Who's Been Working On The Railroad?
If you stood here sometime between 1907 and 1911, you would have heard a multitude of languages.
The hundreds of people employed during the construction of the Milwaukee Road included; Italians, Bulgarians, Japanese, Serbs, Croatians, Montenegrins, Austrians, Swedes, Irish, English, French Canadians, Hungarians, Belgians, Norwegians, Russian, Greeks, Germans, Polish, Spanish, Scotch, Dutch, Finnish, and still others.
The railroad's main contractors dealt with this potential "Tower of Babble" by subcontracting the work to men who spoke the language of the group or groups of laborers they employed.
Things did not always run smoothly. Some men brought long-standing quarrels from their homelands. A simmering feud between the Italian and Montenegrin workers boiled over during 1907, resulting in a St. Paul Pass Tunnel foreman killing a Montenegrin. When the foreman returned to work in June 1908, a Montenegrin murdered him in revenge.
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There was at least one time when everyone got along, during the 1910 fire. When the forest fires forced people into the railroad tunnels, the railroad's superintendent, C. H. Marshall, recalled that:
"We stayed in the tunnel until the next morning and the way that different nationalities and different classes of peoples mingled and fraternized shows what a leveler is danger."
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