On the morning of August 14, 1925, a riveter standing on a wooden platform eighty feet above the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York, caught a hot rivet that had been tossed from a coal-fired forge anchored to the decking above him. He caught it in a tin can, turned it with his tongs, and seated it in a hole in a steel girder with four blows from a pneumatic hammer, while his partner on the opposite side pressed a metal bar against the far end to keep the rivet from driving through. The current passing beneath him, through the gap between the first completed pier and the second, was moving at roughly four miles per hour. The river was carrying the waters of Lake Erie toward Lake Ontario at the same pace it always did, a pace that did not stop for a man working on a platform above it.

If he dropped the rivet, it was lost. If he fell himself, the current would carry him away before anyone on shore could do anything useful. He was one of hundreds of men working on the Peace Bridge that morning. The bridge was six months into its construction schedule.

The steel above him, the lower chord of the first section of the cantilever, was being assembled in sections lifted by a traveling crane that crept outward from the completed pier on rails running along the top chord of the growing structure. Beneath him, the foundation of the pier he worked over had been placed the previous year. Its temporary cofferdams had been driven into the riverbed through forty feet of current, then pumped dry, and concrete poured down to the bedrock that soil surveys had indicated was there—and which was indeed there when the construction crews reached it, something not guaranteed merely because the survey said so. He did not know he was building an international landmark.

He was building the thing in front of him, this connection, this chord, this girder, for the wages the American Bridge Company paid, which were better than he could earn in a Buffalo workshop that summer, and that was why he was here instead of there. The bridge would open on August 7, 1927. It would be named the Peace Bridge. It would commemorate one hundred years of peace between the United States and Canada, which was wonderful for commemorative purposes, but it was not why the men came to the site at first light every day.

They came because the river needed a crossing, and the work on the crossing paid wages. To understand why there was no permanent road crossing over the Niagara River between Buffalo and Fort Erie until 1927—no bridge a truck could use, no road a car could drive across—you had to understand what the Niagara River actually was. The Niagara was not a river in the usual sense. It was a strait.

It connected two great lakes: Lake Erie to the south, at higher elevation, and Lake Ontario to the north, at lower elevation. The water moving through it was not water collected from a watershed. It was the overflow drain of the upper Great Lakes. The entire discharge of Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, which emptied into Lake Erie, left the Great Lakes system through the Niagara River and over Niagara Falls before reaching Lake Ontario and the St.

Lawrence River. The river was thirty-four miles long. It dropped 160 feet over those thirty-four miles, most of it at the falls. What that meant for the river at Buffalo, above the falls, was that it moved with force and purpose.

It did not drift. It was headed somewhere specific, constantly, regardless of whether the construction crew wished it would slow down. The main channel current at the Peace Bridge crossing reached four miles per hour under normal conditions. In spring, when snowmelt and ice breakup from the upper basin raised discharge to its seasonal peak, it ran faster.

The riverbed at that location was rocky, made of limestone and shale, the same rock formations that lay beneath Niagara Falls a few miles downstream, but the surface above it was forty feet of fast water. Forty feet of fast water pushing against any structure you placed in it was the condition you worked in from the day you started until the day you finished. By 1920, the Niagara River at Buffalo had only one fixed crossing for traffic: the International Railway Bridge at Black Rock, a freight structure opened in 1873. It carried railcars.

It did not carry automobiles. It was not a road bridge. Ferry service between Buffalo and Fort Erie, running since before the War of 1812, was still in operation, but a ferry service designed for an earlier era was not equipped for the volume of traffic generated by a metropolitan area of half a million people on the American side and a growing industrial corridor on the Ontario side. Cars stacked up at the dock.

Commercial trucks waited. The river was the same width it had always been, and crossing it still took the same number of minutes it had always taken. The number of vehicles needing to cross each hour was an entirely different figure from what the ferry was designed to handle. The push for a fixed road crossing at Buffalo began in earnest after World War I, when automobiles stopped being a luxury and became essential transportation in the industrial cities of the Great Lakes region.

Buffalo in 1920 was the second-largest city in the United States. It had a steel industry, a grain milling industry, a chemical complex, and a manufacturing base with daily commercial ties to the Ontario side of the border. A bridge at Buffalo would cut the international boundary at the point where that relationship was most direct and the existing connection was clearly failing. But building a bridge across a navigable international waterway was not simply a matter of engineering.

It was a matter of treaties. It required the approval of both national governments, the International Joint Commission—the binational body founded in 1909 to manage shared waters—plus the United States War Department, which regulated construction in navigable waters on the American side, and the Canadian Department of National Defence. The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority was established in 1921 by concurrent legislation from the New York State Legislature and the Parliament of Canada. It then took three more years to reach the groundbreaking.

The approvals required negotiations between two national governments and two state and provincial governments. The financing required a bond structure the market would accept and that projected toll revenue could cover. The engineering required a firm that had worked on bridges of similar span. The political will required a moment when all these factors aligned at once.

In 1924, they aligned. The engineering was assigned to the firm of Modjeski, working under Edward Loeffler. The construction contract went to the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel, with the organizational capacity and construction experience to manage a multi-span steel bridge across an international river on a schedule with political dimensions. A bridge commemorating a hundred years of peace between two nations was expected to open in the year that concluded that century, 1927, and the Bridge Authority said so publicly.

The names Loeffler, Waddell, and Hardesty were recorded in the engineering records. The men who built the bridge they designed were not in the engineering records. They existed only in the payroll books. The design the engineering team settled on was a five-span cantilever truss bridge.

The cantilever configuration suited the site for reasons that were straightforward in the structural logic of that era. A cantilever arm could be built out from each completed pier, extending the structure over the water without the need for temporary falsework standing in the river during construction. Temporary structures in the Niagara River, in a four-mile-per-hour current, were not something you built if you had a practical alternative. The cantilever method provided that alternative.

The main navigation span over the main channel was set at 525 feet, long enough for commercial shipping traffic between Lake Erie and the Welland Canal—which connected the Niagara River to Lake Ontario and required a navigation channel any bridge at this site had to accommodate. Clearance above high water was set at 96 feet. The total structure, including approach spans on both sides, extended to roughly 5,800 feet. The foundation material under the main channel piers—limestone rock—lay at depths ranging from 35 to 60 feet below the river surface.

Rock at those depths was manageable. The river was not like the Mississippi. The problem the Niagara posed was not depth. The problem was the current and what the current did to any structure you placed in it while you worked.

The temporary cofferdam for the main river piers was made of wooden sheeting and steel piles driven into the riverbed from working barges anchored in the current, then pumped dry by constantly operating centrifugal pumps. The pumps ran because the cofferdam leaked. A cofferdam in a river moving at four miles per hour against steel sheeting always leaked at the points where the piles interlocked, at the bottom where the sheeting met uneven rock, at any point where the river found a way through. The pumps removed the seepage faster than it accumulated.

When the pumps worked properly and the sheeting held, the men inside the cofferdam worked on a temporarily dry riverbed enclosed on four sides by walls that the Niagara River tested constantly. The men who drove the cofferdam sheeting did so from barges held in place by anchor chains under continuous load. The anchor chains never went slack because the current never eased. Crane operators worked on those barges above moving water from a deck that moved with the river.

Pile driver operators drove steel sheeting into a rocky bottom that did not always accept the sheeting at the angle the plans required, and adjustments had to be made in real time by men working from a barge in a river, on a problem the plans described but could not fully predict. This was not the work that appeared in the commemorative volume the Bridge Authority published in 1927. That volume described the design. It described the span dimensions, the foundation depths, the navigation clearances, and the cost, roughly $10 million, within budget.

It described the opening ceremony. What it did not describe was what it meant to anchor a pile-driving platform in the Niagara River in November, as water temperatures dropped and the current kept running, and the sheeting kept needing to be driven deeper into a bottom that resisted it. The structural ironworkers who assembled the steel above the piers worked within a craft tradition that had developed on American bridge projects since the appearance of cantilever and truss bridge forms in the 1870s. By 1924, structural ironwork had its own methods, its own crew hierarchy—heater, catcher, bucker-up, riveter—and its own understanding of working on platforms over water, learned by new men from old hands on their first jobs, appearing in no manual published by any engineering firm.

Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve south of Montreal had been present on major steel bridge projects across the northeastern United States and Canada since the 1880s, when reserve men first demonstrated their ability to work at heights over running water during the construction of the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence River. Contractors noticed and made use of it. They hired more Kahnawake men.

The men trained their brothers and sons. By the 1920s, Mohawk ironworkers were a known presence on projects from New York to Chicago, traveling to work as all craftsmen traveled to where the work was. Whether Kahnawake men worked on the Peace Bridge was a question the American Bridge Company employment records would answer if those records were fully preserved and indexed. They kept payroll records.

Whether the Peace Bridge project records survived in a form that would allow any researcher to systematically examine them for the names of structural ironworkers on the crew was not something the published histories of the bridge addressed. The published histories dealt with the bridge itself. Consider what it meant to rivet a floor beam into place on the Peace Bridge in the summer of 1925, on platforms above the Niagara River while the structure was being assembled outward from the completed piers toward the center. The platform was wooden planks supported by iron brackets bolted to the steel already in place.

It extended outward as each new section was completed. Below it, the river was visible through the gaps. And not so far away that a man could not hear it. A low, continuous sound underneath everything else, under the noise of the hammers and the shouted signals and the crane whistle.

The sound of something moving fast through a space not wide enough to muffle it. The riveting gang worked as a unit. Four men. The heater, at the coal forge, kept the rivets at the precise temperature that made them malleable.

Not too hot, not too cold, because a rivet driven cold did not fill the hole properly, and an overheated rivet deformed under the hammer. He tossed each rivet in a high arc toward the catcher. The catcher received it in a metal bucket and seated it immediately in the waiting hole while the heat was still in it. The bucker-up pressed his bar against the far end to resist the hammer blows.

The riveter drove it home within the seconds available before the metal cooled past the point of malleability. The interval between working heat and cold rivet was measured in seconds, not minutes. Seconds. A gang that had worked together long enough to know each other’s timing used those seconds every time.

A gang of men who had not worked together before was slower, produced more cold rivets, more errors requiring re-drilling, more delay in a schedule that tolerated no delay. The American Bridge Company put experienced gangs on the Peace Bridge because experienced gangs were faster, and faster gangs met schedules. And the schedule for this bridge was political. The rivet heater at the forge on a platform above the Niagara River in October 1925, tossing rivets in an arc to catch the catcher’s bucket while a crane advanced another panel above him, was not in the commemorative book.

He was in the payroll record, if the record survived, listed by name and wage and week in a ledger kept by an accountant recording the earnings of the men who made this construction possible. Injuries occurred during the construction of the Peace Bridge. Deaths occurred. The exact number was a figure the surviving records documented incompletely, and the published histories of the bridge did not address it directly.

This was consistent with how construction fatalities were handled on public works projects of that era. The men who were killed or seriously injured appeared in any accident reports that survived in contractor records, in the administrative files of the Bridge Authority, and in newspaper reports of specific incidents at the time they occurred. They were not in the commemorative materials. Construction continued through two winters on the Niagara River, in January and February at Lake Erie, a cold that was not a theoretical idea.

Cold carried by the river in the form of ice debris from the upper lakes when breakup began, with the current driving the ice through anything in its path. And it continued through the spring floods of 1925 and 1926, when discharge from the upper basin raised both the river level and its current at once. The men working the cofferdam pumps during those flood seasons kept pace with a river that was simultaneously higher and faster than usual, pushing harder against sheeting that had been in the water since the previous construction season, worked on by winter in the ways winter worked on driven steel. The bridge was delivered to the Bridge Authority on schedule.

Thirty-six months from groundbreaking to opening. For a five-span steel cantilever bridge across an international waterway, thirty-six months was not a comfortable pace. It was a pace maintained by men who worked under the conditions the Niagara River imposed according to its own schedule. The opening ceremony on August 7, 1927 was attended by the Prince of Wales, the Vice President of the United States, and the Prime Minister of Canada.

They walked across the bridge. They shook hands at the international boundary marker in the middle of the main span, the dividing line between two nations running across the limestone riverbed forty feet below the water. They were photographed doing it, and the photos appeared in the newspapers of both countries and were preserved in the archives of both governments. The men who built the structure they shook hands over were not in the photos.

Some of them may have been in the crowd watching from the Buffalo side. Most had moved on to the next job by August, because a craftsman waiting at a finished project for a ribbon-cutting ceremony was a craftsman earning no wages. They were elsewhere, building the next thing, earning what the next job paid. The Peace Bridge still carries traffic between Buffalo and Fort Erie.

It has been widened and reinforced over the decades, but it stands essentially as built in 1927, on the piers founded by construction crews on bedrock through the cofferdams they held against the Niagara River for two construction seasons. You can drive across it. You can stop at the midpoint and watch the river still moving at four miles per hour toward the falls, carrying the discharge of the upper Great Lakes along the same path it has always taken, indifferent to the structure above it. The bridge works.

It works because the design was honest and the construction was precise, because the steel is where the plans placed it, the connections are tight, and the piers rest on the rock the borings promised. The bridge is not a complicated philosophical matter. Either it stands or it does not. The Peace Bridge stands.

Men built it with knowledge of what they were dealing with—a current that did not stop, river ice out of season, work over water, a schedule with political dimensions, no margin for the problems the river might impose on its own schedule—and they built it correctly. That is not a small thing. It is the only thing that matters in any bridge. It stands.

Their names are in the payroll books of the American Bridge Company. Whether those books still exist in a form that is accessible and indexed is a question that cannot be answered with confidence. There is a Peace Bridge Authority archive in Buffalo. The administrative record of the bridge from 1921 to the present is documented.

The workforce that built it is not documented in the same way, in the same place, or with the same attention given to the bridge’s dimensions, its opening ceremony, and the photograph of the Prince of Wales standing at the international boundary line above the river the workers bridged. The bridge was named for peace between two nations. Peace between nations is negotiated by diplomats and measured by historians. The bridge is steel and concrete.

It rests on bedrock reached by men who worked inside enclosed cofferdams in the Niagara River in January. Its connections are held by rivets that men tossed, caught, and drove home in the few seconds before the metal cooled. It stands in a river that still runs at four miles per hour and will keep running at that pace long after everyone who crossed it is gone. The men who built it built it correctly.

Their names deserve to be spoken in the same sentence as what they made. They are in the ledgers, waiting for someone to look.