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3 books match the query 'Railroad construction workers'
Gandydancer's Children
A Railroad MemoirFrank Wendell Call
University of Nevada Press, 2000
The late Frank Wendell Call is very much alive in these pages as he relates the fascinating tale of the rich, adventuresome existence he lived as a child in the Nevada desert along the Southern Pacific railroad line. In November 1928, Frank E. Call moved his young family from a comfortable home in Ogden, Utah to a tiny two-room shanty in an isolated railroad station in northeastern Nevada. He went to work as a gandydancer, a track laborer.
Meanwhile, Frank and Johanne Call's six lively children adapted to living alongside the tracks in primitive houses without electricity or indoor plumbing. The colorful narrative by the family's oldest child includes commentaries on railroading and the railroaders' language and describes social conditions and customs existing in tiny-town Nevada in the early twentieth century, from the viewpoint of the children themselves.
Traqueros
Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870-1930Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo
University of North Texas Press, 2012
Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty
Navajos, Hozho, and Track WorkJay Youngdahl
Utah State University Press, 2011
For over one hundred years, Navajos have gone to work in significant numbers on Southwestern railroads. As they took on the arduous work of laying and anchoring tracks, they turned to traditional religion to anchor their lives.
Jay Youngdahl, an attorney who has represented Navajo workers in claims with their railroad employers since 1992 and who more recently earned a master's in divinity from Harvard, has used oral history and archival research to write a cultural history of Navajos' work on the railroad and the roles their religious traditions play in their lives of hard labor away from home.