06/06/2026
Most of the figures of American folklore we met in school were either cartoonish like Paul Bunyon’s awesome blue ox, Babe, or cheerily toothless thanks to historical omissions.
Take Johnny Appleseed. He’s presented as a charming goofball who just wanted people to eat apples because apples are great. Apples are great, but he was actually planting bitter fruit that could be used to make hard cider, thus providing booze to the frontier.
John Henry was the incredible exception. There’s no way to sanitize the tale of a black man who literally works himself to death racing against a machine, particularly when he was doing so to justify why people like him should continue to be employed.
The story is probably mostly fabrication, although there is no shortage of nineteenth century laborers who sort of fit the description. It has become an enduring myth not because the particulars are “true,” but because the deep narrative is as American a story as there is.
It speaks to very real ongoing fears about insecurity and automation and, in the way of magical things, it has grown larger as we feed it with our imaginations.
The tunnel most attributed to the legend is in beautiful hill country that is worth a visit even if you don’t like haunted holes in the ground as much as we do.
We felt like we were exploring a damned spaceship as our drone, the Purricane Mk.II (ask Baroness what happened to the Mk.I), glanced down the flooded tunnel.
Next stop: the New River Gorge!
