This article was first published February 18, 2025, at fieldethos.com.
In 1886, the Canadian Pacific Railway had a problem. It needed to build a cantilever bridge for a commuter train over the Saint Laurent Seaway to connect the Island of Montreal with the mainland of Quebec. The problem was that the natural landing site for that bridge’s pier in Quebec fell smack dab in the middle of the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve(Canada refers to its Indian territories as reserves. In the United States, we call them reservations.). So, to grease the wheels of progress, the railway instructed the building contractor it had hired, the Dominion Bridge Company, to employ Kahnawake Mohawks for the project in exchange for access to their land. The thinking was that the Mohawks could be used to perform the more menial tasks of construction, things like unloading boxes and transporting supplies. The Mohawks, though, had other ideas, and the Canadian Pacific Railway only thought it had a problem.
Railway officials couldn’t keep the Mohawks off the bridge. One Dominion Bridge employee was quoted as saying that “they would climb up and onto the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters, most of whom at that period were old sailing-ship men especially picked for their experience in working aloft.” Aloft, in this case, was literally hundreds of feet in the air, and still, the Mohawks had to be chased off the bridge on a daily basis. Even as they were, though, among those who had spent their lives building bridges, a burgeoning respect for the Mohawks’ courage was growing. It wasn’t long before day laborers became trusted coworkers, and trusted coworkers became valued crew members. The Mohawks so took to work in high steel that they followed it from the front porch of their reserve to the bustling metropolis of New York City where they helped sketch the world’s most famous skyline. Mohawks were among those responsible for the construction of many of the Big Apple’s skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Plaza.
So, why were the Mohawks so comfortable working as such great height? There has been significant speculation. Some have suggested that the Mohawks have no innate fear of heights, that it is simply their nature to be as sure footed as mountain goats. Statistics don’t support that position, though, as fatality rates from falls among the Mohawk are on par with those from other ethnicities. When the Quebec Bridge collapsed in 1907, for instance, 75 men were killed. Nearly half of them were Mohawks. And more compelling than any statistic are the crosses that stand at either end of the Kahnawake Reserve and commemorate those who lost their lives walking the iron. They’re sculpted from steel girders.
Others see the Mohawks’ comfort with working in high steel as a course of nurture rather than nature and reference the way that the Mohawks walk one foot in front of the other, a habit, they believe, that might well have developed as the Mohawks crossed narrow logs over rushing rivers. Farfetched, perhaps, but at least possible.
Maybe the most plausible explanation for the Indians’ ease upon the I-beams says that it was the inevitable result from what had become a rite of passage within the tribe, a means by which young men could test their mettle. One of their own, an ironworker himself, said that his “ancestors were just teenagers daring each other to climb the 150-foot structure and walk the iron.”
Elders of the Kahnawake Mohawk dismiss arguments for both nature and nurture, though, along with all other such conjecture, and believe that their success working at height was hard earned and attributed only to their learning to control their fear and trust one another.
Whatever the case, one thing’s for certain; what the Canadian Pacific Railway thought was a problem wound up being the high steel industry’s solution.
Wright Outdoors 