A pamphlet issued by these organizations tells me that Memphis is the largest cotton market in the country, the largest hardwood producing market, the third largest grocery and jobbing market.
Cotton is, indeed, much in evidence in the city. The streets in some sections are full of strange little two-wheel drays, upon which three bales are carried, and which display, in combination, those three southern things having such perfect artistic affinity: the negro, the mule, and the cotton bale. The vast modern cotton warehouses on the outskirts of the city cover many acres of ground, and with their gravity system of distribution for cotton bales, and their hydraulic compresses in which the bales are squeezed to minimum size, to the accompaniment of negro chants, are exceedingly interesting.
The same pamphlet speaks also of the unusually large proportion of the city's area which is given over to parks and playgrounds, and it seems worth adding that though Memphis follows the general southern custom of barring negroes—excepting, of course, nursemaids in charge of children—from her parks, she has been so just as to provide a park for negroes only. In this she stands ahead of most other southern cities.
Memphis has the only bridge crossing the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio. At the time of our visit a new bridge was being built very near the old one, and an interesting experience of our trip was our visit to this bridge, under the guidance of Mr. M. B. Case, a young engineer in charge.
On a great undertaking, such as this one, where the total cost mounts into millions, the first work done is not on the proposed bridge itself, but on the plant and equipment to be used in construction—derricks, barges, concrete-mixers, air compressors for the caissons, small engines, dump-cars and all manner of like things. This preparatory work consumes some months. Caissons are then sunk far down beneath the river bed. Caisson work is dangerous, and the insurance rate on "sand hogs"—the men who work in the caissons—is very high. The scale of wages, and of time, varies in proportion to the risk, which is according to the depth at which work is being done. On this enterprise, for example, men working from mean level to a depth of 50 feet received $3 for an eight-hour day. From 50 to 70 feet they worked but six hours and received $3.75. From 90 to 105 feet they worked in three shifts of one hour each, and received $4.25. And while they were placing concrete to seal the working chamber there was an additional allowance of fifty cents a day.
The chief danger of caisson work is the "bends," or "caisson disease." In the caisson a man works under high air pressure. When he comes out, the pressure on the fluids of the body is reduced, and this sometimes causes the formation of a gas bubble in the vascular system. If this bubble reaches a nerve-center it causes severe pain, similar to neuralgia; if it gets to the brain it causes paralysis. Day after day men will go into the caisson and come out without trouble, but sooner or later from 2 to 8 per cent. of caisson workers are affected. Of 320 "sand-hogs" who labored in the caissons of this bridge, three died of paralysis, and of course a number of others had slight attacks of the "bends," in one form or another.
The bridge, when we visited it, was more than half completed. On the Memphis side the approaches were almost ready, and the steel framework of the bridge reached from the shore across the front pier, and was being built out far beyond the pier, on the cantilever principle, hanging in the air above the middle of the stream. By walking out on the old bridge we could survey the extreme end of the new one, which was being extended farther and farther, daily, by the addition of new steel sections. There were then about 100 journeymen bridgemen on the work—these being workmen of the class that erects steel skyscraper frames—with some fifty apprentices and carpenters, and about twenty common laborers. Bridgemen are among the highest paid of all workmen. In New York, at that time, their wage was $6 for eight hours' work. Here it was $4.50. Very few of the men had families with them in Memphis. They are the soldiers of fortune among wage-earners, a wild, reckless, fine looking lot of fellows, with good complexions like those of men in training, and eyes like the eyes of aviators. No class of men in the world, I suppose, have steadier nerves, think quicker, or react more rapidly from stimulus to action, whether through sight or sound. They have to be like that. For where other workmen pay for a mistake by loss of a job, these men pay with life. Yet they will tell you that their work is not dangerous. It is "just as safe as any other kind of job"—that, although four of their number had already been lost from this bridge alone. One went off the end of the structure with a derrick, the boom of which he lowered before the anchor-bolts had been placed. Two others fell. A fourth was struck by a falling timber.
Hanging in the air above the middle of the stream