CHAPTER VII. HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA

It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill

that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets

to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother had a job as a muck roller--the man

who takes the bloom from the squeezer and throws it into the rollers.

That's all I can tell you now. In later chapters I shall take you into

a rolling mill, and show you how we worked. I believe I am the first

puddler that ever described his job, for I have found no book by a

puddler in any American library. But I wanted to explain here that a

muck roller is not a muck raker, but a worker in raw iron.

When we boarded the train for Ohio, mother had nothing to look after

except the six children. When the porter asked her where her baggage

was, she smiled sadly and said that was a question for a wiser head

than hers to answer. She was glad enough to have all her babies safe.

Everything we owned was on our backs. Our patient father had toiled

for months in Pittsburgh and had sent us nearly every cent to pay our

transportation from the Old World. Now he was out of a job, and we were

coming to him without as much as a bag of buns in our hands.

Before leaving New York, I want to tell what kind of city it was in

those days.

In a recent magazine article a writer picturing our arrival at Castle

Garden said that we “climbed the hill into Broadway and gazed around

at the highest buildings we had ever seen.” But there were no tall

buildings in New York at that time. The spires of Trinity Church and St.

Paul's towered above everything. And we had seen such churches in the

Old Country. Brooklyn Bridge had just been built and it overtopped the

town like a syrup pitcher over a plate of pancakes. The tallest business

blocks were five or six stories high, and back in Wales old Lord

Tredegar, the chief man of our shire, lived in a great castle that was

as fine as any of them.

The steel that made New York a city in the sky was wrought in my own

time. My father and his sons helped puddle the iron that has braced this

city's rising towers. A town that crawled now stands erect. And we whose

backs were bent above the puddling hearths know how it got its spine. A

mossy town of wood and stone changed in my generation to a towering city

of glittering glass and steel. “All of which”--I can say in the words of

the poet--“all of which I saw and part of which I was.”

The train that was taking us to Ohio was an Erie local, and the stops

were so numerous that we thought we should never get there. A man on the

train bought ginger bread and pop and gave us kids a treat. It has been

my practice ever since to do likewise for alien youngsters that I meet

on trains.

When we reached Hubbard, father met us and took us to an uncle's. We did

not stop to wash the grime of travel from our faces until after we had

filled our stomachs. Once refreshed with food, our religion returned to

us, in the desire to be clean and to establish a household. I learned

then that food is the first thing in the world. Cleanliness may be next

to godliness, but food is ahead of them all, and without food man loses

his cleanliness, godliness and everything else worth having. When I wish

to sound out a man, I ask him if he has ever been hungry. If I find

he has never missed a meal in his life, I know his education has been

neglected. For I believe that experience is the foremost teacher. I

have learned something from every experience I ever had, and I hold that

Providence has been kind to me in favoring me with a lot of rather tough

adventures.

Our hardships on entering America taught me sympathy and filled me with

a desire to help others. I have heard aliens say that America had not

treated them with hospitality, and that this had made them bitter, and

now these aliens would take revenge by tearing down America. This is

a lie that can not fool me. My hardships did not turn me bitter. And I

know a thousand others who had harder struggles than I. And none of them

showed the yellow streak. The Pilgrim Fathers landed in the winter when

there were no houses. Half of them perished from hardship in a single

year. Did they turn anarchists?

The man who says that hard sledding in America made a yellow cur out

of him fools no one. He was born a yellow cur. Hard sledding in America

produced the man who said: “With malice toward none; with charity for

all.”