I'm reacquainting myself with stories I've read at some point, and others I missed. There's nothing like reading something again for the first time.
Mr. Mitchell wrote many pieces for The New Yorker. In 1949 he wrote a typically lengthy New Yorker piece on the Mohawk Indians and how they came to be associated with being fearless high steel workers.
Growing up I always heard stories about these New York Indians and how they just seemed to walk along a six inch beam hundreds of feet in the air and do it as gracefully as Joe DiMaggio playing center field. I used to see them on the subway after work in the 70s as they were working on the World Trade Center. Easy to spot.As youngsters, my friends and I used to try and imitate the skill by trying a walk a straight line on a sidewalk and pretend that there was hundreds of feet of empty air on either side of our steps. Invariably we "fell off" and admired the Indians even more.
While making my way through the collection of stories again there was big news on the canonization front. Pope Benedict XVI canonized seven saints, including two women with New York ties, with one of those woman being an American Indian, an absolute first. Thus, I vaguely became aware of Kateri Tekakwitha, who lived in the 1600s and was made a saint because of her healing powers.
Mr. Mitchell's New Yorker piece is titled 'The Mohawks in High Steel' and traces the over two hundred year timeline of how they came to such a profession.
The Mohawk iron worker is from a tribe called Caughnawaga, originally branching from the Iroquois tribe in western and northern New York. They were converted to Catholicism by French Jesuits who convinced them to move to a mission outpost in Quebec. Mr. Mitchell traces their progression from Quebec to high steel workers on Canadian bridges to migrating into the United States when there was more bridge and skyscraper work. New York's Brooklyn North Gowanus section became a destination for living.
The Quebec beginnings are described as having a parish hall named Kateri Hall, named in honor of Tekakwitha, an Indian virgin called the Lily of the Mohawk, whose bones are in Caughnawaga's church, St. Francis Xavier. Mr. Mitchell explains the source of the admiration for Kateri.
"...Indian virgin called the Lily of the Mohawks who died at Caughnawaga in 1680. The old bones lie on a watered-silk cushion in a glass-topped chest. Sick and afflicted people make pilgrimages to the church and pray before them. In a booklet put out by the church, it is claimed that sufferers from many diseases, including cancer, have been healed through Kateri's intercession. Kateri is venerated because of the bitter penances she imposed on herself; according to the memoirs of missionaries who knew her, she wore iron chains. lay upon thorns, whipped herself until she bled, plunged into icy water, went about barefoot on the snow, and fasted almost continuously."
Through a little further online research one learns Kateri survived smallpox that killed the rest of her family and left her orphaned and partially blind, She was baptized as a Roman Catholic and spent the last years of her 24 year old life in the mission village of Kahnawake (Caughnawaga) in what was then New France, and is now Canada.
Joseph Mitchell wrote something about Kateri over 60 years ago in a piece on high steel Mohawk workers. The same week I re-read the story the name Kateri Tekakwitha is all over the news.
In the NYT story on the canonizations, New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan is described as being over the moon that aside from Kateri and her New York origins, another woman, a mother superior, who started in Syracuse but later moved to Hawaii in 1883 (even then, getting away from the snow) was also canonized. Thus, two New York bred women became saints.
If this doesn't help put The Mobius Strip theory before the committee in Stockholm, nothing will. The card of races held this past Saturday at Belmont for New York Showcase Day for New York bred horses had names associated with all its races. The first race was the Iroquois, and the last was the Mohawk.
If I made this stuff up, they'd put me away.
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