Chapter 34 cont. CHARLES H. DAVIS One of the deeply interesting articles published in the Half Century Democrat in 1905 was written by Charles H. Davis under the title, "Fifty Years an Engineer." It is a story such as any man would be proud to write. Says Mr. Davis: I was born on a farm in New York, and lived there till I was nine years old, when we came west. When I was seventeen, and the most boyish looking boy you ever saw, I was employed as fireman on the old Mississippi & Missouri road. Johnny Buswell was my engineer and our engine was the little Iowa, the smallest engine that the company had. She weighed about twenty-five tons and was an old-fashioned wood burner. It was 6 o'clock in the morning of July 15, 1857, that I pulled out of Iowa City on the left side of the Iowa, bound to Muscatine for wood. Johnny Buswell is not only living yet but he is running an engine for the Santa Fe out of Chanute, Kansas. He must be every day of seventy-five years old, and one of the oldest locomotive engineers in the United States, for he fired the North Star on the New York Central before he came to the M. & M., and he began with the M. & M. almost half a century ago. Still his last letter to me was written without spectacles, as he reads. Later I went to the 78 - the old Davenport. Since then I have run various engines. Now I have the honor of pulling the fast mail from Rock Island to Des Moines every other day and back, a round trip of 364 miles. Coal burning engines were not known in this country in those days. The engines that opened this country were all wood burners. Green wood went with them the same as dry. They used to bring down the wood that had been cut up on the hillside of Antoine LeClaire's place, just above the M. & M. shops here, probably only the day before, and give it to us to fire with, and we did it. But when we had work to do, such as getting up the three per cent grade that led up the bluff in the west end of Davenport, we used dry wood that we used to get over in Rock Island. It used to take three and four engines to pull seventeen loads of lumber up that gentle slope. It was only 157 feet to the mile, or about as stiff as any grade you find on a mountain road today where the country id rockiest. Debbie Clough Gerischer Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ IAGENWEB: Special History Project: http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm Gerischer Family Web Site: http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/