14th – Tamped & placed ties. Put on joist plates & etc in the morning. At 12:15 the boss came out & told Tom, Mahoney, Giro & me to go up the R.R. towards Castella & put out a fire that had broken out in Sweet Briar camp. Well, we reached the fire a half hour later & a half hour after that we had fire guards cut to prevent the fire from spreading any farther. So, about 2:00 our work was done, we went down to the river & prospected a while. Pulled off our shoes & washed our feet & by & by we started for the gang. We got back about 6:00, having been gone 4 hours to put out a 15 min. fire.
Gandy dancers are the section hands laying or maintaining railroad track. Whether the term was used in 1901 is unknown, but the term is mentioned in print in 1918. The term was still being used in Oregon in the 1960s. Since the gandy dancers have to work in synchrony to move a portion of track into place, work chants were helpful. Though the most popular chants are from southern African-American gangs with a long tradition of singing and chanting during manual labor, all gandy dancers sang railroad songs.
Since the main tracks from Washington to southern California are already in place, Jesse might have been replacing track or laying new track in offshoots going into the mountains for the booming lumber industry. Track laid back then could last twenty years, and by the time he was working in 1901, replacement tracks might be called for in the Northwest.
While the fires that Jesse mentions here and in one more entry might have been naturally occurring, they could just as easily have been caused by people. Most of the wildfires in the Northwest are caused by lightening, and the giant sequoia trees in California include wildfires in their lifecycle. Naturally occurring wildfires are part of the Northwest’s complex ecosystem and helped create its geography. However, in 1901, industry and residences in the area used fire in a way that we no longer do, and it might have increased the likelihood of forest fires. Also at that time, there is no organized fire suppression teams like we have now. Jesse was just a short-term, manual laborer on the railroad, and putting out fires, or cutting fire guards was just one of many items in his job description.
