Don't let those pretty arches fool you, friend. Every last one of them is standing on the backs of men who never came up whole. I'm Boone Merrick, and this is the tale that bridge won't tell you from a distance.
Look hard at the stone piers holding those arches up out of the water. To set them, Eads couldn't just sink them into the mud — the bottom of the Mississippi is loose sand that shifts and scours away, and he wanted bedrock, the true floor of the world, better than a hundred feet down. So he built himself a contraption called a caisson. Picture a great iron box, open at the bottom, turned upside down and shoved under the river, the water held back by air pumped in thick and hard. The men climbed down inside it through a shaft, and down there at the bottom, by lamplight and in that heavy pressed air, they dug. Dug the sand out from under the box so it sank lower, a foot at a time, carrying the whole stone pier down on top of them toward the rock.
Now here is the thing not one soul on this earth yet understood. When a man labors in that crushing air and then climbs back up to the daylight too quick, something terrible turns loose inside him. His joints seize. His legs go dead beneath him. Some came up bent over double and could not straighten again — and that is the very reason they took to calling it the bends. The pain would drop the strongest man flat. And the deeper Eads dug, the worse it got, for the deeper the air, the harder it pressed.
They didn't know it was the coming up that did the killing. The company doctor, a fellow named Jaminet, went down to see for himself and came up half-paralyzed, and even he could only guess at the cause. So the men kept going down, and kept coming up too fast, because nobody had told them — nobody yet could tell them — that the climb was the deadly part.
First to die was a young fellow named James Moran, March of eighteen seventy. One of the first souls anywhere set down in the record as killed by the bends. He would not be the last. Before those piers ever found their rock, about fifteen men were dead, scores more were left badly stricken, and a couple of them crippled for the rest of their lives — young men, most of them, who had gone down into the river whole and come up broken.
So I'll leave you with this. Stand right here and look from that bridge to the silver arch at your back. They raised that arch better than six hundred feet into the open sky, and not a single man fell off it. Eads went the other way — down into the dark, into the dirt under the river — and the river took its toll in the quiet, where nobody was watching and nobody yet understood. Those arches up there have carried trains and wagons and whole crowds for a hundred and fifty years, and they have never once let go. Next time you roll across that old bridge, you go easy over it. There's a price packed down inside those piers, and the river collected it one slow, bent-over man at a time.