before the fumes were all cleared out of the house we would start sifting it into the drums. Before one had been in the room a minute, pains began to stiffen the cords of the neck. The inside of one’s head was a solid ball of suffering. After a while a numbness eased the pain. I never did get used to the stuff.
Our gang was charging a house one morning about a month after I went on the powder line. The trucker was slow, and many drums of dry powder were on the platform awaiting him. I was stacking trays. Between me and the door were loaded trucks of wet powder. Suddenly, as I faced the doorway, I felt a rush of air strike the back of my neck. It was the first blast of an explosion. I knew instantly what it meant. The only thought I had was, ‘Here goes!’ The next instant a heavy, dull boom rocked the building under us, and tore off a section of the roofing.
We remained alive. Since we were still there, the explosion must have been elsewhere. We had been struck only by the air sucked out by the vacuum following the blast. I seemed perfectly cool; I can’t remember running, and I never could tell whether I went under or over the trucks. I could not have gone around them. The man filling my trays was between me and the door, yet as I stood on the platform watching a cloud of smoke and dust billow slowly above the near-by trees he came out from behind me and stood by my side. Not one of the men could afterward give a logical explanation of his exit from the house. We walked away from the building, for a brand from the explosion might start a fire in our house.
The direction of the smoke indicated that one of the Hall machines, for punching loose powder into dynamite casings, had gone up. We walked quickly up the track toward the scene of the explosion, which was about three city blocks from our line. Sticks and bits of dirt were falling around us from the drifting cloud of burnt powder, and we stopped about a block away. Fire was finishing the job. Our clothes were coated with dry powder and we did not dare go nearer. The bear cage had been leveled with the ground. A hole filled with burning rubbish was all that remained of the house.
That ‘big noise’ took only two lives. Big Albert Barnikan, the operator, had been with the company for fourteen years. He was unmarried, and the sole support of his mother. His helper, Stewart McDonald, had a wife and five children. McDonald’s wife has since died and his children are at St. Anne’s Home in Tacoma, under the joint care of the State and the Dupont Company. Three of his brothers have continued to work in the plant.
Several tons of powder had gone off in the Hall machine building, and considerable damage had been done throughout the plant. Windows were broken, doors and roofs torn off. Metal parts of the Hall machine were hurled half a mile away, some of them falling through surrounding buildings as though the roofs and upper floors were paper. Damage was reported as far away as South Tacoma, and the force of the blast traveled up a valley along the Sound. Other places near by were saved by intervening hills or forests.
Our first care was to collect what we could of the bodies of our friends. We took two small powder boxes. As far as we could identify the pieces, we put each man’s remnants by themselves; the rest we divided equally between the two boxes. Naturally we obtained very little. What had not become pink mist was scattered for hundreds of yards. Enough was obtained so that each family could hold a funeral.
Accidents in powder factories may happen at any time, to anyone, but the mortality over a period of years is small. It is much lower than in lumbering or construction work. Private companies offered insurance to the powder workers at normal rates. Hours were short, pay was good, the living expenses were at a minimum. The company rented bungalows as low as fifteen dollars a month, and stove wood was free for the cutting. Many of the men had gardens.
The employees maintained and governed a club, which any employee could join, though none was compelled to do so. The clubhouse comprised bowling alleys, billiard tables, a barber shop, library, and dance hall, and the families of the men used its conveniences as freely as their menfolks. The Dupont bowling teams competed with those in Tacoma.
A state graded school was provided for the children; those in high school were taken to Tacoma by a school bus. Village government was provided, according to state law, by all properly qualified voters. A motor drive to Tacoma could be made in less than an hour, and many of the residents attended the shows and entertainments there. Others went to Green Park, Olympia, or the skating rink. Mount Rainier could be visited any Sunday or holiday. Chowder, fishing, and hunting parties were commonly held along Puget Sound, which was within two miles of the village.
IV
With only one Hall machine left to make dynamite, the dry powder accumulated faster than it could be used. Blackie, an ex-sailor, and I were taken off the powder-drying gang and put on the dynamite line. Blackie was an old hand there, but it was all new and interesting to me. The Hall machine consisted of a number of wooden plungers that tamped loose powder into empty shells held by a drum and automatically fed into the back of the machine from light crates. A partial revolution of the drum placed a row of shells under the plungers, another movement, after they were filled, emptied them out into a tray. Powder was brought to the machine in little wheelbarrows similar to those John had stumbled over when the mixing house had burned. It was dumped on a conveyor that fed it to the plungers.
Sometimes we made giant cartridges for mining purposes, weighing several pounds. The Hall machine could not make them. They were filled by hand; the tops were folded over and then pounded into shape with a wooden mallet. All the powder dynamite was coated with paraffin. This was done in a building some blocks away, equipped with a big vat heated by steam pipes. The dynamite sticks were dumped from the truck into a wire-bottomed tray, which was lowered into the hot wax. After they were dipped and dried, they were packed in boxes for shipment.
One of the dipping houses had caught fire before I came to Dupont. All the sticks are supposed to be cleared out of the hot wax as soon as they are dipped and coated. Through carelessness several sticks fell unnoticed to the bottom of the vat, and remained there overnight. The men prepared for work as usual the next morning. Two loaded trucks were wheeled near the vat, and the steam was turned on to melt the paraffin. As the men moved about in the house while the wax became fluid, a slight explosion threw hot wax about the room. One of the half sticks had exploded at the bottom of the tank, but the force was too weak to set off the other sticks. Burning bits of paper lay like wicks on the hot wax.
The men ran into the open. No further explosion followed the first, but through the window one of the men, Oscar Peterson, who afterward became drying boss, could see the burning vat with several hundred pounds of dynamite beside it. In disregard of orders he walked back into the house, shoved the trucks away from the blaze, then uncoiled a fire hose and put the fire out.
Another kind of dynamite was gelatine dynamite. No war powder was used in making this. It was made from nitroglycerine and gun cotton, mixed to a jelly in a machine that looked like a giant ice-cream freezer, and delivered warm to punching houses in the ‘jelly’ line. A machine functioning like a sausage stuffer punched shells full of it.
Blackie was told off to run one of the punching machines, and I was sent along as helper. This work was the best I had in the plant. The house was clean, which was wonderful after the dusty drying line and the Hall machine. Many of the men had headaches from the nitroglycerine, but it never bothered me even when I handled the most powerful mixtures. I remained on the jelly line as long as I stayed at the plant.
The process of making gelatine dynamite is the most risky in the plant, for the nitroglycerine used makes any concussion dangerous. If the jelly became cold, we had to send it back to be remixed, as it became stiff when chilled. If too much force was used in the machine to punch the stiff jelly, there was great danger of an explosion.
No one at Dupont could punch powder like Hunky John, who had been at it for seventeen years. He would stand near his machine on short, fat legs, his powerful hands grasping the shuttles. ‘Now we hunky like hell,’ he would tell Si Tippen, his helper. Then the shuttles would whirl swifter and swifter. He never seemed to hurry, but how the filled casings did pile up on the table!
One other friend I made on the jelly line — John Jecklin, a naturalized Switzer. In the gangs of migratory workers one finds men of every degree of schooling and previous social standing. Jecklin had been educated in famous German universities previous to the World War. He could read, write, and speak German, French, English, and Italian; he read ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. His knowledge of literature was profound. One of his happiest days was when he received permission to use the piano in the clubhouse; after work he would play Bach and Wagner by the hour.
During the World War, when all nations threatened Switzerland, he was mobilized into the Swiss service. After the Armistice he found books stale, and he came to America. Like many others he found a temporary resting place at Dupont.
While on the jelly line I spent some time in the jelly packing house. It was considered as safe a place to work in as any powder house can be, but we had a grim reminder of what our fate might be every time we went to work. Many tall trees grow about the plant, and one was near the packing house. A man from our gang stopped us by this tree one day and pointed to a white object hanging from an upper branch. It was in two sections, one thick, the other long and slender. They were joined together, and hung from either side of the branch.
‘I have looked at that thing for the past month, but cannot tell what it is,’ he said. ‘Can any of you make it out?’
We walked about the tree, looking at the object from all angles. Finally one of the men discovered what it was. ‘It is a thigh bone and part of a rib,’ he said. ‘ Must be from either Big Albert or McDonald — probably Big Albert. It has hung there ever since the explosion last fall. Several years ago, when we cut down trees near an old explosion, we found parts of skeletons in them.’
Men at the plant were carefully chosen. On their actions depended the lives of many others. Several were fired while I was there for breaking safety rules, and none of the other men objected; indeed, they sometimes forced the removal of a careless worker. One man was paid off because he could not remember to throw switches properly while trucking.
‘A good thing he has gone,’ said one old-timer. ‘The boss did not care to see a repetition of what happened several years ago when we had to take any man we could get. A dippy guy was pushing powder up from the drying line to a mixing house. He tipped over two trucks of powder, which had to be burned. The foreman warned him that the next one to go over meant his discharge. Two days later the mixing house blew up, and the half-wit beat it. We found out later that he had tipped over a load of loose powder that day. He had scraped it back into the drums and had taken it to the mixing house so the boss would not know of his accident. Some gravel must have gotten in the powder and caused friction under the big wheels, just as it did with Andy.’
An explosion of the nitroglycerine house would have been the worst that could possibly have happened, for a pailful of nitroglycerine would completely wreck the national capitol. After nitroglycerine is made, it is piped to a storage house containing tanks that hold hundreds of gallons. Several very smooth sidewalks extend from there to the mixing houses, and a cart similar to those used by gasoline filling stations to hold lubricating oil is pushed along this way. It holds several gallons. The men call it the ‘Angel Buggy’ and the pusher ‘Little Eva,’ for the cart would surely take him to the angels if it ever got jarred.
One of the nitroglycerine storage houses nearly went up several years ago. The underbrush is carefully cleared out throughout the plant every year by the labor gang. Then it is burned, so that no fire can creep up to a house. That day the fire got out of control, through one of those acts of carelessness that cause most accidents. The N. G. foreman came running when the siren sent out its warning that the building was burning. He dragged a fire hose to the top of the bear cage and stood there with tons of one of the most powerful explosives in the world below him in the burning building. When he left, the fire was out.
V
Fall had gone, winter was past. Many men were leaving the plant for the Alaskan fisheries, and my feet itched to be again on the road. I would either finish my journey to California or take a look at Asia. I gave two weeks’ notice, and instantly a howl arose from those working with me, because I intended to stay on two weeks after deciding to quit.
‘You keep out of my house,’ announced one big Swede. ‘I would n’t work with you from now on for any wages. Three boys were planning to go to Alaska several years ago, and they did not quit right off. They were going to have a big feed the night they quit. Two of them left the plant early that last afternoon — but they took a house along with them. No, sir; you keep as far from me as you can.’
I did not leave, however, until my two weeks were up, and no house accompanied me as I left the Dupont Powder Company’s plant, satisfied as to why Dupont was remote from the highway.