I read Walden many summers ago, and much of it has left me. One passage. however, has always stayed:
Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. (Italics mine)
Anyone who has read Walden, or has read excerpts in the anthologies that are used in school, or who has even read about Walden, knows that Thoreau took a dim view of the industrial revolution and saw the railroad in particular as being emblematic of its values.
It is the five italicized sentences that arrested my attention when I first read Walden and have persisted in my memory. Over the years, I have always assumed that this passage, especially the italicized sentences, are figurative, not literal. Now I am not so sure. Over the past few years I have come across references in the news of unmarked graves, some of them mass graves, along railroad rights of way in that part of the country, enough to lead us to think that such burials were not uncommon. After all, railroad work was hard, and dangerous, and poorly paid. Railroad laborers came from the lowest tier of society: the poor, recent immigrants, particularly the Irish at that time. They were probably considered expendable. (Please excuse the italics in this paragraph. WordPress put them there and seems reluctant to let me get rid of them.)
Most recently, five bodies were discovered at a place called Duffy’s Cut in Pennsylvania. They had been there a long time, along the railroad right of way. They are thought to have belonged to a crew of 57 contract laborers, recently arrived from Ireland. They all disappeared and were never heard from again. It has been assumed that they all perished in the cholera epidemic of 1832. After all, living conditions in the labor camps were crowded and substandard, even for the day, the kind of places where disease spreads rapidly. This latest group show signs of having died violently, however. Were they killed by vigilantes fearful of the spread of of their disease, a sort of extreme quarantine? Who knows? Perhaps we never will know. After all, for over 150 years, we didn’t much care.
But it makes me wonder if, when Thoreau said, “Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man,” he wasn’t speaking literally of a specific incident or practice that prevailed then, the memory of which has since been banished from our national historical consciousness.
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/55-irish-immigrants-re-1378444.html